The Origin of Man: Hand and Tool

Since when has there been this type of the inventive beast of prey? That is one and the same question as: Since when has there been man? — What is man? Through what has he become man?

The answer runs: through the arising of the hand. That is a weapon without equal in the world of freely-moving life. Compare it with the paw, the beak, the horns, the teeth and the tail-fins of other beings. On the one side there is concentrated in it the sense of touch to such a degree that one may almost set it as an organ of touch beside the organs of sight and of hearing. It distinguishes not only warm and cold, firm and fluid, hard and soft, but above all the weight, the shape and the place of resistances — in short, things in space. But beyond that there gathers itself in it the activity of life so completely that the whole posture and the gait of the body have shaped themselves — simultaneously — with reference to it. There is nothing in the world that can be compared with this groping and active member. To the beast-of-prey eye, which masters the world “theoretically,” there is added the human hand as the practical mistress of it.

It must have arisen suddenly, measured against the tempo of cosmic currents — abruptly as a flash of lightning, an earthquake, like everything decisive in world-happening, epoch-making in the highest sense. In this too we must free ourselves from the views of the last century, such as lie, since Lyell’s geological researches, in the concept of “evolution.” A slow, phlegmatic alteration suits the English temperament, not Nature. To prop it up, men flung millions of years about, since within measurable spans of time nothing of the sort showed itself. But we could distinguish no geological strata if they were not separated by catastrophes of unknown kind and origin, and no species of fossil animals if they did not appear suddenly and hold themselves unchanged until their extinction. Of “ancestors” of man we know nothing, for all our searching and anatomical comparing. Ever since human skeletons appear, man is such as he is today. The “Neanderthaler” one sees in every public meeting. It is also quite impossible that hand, upright gait, posture of the head, and so on, should have developed one after another and apart. All that is there together and suddenly. World-history strides forward from catastrophe to catastrophe, whether we can grasp and ground them or not. One calls that today, since H. de Vries, mutation. It is an inner transformation that suddenly seizes all the specimens of a genus, without a “cause,” of course, as everything in actuality. It is the mysterious rhythm of the actual.

But not only must hand, gait and posture of man have arisen simultaneously; there must also — and this no one has hitherto remarked — have arisen hand and tool together. The unarmed hand, for itself alone, is worth nothing. It demands the weapon in order to be itself a weapon. As the tool took form from the shape of the hand, so conversely the hand on the shape of the tool. It is meaningless to wish to separate the two in time. It is impossible that the developed hand should have been active, even for a short while, without a tool. The earliest remains of man and of his implements are of equal age.

What has divided itself, however — not in time, but logically — is the technical procedure, namely into the making of the weapon and its use. As there is a technics of violin-building and a technics of violin-playing, so an art of ship-building and an art of sailing, a fashioning of the bow and a skill in shooting. No other beast of prey chooses the weapon. But man not only chooses it; he makes it, after his own personal deliberation. With that he has won a fearful superiority in the struggle against his own kind, against other animals, against the whole of Nature.

That is the liberation from the compulsion of the genus, something unique in the history of all life upon this planet. With it man has arisen. He has made his active practice independent, to a high degree, of the conditions of his body. The genus-instinct subsists on in full force, but from it there has detached itself a thinking and a thinking action of the individual, which is free of the spell of the genus. This freedom is freedom of choice. Each makes his own weapon, after his own skill and his own deliberation. The many finds of failed and discarded pieces still bear witness today to the toil of this initial “thinking doing.”

If the pieces are nevertheless so similar that one distinguishes by them — with very doubtful right — “Cultures” such as the Acheulean and the Solutrean, and through all five continents — surely with no right — undertakes by them comparisons of date, that is because this liberation from the compulsion of the genus works at first only as a great possibility, and is at the start far from being realized individualism. No one wishes to play the original. Just as little does anyone think of imitating the others. Each thinks and works for himself, but the life of the genus is so mighty that the result is nevertheless everywhere similar — as it is, at bottom, even today.

