I and me

Helena Iara learned to say "me a few weeks ago; she's become very clear in saying what is "for me" and "for you," "for Mommy" and "for Daddy."  What she hasn't said, however, is the word "I".  In grammatical terms, she learned the first person accusative before the nominative; in philosophy, she learned to see herself as an object before she could see herself as a subject.

"Know thyself": from the first Socratic dialogues on, that has been the commandment of western philosophy: I must know myself: which means that I occupy both the subjective and the objective position, standing outside of myself to be both the knower and the thing known.  I don't, however, think that babies learn about themselves this way: before being able to know themselves as themselves, they know how others see them, how others act on them.

I've been thinking recently, for instance, in a piece of contemporary child-rearing advice from the United States: when a child does well on a test or another academic endeavor, we shouldn't compliment her as being "smart" but as "working hard" or "being dedicated."  The idea, I think, is that intelligence is innate, but children develop persistence and dedication, so parents should focus on the virtue that can be trained and improved.

The problem is partly that intelligence isn't innate, but largely defined by others; I've worked with kids living on the street, forever defined as retarded in their school records, whose minds challenges me much more than any of my colleagues from grad school at Harvard.  Even more important, however, is others seeing you as smart: once you have that label, people listen to you more, they laugh at your jokes when you're a kid, they push you into intellectual pursuits, they read your words with more care.  And in the process, the smart kid actually becomes smarter; she trains her mind to do well what people consider to be smart.  (There is, by the way, pretty decent evidence that the climbing IQ scores (30 points higher across the scale since 1900) aren't as much about changes in the test, as they are about urbanization and modernity.  Our lives have taught us to think in new ways, ways that are rewarded by the test.  If IQ tests measured ability to predict weather or sense when a mountain lion might attack you, we'd have dropped even more that we gained.)

Those last paragraphs are the practical upshot of the fact that a baby knows herself as others know her: we have to be very careful how we know her.  But there is also a strange philosophical conclusion to this process: even as we become older, we still have to know ourselves through some metaphor of the same process.  I try to look at myself through other eyes, see myself as others see me.  Rita and I see Helena, and define her in that process, but she also sees us.  For instance, I have always considered myself a good cook, but Helena doesn't much like the food I prepare.  She prefers Rita's.  I find myself thinking of myself in different ways, trusting myself less in the kitchen.  At the same time, she finds me much more reliable and trustworthy than I thought I would be with a baby.  I always thought I would drop her, but since she never expressed fear that I would, I also came to trust myself.

In the end, that old Socratic riff robbed from the Delphic oracle may still hold, but we have to recognize that the only real way to know myself, is to become the other who knows me.

The new tone of the blog

For the first year that I wrote this blog, Helena couldn't talk.  Yes, she could opine, respond, look at me with questions and love and anger... but when it came to talking, communications were a one-way street.  And what she really loved was hearing my voice.  Talking about philosophy was a great way to keep that voice going, to keep her interested, hearing English, looking into my eyes.

Truth is, though, that now that Helena is talking and walking, she has made it clear that she'd rather hear stories, sing songs (well, she contributes a word or two, and then expects me and Rita to continue the song, but she makes it clear what she wants), and to play word games of repetition and made up sounds.  It's great fun, and just as intellectually challenging as talking about Lacan or Kristeva... but it doesn't make for great blogging.  It's more a kind of Dada and Surrealism parenting, which, as we all know, may be fun art to produce, but which, unless it is as great as Magritte or Duchamps, can be painful to see.  I haven't wanted to put anyone through a repetition of those conversations.

For the next couple of months, I'm going to try something new: not narrating the content of my conversations with Helena, but trying to relate what I think is going on in her head, to try to use intellectual tools to try to understand her growing perspective on the world.  Clearly, I'll be projecting my ideas on her, based on the small evidence she can provide with her vocabulary.  None the less, it should be an interesting experiment.

Please let me know what you think, so I can make these blogs interesting to more people than just me.

