Sharing Joy

Several days ago, Helena Iara and I sat on the floor playing with some of her toys.  I took a small lion and pushed the button on its back, which inspired a low, electronic roar.  Helena beamed with joy, then looked at me with the most wonderful, innocent of gazes, a gesture that said "cdid you see that?" better than any words can do.

With that look, Helena taught me something that I've never read in a tome of philosophy or theology: the wonder of sharing wonder, and what that means about childish joy and adult anomie.

As children and teenagers, we learn to hide our joy.  I'm not sure quite why, though I shared some ideas with Helena Iara: might we think that if others see our wonder, they'll gain that power over us?  Or that we need to seem blasé and sophisticated, which are the opposite of wonder?  That the definition of adult is the loss of wonder?  Perhaps is is mostly about modesty: when we show so clearly what we love and what gives us joy, we become naked in front of the other, a kind of intimacy we learn to share with only a few people.  Certainly, if I think of my adolescence, one of the ways I could define it is as the process by which I learned to hide wonder from others... and sometimes, even from myself.

Helena, however, wants to share her joy and wonder.  Whether it is the feel of sand under her toes, the elation of water that splashes on her face, or a music video on YouTube, she not only expresses her joy, but also looks at Rita and me to insist that we admire it as much as she does.  And as we look at the world through her eyes, we come to the same kind of joy.

Almost twenty years ago, I climbed a 20,000 foot peak in Ecuador with several Swiss and Spaniards whom I had never met before.  When we came back from the summit, after (literally) pulling each other up the immense mountain, I wrote to my parents saying that I had seldom felt so close to other people in my life, that nothing builds intimacy like shared suffering, the rope that connects climbers and makes us responsible for the lives of out climbing partners.  Yet even so, I never saw any of those climbers again.  Perhaps the intimacy was too frightening, we had become too exposed.

Something does build intimacy even more than shared suffering, though: shared joy.  Not only that bond that Rita and I develop with Helena Iara, but the one we share with my parents, with Rita's parents and brothers and sisters... with anyone that will open herself to the wonder of a little baby.  It's a wonderful thing, but also a frightening one, so I suppose I understand why teenagers work so hard to cut themselves off from it.  But perhaps it's also the reason that many people have children: because it gives us a small chance to return to something like that wonderful innocence.

Creation from Water

Christmas in the south of Brazil means high summer, the sort of blasted, humid days I remember from August in central Pennsylvania when I was growing up.  It's the perfect kind of weather for a little girl who loves to play in the water, and Helena has spent wonderful afternoons over the last several days sitting in a a kiddie pool in the back yard.  She splashes and splashes until her hands and feet become prunes.  It seemed like a wonderful to talk about the history of water in philosophy.

The day Helena was born, she stared at me with utmost attention, and I felt like I had to say something.  I tried to tell her the history of greek philosophy, just because I knew that I'd be able to keep riffing on that theme for a long time, and I told her about Thales of Miletus, who tried to find the first principle of everything in water.  Yesterday, I started a little bit south of Greece, with the first words of the Torah: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."  It was one of the first texts we had to translate in Hebrew classes, and I still remember the strange vocabulary of "without form and void" or "hovered over the face of the waters."  The point, though, is that Moses (or whoever really wrote those words" associated water with creation.

The obvious connection with a baby is that a fetus is also created in water, and many mythical and psychoanalytic ideas about childhood start exactly there.  As Helena Iara splashed almost all of the water from the little tub in which she was sitting, however, I began to think of something else: for her (as for many babies, I imagine), water is the first experience of making a concrete impact on the world.  I throw my hands into the water and it splashes up to wet my face, my mom, the floor.  My actions have consequences.  Splashing water is an act of creation, one of the first that a baby experiences.

Water isn't like wood; it doesn't stay carved: however much you splash it, it returns to something like its original state.  Simón Bolívar tried to express the futility of his life with the phrase, "Él que hace revolución arra el mar," he who makes revolution makes furrows in the sea."  It might not seem the best metaphor for creation.  But in fact, when Helena splashes, she does change the world.  The surface of the water will not hold her furrows, but there is less of it in the kiddie pool than when she started.  I am wet, Rita is wet... and everyone is happy.  That's a pretty decent metaphor for the experience of most people with creation: it may not last, it may fade away, but for a moment, it makes us happy.

