The Opposable Thumb and the Big Toe: Of The Thinker In Auguste Rodin and Sarath Chandrajeewa

by Laleen Jayamanne

What do the prehensile hand and the big toe have to do with the unique and exalted human ability to think? These two vital anatomical features of our body, the thumb and the big toe, don’t draw attention that much (we take them for granted), but a canonical French sculpture and a small Lankan painting have brought them to my attention recently.

I was predisposed to notice the function of the big toe in Rodin’s modern sculpture, The Thinker (1904) and in Sarath Chandrajeewa’s painting, Thinker in front of the empty doorway (2023), because of a photo of a big toe in the book, Gesture and Speech by the palaeo-anthropologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan. In extreme close-up, it is not a pretty picture, though what Leroi-Gourhan has to say about its function in human evolution is startling, certainly food for thought. He says that the evolution of the human foot with its big toe created the bipedal ability to stand up firmly, and walk upright, without losing balance.

Try walking with the big toe lifted up! Similarly, without the freed prehensile hand, humans could not have evolved to create tools and language, with a big, highly differentiated brain and nervous system of precise sensitivity. He demonstrates the unique refinement of the human hand and foot by providing diagrams of the gradual differentiation of these two drivers of evolution in contrast with some primates. Here’s Leroi-Gourhan:

“The human hand is not fundamentally different from that of other primates. Its ability to grasp, like theirs, is due to an opposable thumb. The foot, however, is radically different from a monkey’s. A primary stage with an opposable big toe is conceivable, but the two paths must have diverged very early, before the earliest known anthropoid stage”.

The Thinker as Archetypal MAN Just imagine placing a woman in the posture of The Thinker. Would it be credible? Sumathy Sivmohan asked this rhetorical question in our recent piece on ‘Abstraction & Empathy’ (Island 19/4/24):

“We already have the figure of the Thinker in Rodin. Do we immediately know to make those connections, and therefore think of the Thinker? Or is it a MAN holding himself in a ‘thoughtful’ pose which kindles the idea?”

So, I did a search and found that there is at least one such example, but its parodic register makes the point. In singer Ariana Grande’s “God Is a Woman” music video, she sits in The Thinker pose while being attacked by small angry men. Rodin’s thinker, though celebrated as a rare modern bronze sculpture, has been parodied in mass culture from as early as 1940. Charly Chaplin parodied The Thinker by placing multiple plaster copies of the statue to decorate the road on which Hinkel’s motorcade travelled in The Great Dictator. He adjusted a detail by making The Thinker stretch out one arm in a ‘Heil Hitler’ salute. Jean Luc Godard parodied The Thinker in his 1968 anti-Vietnam war essay-film, A Letter to Jane. It seemed that the solemnity of this perennial European male posture was unsalvageable.

The Archaic Thinker

But the prototype for the Thinker goes back to ancient times with clay figurines striking the same pose of a seated male figure holding his head in his hand. This iconic gesture (gestus in Brecht, Abhinaya in Mirror of Gesture (Abihnaya Darpan), of resting or holding the weight of the head in his hand with down cast eyes is what makes it an archetypal image of introspective, thinking man, self-aware man. The organ of thought, the brain appears to be weary and heavy, needing support of its ally, the hand. Wikipedia says the following about The Thinker’s archaic lineage:

“The Thinker from Yehud, also known as the Thinker of Palestine,[1] is an archaeological figurine discovered during salvage excavations in the Israeli city of Yehud. The figurine, which sits atop a ceramic jug in a posture resembling Rodin’s famous sculpture “The Thinker,” dates back to the Middle Bronze Age II Palestine (c. 1800–1600 B.C.E.). It was found in a tomb accompanied by various items, including daggers, spearheads, an axe head, a knife, two male sheep, and a donkey, all likely buried as offerings. After its discovery, the broken jug had to be stabilised and restored before being displayed in the Canaanite Galleries of the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.”

“The “Thinker of Cernavodă”, Romania, a terracotta sculpture, and its female counterpart, “The Sitting Woman”, are works of art from the Chalcolithic era. The Hamangia culture produced these remarkable sculptures, with The Thinker believed to be the earliest prehistoric sculpture that conveys human self-reflection instead of the more common artistic themes of hunting or fertility. About 5,000 BC.”

And then Sarath Chandrajeewa does a small painting in 2023 and gives it a discursive title; Thinker in front of the empty doorway, which recollects Rodin’s work respectfully, in that it is not an ‘appropriation,’ neither a copy nor a pastiche of an old master, both tired gestures. But here, the exchange is between two bronze sculptors, one of whom also paints and makes pottery. There is a complex exchange of thought encoded in craft praxis (a theory-practice exchange) going on here, in this act of naming. A rare Lankan practitioner of bronze casting of monumental statues, (trained in the European tradition in Britain and post-Soviet Russia), and of abstract work in bronze, from the global South, salutes a modern European master in an oblique manner, fully cognisant of the vast aesthetic, historical and political differences that separate them. The gesture is quiet, measured, very modest indeed.