MommyDaddyBaby

Helena has a way to say "family": MamãePapaiBebê, all said together as one word.  Since she is just working on the idea of plurals (her three dolls are "bebês", the only plural she uses), it isn't strange that collective nouns like family express concepts that are still difficult for her... but her word brings up the basic question of how collective nouns are possible at all.

The history of metaphysics spent a lot of time on an even simpler question, that of the noun itself.  If we think about, for instance, the birds that flit outside of Helena's window, she'll she sparrows and canaries, azure crows, bem-te-vis, and loads of songbirds... but also arancuás, which look like chickens and jump from tree to tree like monkeys.  And in the marshes on the way to the beach, she sees ibis and herons wading.  Then frigate birds and gulls high above... and how does she know to call all of these animals "birds"?  An amazing process of categorization is going on here.

Bertrand Russell famously insisted that the only real "proper nouns" were "this" and "that", because even to say that John in the morning is John in the afternoon, is really giving the same name to a person who has changed.  (Borges made a great story out of the idea, Funes el Memorioso)  The point is, that seeing the sameness of things around us isn't as simple as we feel it is: in fact, the mind is involved in a major effort of organizing and categorizing a waterfall of colors and sounds that come through the senses, trying to make them meaningful and comprehensible.

Fortunately, babies don't get lost in that kind of speculative claptrap, and Helena isn't worried about why nouns work.  She just uses them.  However, the next step of generalization, that of collective nouns (family as a group of people, forest as a group of trees), still stands a little beyond her.  MamãePapaiBebê works as a list instead of a collective, something that might work for small groups like out family.  But when Rita was a girl, with seven brothers and sisters, as well and Mom and Dad and a couple of uncles and aunts living in the house, I doubt that she could have described family with a list.  It just gets too long and complicated, like saying "aspen, pine, lodgepole, grass, aspen, bear, deer, pine (and one and on)" instead of saying "forest."

It's interesting to see how watching a baby learn language, clarifies old debates between Hume and Kant, Russell and Wittgenstein, which seemed so academic twenty years ago.  They aren't academic at all; they're exactly what goes on in a baby's mind as she learns to speak.

Adventures in language

Yesterday, I took Helena to the grocery store, and as always, she was the hit of the day, with everyone staring at her, talking to her... (in fact, we may have to work hard so that she doesn't get too arrogant, given how everyone dotes on her in public.)  Then, at the cashiers, we checked out and Helena said "obrigada" to the girl working the line.  The girl was in a bad mood, and didn't pay attention to Helena, so Helena spoke in a louder voice, "Thanks!"  The message, at least the one I understood, was "if you don't understand me in Portuguese, then let me try English!"  Better, after all, to think that someone doesn't understand, than to think that they are being rude.

The point of all of this, I suppose, is that Helena has learned that language is descriptive; it's also a way to ask for what you want.  But at some basic level, language is a social lubricant, a way to make contact with other human beings.  And when they don't recognize that element (something common to rude cashiers and many types of analytic philosophers), Helena wants to try something else.  Even if that means talking English in Brazil.

This morning, another interesting bilingual game.  Helena loves to use the diminutive and the aggrandizing forms of nouns: Mãe (mother) becomes maezinha (little mommy), a rock is a pedrinha, and she sings "macaco, macaquinho, macacão" (monkey, little monkey, big monkey) to herself for hours on end.  As she walked around her room this morning, looking for her stuffed alpaca ("paca, paca?"), she had to step around a number of pillows.  She looked at Rita and me in the way she does when she wants us to do something, and said, "pilinho."

"Pilinho" would be the perfect diminutive form if pillow were a Portuguese word, meaning "little pillow."  It isn't, of course, and Helena probably learned quickly as we laughed.  But it makes me wonder how Helena distinguishes one language from another.  How does she hear the difference?  Know that she should speak one language to me, and another to a person she meets on the street?  Honestly, I'm not sure how she figures it out, but as her language skills get better (and as we travel to the US next month, where she'll have to figure out the whole context anew), I have a lot to learn.