Happy Babies

For anyone who spends time around babies (or at least most babies; clearly, there are loads of exceptions), one of the most striking and wonderful things is their happiness, the contagious innocence of their smiles and giggles.  For someone like me who likes to think philosophically, this joy is wonderful, but it is also a philosophical problem: why?  Why are babies so happy so much of the time, while adults... well, simply, aren't.

There are lots of answers to such a simple question, of course, and I've tried out a bunch of them at different moments in this blog.  But as Helena Iara and I swung in the hammock yesterday, and she grinned at the swinging motion, at the huge lizard gliding across the yard, at the wind in the trees and the sound of my voice, I remembered some of my father's words from when I was a teenager: "The more different things you can enjoy in life, the better chance you have to be happy."

(Contrast with one of my favorite lines from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "You know," said Arthur, "it's at times like this, when I'm trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxication in deep space that I really wish I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young."
"Why, what did she tell you?"
"I don't know, I didn't listen."

Sometimes, it's worthwhile to pay attention to one's parents.)

Dad's lecture... well, not so much a lecture, with the disciplinary tone that entails, but really a kind suggestion, came at the height of adolescent pretension, the moment when we show that we're better than other kids because of what we hate.  Country music, parachute pants, pet rocks, hot dogs, heavy metal... honestly, I don't remember what it was that brought on the conversation, but something I knew that I should not like, if I were to appear the sophisticated grown-up I wanted to be.  An American teenager puts a lot of time into learning how to dislike things, so that he can feel as if he is superior, cool, different, the same...

In truth, what what likes is more about identity, about constructing who I think I am and how I want others to see me, than it is about pleasure.  That's why the question, "What kind of music do you like?" is such a fraught one.  It's not really a question about aesthetics, but about whether you're going to be cool enough to be my friend.

Babies, as I told Helena, don't fall into those traps.  They can enjoy the play of light on the leaves without anyone laughing at them for being simple.  They can express their love for their mommies transparently without being accused of being "Mama's boy."  They haven't yet learned that enjoyment is a complex system of social controls.  They just enjoy.

Mimetic Desire

Helena hasn't spent much time with other babies.  Yesterday, however, Rita hosted a baby party for several of the women who had been in her maternity class, so Helena spent the afternoon with four other babies, all of them about her age.  It was a fascinating encounter, perhaps meriting an essay on the anthropology of babies, but I want to talk about just one event.

Helena sat on the living room floor, surrounded by toys and pillows.  Pedro, a handsome little boy about a week younger than she, was playing with a toy truck we brought this week on our long trip from the US.  Helena found her favorite rattle and began to shake it, attracting Pedro's gaze.  He dropped the truck and crawled as fast as he possibly could toward Helena, reached for the rattle, and ripped it from her hand.  Helena didn't even cry, she was so surprised, but Pedro's father took the rattle, explained the need to be kind, and gave it back to Helena.  For the next five minutes, the scene repeated itself, even as Pedro's father gave Pedro another rattle, distracted him with other toys, and tried everything he could imagine.

As I sat on the hammock, rocking with Helena some hour later, I told her about two French philosophers who have thought long and hard about this dynamic, though not necessarily with babies.  One of Jacques Lacan's most famous aphorisms, for instance, is that "Man's desire is the desire of the other," which can be read in many ways, among them that I want what the other wants. (Probably, the most accurate interpretation is that what I desire from you is not you yourself, but your desire for me, but I didn't talk about that with Helena.)

More to the point, though, is the literary theory of mimetic desire, developed most carefully by René Girard as he looked at romantic triangles in novels.  Two men love one woman: this is the stuff of Balzac, Tolstoy, Jane Austen, and who knows how many other great novelists.  For Girard, however, the basic question here is not, in fact, the object of desire (Anna Karenina, the femme fatale of film noir), but the relationship between the two men.  I desire the thing (the woman, the car, the whatever) not because of what lies essential in it, but because I see that another person desires it.  Girard extended this argument to our relationship with fiction (Don Quijote desires what Amadis de Gaul wanted, etc), but the basic point is there: our desires have more to do with imitating the desire of the other than with anything that comes from the object of desire.

 And there, I explained to Helena, is Pedro and his desire for the rattle.  The rattle is cool, of course.  It makes a nice sound, you can chew on it, you can bang it on the floor.  But what really mattered to Pedro is that Helena had it in her hand, that she was enjoying it.  Mimetic desire starts when we're little.