To the “thinking of the eye,” the understanding sharp gaze of the great beasts of prey, there has thus been added the “thinking of the hand.” Out of the former there develops, from then on, the theoretical, contemplative, meditative thinking, the “reflecting,” the “wisdom”; out of the latter the practical, active thinking, the shrewdness, the proper “intelligence.” The eye searches after cause and effect; the hand works after the principles of means and end. Whether something is suitable or unsuitable to the end — the value-judgement of the active — has nothing to do with true and false, the values of the contemplative, with truth. The end is a fact, the connection of cause and effect a truth.⁴ Thus arose the very different ways of thinking of the truth-men — the priest, the scholar, the philosopher — and of the fact-men — the politician, the general, the merchant. From then on, and today still, the commanding, indicating, fist-clenched hand is the expression of a will. Hence the disclosures from handwriting and from the shape of the hand. Hence the turns of speech about the heavy hand of the conqueror, the lucky hand of a man of business; hence the soul-marks of the criminal’s and of the artist’s hand.

With the hand, the weapon and personal thinking, man has become creative. All that animals do remains within the frame of the doing of the genus and does not enrich its life. But man, the creative animal, has spread over the world a wealth of inventive thinking and doing that makes it appear justified when he calls his short history the “world-history” and regards his surroundings as “humanity,” with the whole of the rest of Nature as background, object and means.

The doing of the thinking hand, however, we call the deed. There is activity with the existence of the animals; deeds only with the existence of man. Nothing is so telling for the difference as the kindling of fire. One sees — cause and effect — how fire arises. Many animals too see it. But man alone thinks out — end and means — a procedure for producing it. No second deed makes so strongly the impression of the creative. It is the deed of Prometheus. One of the most uncanny, most violent, most enigmatic appearances of Nature — the lightning, the forest-fire, a volcano — is called into life by man himself, against all Nature. How must it have worked upon the soul, that first gaze into the self-kindled flame!

Under the mighty impression of the free, conscious single deed, which lifts itself out of the uniform, instinct-driven, mass “doing of the genus,” there has now shaped itself the proper human soul, very lonely even by comparison with other beast-of-prey souls, with the proud and melancholy gaze of one who knows about his own destiny, with the unruly feeling of power in the deed-accustomed fist, everyone’s enemy, killing, hating, resolved upon victory or death. This soul is deeper and more full of suffering than that of any animal. It stands in irreconcilable opposition to the whole world, from which it is divided by its own creativeness. It is the soul of a rebel.

The earliest man eyries alone, like a bird of prey. Even if a few “families” join together into a pack, that happens in the loosest form. As yet there is no talk of tribes, let alone of peoples. The pack is a chance gathering of a few men who just happen for the moment not to be fighting one another, with their women and their women’s children, without common feeling, in complete freedom — no “We,” as a herd of mere genus-specimens is.

The soul of these strong, solitary ones is through and through warlike, mistrustful, jealous of its own power and prey. It knows the pathos not only of the “I,” but also of the “Mine.” It knows the intoxication of the feeling when the knife cuts into the enemy’s body, when the smell of blood and the groaning reach the triumphing senses. Every real “man,” even in the cities of late Cultures, feels at times the sleeping glow of this primal soul-stuff within him. Nothing of the wretched establishing that something is “useful,” that it “spares labour.” Still less of the toothless feelings of pity, of reconciliation, of the longing for rest. But, instead, the full pride of being feared, admired, hated far and wide for one’s strength and one’s fortune, and the urge for revenge upon everything — be it living beings or things — that wounds this pride, even merely by its existence.

And this soul strides forward in growing estrangement from the whole of Nature. The weapons of all beasts of prey are natural; only the armed fist of man, with the artificially made, thought-out, chosen weapon, is not. Here begins “art” as the counter-concept to Nature. Every technical procedure of man is an art and has always been so called: the art of archery and of riding, like the art of war; the arts of building, of governing, of sacrifice and soothsaying, of painting and verse-making, of scientific experimenting. Artificial, contrary to Nature, is every human work, from the kindling of fire to the achievements that in high Cultures we designate as the properly artistic. From Nature is wrested the prerogative of creating. The “free will” itself is already an act of rebellion, nothing else. The creative man has stepped out of the bond of Nature, and with every new creation he removes himself further and more hostilely from her. That is his “world-history,” the history of an unstoppably advancing, fateful estrangement between man-world and universe, the history of a rebel who, grown out of the womb of his mother, raises his hand against her.

The tragedy of man begins, for Nature is the stronger. Man remains dependent upon her, who, in spite of everything, embraces him too, her creature, within herself. All the great Cultures are so many defeats. Whole races remain, inwardly destroyed, broken, fallen to barrenness and spiritual derangement, as victims upon the field. The struggle against Nature is hopeless, and nevertheless it will be fought out to the end.