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. You would be like a sentient jellyfish, only more so. You would be in the grip of the world, but the world would never be in your grip. You would be prehensively impotent.

What difference would adding a gripping organ like the hand make to this rather bleak and frictionless mode of existence? With the addition of the grip you would now be able to reach out and seize an object—people as well as things—cradle the object, caress it, squeeze it, mold it, hang on to it, put it down for a while, pick it up again, carry it somewhere, hand it to somebody, throw it, pinch it, turn it in your hand, get to know its shape and texture, cup it, fiddle with it, warm it, feel its solid presence. What would these actions mean to you? I suggest that the most primitive meaning of the grip is that it converts what is not mine into what is mine—it converts the separate and alien into the joined and nonalien. It takes something from the world and places it in my world. I call this operation de-alienation: thus the grip is a device of de-alienation. The gripless existence is an alienated existence, but the world of the gripper is a de-alienated world. The world begins in alienation—that is the primary modality of our experience—but the grip (in the human case it is mainly the hand) permits this alienation to be nullified or reduced. With the aid of the grip, objects move from other to mine. The grip is what creates the sense of possession—not in the legal sense, but in the existential sense. Merely seeing or hearing an object is not possessing it, but seizing and grasping an object is a far more intimate encounter, in which possession is implicated. To grasp is to acquire, to take possession of. I grasp, therefore I possess.

Consider a primeval man striding across the African savannah, with little he can call his own. He espies a nice looking round stone by the wayside. He pauses and stoops to pick it up. He likes the feel of it—the smoothness, the weight. He envisages its utility in hunting or fighting, or just throwing it for fun. It feels snug in his palm, as if it belongs. His fingers fondly encircle it. The contact gives him a strange thrill. Happily he strides on, his trusty stone gripped tightly in his hand. The stone has become his—he now possesses it. Before it was pure objectivity, just a fragment of an alien and possibly threatening world; now it is his ally, his accomplice, and his friend. His being now includes its being. He turns it deftly in his hand, as if the two were made for each other. He is reluctant to part with it; he certainly won’t let anyone take it from him. The stone is now his instrument, an agent of his survival, and an extension of his being. He feels a sense of oneness with it—of solidarity and belonging. The stone has been de-alienated. The stone has been humanized. There has been a meeting of man and object. The for-itself has made peace with the in-itself, or a fragment of it. It is no longer just a stone; it is now part of the human Umwelt.²

With this sense of oneness, of closeness, of possession, a range of other relationships can be formed: controlling, taming, governing, shaping, subjugating, cherishing, annexing, amassing. And it is not just the inanimate impersonal world that can be de-alienated by the grip; we can also grip parts of our own body and the bodies of others. Most of one’s own body can be self-gripped, from head to toe, but some areas are hard to get to, depending on one’s degree of flexibility. Some people cannot grip their own feet; hardly anyone can grip certain areas of the back. The inside of the body cannot be gripped at all—the heart, the lungs, or the liver. In the happily prehensive state we feel no alienation from our own body, though ailments can interfere with self-gripping in different ways (paralysis, obviously). Then self-alienation will likely ensue—the body will not be fully mine. We already feel pretty alienated from our internal organs—the ungripped parts of our bodily being. A total ban on self-gripping is likely to feel uncomfortable and gulf-inducing (consider the genitals and certain “Victorian” prohibitions). Our prehensive relationship to our own body shapes our feelings of possession with respect to it. Parts of the body are among the first things we grip, and this “auto-prehension” leaves its imprint on the psyche. I am always within reach of my own body. This body is possessed by me because I can always grip it freely.³