Happy Sleep

This post isn't really about the philosophy I've talked with Helena Iara.  In fact, it's much more about me (One could argue, with good evidence, that one could say this about every post on this blog, but I'll leave issues of projection for another day).

I've always seen myself, and probably correctly, as a happy person, and I've long wanted to attribute this fact to a certain reflexivity, perhaps even a philosophical orientation, in my character.  When things get tough, I can think through them, analyze them, criticize myself, and come out happy again.

Unfortunately, over the last year, philosophy hasn't saved me from the occasional black moods, emotions that have always seemed very foreign to who I am.  As is obvious from these posts, I have often been very happy with Helena and with Rita, but from time to time, a kind of sadness and irritability has passed over me, something I feel powerless to stop and change.

Over these months, I have spent time and effort trying to understand this emotional blackness, testing hypothesis after hypothesis in a kind of spiritual scientific method, but without any success.  I think, however, that I may have come to some kind of a conclusion.  It all has to do with sleep.

I had always attributed my better than average happiness to my better-than-average capacity to reflect and philosophize, so one can understand that I would be a bit disappointed to find that the real cause could be something much more jejune: the fact that I sleep 9 hours most nights.  Or more accurately, slept.  You can't keep that up with a baby in the house.  Sleeping less, I have found myself exhausted, unable to keep up the happiness that I always found so easy.

I suppose it shouldn't be a surprise that happiness is organic, a form of energy not that much different from the ability to run a marathon or climb a 20,000 foot mountain.  I couldn't do either of those without sleep either.  But ever since Aristotle declared that the purpose of philosophy was to seek felicity, thinkers have claimed that their way of seeing their world, their techniques of reflecting on themselves -- all of philosophy, in fact -- would serve as the royal road to happiness.

Helena slept almost 18 hours today, and she can't stop smiling.  Maybe we really just need more sleep.

New Michelangelo fresco found in the Vatican

I know I don't have time to play with Photoshop right now, but this one was just too much fun not to do. The original is below:

Christmas

OK, it isn't really Christmas yet.  We've got a good three weeks to go.  But since Rita and I leave for Brazil on Sunday, my parents came to Santa Fe this week to celebrate an early Christmas with us and Helena Iara.  It was splendid, with everything one could possibly want from a holiday: great food, presents, laughs with friends and family...


But since Christmas came early, I felt like I had to explain a little bit of the holiday to Helena.  I told her of a people who had been oppressed and abused by everyone, by the Egyptians and the Persians and the Babelonians and the Romans, and who dreamed of a savior, someone who would free them from oppression and slavery.  They imagined some great warrior, some heir of the fabulous David, who would throw the Romans into the sea with swords and fire... and they got a little baby.  Tiny, weak, and happy.  One who would soon have to flee into Egypt in fear of those some Romans.

Some savior!  But, as I explained to Helena Iara, I think that was the point.  A savior saves us, and we don't have to do anything.  A baby, on the other hand, acts by turning us into actors, makes us into agents.  We want to help, care, be kind, love the little baby.  And that was, after all, the goal of Jesus's ministry, later, too.  To help people to love each other, to do justice not only on the political level (he was pretty weak as a revolutionary leader), but especially on the personal one.  To do justice, to love one another, and to walk humbly with your God, as the prophet put it.

And babies, I have learned over the last several months, do that pretty well!

Prohibition and desire

Helena Iara isn't even a year old, but she already understands a the logic of desire: when things are prohibited, we want them more.  For instance, imagine that she is sitting in her baby seat, set on top of the table as Rita and I have lunch.  We will offer her toy after toy, which she will play with for a moment, and then throw aside.  A toy left barely within reach deserves a little more attention, if only because it is a challenge.  But... a piece of paper?  A hot teakettle?  The Tabasco sauce?  Anything that we do not want her to touch (and we don't even have to say it explicitly), that's what she wants.

A lot of intellectuals these days connect this idea with Michel Foucault, and he certainly did formalize the ideas in his political philosophy, but Foucault himself attributed the seed of the idea to Deleuze.  And as I explained to Helena Iara a couple of days ago, the idea goes back at least as far as Paul of Tarsus, with his famous, "Were it not for the law, I would not have known sin," and the rest of the epistle to the Romans.  Paul certainly didn't invent the idea, either: any mother paying close attention to the behavior of a baby will see the same thing.

But as a philosophy professor of mine once said, "The dirty little secret of philosophy is that most of the great idea have already been thought.  We try to complicate them up so that we look smart and original, but carpenters and grandmas had them long before we did.  Even so, it's worth while to repeat them, though."

