Prehension by Colin McGinn

Author:Colin McGinn [McGinn, Colin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, cognitive science, evolution
ISBN: 9780262029322
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2015-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

12 The Meaning of the Grip

In this chapter I propose to engage in a phylogenetic existential psychoanalysis of the grip. My style will accordingly switch from the analytic-rigorous-scientific (well, somewhat) to the literary-expressive-humanistic. I intend, that is, to write like a “Continental” philosopher (think Sartre and Heidegger). I want to explore what the grip means to the gripper—its existential significance. I am speaking here of what might be called the lived grip—of what it feels like to be a gripping being. What are the constitutive structures of the gripping consciousness? How does the grip shape our being-in-the-world? What is our being such that in our being we grip other being? What are the phenomenological modalities of the gripping self? How is our human interiority constructed from our gripping exteriority? This is to be a no-holds-barred exercise in the “hermeneutics of the hand,” from the perspective of human prehistory. It is not intended as science.

Try to imagine what it would be like to be a completely gripless conscious being: no hands, no mouth, nothing with which to seize and hold an object—one’s own body, the bodies of others, the inanimate world. It isn’t easy to imagine this, because we are so steeped in our prehensive powers—but try.1 You would confront the world in a thoroughly passive manner, with no part of it ever squeezed or grasped or clasped. Presumably a disembodied self would be in this state of total griplessness. Moreover, suppose you have no memory of gripping, and are not even able to imagine gripping anything—you don’t even know what it would be like to grip something. When you see an object passing by, you do not even have a thought that involves gripping the object. Gripping is just not part of your physical or mental being. You don’t even have the concept. How, in that totally nonprehensive state, would you feel about the world? What would your relationship to it be like?

I suggest that your primary feeling would be one of being cut off. You would feel isolated, separated, sundered, and remote. You would perceive the world and think about it (we are supposing, for the sake of the thought experiment, that these are not prehensive acts), but you would experience it as at-a-distance from you, ontologically removed. The overwhelming sensation would be of a gulf between your conscious self and the world outside it. You would be here and the world would be there, and nothing would join the two. There would be a deep duality, an impression of complete disengagement or divorce. Phenomenologically, you and the world would belong to separate spheres. You would be a passive spectator, unable to take hold of anything. You would have no leverage on things, no purchase. You would be bereft of a vast swathe of experience, routinely enjoyed by all prehensive creatures. You would suffer a profound experiential lack, comparable to blindness or deafness or complete lack of sense experience. You would not possess a basic way of connecting to the world that is taken for granted by all prehensive organisms.

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