I and Thou

Helena Iara has a new sound: "ó".  I'm not sure whether she gets the Portuguese sounds from people around her, or whether all babies sound like this, and I'm the one that understands it like the ó sound, but if you can imagine someone with a strong French accent expressing disbelief, you get something like it.  In Portuguese, however, this sound is very close to the signal for the vocative case, the particle that you put before someone's name to indicate that you are talking to him or her.  The vocative is common in many classical languages, but English has lost it, except in the "Hey, Alex" form, often considered rude.

And in fact, Helena does seem to use this new word as a way to call our attention to her (though I have to admit, just about anything she says will get our attention: that's the nature of a baby), so as we conversed this week, a dialogue that went something like this:

"Ó."
"Oooh."
"Ó."
"É?"
"É." (Giggle)
"Eh."
"Ó." (Laugh)

I managed to get in a few words edgewise about Martin Buber, the German Jewish philosopher.  Like Helena in our conversation, he begins with the vocative, or more exactly, with the "I-Thou" relationship.  Buber wrote during one of the most tumultuous times in German history, beginning during the era of Bismark, continuing through the first world war, and staying in Germany as a popular educator (Jews were excluded from formal education during the Third Reich) until he fled for Palestine in 1938.  Though certainly not an opponent of modernity, he saw the way that fascism and technology had made people into things.  Most of modern science and politics was focussed on the relationship between the I and the it, an attempt to gain objective understanding and thus control.  What this focus failed to consider, Buber said, was that relationships between humans are not I-it, but I-Thou, two people seeing each other as subjects, not as subject and object.

In the end, Buber insisted, the I-Thou relationships is prior to the I-it.  If we look at the chronological development of a baby (or at least of Helena Iara, the only baby I know well), he is clearly right.  For her language doesn't exist in order to describe or to control the world.  It exists to develop a relationship to others, to call their attention and stimulate their care, their laughs, their loving gaze.  To a certain degree, all of her language is vocative, and not just "ó."

The big city

This week, Rita and I had to take Helena Iara to the US Consulate in Rio de Janeiro in order to register her as an American citizen and to get her a passport; we also had to finish up a long project that we have been doing with community pre-schools there.  Helena was fascinated by the big city (Rio has 8,000,000 people, and the rush and confusion of the place rivals any city I know), but not necessarily for the reasons that most tourists love the place.  She liked sitting in the Parque do Aterro and watching people on the Praia do Flamengo, with the classic horizon of Pão de Açucar in the background, but what she really loved was the movement, the lights of the cars, the rush of people, the view from the hotel, the smiles on the subway and in buses...

Sunday evening, we went to the French Cultural Center downtown, where Helena was fascinated by some outdoor art that mixed graffiti with abstract impressionism, the sort of art most people will say that you have to "learn to appreciate".  Helena didn't have to learn: she just loved it.  Though she is at that point where she shows her boredom very quickly, she was happy to stare at each of the five large paintings for more than a minute each, and a minute is a long time for a baby.  She thought the art was wonderful.  Picasso famously said that he "spent his whole life learning to paint like a child," but I wonder if one shouldn't also put a lot of work into learning to see art like a child.

I didn't use the word "wonderful" by chance: the great thing about taking the trip with Helena was her constant sense of wonder, her willingness to be thrilled, to show how elated she was by the simplest of experiences.  It gave me a lot of insight into why babies are so happy: adults learn to hide that excitement and wonder, because it says that we didn't "already know," that we aren't urban sophisticates.  Adults have to be blasé, but babies can express wonder.

"Blasé" brings me to the other philosophical talk that Helena and I had in Rio de Janeiro, about the sociologist Georg Simmel, who used that word to describe the subjectivity of human beings in the modern city.  To be blasé means that you can say "been there, done that" or simply "whatever" to any experience, and that such an attitude buys you prestige among others.  It's pretty much the opposite of Helena's way of seeing the city, and something I have long tried to ignore (except, of course, as a teenager, when blasé is obligatory).