And in the end, as I repeated the connection between prohibition and desire to Helena Iara, I knew I was not being original.  But it helped me not to get irritated as she reached, yet again, for the sharp spines on the crown of thorns plant in front of the window.

Peek-a-boo Two

When I wrote last week's blog, I forgot the great philosopher of the Peek-a-Book, Bishop Berkeley, so Helena and I had a quick talk about him this week.  He seems to make the same mistake that contemporary psychologists do about babies, thinking that what the kid is struggling with is merely object permanence, with the idea that things can exist outside of our perception of them.

Berkeley took philosophical idealism to its extreme, saying that in fact, the world itself did not exist.  All that was "really there" is the subject who perceives, and God who sends the perceptions directly into his soul.  The world "as it is", other subjects... all are merely my own projections, confusions of my relationship with God.  There is a certain mystical logic to this, at least as Western Mystics have always said that God is all that really matters, but both babies and most of the original thinkers of Judeo-Christianity didn't make that mistake.  After all, Jesus says, "As you do to the lest of these my brothers, you do to me."  It isn't as Berkeley suggests that others are a projection of the subject's relationship with God, but that God is an extension of the justice we do to others, especially the poor and vulnerable.

I think babies understand the basic premise, and parents do, too.  God is, to a certain degree, a byproduct of the love we bear for one another.

Peek-a-Boo!

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena has come to love the game of peek-a-boo in its various forms: I cover my eyes with my hands, and then open them up to "peek-a-boo"; Rita hides behind a wall and then appears; I slide below the crib, makes sounds, and then lift my head up with a loud "beep!"  These games guarantee a laugh from Helena, and also gave an excuse for a brief talk on philosophy.

Most psychologists interpret babies' love for the game of peek-a-boo with their understanding of object permanence: when a child comes to understand that an object is there whether I look at it or not, the appearance and disappearance of objects becomes an intellectually challenging game.  "Where is the thing?  I can't see it, but it makes sounds, so it must be there... There it is!"  The confirmation of this knowledge brings the laugh.

As I told Helena, though, I think there is a basic epistemological error in this way of reading peek-a-boo.  It makes sense for when the baby's eyes are hidden, but babies love it even more when the adult hides his or her own eyes.  It is the adult who can't see, not the child, so object permanence isn't really at issue... unless, of course, we think that children are as stupid as the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal, described in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as "A beast so mind-bogglingly stupid it thinks that if you can't see it, it can't see you."  Since I don't think babies are that mind-bogglingly stupid, we have to come up with another reason for why they love peek-a-boo.

My sense is that babies love to see their parents cover their eyes, pretend not to know where the baby is, and then open them to a "There you are!" because they are learning to recognize the perspective and subjectivity of the other.  The game plays with the slow realization that other people are not merely there to serve or impede the baby's desires, but have their own perspective on the world.  Babies come to see that others are also subjects with desires and perspectives... and limitations.  Dad is not a God-like figure, because he can't see when his eyes are covered; like the baby, he only know the world by the holes in his face that let sensations in.

Sara Hrdy gives the example of the “False-Belief Test”: sitting with a mother and a small child, Hrdy would ask the mother to cover her eyes. Then, she would hide a cookie that had been in plain sight before the mother had closed her eyes, and ask the child, “Where does you mother think the cookie is?” In general, middle-class American children younger than four years old said that their mothers believed that the cookie was hidden under the table. Older children, on the other hand, generally recognized that the mother would continue to think the cookie was on the table – a false belief – because she had not seen the cookie move.  Attributing a false belief of the other, the recognition that his or her point of view is incomplete, shows that I accept that the other has a mind with different beliefs and perceptions than my own... and in that way, exactly like my own perspective, which is also limited and often wrong.

Hrdy is talking about older kids, but playing peek-a-boo with Helena Iara suggests that this process happens much earlier.  In fact, I'd like to suggest that it's a central part of what it means to become human: for the Tupi-Guaraní Indians, for instance, this ability to recognize that the other has a perspective (and the desire to learn from that perspective) are the center of what it means to be a person.  And no less thinker than Emmanuel Kant insists that the essence of ethics is recognizing that the other is an "end-in-himself", a subject with a separate perspective on the world.

Peek-a-boo as an ethical exercise: who would have imagined that a baby's game would be so essential?

Happy Thanksgiving

"Hey, you!"

