Michelangelo's Finger

An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence

Raymond Tallis

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781848875524
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

In this startlingly original and persuasive book, Raymond Tallis shows that it is easy to underestimate the influence of small things in determining what manner of creatures humans are. He reveals that over time the repeated and multiple effects of the seemingly insignificant can make an enormous difference and argues that the independent movement of the human index finger is one such easily overlooked factor. Indeed, not for nothing is the index finger called 'the forefinger'. It is the one we most naturally deploy when we want to winkle things out of small spaces, but it plays a far more significant role in an action unique to us among primates: pointing.

In Michelangelo's Finger, Raymond Tallis argues that it is through pointing that the index finger made a significant contribution to hominid development and to the creation of a human world separate to the rest of the natural world. Observing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the hugely familiar and awkward encounter between Michelangelo's God and Man through their index fingers, Tallis identifies an intuitive indication of the central role of the index finger in making us unique. Just as the reaching index fingers of God and Man are here made central to the creation of our kind, so Tallis believes that the simple act of pointing is central to our extraordinary evolution.

chapter one

How to Point: A Primer for Martians

There can be few more dispiriting experiences than being the re -cipient of detailed but entirely superfluous explanation. Of all the things readers of this book may feel they need, instruction in how to point might seem to be the least pressing. But it is a necessary step towards understanding what pointing, ultimately, points to.

At first sight, nothing could be more straightforward, natural and unpuzzling, than pointing. It seems, of all our gestures, to justify what St Augustine said when he famously described bodily movements as ‘the natural language…of all nations’. ¹ Pointing ap pears to be the least conventionalized of the signs human beings use to communicate with one another, and consequently to require the minimum of decoding. It certainly appeared so to the Sophist Cratylus. According to Plato, he argued that, if we communicated solely by pointing, misunderstanding would be avoided. ² Indeed, ‘Pointish’ seems so transparent a language, or proto-language, that it has frequently been seen as the key to the miracle by which the speechless infant becomes the toddler who speaks. And when some -one wants to know what you are talking about, you can always, as a last resort, point to it.

However, all is not what it seems. Pointing is not at all straight -forward. What is mor e, it does not deliver what would be needed if it were the sole bridge from babbling babyhood to talking toddler -hood, or an all-purpose means of clarifying what is meant when language fails us. Nevertheless, it is central to developing the mode of consciousness – explicit, shared, collective – that is in finitely elaborated in (uniquely human) language. It is worth dwelling on this a bit.

First of all, as just noted, pointing does not always deliver what is required. The index finger by itself is not sufficient to make clear what it is that is being pointed to, at, or out. There is the well-known and probably apocryphal story of the anthropologist who wants to learn the language of a newly discovered tribe. Accom panied by his native informant, he points to a series of pictures he has brought with him – of objects such as a dog, a house, a tree and so on. To his astonishment, each picture elicits what sounds like the same word. He gets very excited. What kind of world-view must these people have, if they use the same expression for things as disparate as dogs, houses and trees? Has he stumbled upon a new mode of human consciousness? In the middle of the night, the penny drops. The word elicited by pointing to each of the pictures is the word for ‘picture’. And non-apocryphally, David Wilkins reports that he had to be retrained how to point ‘properly’ when he lived among the Arrernte people, in particular to appreciate the key role of pointing with the extended lower lip to supplement index-finger pointing. ³

Secondly, if pointing is a ‘natural’ mode of signification, it must be a rather special one, because humans are the only living creatures who point. This is why nothing is straightforward about pointing: it partakes of the complexity of human consciousness and, indeed, I argue that it has played an important part in its elaboration. Before we examine these complexities, we need to get our object more sharply in focus.

What is pointing? It is sometimes a wise, and always a safe, move to consult a dictionary to find out what you are talking about. When the lexicon in question is The Oxford English Dictionary, the reward is generally beyond expectation, and a search for definitions rapidly turns into an archaeological dig into the accumulated past of human thought. (Of this, more presently.)

A Lexical Interlude

‘Point’ has so many primary and derivative meanings and uses that we are in danger of losing ourselves in a labyrinth. The Oxford English Dictionary lists sixty-five meanings. That to which we ultimately point, what the grammarians would call its cognate object or internal accusative, is a ‘point’ and this itself proliferates like the hyphae of fungi. A ‘point’ may be (to pillage the OED) a prick (ab -sence) or dot (positive). It may mark a pause to articulate the sense of something, giving notations or time junctures, hence decimal points and the points seen in mediaeval musical notation, indicating a note, that is to say a separately produced sound, though it would be several hundred years before point would acquire another meaning in opposition to counterpoint. It may, of course, mark the end of a separate piece of sense or communication – a period. It is notionally a minute particle of anything, the smallest unit of meas -urement; the smallest or a very small portion of time; and ditto of space. Points may be units of counting, as in scoring games, competitions or examinations. They may mark accumulated credit in credit cards; may be the measure of the size of typeface (this book has been typeset in 12 point). Most mysteriously and paradoxically, they may indicate position without magnitude. The point may be: the precise matter being discussed (‘Your point being?’ – the perfect put-down); that at which one aims, or for which one strives or contends – aim, object, end; a conclusion, culmination, period; or a sharp end to anything. And expressing something with delicacy, we put a fine point ‘on’ something. An indication, a hint, a suggestion may be all that is necessary to re-locate a certain fieldsman in cricket from point to silly point or to criticize the extremities of a horse.

