Topic: 23. PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE STICK
I. GENERALITY TO SPECIFICITY: THE INDIVIDUAL TO THE TOOL.
What first distinguished the human being from an animal was his use of a stick, merely, for protection and for food. The culture that has come to be was originally contained in principle in this simple "naturefact," as anthropologists say, or randomly-found object lying at the feet of a hungry or fearful human. Once in his hand, the stick (or other such object) became a weapon that other beings, animals and human alike, shortly came to fear. Our purposes here are not to repeat what has already been said by anthropologists, however, and to discuss further the importance of tools for the person. Rather, we are going to consider what "sense" the human being imparted to the stick. The stick in the hands of a human was invested with a certain "mentality" or "humanity" which constitutes the subject matter of a phenomenological analysis; phenomonology we take to mean a consideration of objects, not as in science from the outside in, but as philosophy from the inside out. The stick, now a weapon, is alive in a sense analogous to a living being. We can "penetrate," as phenomenologists say, the "essence" of that stick or stone used as a tool. I might also reiterate what I said in Section #1 regarding Philosophical Anthropology as starting with some simple fact--here the primal tool--and extrapolating to a broader area of interest, which in this blog is civilization as we know it today. These are all considerations which within this blog have come to be cliches of Force Theory. I said not long ago that "the stick completes the arm; the slave completes the stick." What is suggested by this formula, I am saying, is a "total" philosophy of society. My point while suggestive still needs expanding and elaboration. By understanding the mere stick "phenomenologically," I am saying, we may move to some opinion on broad processes of culture and civilization, leading up to, we suppose, a sort of "politics of the stick." These are the same sticks suggested by the ritualistic faces, rods symbolizing authority carried in a Roman parade.
Hegel's "dialectical" principle has always been open to interpretation and we cannot, here, consider ourselves pure Hegelians. What was suggestive in Hegel was put to more concrete application by the great Engels, who, we regret to say, may have missed the point in his final conclusions. We may follow Engels up to a point. But above all we want to avoid simplistic explanations. For example, I said earlier that "mind is a psychological reflex of the tool." When early man started using sticks and stones as tools, mind, having a new role in human life, evolved accordingly in order to enhance tool use. This would be a simple and straightforward statement and one that has been convincing, so far, to anthropology teachers and their students. I could talk this way to my classes and be perfectly convincing. But here we want to say more. We want to say, rather, that, while indeed having a supportive and enhancing role in human life, the tool also in an important senes opposed the human being. In other words, the tool had an ambivalent role in human evolution. In this chapter of my blog I will point out that applied to some purely "external" problem--to kill animals or to dig roots--the stick was useful; any enhancement of this tool, something possible only through mind and intellect, would have a fostering and enhancing role in human life. This fact is clear enough. This point is nothing that I would have to work to convince my students of. On the other hand, where the tool and technology intersect with social life--as they must--an entirely new problem arises. Human group life must change, somehow-- marginally at least, perhaps radically--to accomodate tools. A major issue for humans arose when they began to use their technology--weapons, here--against one another. Not only did humans challenge outlying hunting bands, regarded as competitors for food, they sought to subdue one another in dominance relations. Sexual fighting could use lead off and on to serious injuries being inflicted, as, of course, the mere stick by itself, wielded by an otherwise limp and more or less ineffectual arm, leveraged the violence of the arm expondentially. We need no lesson in physical force to understand this principle. This leveraged violence, and the way it was used not merely outside the group but within the group, became an ongoing problem of society. Here we must evoke the general Hegelian point of view. We must say that each "problem" that arises--here the contradiction between healthy, relatively nonviolent relations within the group and, on the other hand, leveraged violence of extra-biological weaponry--has to be resolved in some way. In knowing this need we are Hegelians. The way that ingroup armed violence was resolved, I aver, was language. So, unlike simplistic explanations for the relationship between language and tools, we are rising to the viewpoint that language in an imortant sense first opposed tools. We are saying that language originated among humans as the cries of disadvantaged persons facing the man with the stick and being forced to negotiate with him. The first language, we are saying, was in negotiating a peaceful settlement of violence within the group.