Thanks to her paternal grandparents, Helena has several new toys that talk to her.  One is a little ball with buttons and lights and a little internal motor that allows it to roll by itself, while the other is a "baby's learning laptop."  Both of them talk and flask more than I might like, but they aren't all that irritating... except for one fact.  If you don't play with them for a while, they yell at you.  The laptop asks, "Are you home?"which isn't actually that bad, but the ball sings "So much fun to learn and see, why don't you come and play with me?"  Though only an inanimate object, it demands that you pay attention to it.

As we had dinner with Joey and Sarah, Helena's American godparents, last Friday, Joey heard this story and declared, "Only six months old, and she's already being interpellated!"

Helena is probably one of the few babies around whom one can have a sensible conversation about French structuralist Marxism (though who knows; it may be that lots of babies love the subject.  I don't want to do the research to find out), but it still does require a little bit of explanation.  In his classic example of this process, the French philosopher Louis Althusser mentions a police officer who yells “Hey, you!” on the street.  When I turn to look at the officer, I recognize myself in his words and recognize his authority over me.  In the simple action of turning and looking, power molds my subjectivity and legitimates the authority of the police officer.  But if I just continue walking, pretending I didn’t hear, I look like a surly adolescent, which also, perversely, affirms the power of the police officer.  Interpellation, then, both constitutes the subject and establishes the context of power in which both the “oppressed” and “oppressor” operate.

According to Althusser, this "Hey, you!" is the way we come to see ourselves as an I, as a subject (for him, like for Foucault and many other French theorists, the subject/agent is always confused with the subjected subject, the "king's subject".)  One is subjected to a person or process as much as one is the subject of an action.  However, in almost all of the theory around the issue, it is a police officer, a person in authority, who calls your name.  In Helena's case, as Joey pointed out, it was actually an object (not an inanimate object, unfortunately, because it is capable of moving itself) that engages in the process of interpellation, which can call out to the baby "Hey, you!"

What does all of this mean for Helena as she grows up?  Not much, I hope... she also has many other flesh and blood people (authorities and not) around her.  But what about for kids who grow up immersed in technology that demands their attention?  With video games and robots and who knows what more?  Will they develop the strange dynamics of resistance, fear, and obedience that we have with police officers, except with machines?  A frightening prospect.

Realized Eschatology

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena Iara has come to love the anticipation of things as much as the things themselves: sometimes even more.  For instance, she (like many babies) loves zrrrbts, the release of air against her stomach or another big space of skin, but now she smiles and laughs even more as I breathe in, breathe out, come close, pull away... play the game of "zrrrbt coming!"  In the same way, she has long loved to hear a fake sneeze, finds it hilarious, but now she giggles even more in the "ah, ah, ah, ah..." that comes before the "choo" of the expelled sneeze.

So today, she and I talked about the idea of realized eschatology in early Christian thought, something we find in both Paul and John (no, not the Beatles, the Apostles...), expressed perhaps most clearly in the phrase "The Kingdom of God is among you."  (Luke 17:21)  The idea is that the Kingdom of God (generally understood in that time as a kind of worldly utopia of justice and peace, not, as in post-Constantine Christianity, as heaven after death), is a promise of a just future, but also something present in the community that is struggling for that justice.  If you have ever been inspired by a civil rights march or a rousing folk song by Pete Seeger, you probably understand what I mean: people come together to struggle for justice in the future, but as they come together, they have the sense of solidarity and joy that they hope such a future will bring everyone.

Paul talks about politics and religion, but for Helena Iara, the same is true of a funny sneeze: the future begins to colonize the present, and we get the joy of the anticipated result long before the thing itself.  As I told Helena, it reminds me of the way my father always thought about vacations: he would sit over books and guides and photos for months before we left home, not so much because he wanted to make the trip error-free, but because he loved the anticipation of the trip as much as the trip itself.

I think Helena's joy may explain why Buddhism never really tempted me with its condemnation of desire.  Buddha said, quite correctly, that suffering comes from desire, because we almost never get what we want, and when we do, it turns out to be something different that we thought it would be.  As such, to be happy, we must overcome desire.  I think, though, he missed the joy of realized eschatology, the giggle we see on Helena's face as she waits for the fake sneeze to come.  Desire and struggle isn't just something for the future: it's the way the joy we want from the future can touch the present.