The sheer monumental form of Rodin’s Thinker (6 feet), is emphasised by the fact of its placement at a height emphasising the weight of thought bearing down. Besides, seated on a rocky surface he leans forward, twisting his body by placing his right elbow on his left knee, with his hand supporting his head lost in thought. Thinking appears to strain the body to an extreme. The feet rest on an uneven slope creating a sense of a somewhat precarious balance, emphasised by the big toe of his right leg which grips the rocky ground as though to steady himself from slipping.

The Asian Squatting Posture

In contrast, Sarath’s thinker is squatting on the ground and therefore has a stable stance working comfortably with gravity, as all Asian dancers and martial artists also do in their bent-knee stance, while standing. However, the thinker’s right big toe is separated from the little toes and appears to have a life of its own. which is why it stuck out like a sore thumb, as we say in English. The mimetic correspondence between the two thinkers helps to differentiate them on the basis of this similarity. Their big toes sharpen our perception and readies the mind to perceive differences and diverge. This power of divergence, while working within a tradition, is what the late Kumar Shahani called creativity, within Indian Modernism. A contribution to the richness of Indian Modernism which engaged with tradition without reproducing clones and neo-traditionalist kitsch.

‘All that is Solid Melts into Air’ Marx

The high seriousness of Rodin’s The Thinker easily lent itself to parody partly because it is a highly abstract work, free of context, universal. It is in the great lineage of nude sculpture from classical Greece of idealised male figures such as Apollo, to the perfect anatomy of David by Michelangelo. These lessons have been internalised by Rodin who comes at the tail end of this European tradition, after the famous Laocoon of the twisted bodies entangled in a serpentine struggle with a large snake. Rodin’s The Thinker appears belated, an anachronism in the midst of the dematerialisation of space and time in impressionism and other Modernist work of the late 19th Century capitalist, industrial modernity.

Rodin’s model for his The Thinker, ironically, was a boxer who often suffers from brain damage as an occupational hazard! But by then the division between the body (manual labour with the hand) and mind (intellectual labour with the brain) had had a long history in Europe from the Florentine Renaissance on, where the abstract brain work produced Linear Perspective and mapped the globe, as well as the factory system with its division of labour, to produce wool for the market, which required workers with manual skills.

The European Thinker as a Melancholic

It was in this 16th Century tradition that the pathology of Melancholia was written about in Italy, as the signature malady of men who lived by exercising their intellect, that is men of genius, artists, poets and philosophers. In contrast, in classical Greece the thinker was a man who walked and talked, a peripatetic figure as in Plato’s Academy, seen in paintings. Socrates and his students appear to have had a wide repertoire of gestures for picturing thinking as a collective, active process. But it is in the Renaissance that the iconography of the head resting on a hand was revived from prehistoric times to represent a unique male individual as the thinker. Is this because of the immense archive of Classical Greek knowledge that opened up to be mastered, creating the Italian Renaissance?

Thereby in the Renaissance, the thinker as a sedentary, isolated figure of genius became a well-recognised archetype in both the philosophical and medical discourse on Melancholia and also in painting. The German Albrecht Durer, who is the major figure of the Northern Renaissance made the most iconic image of the pathology in his copper engraving, Melancholia 1, (1514). Here the allegorical figure of melancholy is an angel with wings, but in the form of a large woman sitting with her head resting on her hand, in a workshop with craft tools and a geometric form all scattered on the floor unused. His St Jerome in his Study shows the scholar alone in his study at his desk, with a dog, associated with the ‘black dog’ of melancholia. This tradition presents male artists and scholars as being prone to melancholia. They are thought to suffer from a manic-depressive polarity, where creativity of genius flowers when experiencing inspiration or enthusiasm (meaning possessed by divinity), and that very exertion creates the depressive melancholia as well.

The Melancholy Prince of Denmark; ‘To be or not to be …’

With Hamlet as the melancholy prince, the iconography gets theatricalised and dramatic in the sense of being subject to conflicting emotions and moods which give rise to the soring poetry of existential agony and incomparable scenes such as his address to the skull of ‘poor Yorick’ (the Court Jester), at his grave site. The young prince thinks on his feet unlike the older men weighed down by abstract thought.

There is a vast European archive devoted to the pathology of Melancholia. In entering it one risks never returning from it intact. Such are its seductions. So, it’s best to have a brief peek into it and salvage Freud’s essay on ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ which is a very accessible text worth reading. He makes a distinction between mourning and melancholia by saying we mourn the death of a beloved person but the sadness of melancholy is a more generalised, defused feeling of profound emptiness and we are unaware of what it is that we have lost; its unconscious.