The human being is a rather generalized animal, not capable of any extreme or highly directed exertion. This is the first thing we learn about so-called human nature from anthropology. For our purposes we observe that the human being is soft and weak; that is all we need to say. If the human being is soft and feeble, compared to the lions and gorillas that would be man's competitors, then by contrast the stick is hard and focused. What is morphologically opposite between man and stick becomes functionally opposite, as the stick, in hitting or stabbing, either one, concentrates the general effort of arm and hand into one moment of extreme force. In the swing of the arm is a general activity; in the instant of impact all the effort that has accumulated becomes, in the end contact, a concentrated and violent moment. This principle of accumulated force is taught in any introduction of physics course. Inasmuch as the stick is opposite to what the man is, this naturefact complements the man and renders whole what is only partial. The man is born partial; through culture, and through his own effort, he becomes whole. This is all we are saying. That culture requires human effort is not important if the effort required is only to lift a found stick or stone off the ground and carry it about. By this simple process culture began. That the stick is hard is a natural fact; that the stick is focused and directed is a quality invested in the stick by human use. The stick may be used as a club or spear; it may be used to hit or stab. In any case, the stick does what the human being cannot do with his arm or even his teeth (which became smaller as tools progressed). The stick gives human exertion its "pointed" quality. But there is more. The stick leverages this "pointed exertion" beyond what an animal is capable of. Thus, if sharp teeth stab and wound, the stick wounds even more. By extension and leveraging the body can surpass itself and accomplish more than can the special members--the teeth and so forth--of the animal. That is, the stick is more useful than are teeth so long as we assume that the purpose for which the stick is used is a "pointed"--that is, very specific--purpose. The stick can be used to club or stab, but that is all. The stick may be used to dig, too, say for edible roots and grubs, which constitutes another reason humans male or female came to have always a stick in hand. This is the way human evolution proceeded for countess milenia. In our present train of thought it is enough to say that the human being passed from a State of Nature to a State of Man with the "discovery" of the simple stick; everything basic that evolved subsequently derives, in essence, from the principle of the stick as used by human beings in their simple daily activities. We may say, in short, that the evolution of the brain was a biological afterthought, perhaps, not to improve the tool, necessarily--because use of a simple naturefact (artifact) would put humans in a vastly advantaged relation to animal competitors--but to accomodate human beings themselves to their own technology. It was at an early stage of culture, even the lower paleolithic, that technology began to intrude into human personal relationships and have, in that regard, a destabilizing and "denaturalizing" effect in these relations.
Ludwig Klages proposes that mind is antithetical to life. His book title, Geist als Widersacher der Seele (Spirit as Adversary of the Soul) pretty much summarizes his point of view and renders redundant what follows in the opus. In my own book, tentatively titled Phenomenology of the Stick, I adhere to Klages essential thesis. Where I differ from Klage is in regard to the issue of where "mind" first appeared. I am saying "mind" at the beginning of the paleolithic, at a time when ancestral human brains were no larger than those of apes; but this "mind" existed essentially as a "principle" within the stick. For our purposes the stick was findamentally mind itself, but outside the biological body and in a material, non-organic form. Mind as it appeared as an epiphenomenon of the brain (we are saying) was simply an internalization of the stick; a reduction of the stick, we are saying, to a psychological reflex.
Nevertheless, the externality and alienability--and finally the oppositionality--of the stick persist in the mental response to the stick. Thus it is entirely appropriate to say that the mind is in an important sense "alien" to the body, and, as an alien entity can potentially be opposed to the body that contains it. In the individual life, the antithesis of mind and vital essence are not necessarily severe; the person can effectively use mind to advance himself and his family. This is clear. On the other hand, the prospect of a whole society raises an entirely new and larger dimension of the issue of Geist als Widersacher. Society, we are saying, is disembodied Geist or the collective representation of what we have been calling the "stick." Human beings come together, first as master and slave, "through the stick." Duhring points out the necessity of force in forging complex society; we are adding to this thesis only that the medium of force is "the stick," the technics of weaponry. But society as it grows larger and more complex shows its origins in leveraged force, in the sense, we are saying, that society is both larger than and external to the individual. It is proper to say that society is opposed to the individual. Society is alien to and opposed to the life of the individual. Our stand at present--before we discuss the meaning of race in history--is "anarchistic." Even as society--or leveraged stick of sticks--is opposed to the individual life, race is opposed to society.
Where the present essay departs from the other social philosophers we have discussed is in the issue of the time of origin of this extreme antithesis. But, as we are seeing here, the oppositionality within human life began to appear at the very beginnings of human existence, when tools--even an implement as simple as a mere stick--was first used.
Last edited by richard_swartzbaugh (2009-11-03 14:53:44)