"Where's her mommy?"

A couple of days ago, Helena Iara and I were playing in the living room, when she found a tiny rag doll.  It's a very simple thing, just arms and legs and head and eyes, and Rita bought it when we were in Chiapas, Mexico, five or six years ago.  But what matters to the story here is that the baby is part of a pair: there is also a mommy doll, and they are always together (they were first sewn together, but as happens with curious babies, Helena seems to have picked them apart).

So what did Helena do, upon finding the doll?  A worried expression came over her face, and she began to say "Mommy?  Mommy?" but not with the sort of voice she uses to call Rita.  She walked around the room, looking in the toy box, on the sofa, other places where the mommy doll might be.  She only came to smile again when she found the other doll.

Who knows how many ethical systems philosophers have thought up over the thousands of years since Aristotle talked about finding virtue in the middle between two extremes.  Kant and the duty to the moral law, Mill's utility, Levinas and the face...  But I'd put a good bet on the first step of any ethical system being empathy, feeling for a baby who has lost his mommy.  Maybe both the baby and the mommy are just cloth, but it means something.

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.

A pair of pathetic peripatetics

Last week, as Rita's sister Sandra was looking after Helena Iara, she lifted our baby's hands above her head as she stood up, and the little girl began to walk.  With a lot of help, of course, but even so, it is quite striking to watch a baby as small as she is stepping along the ground, shouting with joy at each step.  The day afterward, Rita and I took some pictures of these steps:

I have always found it fascinating that one of the most influential schools of classical philosophy called itself the "Walkers": the Peripatetics, founded by Aristotle in the 4th Century BC.  Many of the philosophical schools started with rather strange names, including the stoics (because they met under the stoá, or common porches) or the cynics (who took the kuon, or dog, as their symbol as a way to symbolize their affront to authority.  Some people say that the Peripatetics took their name because Aristotle liked to walk as he lectured, others because their members were to wander the world to teach others.  Regardless, it is strange that the most establishment and staid of the schools would choose a name having to do with movement.

I didn't start off talking with Helena about Aristotle, though.  I told her a joke from Calvin and Hobbes: "What if someone calls us a pair of pathetic paripatetics?" Calvin asks his friend.  After the pause (one of the most important innovations Bill Watterson brought to the cmic strip was the idea of dead time), Hobbes responds, "I've never heard of anyone taking the time to rhyme weird insults."  "But shouldn't we have a ready retort?"

The joke is even more clever than it seems, given that "pathos" (the root of pathetic), which meant both suffering and passivity, was the thing that the Peripatetics, the Stoics, and many of the rest of the philosophical schools of the ancient world were trying to avoid.  A pathetic peripatetic isn't just a weird insult: it's a metonymy for failure.  The Peripatetic's philosophy, it appears, was insufficient to guard him from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, which was the whole point of philosophy: to be a shield against the suffering endemic to the world.  Of course I explained all of this to Helena, but what she really liked was the alliteration and rhythm of the words.

It's interesting how often walking comes up as a philosophical or religious practice: I told Helena about mendicant monks in Theravada Buddhism, about the vision quests of Native North Americans, and about the way that the prophet Micah summarized the message of the Hebrew religion: "He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"  (The King James translation doesn't catch the heavy political tones of Mishpat and Hesed, the words translated as justice and kindness, but that's for me to explain to Helena Iara another day)  Jesus called his philosophy the 'hodos, the path or way, and he's hardly the only thinker to do so.  Walking, wandering, wondering, all of them seem to get mixed up as a way to talk about philosophical reflection, but without a mirror.  Perhaps it's a way for us in the west to think through the shift in perspectives that is so central to Tupi-Guaraní philosophy.

After all of these digressions with Helena, I finished with the story of Justin Martyr, who's confessions are also about walking... walking from one philosophical school to another as a way to find truth, happiness, and some kind of justice in an unfair world.  Though we don't generally associate Justin with a good sense of humor, one of the things I remember from my attempts to translate his writing in grad school is how he made fun of the cynics and stoics, the epicurians and the peripatetics.  What's interesting, however, is that the last philosophical school he found, the one that gave him the most useful way of thinking, was Christianity.  We see it as a religion today, but in the 2nd century, it was a philosophy: a powerful one, one that made people willing to rise up in revolution against the Romans or be martyred in hundreds of icky ways, but a philosophy.  Away to walk, we might say.

It's pretty exciting that Helena Iara ca walk and think every day a little more, and with a little more autonomy.