The verb ‘to point’ has no less than sixteen stem meanings, several of them with numerous branches. The one most pertinent to our inquiries is the ninth: ‘9a. Intransitive To indicate position or direction by extending the finger; to direct attention to or at something in this way.’ That is what pointing does. How does it do it? What would one tell a Martian about the basic rules of Pointish? To indicate something in the canonical form of pointing, you need to extend your arm and index finger in the direction of that which is pointed at. Precision pointing requires the index finger to be offset from the others and it is relevant therefore that in humans the index finger naturally protrudes above the other fingers, whereas in the non-pointing chimpanzee it does not. Aside from the ability to isolate the finger, pointing is more of an achievement than it sounds. My years looking after patients with neurological problems have been a constant reminder of just how much of an achievement accurate pointing is. ⁴

How to Point: Physiology and Biomechanics

Point at an object. Observe yourself extending your arm and index finger in the direction of the target. Most likely, you will have separ -ated the signal of the index finger from the noise of the rest of your hand, to ensure precision, by curling the other fingers under the palm of your hand. Your thumb will assist in this by pressing on the middle finger, as if holding it back. The arm has to be held steady, so that the long axis of the index finger and the imaginary line connecting you and the object are congruent. Stretching out your arm involves muscles around the elbow and shoulder joint acting in coordination, so that there is a smooth unfolding. Maintaining the position requires the careful calibration of the force exerted round the elbow, so that the extended position is maintained. The position of the elbow as a whole has to be sustained by the operation of a galaxy of muscles in the upper arm, in and around the shoulder joint, and even in the trunk to maintain the stability of the shoulder joint, and to keep the shoulder itself in place. The necessary stability to maintain fixation on the target, in short, requires the exquisite control of numerous muscle groups acting in concert. This control – from the fractionated finger movement that separates the index from its fellow digits, to upholding the outstretched arm – is made poignantly evident in its absence, for example, in patients who have had strokes, who cannot separate their curled-up fingers, move their arm into the right place, or hold it steadily once there.

The achievement inherent in judging the appropriate position of the outstretched hand is easy to overlook. The object is over there and the arm is simply invited to, as it were, engage in a ‘virtual reach’. But assuming the right posture in the right place is not as easy as it appears. First of all, each of the joints – the shoulder, the elbow and the wrist, has several degrees of freedom: there is a range of possible positions it can adopt in several planes. The choice of positions has to correspond to the relation between three things: myself, my arm and the object to be pointed out. Pointing, in other words, has to be enacted within a frame of reference which defines the coordinates of myself and of the object, which will then in turn define the location and characteristics of the line that will link the one with the other. I locate myself at a kind of 0,0,0 point within an egocentric space that encompasses both me and the object. The challenge, therefore, is then to translate the relation I see, and feel, between myself and the object, into a line that links them; and use my own arm to flesh out (literally) that line, so that it is visible to the person for whose benefit I am pointing. In order to do that, I have to translate the difference between the present position of my arm and the position necessary to point at the object into patterns of muscle activity.

There is much more to it than I have described but I imagine I do not need to say more to persuade you of the scale of this achievement. It is possible to point of course with the whole arm – and people who have had amputations do that – but fine-tuning requires the separation and unfolding of the index finger. This is an example of so-called fractionated finger movements. These are controlled by a particular pathway in the nervous system, the cortico-spinal tract which is a hotline between the cerebral cortex and the nerves in the spinal cord controlling voluntary muscles. Other primates have fractionated finger movements controlled by the cortico-spinal tract, which enable them, for example, to winkle nuts out of tight spots; but these movements are far less well developed than in humans. Just as chimpanzees do not have a fully opposable thumb, so their ability to separate their index finger from its fellow digits is less well developed.

Reaching, holding the extended arm steady, against gravity and other countervailing forces, and even fractionated finger movements, are not, of course, unique to pointing. And the use of the index finger in the way described is not the only mode of pointing, al though it is the canonical referential gesture that makes clear what is present in other, less versatile, modes of bodily pointing, using the thumb, the arm as a whole, the elbow, the shoulder, the head, the torso, the eyes and even the foot. Index finger pointing makes most explicit the essence of pointing.