Wind

As Helena and I walked to buy vegetables a couple of days ago (well, I suppose as I walked and carried her, and she entertained herself by watching the world go by and kicking her legs), a strong wind came down from the northeast.  Helena hasn't faced much wind in her life, and she didn't like it.  Or perhaps more accurately, she complained and was fascinated at the same time, wanting to understand what it was that was beating against her face and making her cold.

It seemed like a good time to give an etymology of wind, an idea that plays a much bigger role in the history of religion and philosophy than most people realize.  In Hebrew, the word for wind is ru'ah; in Greek, pneuma, and in Latin, spiritus; in all three languages, the word also means two other things.  First, rather like the English phrase "he got his wind back," or "she ran faster after she got her second wind," all of those words also mean "breath."  But more significantly, all of them have also been translated as "spirit", that essential word in the history of western religion.

I explained to Helena Iara that spirit, like wind, is something you can't see, at least not directly.  You can only see its effects and consequences.  Helena loves to watch the trees blow in the wind, for instance, or to watch a stormcloud roll over the house.  In the same way, many ancient peoples believed that you can't see spirit, but that doesn't make it any less present; its effects are obvious.  And spirits/winds can be both good and bad, blowing the clouds away to show the sun, bringing clouds and rain to water the crops, but also the cold wind of winter that bites our faces, and the drafts that almost every traditional people believes is the origin of colds and the flu.  Good and evil winds, good and evil spirits.

Spirituality, on the other hand, seems impoverished and new age in contrast to the raw power of wind.  Maybe it's because we're too German, where spirit is Geist, a cognate of ghost: it seems like what is left over when the body is gone, a soul that floats up to heaven.  But like most religious concepts, spirit starts out as something very material, like the sun (Apollo, Ra) that burns and makes the plants grow.  You feel it in your face, use it, curse it, struggle against it...

And as we walked back from the market, the wind at our backs, Helena seemed much more content.

The semiotics and social agency of eating

People without babies (OK, me, before we had Helena) often mistake the real challenges of caring for an infant.  I had always imagined that "sleeping like a baby" had some basis in truth, for instance but teaching Helena Iara to sleep has been one of the most difficult challenges we have faced.  And food... we all need food, right?  People like to eat.  The problem with most Americans is that we eat too much, after all.  In fact, however, teaching Helena Iara to eat has also been a challenge.


The problem with food, as I explained to Helena a couple of days ago, seems to be more about semiotics than about taste.  Semiotics? you ask (and certainly Helena would have asked, could she speak).  The science of symbols?  What does that have to do with food?  Well, I explained to her, she had seen a spoon before, because we use it to give her medicine.  She doesn't like medicine, whether because it tastes bad or because it's associated with when her belly hurts, so the spoon has become a symbol associated with something she doesn't like.  It doesn't matter what the spoon has in it: it carries more than just food, it carries meaning.  Give Helena orange juice in a spoon, and she'll spit it out.  Give it to her in an adult's cup, and she'll plead for more.

And that's the point of semiotics: symbols and signs matter.  They don't just refer to things, but they bleed into those things, imbuing the signified with the taste of the signifier, the thing with the sound and associations of the word.  The Danes named the beautiful island they found in the north Atlantic "Iceland", and the terrible, glaciated place "Greenland", largely so that other countries would think that the sign described the place, and leave them alone on their wonderful geyser and hot spring paradise.  Much of marketing is based on the same premise: associate the right words and signs with a thing, and people will come to like even something as nasty as Coca Cola or Cognac.



But there's another issue behind the spoon, too.  Adults hold the spoon, and we give it to babies.  They aren't the actors of the action, not the protagonists of the story.  Since helping children to see themselves as protagonists, as actors on the world stage, is what most of Rita and my work and mature writing has been about, I suppose it makes sense that I would talk with Helena about that problem, too.  She wants to feel like she is the agent, that she is the one doing the eating (and the choosing, the chewing, everything).  Almost all adults have come to wonder at and fear that one simple, infantile phrase, "I can do it myself," and Helena has already reached it at six months, long before she is able to speak.

Smashed banana and applesauce are the foods that start most babies on the road to eating, but Helena hates them, they literally make her vomit.  The foods come on a spoon that also carries meanings she doesn't like, and she doesn't control the process.  But hand her a piece of a ripe pear, and she'll gum away at it contentedly.  The same with a peeled half of an orange.  And yesterday, Rita pierced the grains on a corn on the cob, and Helena eagerly sucked out the marrow.  It was a messy process, but a wonderful one, and she smiled and laughed and ate with real gusto.