None the less, four days in the big city with a baby helped me to understand why people become blasé.  Yes, Helena wondered at the city.  It thrilled and elated her, and simply watching her enjoy the place gave Rita and me a lot of joy.  However, the constant agitation and stimulation was simply too much: Helena had to either sleep or break down crying after fifteen minutes on the street, and by the final day, Rita and I were completely exhausted.  Being blasé might have been the filter we (or Helena) needed to be able to survive the city.  It would have been a much easier trip, if all three of us had that attitude.

On the other hand, it would also have been much less joyful.

Saying "yes"

Because Helena Iara can say only one word, "é" (if it is, indeed, a word, a problem I have been thinking through for the last several blogs), I'm probably turning it into the most analyzed texts since the rabbis wrote the first commentary on the Tanakh.  None the less, since it is great to talk with her by saying "é, é, é," afterward it makes sense to talk with her about the word.  Today we talked about the second meaning of the word, not so much about being as a simple "yes."

For Friedrich Nietzsche, "yes" and "no" were effective synecdoches to think through philosophy.  Nietzsche diagnosed much of human thinking as "life-denying," as a huge "no" to the reality of existence.  The idea of heaven, for instance, puts all that it perfect elsewhere, after death, which makes the concrete stuff of life into something miserable in comparison.  Nietzsche demanded a different response, a great "yes" to life, but to all of the different parts of life, not just the possible perfection in the future.

As I explained this to Helena, I thought of a conversation I had with a Colombian friend, more than a decade ago, when she and her husband decided to have a child.  Life was terrible in Bogotá at that time, with constant kidnappings and murders, and the renaissance that has now made Bogotá into such a wonderful city had not yet started: the traffic and pollution and simple rudeness of people made it the city a miserable place to live.

In the midst of all of this, I wondered why anyone would chose to have a child, to which my friend responded with one of the wiser ideas I have heard.  "Here in Colombia," she told me, "we know very well that life isn't worth anything.  People will kill you for the price of a cup of coffee.  So if life is going to matter, to be worth something, I knew I had to do it myself.  Adeleida [her daughter] is a bet.  A bet on life.  By deciding to have her, I commit to saying that life matters, that I will make life mean something and be worth something, even if no one else will."

Children can be one of the great ways to say "yes" (though fortunately the only one), not simply to affirm that life matters, as Nietzsche would have it, but to make life matter.  I think I'd missed that in the long years that I didn't want kids.  So just as Helena says "yes, yes, yes" ("é, é, é"), she is affirming life.  And she, in my turn, is a way that I have learned to affirm it, to say that it does matter.

More on Being a Baby

After writing my last blog, with its rather exaggerated conclusion that Helena Iara knows more about Being than Heidegger (because for her "é" is an empty signifier), I began to think a little more about my argument, and to talk it over with Helena as we sat in the winter sun and enjoyed one of the few nice days we've had in the last several weeks.  Nietzsche seemed to be an interesting addition, and since she liked the sound of his name, I talked about him for a bit.

I hope I am getting this argument right here: I have robbed in mostly from one of the best books I've read on the mad German genius, Alan White's In Nietzsche's Labyrinth.  For Nietzsche, "nihilism" is an important category, but not in the sense that was most common in his time, that of the nihilist revolutionaries first chronicled by Turgenev, who tried to overthrow the Russian Tsar.  For Nietzsche, nihilism was an ontological category, a consequence of his discovery that "God is Dead."

I explained to Helena that there are three levels of nihilism in Nietzsche's thought.  First comes religious nihilism, the stage in which most of humanity lives.  It is religious because people believe that there is a God, but because such a being does not exist, they really believe in nothing.  Religious nihilism is about delusion.  At the second level is absolute nihilism, which happens when people come to recognize that God does not exist, and they then accept the truth that they believe in nothing.  But this form of nihilism is basically negative, because these nihilists are disappointed that there is no Divine in which to believe.  Absolute nihilism is the kind of disenchantment we associate with the word "nihilist."

