Invisible Hands

Heidegger and Adam Smith on Tacit Knowledge

“With a mighty hand and outstretched arm; God’s love endures forever.” (Psalms 136:12)

“The individual…is led by an invisible hand to an end which is no part of his intention.” (Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations)

“Apes too have organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands. The hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs—paws, claws, or fangs—different by an abyss of essence. Only a being that can speak, that is, think, can have hands.” (Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking)

The Forgotten Hand

The history of thought is a history of the hand, from the hand of God to the invisible hand of the market, from the hands of the clock tower to the hands of the handyman, from the fingerprints of the potter to the handwriting analysis of the true crime detective, from the military salute to the handshake, from the open hand of the psalmist to the like button.

Hands are everywhere, if unnoticed. Yes, there is the mighty hand of the Lord. But obstructed by the obtrusiveness of the image is the question—why emphasize the hand at all? God speaks, yet the Bible emphasizes the hand of God, not the mouth of God, or the nose, or the lips, or the ear. We cannot see God’s face and live, but we are beneficiaries of a divine hand.

The laws of the Sabbath open with variations on the theme of extended hands, hands crossing domains, the hand of the beggar and the hand of the private property owner, reaching out for each other.

The Hand As Metaphor For Tacit Knowledge

The fact that hands are everywhere, yet hiding in plain sight, makes them the perfect metaphor for tacit knowledge. Hands precede thought. They are the physical instantiation of what thinkers call the “a priori.”

In Being and Time, Heidegger, describes two different ways that things can appear. Things can be “present at hand” (Vorhandensein) and “ready to hand” (Zuhandensein). The former appear as objects we can measure and analyze, while the latter are appear as tools that we use. The carpenter who uses a hammer relates to it as Zuhandensein. The museum-goer looking at the same hammer behind closed glass as an anthropological specimen relates to it as Vorhandensein. If the second hammer could tweet, it would write, “We are not the same.”

Things which are present to hand are explicit; things which are ready to hand are implicit. When I don’t know what a word means and look it up in the dictionary, it’s present at hand. When I fluently type this sentence, the words are ready to hand.

You can teach bots to do anything explicit, but not to do that which is implicit. Hubert Dreyfus, a Heidegger commentator, argued in the ‘60s, that bots will be human only when they can win at ping-pong. Deep Blue can win at chess, because you don’t need hands to move pieces. You don’t need embodied knowledge to know how to maneuver within the borders of an 8x8 grid. By contrast, a child can play ping pong without any knowledge of calculus, even though the mapping of her swings would challenge even graduate students.

Tacit knowledge is transmitted through observation and imitation, while formalized knowledge can be transmitted through books and code.

The word tradition means to pass down or over; it implicitly requires hands. When traditions are lost it is because the tacit knowledge fails to transmit. One can recuperate and reconstruct a lost or broken tradition, but one can never retrieve tacit knowledge itself. Some might say that tradition itself was never so simple, but always involves elements of both transmission and rupture, so that to be traditional is to learn from one’s examples how to be reconstructive.

Adam Smith and Heidegger

To my knowledge, a comparison of Smith and Heidegger has not been conducted. The one was a Scottish classical liberal, while the latter was a German conservative. The one ascribed to what Isaiah Berlin calls negative liberty, while the latter believed in positive liberty. For Heidegger, freedom is a spiritual calling, rarely achieved, not simply the right to be unbothered by the state.

Yet both thinkers founded their work on the metaphor of the hand.

Smith personified the market, or, if you prefer, immanentized the God of Exodus in the mechanism of supply and demand curves. For Heidegger, the hand of God is likewise immaentized in the impersonal form, “Es gibt.” This grammatical construction, which just means “there is” literally translates as “it gives.” What gives? Being? Meaning? Language? Some have sought to answer in this way, but a more secular answer is that we don’t know, all we know is that something is here, given to us. And yet, in this bait and switch, Heidegger preserved a divine gesture, the outstretched hand. Heidegger maintained the metaphor of life as a gift, a hand reaching out for ours. Meaning is possible not because of autonomous reason, but because of what we are first given.

Ironically, Smith’s views are used to support classical liberalism, while Heidegger’s often lead to arguments for communitarianism, yet both describe something similar an otherness in the heart of the familiar, a familiarity in the heart of the foreign.

Smith’s shocking conclusion is that there is no fundamental contradiction between pursuing self interest and promoting the public good. In certain ways, Heidegger’s thought follows a similar trajectory. There is no contradiction between the pursuit of an authentic life and the pursuit of a communal and traditional one. Dasein’s task is to be original, yet it can only do so by belonging to a community. Dasein’s task is to belong to a social world, yet it can only do so by being original. Rupture—the rupture of the self from the social world—is not the opposite of tradition, but its cornerstone.

Yet Smith’s Invisible Hand is tacit in a way that differs from Heidegger’s. For Smith, the hand is literally invisible to us. It is a kind of miracle. For Heidegger, our hands are literally visible, but phenomenologically invisible. We see them; but the hands that we use are not the same ones we see. We can either use our hands or look at them, but not both at the same time. Heidegger’s hands are Gödelian—whatever we can say about them does not exhaust them.

Applying Heidegger to Smith, we might ask whether supply and demand appear to the hand of the market as “ready to hand” or “present at hand.” Perhaps, when the price is right, the former. When markets fail, and incentives are misaligned, the world becomes “present at hand.” Volatility might be a sign of an environment moving between the ready and the present, trying to find its way between tacit knowledge and explicit self-critique.

Critics of Smith and classical liberalism are right to suggest that belief in markets requires a kind of faith. What they often miss is that this belief also requires a sense of tradition. Things work not because they are unbreakable, but because they are capable of being reconstructed. Tradition is the art of making our reconstructive efforts tacit again.

The greatest sleight of hand is that we are too busy watching the trick, we don’t see ourselves watching it.

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