But it is in relation to other people that the de-alienating power of the grip really shows itself. The island of the solitary self is bridged by acts of other-prehension. This goes all the way from the formal handshake to the intimacies of sex. It’s all grip, grip, and more grip. The more I can grip you the closer we are, and the more you are mine. The alien other approaches me, possibly unfriendly or threatening, but she extends an open hand, which I take in mine, and squeeze and hold, feeling its fleshy warmth and soft pressure—and then she is no longer quite so alien. I might not have seen a particular person for a while, so that she has grown somewhat alien to me, but I seize and shake her hand and there is re-de-alienation. The bridge, the link, the connection, is formed anew. “Only connect,” as E. M. Forster famously advised; we might revise that to “Only prehend.” Then there is the shoulder squeeze, the body hug, the prolonged interweaving of fingers—all the forms of interpersonal prehension. Hand-holding is the primal form of manual de-alienation: a giving and receiving, symmetrical, reciprocal, both assertive and submissive. Hand-holding says: “You are mine and I am yours.” It is a possessing and a being possessed. To be bereft of any means of gripping, as in our thought experiment, is to be deprived of handholding—an existential tragedy. When gripping turns more intimate its capacity for bond-formation becomes yet more pronounced. Sex is thoroughly prehensive, is it not? What is vulgarly called a “hand job” is an act of prehensive intimacy (and many other forms of manual action could be designated with that peculiar phrase). The vagina itself is a prehensive organ, holding the (gripless!) penis in its firm embrace. The prehensive powers of the mouth may also be called upon. The whole body can be held tight and squeezed. Sexual activity is a very “grippy” matter when you think about it, and possession is its watchword. There is a continuum of prehensive closeness in human relations, and emotional bonding mirrors its gradient. The grip plays an indispensable role in the transition from alien to intimate, from stranger to beloved. Marriage itself could be seen as prehensive completion (with the finger-gripping wedding ring as a symbol of prehensive ownership).

Much more could be said about the grip and other people (as well as pet animals) but I think I have given enough of a sense of the grip-other nexus. In what Sartre calls “Being-For-Others”⁴ the grip plays a vital establishing role. I certainly think this role should be recognized and cultivated (as a practical matter). When early man moved in a more social direction, forming more extensive interpersonal bonds, the role of the grip will have assumed greater importance in human life, with the handshake probably an early development. The linking of hands became common and welcomed. From gripping mainly branches the hand became an organ for gripping parts of human bodies, among other things—from brachiating to glad-handing, as it were. This is the grip as social cement.⁵

I have already discussed the grip in relation to inanimate objects. From the gripping of found objects, like sticks and stones, humans moved to systematic toolmaking and utilizing, which always involves extensive use of the grip. Thus nature becomes ever more de-alienated—rendered ours. The notion of craft embeds the grip, and craftsmanship came to define the human species in due course. In crafting a natural object we bring it into the sphere of human value (“handmade” is a term of approbation). Industry is an outgrowth of this ever-widening grip expansion. In the institution of private property (often referred to as “holdings”) we find the legalized expression of primitive prehensive possession. (I shall say more in the next chapter about the hand and culture.) The human hand proceeds to denature more and more of nature, making the human world a manually constructed world-to-be-gripped. Material culture is manual culture. We now live out our days in a thoroughly de-alienated world, with our surroundings everywhere showing the imprint of the human hand. The grip has conquered nature to a considerable and unprecedented degree—so much so that there is a tendency for people to think that we own nature. The world is our world; it is radically nonalien. Certainly there is a human aspiration to make this so—and to wish it were so. We want to remake the world in our own handy image. We want being to be being-for-us. Our will to power seeks to universalize hand dominion. If only we could mold and shape everything to our will!

In response to this anthropocentric tendency, which is both understandable and also deplorable, and to indicate the existential limits of the grip, I now want to make the point that our de-alienation of nature is always partial—and this too defines the human Dasein. We are essentially beings whose being-in-the-world is always partially alienated, despite the impressive de-alienating powers of the human hand. The project of de-alienation is inevitably incomplete—doomed as an existential imperative. The world, in fact, can never be mine. Why? Because all gripping, manipulating, and transforming must deal with an objective raw material that asserts its own identity and recalcitrance. The hammer may slip out of my grasp or hit my finger or fly apart, because of its nature as a material object subject to impersonal forces. The hammer is an obedient human instrument only up to a certain point—and then it becomes an alien natural object. Every tool of man is also an object of nature. The objective alien being of our tools cannot be gainsaid or canceled, try as we might. There is always an alien residue to every de-alienated object. In every object that is mine there is always an aspect or dimension that is not-mine. The grip is not omnipotent. We are always confronted by the real possibility of re-alienation. Tools that help us live and make us safe can also harm and even kill us. Tools may assuage our natural anxiety in the face of the world, but they are still part of that world, and so may produce the same anxiety.