The final level of nihilism, "realized nihilism" (and again, I hope that I have the terminology right), is when one recognizes that there is no God, and that it doesn't matter in the least.  One could argue that the Madyamika Buddhist idea that there is no difference between nirvana and samsara (perfection and the real world) is exactly this: we don't need to condemn the world for being less than we want, but to celebrate it for all of the good it has.

Now, I don't want to enter into the debate about the death of God (because I think the God who Nietzsche declared dead is very different from any God I would find convincing... after all, as I mentioned in the last blog, the Hebrews don't even have a word for Being, so God as Infinite, Omnipotent Being would be very foreign to them.  But the point, I think, works when we talk about Being instead of God.  Helena, who says "é" (it is) and leaves the signified empty, is a realized nihilist, not even concerned that Being, as imagined by philosophers of the West, is a delusion.

Perhaps this is why Buddha is so often represented as a baby...

The sounds of Being

For someone who supposedly does not speak, Helena Iara is tremendously verbal.  She responds when we talk to her, sings along with her favorite songs, and tells us very clearly when she is happy or unhappy.  And amazingly enough, at the age of three months, she speaks one word very clearly, "é", the Portuguese word for "it is", or (in response to some questions: Portuguese is complicated that way") "yes".

You're allowed to doubt me, of course: everyone knows that children don't speak until they are around a year old, and when they do speak, nouns come first.  It's mere chance that one of her first sounds happens to mean something in one of the languages that her parents speak.  She can't possibly understand the meaning of "To be" or "Yes", immensely complex ideas.

This whole counter-argument is quite true, but I still want to contend that Helena is, in fact, speaking as sensibly as any adult does.  Half of the argument depends on Ludwig Wittgenstein, the other on a rather difficult critique of the whole western philosophical tradition.

Wittgenstein, as a pointed out in a conversation with Helena many weeks ago, insisted that the essence of language does not lie in a single way that words mean or signify things or ideas.  In fact, there are many different ways that language works, and we have to pay attention to what kind of a "language game" we are playing.  If, however, we were to begin a general theory of language based on Wittgenstein's later works, though, it would probably begin with remark 42 of the Philosophical Investigations (and I'm citing from memory here, though it has been a long time since I studied the book): "For a large class of cases -- though not all -- it can be said that the meaning of a word is its use in a language game."

When Helena speaks with us, and we ask her "are you a cute baby?  Are you the smartest baby around?" and she responds "é", she is, in fact, playing the language game correctly, answering with one of the acceptable ways to say "yes" in Portuguese.  She may not know what the word means, but she is using it correctly: and the truth of the matter is, if you ask me about a lot of words I use, I might have to defend myself the same way: a perfect definition may slip away from me, but I know how to use the word!

Which brings me to the second question, the one about the western philosophical tradition.  Martin Heidegger famously insisted that the real question of philosophy is "what is Being?" and that most of post-socratic philosophy is a bad-faith detour to escape that very simple issue.  He then wrote five hundred pages of indecipherable prose to try to investigate Being, and didn't even get halfway through his project before giving up.  Freshman philosophy students have run the same gamut since philosophy became an academic discipline.  "What does 'to be' mean?"

"É"is the third person singular of the word "to be" (ser) in Portuguese, even if it is also used to mean "yes."  But many non-indo-european languages don't have a word for "to be" or "it is": in years of studying Hebrew, it was always a challenge to try to translate English phrases with "is" or "was" into classical Hebrew, because the word just doesn't exist.  The word that most often gets translated as "being" in the Old Testament (including in the famous self definition of Yahweh as "I am that I am") really means "to become" or "to make oneself".  [That phrase from the Moses story is even more complicated by the fact that in Hebrew, there is also no present tense: it might be best translated as "I will become what I will become," which makes God into a very different divinity than most Christians think!]  In my brief attempts to learn Aymara and Kuna (two native American languages) I have also failed to find a word that really captures the sense of "being" in English (or any other indo-european language I know).