In fact, Helena loves to eat.  It's just that she want so eat the right symbols along with her food, and she wants to do it herself.

Cause and Effect

Helena loves the bathroom sink.  I've mentioned that in other blog posts, but she loves it so much it bears repeating.  And in the last several days, to her surprise and joy, she has learned to turn the water on: she stands before the mirror, by the sink, and throws herself toward the mirror, as if to embrace her own image.  As her belly hits the handle on the faucet, the water flows on.  She looks toward the spigot, straightens up, and smiles as broadly as a girl can smile.

Though several times Helena has also been able to turn the water on with her hand, it seems that she thinks that the cause of the water flow is her lunge to touch her own image, a fact that inspired a conversation about magical thinking and the philosophy of David Hume.  As much as we might like to dismiss magic in current rationalist discourse, we can actually see it as an important precursor for modern science, because magic is basically an attempt to understand cause and effect.  I got sick, and I don't know why.  On the other hand, when I get a bruise, I know why: it's because I got in a fight and my enemy hit me.  Under the same logic, then, if I am hurt by illness, it must be because my enemy did it.  Magic serves as the connection to explain how my enemy was able to affect me at a distance.

Helena isn't thinking magically, but she is trying to connect cause and effect: Whenever I lunge at the mirror, the water turns on, so she thinks the lunge is the cause of the water.  To a certain degree, it is, but only when mediated by her belly striking the handle, the essential element she may not yet have grasped.  The point is that she is researching her world, and trying to find ways to test her hypotheses.  When she tries the same thing with another bathroom mirror, and the water doesn't turn on because the handle for the sink is somewhere else, she'll have to develop new hypotheses.

By seeing people's failure to connect causes and effects (or their recognition that they had the wrong cause for the observed effect), the Scottish philosopher David Hume developed a skepticism about the intrinsic connection between cause and effect.  We may assume that the lunge at the mirror causes the water to flow (or that the rotation of a key causes the car to start), but we never know if we are actually right.  It may be that we just haven't found the case where it doesn't work, or the intermediary step that is truly essential (turning the handle).  This skepticism did great things for philosophy and science, forcing Kant to develop his categories of apperception and bringing the scientific method of trial and error closer to its modern form.

At least that's why I explained to Helena Iara.  She wasn't that interested.  She just wanted to turn the water on again.

The Dinner Party

A symposium sounds so serious, the kind of thing that one tries to avoid on a university campus, knowing that it will probably be staid old men talking about something you know nothing about.  The word comes down to us from one of Plato's best dialogues, called "The Symposium" in most translations, but which really means "the drinking party" (sym being "together" and posion being "to drink").  Similarly, the central rite of Christianity, the eucharist, is also originally a drinking party, where Jesus and his disciples came together to drink wine, tell stories, and think together.  Eating, drinking, and thinking have long gone together.

(photo by David Shaw)

You can see, then, why I have been so excited about the day that Helena would begin to eat solid foods.  I had no expectations that she would suddenly burst forth with reflections on Diotema and Alcibiades (two of the guests at Socrates's symposium), but there is something wonderful about eating together, about sharing food and a table.

One can imagine my sadness when she not only made a face at the apples that Rita had carefully prepared, but then threw them up, together with all of her milk that morning.  And a houseguest -- Barbara, the wife of my mentor in politics, Scott Armstrong -- had to catch the vomit in her hands.  Not exactly the conviviality for which I had been waiting.

In fact, Helena likes the social practice of eating.  She likes to sit with us, take a spoon in her hand, coo in response to the dinner conversation, and even ask Rita to bring the lip of a water or orange juice cup to her mouth.  Perhaps it is a little like speaking, where she mastered the social conventions of talking and listening long before there is any content to her words, she has learned the social game of eating, the dinner party part, long before she has learned the joy of chewing and ingesting food.

We'll see how she takes to eating over the next couple of weeks.  For now, I'm content that she's good company at our daily symposia at the dinner table.

Questions and Answers

My brother came to Santa Fe this week to meet Helena Iara, so she and I didn't have as much time alone as we often do to talk about philosophy.  This lapse in our conversations allows me to go back to a chat we had almost two months ago, before leaving Brazil, one that says a lot about why I would possibly want to talk philosophy with a girl who almost certainly can't understand most of what I have to say.

