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Heidegger and Humanity of the Hand: Smartphone Cynicism

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In the chapter “Telling by hand”, we see Ingold proposing a very interesting concept that is the “humanity of the hand”. Where the author argues, with help from Heidegger’s philosophy, that it is in the hands that the essence of humanity lies. Other senses of perception, the eyes, the nose and the ears, do not afford us the ability to tell stories the way the hand does. It could very well be said that with our eyes, nose and ears, we perceive the world while through our hands, we shape it into form. With our hands – the supreme among the organs of touch, we write, we draw, we thread and as such, we are able to tell stories to the world. 

Humans and the Language of Hands

According to the famous German thinker – Martin Heidegger, the hand is no mere instrument, for only with it came the very possibility of instrumentality. Supported by anatomist Frank Wilson’s claim that the hand exists as an extension of the brain and not a separate device under its control. The brain reaches out into the hands and from there it reaches out into the world. The hand is what separates us from mere animals, but it is not because we have opposable thumbs, nor the fact that we have flexible fingers that move independently, equipped with nails instead of claws. For Heidegger, it is language that holds the hand, which in turn is what holds man. For him, words as the essential realm of the hand provides the stable base in which humanity is grounded. 

For this exact reason, animals are considered by Heidegger to be “poor-in-the-world”, for they lack the essence of “world-forming” that characterizes man, an essence afforded to man by the hand. “Humanity” thus, challenges man by opening up for man a world that is not simply given, but one that must be unraveled to be properly understood. The task of the hand as follows is to tell, one must write, one must draw, only then may one’s world be properly formed.

As such, for the German philosopher, writings only truly tell (a story) when it is written by hand, as opposed to text produced through a typewriter. He argues that the human eye’s script is interpreted as the form of writing that tells and through holding the pen, the hand expresses our humanity. A humanity that starts with the essential “being” which then allows us to “feel”, and it is through that feeling that we start to “tell”. This is exactly what the typewriter has taken away from us – our humanity, for to type is not to write at all, and the typewriter paradoxically stops us from writing, an act that inevitably silences us from telling. 

Stories of Screens, Scrolling, and Smartphones

Ingold’s concept of the “humanity of the hand” can be further extended to the contemporary act of typing on our smartphones. This specific process of mediation reveals how our hands continue to mediate thought and feeling, even in a digital context removed from the material intimacy of pen and paper. While Heidegger mourned the typewriter’s detachment of writing from the hand, the way we send texts today further complicates this separation and disconnect. It can be argued that touchscreens still demand the tactility of our fingers, but the gestures we make with every tap, swipe, and scroll, completely transform writing into a choreography of minimal movements. Hence, the new generation is being taught both this choreography alongside writing by hand simultaneously, resulting in a generational difference and new ways of perceiving and telling stories. 

In handwriting, the thumb is peripheral and supports the pen that is the main object of mediation, whereas in texting, the thumb becomes the primary storyteller. Every new development to our smartphones reduces the thickness of our screens and consequently the distance between our fingertips and the world within our devices. The thin glass screen acts as an invisible barrier, creating the illusion that all forms of mediation are coming directly and instantaneously from our fingertips, almost as if we have become one with our devices.

Today’s digital age creates endless possibilities for our bodies to craft messages, emotions, and relationships. With every communication platform competing for users’ attention, people are always building connections through new innovative ways. Whether that is through texting, calling, reposting, sending stickers, or even Instagram reels, the overstimulating combination of text, audio, and visuals convey more than words simply could. The rise of meme culture on the internet invented a new way to express oneself, which is to make references to other preexisting media. This way, our internal thoughts and feelings, even those that we are unable to fully express, can be mediated with massive external reach, all from the from our fingertips. 

Through these rapidly changing technologies, our bodies constantly translate feelings into digital traces. Instead of leaving fingerprints on tangible objects we touch, we leave digital footprints after every interaction. Furthermore, this enables your smartphone to then reconfigure its role in mediation. Regardless of its convenience and innovation, nothing can compare to the feeling of holding a physical handwritten letter. There is power in the warmth of touch that is now reduced to the cold surface of glass. Ultimately, our fingers’ ability to edit before sending and our habitual scrolling creates a new expression of the hand’s humanity, emphasizing the negotiations between intimacy and distance in the mediated fabric of modern communication.

The Typewriter Returns

Comparing this with Heidegger’s pessimistic opinion of technology, and specifically the typewriter, we can imagine his stance on the disconnect between the hand and smartphone. Through a handwritten letter, we receive more than the words on the page. We see the erased or crossed-out attempts, the personality in the way each “i” is dotted, or even an ink smudge from writing too fast. As we adapted to using typewriters, we lost the sense of humanity and personality in handwriting. However, through the typewriter, we still see a lingering sense of intention beyond the words, we can see the “x”-ed out phrases, creased paper corners, or even a coffee stain on a message written late at night. Evolving into the smartphone, we lose more of these unintentional material stories that linger in each message. With the ability to unsend, edit, and pre-send our messages, we so ingenuinely mediate our communication to a point where we have lost our humanity.