So here's the point: we could say that Helena's use of "é" is empty, without content because she doesn't know the meaning behind the signifier.  One could argue, however, for as many pages as Heidegger tried to say something else, that "being" is an equally empty word, and we don't know what "is" means any more than Helena knows what "é" means.  In Hebrew, if you want to say something like "roses are red" you just say "roses red" -- the connecting role played by "are" (to be) is simply understood or silent.  Which to me means that "being" is a blank, a signifier without a signified.  So if Helena is using "é" in the right context, she has as much right to the word as Martin Heidegger.

You make me feel like a natural... Daddy?

As Helena Iara has grown older, she needs more intellectual stimulus to make her happy: she wants movement, new things to see, and new sounds to hear.  One of the easiest ways to make her happy is to sing new songs, and I have had to search the depths of my musical memory to find music that she likes.  The most recent success have been songs from Motown: "My Girl" and "Natural Woman."

"My Girl" makes sense in a new context: Helena is, after all, my girl, and the lyrics of "I got sunshine on a cloudy day/ and when it's cold outside, I got the month of May" actually work much better for a father's love than for a boyfriend's... at least if we accept some kind of feminist critique of the use of girl as a term of affection for a grown woman.

Aretha Franklin's amazing "You make me feel like a natural woman" requires some lyrical adjustment, of course, with "Daddy" standing in for "woman."  But as she and I talked afterward, I told her how Judith Butler uses those lines as some of the most powerful arguments in her Gender Trouble, a book that revolutionized that way philosophers look at gender.  Butler shows that the male gaze is what makes a "natural woman," that "natural" is, in fact, constructed.  Which means that natural is actually cultural.

Helena got impatient at this point, so I didn't get to explain the rest of the argument, which is both difficult and brilliant, but changing the lyrics makes me think that "You make me feel like a natural Daddy" also fits well into Butler's basic argument.  Being a father seems to be one of the most essential, natural things there is, something that is pre-cultural.  But the truth of the matter is, one only becomes a father through the interaction with a child; fatherhood is not a biological fact, but something constructed through the loving gaze of the daughter.  Not, perhaps, a profound or new conclusion, but at least a justification for singing a great song to Helena.

A Taste of Baby Epistemology

Helena Iara is now able to grab things: not with any particular dexterity, but she understand that her hands can manipulate the world.  So a couple of days ago, I passed her Tereza, her smiling rag doll, and watched as she first embraced it, then pulled it closer and closer to herself, and then, finally, reached out with her tongue and licked the doll's face.  It was a very different action than the need to suck that she (and most babies) have, and also different from older babies' desire to put everything they see in their mouths.  Like a six year old with a precious ice-cream cone, she stuck her tongue out and licked the doll's cloth face.

It isn't the first time I have noticed Helena's concern with taste: whenever she take a bath, if water drips toward her mouth, her tongue darts out to taste it with transparent curiosity.  When she can, she licks my and her mom's skin.  Clearly, taste fascinates her as much as sight or sound.

Helena's epicurian research led me to a couple of chats with her over the last couple of days.  I started off thinking about senses, especially about Franz Hikelammert's hypothesis that the Greek metaphor for learning is sight (think of the verb theatreo, to see, for instance), while the Hebrews preferred sound (hearing and hearkening to the word of Yahweh).  These metaphors, however, are formal epistemologies: how people (adults, mostly) come to know, and to confirm that what they know is true.  Helena uses both sight and sounds to learn about her world, but what about taste?  Does that sense fit into any kind of theory of knowledge?

As I told Helena about Hinkelammert's theory, I remembered one of the oddest images from the Phædrus, a dialogue I haven't studied for a long time (sophomore year in college!), but which can break down any simple interpretation of Plato.  The story is distinctly odd, with Socrates telling a myth about how a man can come to know the truth of the Forms, starting with lying with a comely youth (but not culminating the sexual act) and then moving on to a mystic voyage through the land of the Ideas.  And in the end, the knower does not know the forms by sight, but by taste.  Man eats the Ideas.