Feminists have done some very important work on this pathology of depression (an epidemic in the global North), and have asked why the category of genius has been coded as male. One of the reasons being that gifted women have only rarely had access to the symbolic means to express their profound experiences of loss, sadness and melancholy, unlike men who have had the full range of cultural expression at hand through access to deep education and training.

Ophelia or Portia?

In this force field of Male Melancholia and attendant exceptional classical erudition and creativity of highly gifted men of genius, the figure of Ophelia cuts a sorry picture, no doubt a depressive, given how she is treated by Hamlet, but without the corresponding eloquence of speech, she simply drowns herself in her sadness. In contrast, the clever Portia was a favourite among school girls of my era when there were inter-school Shakespearean competitions where her verbal eloquence, quick wittedness and stirring speech were always on display; ‘The quality of mercy is not strained…’.

Melancholia (Kalpanacari-Thanikam dose hewath Kalakireema?)

Sarath’s ‘Thinker in front of the empty doorway’ is one of the few paintings I was drawn to in his Visual Paraphrases exhibition of 2023 at Barefoot Gallery. And that it was placed next to The Ascetic, (in the catalogue), created a montage, where one noticed the counter-intuitive vibrancy of colour of the Ascetic with primary colours and the disturbingly unruly manner in which the mostly light colours and lines formed the semi-abstract Thinker.

The Ascetic was inviting while the Thinker was sort of disturbing to look at, though I found both compelling in their own way. While the brush strokes abstract the body of the thinker, he is very firmly situated in front of ‘the empty doorway’, a void. The figure is also firmly grounded in his striking squatting position. It’s a class specific posture, though not gender specific, and perhaps it’s also very South Asian, which is easily performed by manual workers, both urban and rural. People of upper classes who do not sit on the ground do not have the muscle strength and flexibility to sit in this manner.

A Void

It’s the incongruity between the title, Thinker…, with its European art history lineage, and the Asiatic squatting posture which struck me at first. The empty doorway is haunting with its yawning void, marked in black, fading to a grey white background with a barely delineated doorpost with the missing door, recalling ‘The’ looted doors and windows of Jaffna during the civil war. Here’s how Sumathy Sivamohan formulates Sarath’s mode of abstraction:

“Sarath’s art is abstract – but they build on the ideas of palpable forms of the real – images of the war that have come to be both tactile and material, like the wood, and have come to stand for the dislocation of war”.

Unlike Rodin’s context free thinker, the melancholy thoughtfulness (kalpanakari-thanikam-dose?) has a social/historical referent presented as a fragment, ‘…the empty doorway’, but abstracted from realist coordinates of place and time. Sumathy identifies a similar dynamic in the abstraction in Fallen Monument where she recognised immediately the scattered fragments of the Jaffna peninsula as her home.

But it’s the rough brush strokes, scrapings and scratching perhaps and the variety of patches of pastel shades of colour mixed with patches of black that emit energy which makes Thinker in front of the empty doorway as alive as The Ascetic but in a more troubling, agitated way, which I guess is what thinking feels like when it does not repeat the same thing over and over, but plunges into a void to find a foot hold, to grip onto something or hang onto something to orient oneself.

The Limits of Realism & Empathy

Had this figure been painted in a realist more empathetic mode, with a sad facial expression say and solid anatomy, its power to create meaning would have been quite different, more limited, I think. What is definitely solid in the painting, though lightly sketched, is ‘The empty doorway’, a fading trace of a violent civil war history, marked with the definite article for emphasis.

In the absence of a realist anatomy to identify with empathetically, one feels a pulsing of the nervous system, suggested by the jostling markings, scribbles, incisions even and colours that don’t ‘complement’ each other. The texture is imperceptible on paper and barely registered on the computer screen, my only forms of access to this painting. The thinker’s bowed, slightly turned head with downcast eyes, rests lightly on his hands with clasped fingers held in front symmetrically, as in a gesture of prayer, elbows resting on the knees, a figure of introspection.

Celestial Blue

A light, radiant, soft, celestial blue patch of colour on the thinker’s head echoes the same colour at the top left-hand corner of the frame and elsewhere on the body including the right big toe, suggesting an outside, out of frame. These qualities of blue appear to lighten the existential gravity of the ‘Thinker in front of the empty doorway’. Here, there is no weighty realist musculature of Rodin’s Thinker to weigh us down with sorrow.

Instead, one feels an energetic, intensive body (expressed with movement-colour somewhat muddied and a variety of markings, abrasions), that makes the beholders minds’ eye restless; perhaps an image of thought under duress. The blue big toe fires a neural connection in the brain of a thinker (an old woman) who thereby dodges the blues.