Thus a profound ambivalence underlies our relationship to the world of human tools: we love them and we hate them. We play imaginatively with the idea of the perfect tool, the tool that will never let us down or harm us, but we know that this is a fiction—a piece of wishful thinking. Mold and shape as we will, the natural world will have its say. It will defy the imperious hand, and even make a mockery of it. It will bite the hand that makes it. Still, the project of de-alienation can be partially successful, and hence can alleviate the existential predicament in which we find ourselves, as angst-ridden fragile beings in a hostile and indifferent world. The hand can ward off the ever-present danger of death and destruction by means of its elaborate constructions, even if death still lurks in every object, no matter how humanly configured. What can in principle kill us can also help us live. The meaning of the tool is therefore enhanced life combined with an undercurrent of death. Think, for example, of cars and car accidents: oh, how we love our cars, but we are terrified of them too!⁶ The world of human equipment is a double-edged sword. The idea of the perfect tool is just a comforting myth, a fairy tale to keep the wolf at bay. No human hand, no matter how skilled and ingenious, can ever remove the fangs of nature.

Animals too can de-alienate through prehension, though their existential dreads are (apparently) less pronounced than ours. In the case of animals, the mouth is the prehensive organ of choice: what is in my mouth is mine. The possessiveness of a dog or cat about what it has in its jaws is palpable—not just food but objects of all kinds. Licking has a special meaning for (many) animals. Taking things into the mouth is appropriation, a seizing of assets. The animal joins itself to the world mainly via the mouth, though some animals have other prehensile organs (the tail, the trunk). When an animal sinks its teeth into something a part of the world has been assimilated into the animal’s domain. Swallowing only completes the assimilation.⁷

The foregoing is one side of the meaning of the gripping action—the incorporation into the self of what was outside the self. The other side concerns attaching oneself to the world: self-transcendence, not self-incorporation. Not linking the world to me, but linking myself to the world. I am alluding here to what psychologists call object relations and attachment theory.⁸ The isolated ego, languishing in its solitude, longs to become connected to others, to escape its solitariness. From a developmental perspective, the neonate, freshly released from the soft grip of the mother’s womb, finds reattachment in the mother’s breast: the breast is what is orally gripped and sucked on. Thus the breast becomes the primary object in the infant’s set of object relations. The infant attaches itself, physically and emotionally, to the mother’s breast, via its mouth. (This original attachment may lead to regressions in later life, according to object-relations theory.) But the infant must soon augment its object relations to include the whole mother, not just the breast part, salient and proximate though it may be (succulent too). The cessation of breastfeeding will inaugurate this new era of object relations and attachment. Then the father must be included, and later other people. Maternal deprivation occurs if the child’s attachment to the mother is disrupted, because attachment relations are essential to psychological well-being and successful maturation. The happy child is the well-attached child, according to theory. But object relations can be fraught and fragile, so that there is anxiety surrounding them (the breast is always being withdrawn). Hence a fear of loss attends the child’s object relations—of disattachment. In these basic psychological object relations, then, we find bonding, socialization, a sense of connectedness, relief from aloneness, security, self-approbation, openness, self-transcendence, and peace of mind—all that is healthy and good. Fetishism, regression, neurosis, even insanity, can (allegedly) result from unsatisfactory object relations.

Let us summarize all this by saying that the human psyche thrives on attachment. Then the point I want to make is that attachment depends to a considerable extent on prehension—chiefly, by mouth and hand. If a child lacked prehensive capability, by accident of birth or upbringing, then object relations would be impeded and possibly completely ruptured. The breast must be gripped and sucked (or failing that some breast substitute—the “dummy”). Hence the baby is orally hyperactive, and orally centered (compare Freud’s “oral phase”). Oral prehension is the original bodily mechanism of emotional attachment, according to these theories, closely followed by the hands. We reach beyond ourselves to form connections with others precisely by gripping them. No doubt some attachment can be achieved in the absence of prehension (though it is hard to obtain data about this), but given the way humans are physiologically and psychologically constituted, gripping is their primordial mode of object attachment. The infant cannot just think, “It would be desirable to become attached to my mother” and proceed to do so; he or she must go through a sequence of developmental stages in which object relations are organically and naturally established.⁹