In distinguishing ourselves from other animals, Heidegger emphasizes the strength of the hand in the realm of communication, or more importantly, storytelling. Despite the capabilities of this dexterity, we find our communication regressing to selections of premade facial expressions–emojis. When considering interpersonal communication, we see this grasp of personalisation among the monotonous, identical fonts in messaging systems. In place of personalised handwriting styles, some find ways to change their typing font. In place of crossed-out phrases and typos, some retype their messages rather than editing or deleting . As such, with the dramatic development from the typewriter to today’s smartphone, the typewriter maintains more personalised humanity in comparison to the smartphone. Perhaps if Heidegger could re-evaluate, his interpretation would cut the typewriter some slack. 

Courtesy of Kim Chi Tran, Maxine Gray, Nam Pham

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Digging into Heidegger

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Upon reading Ingold’s “Making”, we discovered that Martin Heidegger, a German Philosopher and one of the most important thinkers of modern times, was cited numerous times to support the text’s main arguments. Born in 1889, Heidegger published his first major work, “Being and Time”, at the age of 1933, when he was recognised for his philosophical contribution to phenomenology and the movement of existentialism. In philosophy’s realm of metaphysics, Heidegger focuses on the study of fundamental ontology, which can be more easily understood as the study of “what it means for something to be”. In Ingold’s “Making”, 4 of his other works are cited, which are ”Poetry, Language, Thought” (1971), “Parmenides” (1972), “Basic Writings” (1993) and “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude (1995).

From these works of Heidegger, his diatribe against the typewriter was used to support Ingold’s argument in the chapter “Drawing the Line”, as well as in the chapter “Telling by Hand”, where the philosopher’s criticism of technology’s effects on human essence was employed. His fundamental ontology was also greatly useful to Ingold’s, as in the chapter ”Round mound and earth sky”, it was drawn to make the important distinction between an object and a thing, where “people” are said to fall into the latter of these two categories of existence. So, in summary, we can see that Heidegger’s Philosophy laid the essential foundation for Ingold’s main arguments in these three chapters, but how exactly do they support the text in “Making”?

The Object at Hand…

For Heidegger, the category of an object is definable as being “complete in itself”. The confrontational “over-againstness” that characterises an object can be understood by the example of a chair. We may look at the chair and interact physically with it, but there exists an invisible distance between us and the chair as an object, for we are unable to join in with the process of its formation. In short, an object exists independent of our perception of it and is in itself complete. A thing, on the other hand, Heidegger defines as a “coming together of materials”; it is fluid and inviting. When we interact with a thing, we do not experience such a distance as with an object, and, as such, “people” would be considered a thing under this definitive categorisation.

Further in the chapter “Telling by hand”, Heidegger challenged the notion that human essence lies in the mind, proposing a focus on the hand instead. He argued that rather than being a mere instrument of the mind, the hand is the precondition of the possibility of having instrumentality. Hence is the saying, having a thing “at hand”, even when it is intangible, such as an upcoming event. For Heidegger, humans having hands is the fundamental essence that differentiates man from mere animals, as we are creatures capable of “world-forming”. On the other hand, he insists humans do not “have” hands, rather the hands hold the very essence of what makes us human to our core (Parmenides, 80). The hand offers us a world of contradictions; through our hand, we can enact greetings, commit murder, and even document the world. 

The Irony of Typing…

In his work, Parmenides, he deepens his perception of the hand to an extension of communication. He explains, handwriting is defined to be words as script (by the hand), and inasmuch as it holds the pen, it also holds one humanity; this is the essential difference between writing and typing with a typewriter. He describes typing as a transcript or a preservation of the handwritten word. In the realm of writing, the typewriter has essentially robbed the hand of its power. Now the act of typing affords a sense of anonymity over the more personalised counterparts; the handwritten words contain meaning beyond the text’s inherent interpretation. Ingold highlights Heidegger’s aversion to the typed word; “with scarcely disguised revulsion, ‘writes “with” the typewriter’. [Heidegger] puts the ‘with’ in inverted commas to indicate that typing is not really a writing with at all”(Making, 122). The hand loses its agency and signature on its writing. Stripped down to its core meaning by type, he claims the very essence of each individually written word is misunderstood when labelled as “the same when typed”. (Heidegger would NOT like this work…) To tell, or more specifically, write a story, one must feel the world and be in the world. Through type, experiences, stories, and lives are reduced to transmissions of encoded information.

Ingold’s Refute

Although Heidegger has some interesting interpretations on the human interaction with media, Ingold notes that Heidegger is a rather bitter older man. Most of his work is obsessed with picking apart the rise of technology and the decay of humanity in response. In comparison he showcases Leroi-Gourhan, a genuine technology enthusiast who encouraged the rise of technology in place of human’s inferior physiological forms. Through the many objects our hand holds, Ingold notes–above all–the hand of others to be held, both in guiding and to be led by the hand. He lingers on the distinct qualities of the human hand, down to the anatomy. Not only does he note the importance of the hand, but the hierarchy of fingers, for the finger may offer feeling and touch, yet it cannot hold without help from the thumb. Through the vehicle of typing, he compares other similar extensions of the hand. He questions a forklift driver’s ability to feel the weight of the load he lifts. Aside from the otherwise two-dimensional medium of typing, he also notes the sensation of the keys while typing, and questions if the typist notices the nuance in shape.

As a fierce guardian of the physical, manual space, Heidegger strongly disavows the integrity of technological assistance and its ability to portray a meaningful story. In this interpretation, the very act of typing in favour of writing, strips inherent depth from a piece. He emphasises the value of the human hand as the pinnacle symbol of the essence of humanity.

Maxine Gray & Nam Pham