In the present paper I will attempt to illuminate the intertwined relation between
culture and consciousness as being based on some hardwired aspects of human phylogeny.
I will suggest, despite the fact
that the human intellect is traditionally described in terms of visual
metaphors, that our conceptual skills are based on a kind of crosstalk
between different sense modalities and motor-control, i.e., visual perception and
processing alone can not provide sufficient grounds for
abstraction, and hence, concept-formation. In my argumentation I
will start with Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between the physical,
vital, and human orders, establishing a kind of bridge between the
hard-wired and physical on the one hand, and the cultural along with
the mental on the other hand. I will briefly delineate some recent approaches to consciousness,
since precisely it plays an important role
in enabling culture and mental life to enter the scene. Finally, I will
outline the synesthetic bootstrapping theory which, in harmony with
conceptual metaphor theory, suggests a possible evolutionary path
towards a proto-language, i.e., it establishes the possibility of abstraction and
metaphoric mapping anatomically.