It is easy to see that this type of psychological theorizing has its counterpart in ordinary adult human relations. I become attached to others, thus easing my essential solitariness, by means of prehensive acts of many kinds, already enumerated. I become emotionally attached by becoming physically attached. This is how I link myself to others (and to the material world). The purpose here is not possession but augmentation—expansion, enlargement. I seek to be embedded in a world that exists beyond me, particularly a social world—to become one with the universe, as people say. But I can’t do it just by wishing it were so, and language has its limits in cementing bonds; the hands (and mouth) are the preferred means of securing the desired end. They are the apparatus of attachment—the hooks, the glue. If we consider early man, with his dawning self-consciousness, his limited language, and his need for others, then his hands will have played an indispensable role in forming interpersonal attachments. The hands are the tools of human attachment. The social being of man is a hand-mediated being (with the mouth playing its own distinctive role). And let us not forget the emotional attachments we form to purely material things, which are also experienced as self-expanding, such as tennis racquets, guitars, motorcycles, and kayak paddles. These are gripped objects, expressly so, and the grip surely mediates the felt attachment. A yearning itch in the hand to connect to these objects is a sure sign of their positive valence. There is pleasure and value in the grip.¹⁰

In fact, I think we can go further and defend a kind of “externalism” about our human implements—that is, these objects can become literally parts of the body. They are not just joined to the body, but integral to it. Thus the body externalist will claim that when I hold a tennis racquet in my hand, say, it is actually functioning as a part of my body. The fact that it is physically detachable will not disqualify it from being a part, because it is easy to imagine a “Twin Earth” on which people’s fingernails (say) are detachable and yet parts of their body. The Twin Earth people, we may suppose, take their fingernails out at night for safekeeping and insert them again in the morning—yet they are otherwise just like us. What matters is the functional connection, not the ease of removal. A prosthetic hand or leg can surely be or become part of its owner’s body, as much as an artificial heart or a hipbone made of titanium. What if we discovered tomorrow that our ordinary human bones were in fact installed by clever surgeons at birth? Would we conclude that these bones are not really parts of our body after all? What if in some possible world tennis racquets grew naturally from the hands of players if they played enough tennis? Would we allow that these are parts of their body but insist that the racquets you buy in shops can never be? What if the handle grew naturally but you had the buy the head and strings? There is just no principled distinction here. The concept of a body part is very fluid and functionally defined. What counts as a part of my body is what acts as a part of my body.

We can thus say without undue exaggeration that the instrumental environment of humans belongs to their extended phenotype: our human tools are parts of our species anatomy, like birds and their nests and beavers and their dams. It would certainly be quite wrong to exclude tools from the domain of the body just because they are not located inside the skin—that would exclude teeth, hair, and nails (as well as the skin itself). No matter which way you cut the pie, the body is not in the skin! We may as well declare that the human body extends out to include the equipment we use to augment the body with which we were born. Tools are just remote prosthetic devices. We should go externalist about the body (the phenotype). Thus we have the native body and the acquired body, as we have innate ideas and acquired ideas (which are both still “in the mind”). The native body can be augmented with prosthetic devices that then become (acquired) parts of it. This process of augmentation extends to all human tools. With a bit of conceptual ingenuity, indeed, we could no doubt argue that a given individual’s body extends out to include the bodies of others, given the right functional connections (certainly a body part of yours could become a body part of mine, as with a transplanted leg). Teamwork results in an extended social phenotype for the individual (the team functions as a tool by which I achieve my goals). As people have spoken of the “extended mind,” so we might speak of the “extended body.” From this point of view, the mind does not really extend beyond the body after all—since the body itself is already extended. The usual vague notion of the body is conventional and does not reflect the real underlying ontology. The best theoretical natural kind here takes the body to be extended into the instrumental environment. There is no natural cutoff point between eyes, fingernails, ear wax, gut bacteria, sweat, beards, prosthetic limbs, clothes, reading glasses, satchels, bicycles, cars, and tennis racquets.¹¹