How to Point: The Rules of the Game

What are unique are the rules of the pointing game? It is quite a business and there are four components. There is the producer (the person doing the pointing); the pointer used by the producer (usually the outstretched hand and index finger); the pointee (that which is pointed out); and, finally, the consumer (the person for whose benefit the pointing is carried out). The producer uses a part of his or her own body to establish an axis that joins the producer with the item being pointed out – with the pointee. The consumer is invited to follow the virtual line with her visual attention until it reaches the pointee.

The nature of the pointee may vary enormously. It may be a mat -erial object; or the rough location of an object (as when we point ‘somewhere over there’ or at the clouds in the sky or ‘over them hills yonder’); or the direction of an object whose precise location is or is not known; or simply a direction, as when one is pointing to which way someone went, or where something was located a little while back (as when, for example, I point to an empty chair), or indicating in which direction a town is, or which way is north. In the most straightforward case, the pointee is a determinate, clearly located, clearly defined material object – a cup, a cat, the kind of thing that the philosopher J. L. Austin, with tongue slightly in cheek, would have called ‘medium-sized dry goods’.

The pointee gets pointed out in virtue of lying on a line projected from the tip of the producer’s finger. The outstretched finger lays down the first few inches of the line by embodying it. The arm of course is not merely the transporter, the supporter, the plinth, but often forms part of the line itself. With its help, Pointish is whole-arm-shouted rather than finger-whispered. This is important when producer and consumer are separated by distances that shrink the phenomenal appearance of their bodies – as when both are in the Great Outdoors.

So much for the producer, the pointee and the pointer. What of the recipient or consumer, without whom pointing would be pointless? To benefit from the producer’s action, the consumer has to understand the intention behind the action, to understand why the producer is assuming that particular bodily posture. And then she has to work out what it is that is being pointed to. Identifying the act as one of pointing should not be too difficult, if only because there are relatively few reasons for holding up one arm and making it and the index finger stick out in what we might call the ‘indicative’ mode or mood. Pointing postures are assumed only for the sake of pointing; they rarely happen accidentally or as part of other actions. Even so, it is not self-evident that the hand-and-finger is indeed pointing rather than merely reaching out or signalling in some other way. While the very name of the index finger broadcasts its distinctive role in indicating things, it does not have its name written on it. Grasping (a word whose over-determination scarcely needs underlining) what the producer is pointing at, out or to, however, is even more demanding.

What is so difficult about it? Quite simply this: in order to loc -ate the pointee, the consumer has to assume the position of the producer. Clearly we do this mentally, not bodily, though when pointing fails and we cannot see what the other person is pointing out, we might come close to her and look along her arm as if along a telescope. (A certain amount of irritation is often evident under such circumstances: the producer with the dimness of the consumer and the consumer with the vagueness, or unhelpfulness, of the producer.) Normally, though, the consumer has to cast herself in her imagination out of her own body and mentally look along the line drawn in space by the arm and index finger extending from the producer’s body. The consumer, that is to say, has to put herself in the producer’s place. This is a rather remarkable thing to do: it amounts to an, admittedly minor and temporary, but nonetheless real, abdication from the sense that one is at the centre of those things that are lit up in one’s sensory field; that one is the centre of the experienced universe.

This is an extraordinary achievement, and it says a lot about what we humans are. In the next chapter, I shall argue that this voluntary displacement of the human subject from the material centre of his world is a first step in the growth of an important intuition: that one is part of something greater than one’s self and greater than the parish uncovered by one’s sense experience; that one is part of an explicit community of subjects; and, ultimately, that one is an atom or unit of a society. Acquiring the ability to point or to understand what someone else is pointing at is a step in the collectivization of one’s individual consciousness through the joining of attention. Point ing, in short, points towards a distinctively human form of awareness; a uniquely human breach in the solitude of sentient creatures.

It is not always, or even usually, necessary to put one’s self precisely in the other’s person’s place in order to identify what it is he is pointing at. Sometimes, as when pointing is supplemented with words – ‘Look at that cat!’ – it is necessary only to look in the right quarter of space. ⁵ This composite mode of pointing – fingering plus words – is more advanced, a development occurring later in an individual human life and later in the history of the human race. At any rate, interaction between carnal (digital) and semantic (verbal) pointing, between pointing with the flesh and pointing with air or ink, is surprising, indeed strange. Just how strange this compos -ite pointing is will become clear when, in Chapter 5, we discuss the intersection between semantic (or linguistic) and material (or physical) space in the use of so-called ‘ostension’ in teaching the meaning of words. For the present we shall accept that the producer may sometimes use words to assist the consumer, so that the latter does not ...