The Hand

I begin with the two epigraphs above to introduce, and eventually challenge, a certain narrative. The first epigraph consists of the lines which begin John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and I present them here because where we might expect Locke's account of reading to describe the eye, he instead invokes the hand, calling up the embodied practice of reading and foreshadowing the importance of the hand in the gaining of knowledge. Furthermore, the description of a book, an object to be handled, raises the question of the relationship between the thinking subject and the objects the thinking subject handles. Locke's philosophy, the story goes, upholds an insurmountable distance between the mind and the objects that the body encounters. More than three hundred years later, philosopher Zdravko Radman's collection The Hand, an Organ of the Mind: What the Manual Tells the Mental dismantles a dualism that would locate cognition solely in the mind, separate from manual action of the body, a dualism that Locke is supposed to have developed and bolstered. In contrast, Radman's collection argues that the hand has capacities such as perception, know-how, cognition, social interaction, and communication.