We were sitting on the hammock on the front veranda, enjoying one of the first warm days of the Spring in the south of Brazil.  She would say "é" with the intonation of a question, I would respond with "ó" or "é", now more like a statement, and she would respond with another question or what sounded like an answer, and we went on for half an hour like this, just swing back and forth on the hammock as we swung back and forth in the conversation.

Questions and answers, I explained to Helena, are one of the basic issues of hermeneutics (the science of interpretation of texts), especially in the form adapted by Hans-Georg Gadamer.  Gadamer said that the real challenge of any attempt to interpret a book is to find the question to which the book is the answer.  What issues mattered to the author?  Why did he or she address them in that way?  Looking for the question is a way to try to get into the head of the writer (or just someone with whom you are talking), to see the world from his perspective for a second.  In the language of hermeneutics, the challenge is to find the horizon of the other, what is the limit of what he or she can see?  The job of the reader is to try to make his own horizon overlap that of the other, so that there is some kind of an encounter of perspectives on the world.  An exchange of questions and answers: not as in "you ask the questions and I answer," but "I am trying to find out what questions really matter to you."


To a certain degree, Helena and my exchange on the hammock was exactly this kind of negotiation of horizons.  I try to figure out what matters to her, what questions she is asking: it is about the tree moving behind me?  About the light warm wind?  About the shadow of the house moving slowly across the front lawn?  What matters to this baby?

I can't possibly see the world from her perspective.  She has a kind of innocent wonder to which no adult can return, and the raw nature of her perceptions, un-encumbered by the experience that older people have, would be impossible to recover.  But these conversations help me to encounter her horizon, to see what she is capable of seeing, what questions matter to her.


The same is true of this whole blog.  How can my philosophical concerns (my horizon) encounter the limitless curiosity of a baby girl?  From time to time, the encounter is productive.  Other times, it's a dialogue of deaf people.  But that's like almost any encounter, isn't it?

Labels, cast-offs, and the sacred

Helena Iara loves the labels on her stuffed toys.  She often spends more time studying the labels than she actually does playing with Pinkme the Hippopotamus or her various soft and cuddly frogs.  Now, though we could fear this as a sign of consumerism, I think there is something else going on.  So as we were walking to the park this week, I began to talk to her to try to think about why.

The anthropologist Mary Douglass did a fascinating study of the philosophical origins of the purity laws of the Hebrew Torah, and concluded (in good structuralist fashion, but probably correctly), that the Mosaic law is based largely on definition and categorization, and what doesn't fit in the categories, is an "abomination", impure.  For instance, one defines fish as things that live in the ocean and swim, but mollusks and shrimp live in the ocean, but they don't swim.  Outside of the category, they are impure and not kosher.  Similarly, animals are defined by the way they walk and the structure of their hooves, so pig and camels, with feet divided in a different way, cannot be eaten.

More telling to the idea of the label, is the way that Douglass interprets the ritual of circumcision.  Douglass says that the Hebrews considered the foreskin to be something "left over", an excess on the body.  It was neither of the body, nor not of the body: it didn't fit into the categories.  Thus, it had to be cut off.  Since Helena doesn't have the anatomical experience to understand these categories, I doubt she understood what I was talking about... but then again, I'm not sure how much of any of these talks she understands, even as she's approaching six months old.

Several decades after Douglass wrote Purity and Danger, the Bulgarian philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva took up her argument, situating it within wider religious ideas of the ancient world.  In Latin, for instance, the word sacer can mean both "abomination" and "sacred", both what is cast off, and what is most valued.  To a certain degree, this idea makes sense, for though shellfish don't fit in easy categories and definitions, gods don't either.  Bringing the idea of the abomination and the sacred under a single category of misfits, Kristeva talked about the abject, or literally, what is thrown down.

You (and Helena) are almost certainly wondering what any of this has to do with Helena's fascination for the labels on her stuffed animals, but in fact the connection is easier than it appears.  Like the Hebrew idea of the foreskin, the label is something that sticks out, something that doesn't really belong.  It messes up the smooth flow of Pinkme the Hippo's rump.  It isn't part of his body, but it isn't part of the rest of the world, either.  For that reason, it fascinates Helena: not one thing or the other, it defies simple categorization.

I went on to argue to Helena that designer labels serve as our postmodern sacred, and the huge "Dulce and Gabbana" or "Nike" that we wear on our chests stand as a symbol of our fidelity and piety to the great gods of our day, consumption and money.  Maybe or maybe not.  Regardless, labels, the sacred, and the cast off all draw a baby's attention.