I have spoken in glowing terms of the grip, emphasizing its positive features. These features figure in the meaning of the grip to she who grips. But the grip also has a dark side. I shall briefly dwell on this grim aspect of gripping. There are two aspects to consider: the hostile grip of the other, and anxiety about one’s own grip. We have such locutions as “under my thumb,” “in her clutches,” “held hostage,” “grasping landlord,” “iron grip of the state,” and “put the squeeze on”—all of which have negative connotations. There are also unwelcome manual acts such as strangling, prodding, jabbing, slapping, punching, pinching, snatching, grabbing, groping, and so on. The hand can obviously be used to perform evil acts (though it pains me as a hand enthusiast to say so). Thus we can rightly fear the grip of the other, as well as sometimes welcoming it. Imprisonment and confinement are undesirable ways of being “held” and indeed often employ griplike devices (handcuffs, shackles). We also speak of being in the grip of addiction or insanity. The handshake, though generally positive, can easily carry a negative potential, because it can be an assertion of power or domination. An excessive squeeze of the hand can be used to threaten or instill fear, and the hand held too long in a vicelike grip is redolent of forced captivity. Thus ambivalence attends our sentiments regarding the grip. The same is true of the mouth: biting is something to be feared—and the kiss can turn quickly to the bite. Not all gripping is good, by any means. Strangling someone strikes us as especially loathsome, because it is an intimate use of the hands to literally squeeze the life out of a person. The strangler is a kind of evil ironist. The phrase “killed him with his own bare hands” is particularly chilling.

Then there is grip anxiety, grip panic. This comes in several forms: losing one’s grip on something valuable, gripping forbidden or disgusting things, gripping dangerous things, and a total loss of the ability to grip. Let us focus on cases of grip fallibility. The dramatic paradigm is losing one’s grip while hanging from a high place, possibly from someone else’s fallibly gripping hand. The hand becomes fatigued, cramped, and unable to hold on a moment longer—and then the object or person is dropped, possibly to his or her death. Or the hand may be clumsy and unskilled, or just plain slippery. We are always dropping things or failing to grasp them properly. Because the grip is fallible it is surrounded by anxiety: is my grip good enough, strong enough, likable enough? This grip anxiety is mirrored in our anxieties about life itself: what if I lose my grip on life? The dying person is told to “Hold on!” In death we “slip away.” It is as if we think of ourselves as holding life tightly in our hands, but our hands may not be up to the task. This is why dangling from a cliff seems like such a powerful metaphor for mortality: we are “hanging on to” life for all we are worth, but our grip is fallible—so life might slip away. We are also told to “seize the day” and “take life in both hands” and “grab what life has to offer.” But we recognize that like all gripping, the gripping of life is fallible, sometimes futile. All gripping is inherently precarious, in the nature of the case. Whatever can be gripped can become ungripped. The grip is haunted by fear of its loss. Hence, all gripping is anxious gripping.

The value of the grip is therefore double edged, both positive and negative. It can create attachment and possession, which are good, but it can also lead to disaster and subjection, which are not so good. The attachment is shaky; possessions can be lost. The grip of the other can be a locus of dread. The hand is the soul’s emissary into an alien world, but it can never in the end erase the alien substance of the world. It can at best mitigate it. The hand is a bridge, but a shaky bridge. It is at most a partial solution to our existential predicament. The self-other rupture can never be fully healed. The world can never be my world.

Let me end this flowery chapter with some light musings on the thumb and forefinger. In the hierarchy of human grips, that between thumb and forefinger must rank as the most exquisite. The terminal pads of the two digits fit snugly together and permit fine-tuned variations of movement, as with rolling a small round object between them. The pressure between thumb and forefinger can be precisely calibrated, and there is a high concentration of sensory innervation. Of all our hand capacities, this is probably the one with the greatest evolutionary significance, with a strong claim to making us what we are today. Is it an accident that joining the tips of these fingers produces a circle, the most perfect geometrical figure? Clearly, evolution has exquisitely tuned these delicate-yet-robust organs to work together in perfect harmony.

But what do they mean to the person who possesses them? What image do they conjure in the mind? I suggest that they signify perfect union. They are separate entities that can operate independently, and are different in form and movement, but they join together in beautifully calibrated acts of delicate cooperation. The two together are far greater than their sum considered separately. They resemble nothing so much as a perfect marriage. But compared to them no human marriage can match their effortless union. They work instinctively together, with no friction or conflict of interest or mutual misunderstanding. They stand as a model of the perfect partnership. They function as a unitary entity, but with separable parts: the ideal team, the flawless duet. They give us, perhaps, something to aspire to—or remind us of our own imperfect unions. They are complementary, selfless, and supremely competent. In an imperfect species, they stand out as avatars of perfection. They are one of the great natural wonders of the world.