In Tupi-Guaraní philosophy, the mouth also takes center stage in epistemology: the ethical and ontological commandment of Amazonian Indians is to live the perspective of the other, to see through the eyes of the jaguar or of the enemy tribe.  But the path to this perspective is oral: one either eats the flesh of the enemy, to consume his perspective, or sings his songs, to feel the words of his language on your tongue.  Ayahuasca, the famous shamanistic drug to transform perspective, is also oral, the first thing that people who take it comment on, is how brutally bitter it is.  For the Tupi-Guaranís, new knowledge come about through taste.

In the contemporary West, on the other hand, taste is an æsthetic metaphor: someone has good taste when she dresses well, recognizes good art, or likes the restaurants I like.    I wonder if we aren't missing something important here, and I shared this idea with Helena as she licked the back of my hand.  Could it be that taste is the best way of thinking about new knowledge, ideas and thoughts that break the paradigms we have always used to understand the world?  Could it be that the fact that Christians eat and drink in their essential ritual is much more interesting that I thought when I took communion in church as a kid?

For Plato, for the Tupi-Guaranís, and for Helena, taste serves as a way to understand something that is completely other.  Helena has only tasted milk, so water is a stunning revelation, the salt on my hand an almost mystical experience.  Think about the first time you felt wasabi in your nose, or the hot-sweet of a Thai curry... one has to step out of himself to live the experience.  Learning about a new tree, on the other hand, is something I can extrapolate from my knowledge of other trees, and I can describe music by reference to other kinds of music you have already heard: "Imagine Paganinni played by Metallica...".  Taste, on the other hand, doesn't fit.  Try to describe wasabi to someone who has never tasted it.

So I think Helena is on the right path.  Taste is a way to knowledge, and it will be exciting to see all of the new flavors that she will experience in the coming years.

Pendulum

Most people don't associate the words "cold" and "Brazil" very often, but winter here in Florianópolis can be very unpleasant.  Last night it was in the mid thirties, with cold winds and rain, and today the sun didn't warm things up much at all... in most places in the US, such weather would be little more than a drag, but here, where no houses have central heating and few even have a fireplace, the outside and inside temperatures are exactly the same, so we have had to swaddle Helena Iara up tightly.  She hasn't liked it very much, and she gets very impatient.

Wrapped in layers of blankets, there aren't many ways to play with a little baby, so we have had to resort to other techniques.  Helena loves to swing, for instance, so we have rigged a rope down from a roof beam, and then tied it to her bassinet, which allows us to swing her in a pendulum with a more than five foot arc.  She enjoys the movement, calms down, and often will even sleep, even when wrapped in heavy blankets.

As Helena Iara swung back and forth today, I explained to her how the pendulum lays at the root of modernity.  The story is almost mythical, and probably too good to be true, but it goes like this: Galileo Galilei was bored in church one morning when a wind came in the windows of the cathedral and began to swing the chandeliers back and forth over the nave.  More interested in the movement than in the sermon, Galileo began to use his heatbeats to count how long it took for one chandelier to swing back and forth, and then compared it to another chandelier, swinging on the other side of the church, but with a much smaller arc.  Though one sung much more than the other, both took exactly the same period of time to complete their passage back and forth.

I can only imagine Galileo's heart beating faster and faster as he got excited by the discovering, thus destroying his data, but that's not so much the point.  What matters is that Galileo had discovered that all pendula with the same radius will have the same period, in spite of how far they swing.  The insight would be fundamental in working through modern physics, but with Helena, I focussed on what that discovery meant for time: suddenly, one could measure hours, minutes, and even seconds with the use of a pendulum, something much more accurate that the sand and water clocks of the middle ages.

Marking time is one of the major characteristics of modernity: time is understood as something that passes, something that can be measured, used, or lost.  It is divisible and universal, valid for all people.  Pre-modern (or simply non-modern) people don't think of time in the same way, nor, more applicably to this blog, do babies.  For them, time functions in a different way, not measured by the swing of a pendulum, but by periods of play or boredom, eating and sleeping.

But what time means for babies... that will have to wait for another day.