FIRST PRIMAL FACE
They say that the first attention-grabbing sight for a newborn is a human face. But the baby has such a fuzzy ability to focus that holding up a pie plate with two “eyes” on it will make the infant stare. Thus we should not be surprised that the earliest sculptures found look like this “pebble”:
Deleuze, a philosopher, tries to get under language to the simple impact of sensory life. This professor says “pre-ontological” which is a little like saying “pre-Cambrian life.” I once took a pasting after a sermon that referred to that. A scientist said I was simply ignorant — there WAS no life in the pre-Cambrian era. Today I would say to him, “Perhaps that kind of life simply didn’t conform to your understanding of life.” Perhaps he was 19th century, so concerned with categories (boxes) and confining all phenomena to their proper places that he couldn’t recognize processes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUQTYlCTfek
My seminary advisor was always after me to define the “virtual.” But I didn’t know about Deleuze then and anyway my advisor detested all deconstruction, esp. after his handsome son broke the happy family category with a murder/suicide. The news of this was immediately suppressed. There is no box for such a thing. It cannot be allowed to exist.
“The Makapansgat pebble, or the pebble of many faces, is a 260-gram jasperite cobble with natural chipping and wear patterns that make it look like a crude rendition of a human face. The pebble is interesting in that it was found some distance from any possible natural source, in the context of Australopithecus africanus remains in South Africa. Though it is definitely not a manufactured object, it has been suggested that some australopithecine, or possibly another hominid, might have recognised it as a symbolic face, in possibly the earliest example of symbolic thinking or aesthetic sense in the human heritage, and brought the pebble back to camp, which would make it a candidate for the oldest known manuport at between 2.5 and 2.9 million years ago. The teacher Wilfred I. Eizman found it in the Makapansgat, a dolerite cave in the Makapan Valley north of Mokopane, Limpopo, South Africa in 1925. Almost 50 years later, Raymond Dart was the first to describe it in 1974.” (Wiki)
It was a naturally occurring form (rather like the baculite fossil interiors that look like buffalo) in a stream but had been carried to a cave a dozen kilometers away, inhabited by humans. It weighed a little over 8 ounces and could not have been carried any other way than in the hand of a hominin who recognized a face. The object is dated to 2 or 3 million years ago. This act happened. Those who try to put this in a box (human made or accidental) forget that everything we sense is an interaction of something concrete existing apart from us and our ability to see, interpret and imagine.
There are erosion imprints on the tops of mountains that are shaped very much like footprints. One is said to be the footprint of Jesus as he ascended into Heaven, others are said to be the imprint of some other important person achieving lift-off. We want to see proof of special powers, hierarchy.
https://inallthings.org/christs-footprint/
Much of the discussion of primal understanding of the world or of ambiguous interpretations that need focusing is controlled by language. Writing and definitions are key. How does one talk about things for which there are no words? Some say one can only point at the source of the sensations of existence.
Others borrow from other languages. Germans always have a lot of useful words like “Dasein”.which is a German word that means “being there” or “presence”. But then thinkers will redefine such a word and if you use a German word for an English phenomenon, its use will bring up English examples anyway.
Here are two words that mean almost the same thing: “Ontology is studying the structure of the nature of reality or the nature of exists and, epistemology is studying the potentiality of the knowledge of human being. Ontology is about Being that exists as self-contained or independent of human.”
Here is an array of a word achieved by adding a prefix before figuring out its meaning:
I. Pre-ontological does not mean prior to Being or beings but rather prior to the study of or question of the Being of beings. It is the ground or condition for such questions. For Zizek the pre-ontological is prior to any structuring of the world by man.
II. . . . Preontological means that before there were any substances (whatever those are conceived to be) there was the possibility of substances. This possibility would be analogous to the physicists’ potential energy which is, I suppose, fundamental to kinetic energy.
III. Preontology is the “state” required to make an ontological approach towards some X.
IV. Mucb like prescience is a requirement of science. The prior to of something is required for something to be. The being of beingness is Heideggerian. His terminology may or may not be of use to you depending on what you are looking at investigating. It revolves around Heideggers hermeneutics. The interpretation of interpretation, or what I see are “parallel” to Husserlian “sedimentation”.
Harumph.
So one who wants to know what existence is must be content with feeling it and participating in it, or one can make up words. If one can say “existence” which is the point of ontology, then one can say “pre-existence” or “post-existence” or “quasi-existence.”
So this fist-sized round stone exists and you can see from a photo what it looks like. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGhSILn60Bs It is exhibited in an art museum as first art.
Objectively (cough) it is a stone with two holes and a slash, which a newborn would be pre-programmed to focus on as a “first face.” It could have happened accidentally by erosion. It could be like vegetables that seem to us like humans or maybe human private parts since the naughty bits always catch our attention. But it’s clearly possible to consider it a face and to imagine that either a hominin thought it looked like a face and kept it because of that, or a hominin saw a vague face-like pattern and worked on it a bit, the way that Blackfeet sometimes did a bit of filing on baculite imprints to make them look more like bison.
At what point does a natural object become “found art”? At what point did the hominin mind become capable of art — what is the ontology of human art? If an elephant slashes colors onto paper, is that art? If we look at it and imagine what it expresses, is that art? Is it pre-art, a phenomenon not yet defined, or is it post-art something that looks like art but isn’t?
Why do we feel like we have to talk about it? If you were wading by a cobbled beach and found a stone like this one, would you keep it?
