A brief note on knowledge in the hands

Some time ago, in a post on learning Chinese and the Bulgarian bagpipes, I wrote about the notion of concepts expressed in the hands, about the way in which learning a new skill—whether speaking Chinese or playing the bagpipes—goes beyond the acquisition of information, and instead involves the formation of particular kinds of bodily habit. Some time after writing that, I came across the following snippet from Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, and I thought that it was worth sharing here. Here’s the quote:

 

To get used to a hat, a car or a stick is to be transplanted into them, or conversely, to incorporate them into the bulk of our own body… It is possible to know how to type without being able to say where the letters which make the words are to be found on the banks of keys. To know how to type is not, then, to know the place of each letter among the keys, nor even to have acquired a conditioned reflect for each one, which is set in motion by the letter as it comes before our eye. If habit is neither a form of knowledge nor an involuntary action, what then is it? It is knowledge in the hands, which is forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be formulated in detachment from that effort (166)