The Hands of Time

The Culinary Institute of America has a wall full of hand prints.   Not just random prints but those of well-known chefs. That the CIA would memorialize chefs via their hands makes eminent sense.  Everything about the cooking process involves hands: planting, harvesting, cutting, peeling, handling skillets, cleaning up.   Before she got famous with Chez Panisse, Alice Waters worked at a Montessori school. “Montessori went straight to my heart, because it’s all about encountering the world through the senses. That how kids learn best. The hands are the instrument of the mind--that was how Maria Montessori put it.”

Sadly, when it comes to philosophers, the mind-hand couple linked by Montessori tends to be disconnected.  The general trajectory has been decidedly one-directional: moving away from the concrete realm of lived experience (hands) and toward the a more abstract, more simplified, more artificial one (mind).

Take time.  We still use expressions like “springtime,” “lunch time,” “having a rough time” or maybe the “time of one’s life.”  Such expressions remind us of an older, more concrete,  take on time:  a span defined by ongoing activities, permeated by a qualitative dimension.  

We might call this “baseball time.”  

The question “how long a time does a game last?” cannot be answered by referring to a fixed clock counting down the instants.  The “time” of a game, depends on the activities taking place on the field.  Similarly, on the more traditional take,  “noon” is not marked by a clock but by the sun’s position in the sky.  There is no separate, quantitative, “time” running independently of ongoing (qualitative) activities, the two are interwoven.

Our world is filled with phrases like “killing time,” “wasting time,”  “time is money.” To get there required a philosophical shift indicating a more artificial take on time. Instead of thinking time in terms of events, i.e. the day/night cycle, think of it on the model of a detached, homogeneous line composed of separate dots.  The dots, instants, keep disappearing and the line is quite separate from ongoing activities. Think, not of baseball, but of sports regulated by a clock. Springtime, summertime, wintertime, as qualitative markers, fade away. Instead, we highlight a  time-line that ignores the specifics of ongoing activities.  The newer take on time both creates and celebrates the world of 24/7.  In such a world there would, ideally, be no pauses, no suspensions of busy-ness, no limitations on the dominance of commerce in life. Instead of baseball time we now have Las Vegas time.  

Let’s say it’s the 4th of July, Independence Day. So what?  The casinos, working 24/7, don’t differentiate between this day or any other.  Sunshine is fading, night is arriving.  So what?  Why sleep?  The gaming rooms are open 24/7.   The natural cycle of day/night, along with the cultural cycle of historical/political, religious celebrations become annoyances, frustrations, interruptions in the nonstop frenzy of Las Vegas time.

The 24/7 world of all commerce all the time, transforms many traditional activities associated with hands into  wastes of time.  The handprints at the Culinary Institute remind us of an area which has taken a special hit, cooking.  As mentioned in a previous blog, a Silicon Valley engineer has even invented a food substitute, the ready-made drink Soylent, that can be utilized in  lieu of meals.   Eating food that is the product of loving hands, the preparation and clean-up of which often involves the helping hands of others, becomes more and more an exception rather than the rule. 

  

The personal world of the hands has not disappeared. But, as philosophy goes so goes daily life, and much philosophy has taken us into the world of abstractions.  24/7, along with the outsourcing accompanying it, transforms key instances of natural and cultural time into annoyances and limitations.  How to resist? Well, humans are, after all, the only animals that cook.  They are also the only animals that engage in relaxed conversations. Perhaps using hands to produce meals, cooperating with the helping hands of others in preparation and cleaning up, all the while engaging in conversation, is one way to establish a beachhead.