Do unto others...

Yesterday, Helena Iara and I went to the playground in the Trindade neighborhood, while Rita gave a presentation at the nearby university.  Helena got to play with a little boy from Angola, another from Holland, and a girl whose mother seemed to be Colombian or Venezuelan: a multicultural place in the middle of Florianópolis.  She also learned to do some new things in the playground, like the fireman's pole and going down the rope ladder.

Later in the afternoon, after Helena was tired enough that she didn't want to climb the ladders any more, she sat down on the stones of the playground and asked me to sit next to her.  When I did, she gathered up some pebbles and poured them over my legs.  "Please don't do that, Helena," I said.

She took more pebbles and poured them over my leg, this time with a naughty smile.

"Helena!"

As she gathered the pebbles for the third time, I prepared strategies for stopping her... but she poured them over herself and laughed, instead, one of those wonderful two year old contagious giggles.  Then she did it again.  "Gather stones, Daddy," she told me.

One of the most famous ethical precepts in the West is Jesus's "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you," commonly called the Golden Rule.  In fact, it wasn't a new concept to Jesus (it was pretty common in the early Talmud), and you can see similar ideas in religious traditions the world over.

Most of the time, we understand the Golden Rule as a commandment -- in technical language, as hortatory, a request to do something.  I wonder, though, if it isn't more of an objective description: not a commandment, but just relating how things are.  "We do unto others as we want them to do to us."  Helena wasn't pouring the stones over me because she wanted to be naughty or to do something bad to me: it was an invitation for me to pour stones over her.

In a similar way, I've found that most of the truly bad people I've met in my life (not many... but a leader in the Chilean secret police, a couple of human rights abusers in Colombia, gangsters from time to time) truly expect that other people are going to do bad things to them.  "I'll screw them before they screw me," seems to be their motto.  It's more like "Do onto others as you expect them to do unto you," but a modified Gold Rule is actually a pretty close description of the way even really evil people think.

What's interesting here is that an ethical rule and the description of "how things are" turn out to be exactly the same, which sounds pretty Panglossian (and not a description of the ethical mess of the real world.).  But what's interesting, I think, is where desire starts.  In the evil version of the Golden Rule, we start with my imagination of the desire of the other: I think he wants to screw me over, so I'm going to get him first.  With Jesus's interpretation, a person has to take responsibility for what he wants: Do onto others as you want (not as you think that they would want) them to do to you."

And that makes all the difference.

Sound Effects

Helena absolutely loves playgrounds, but she has never been a great fan of teeter-totters.  She prefers swings and slides and anything she can climb... and I have to admit that I empathize with her on her choices.  Even so, when we went to the playground on the shores of the Lagoa de Peri a couple of days ago, Helena wanted to get on the "up-up!" (as she calls the teeter-totter), and I decided to add a little to the game.  As she went up and down, I made strange noises: hardly the sound effects of a sci-fi movie, but something that tried to imitate airplanes and spaceships and who knows what else.  And for the first time, Helena's laughs on the teeter-totter were something similar to her expressions on joy on swings and slides.  She didn't want to get off, even after hundreds of ups and downs.

 This week, I have also been working on the title sequence for the new internet-based news channel that Rita and I are developing with teenagers from the favelas of Recife.  Though I had figured out some interesting images and visual effects, I simply was not convinced by the way the titles were coming out: they seemed to lack emotion and gusto.  Thinking of Helena and her teeter-totter, I began to work on the sound: not just the music, but the sounds that go on in the background that often pass straight to our subconsciousness.  And suddenly, the images began to make sense -- it's not that they were cooler or more interesting, but they became comprehensible in a new way.  With sound, the viewer sees new things.

Now, I think it's a bit of an exaggeration to say, along with the French cinema theorist Michel Chion, that film truly functions as a new space teaching us how to hear.  None the less, sound does teach us to see: imagine the explosions of a blockbuster movie without the booming sound effects of a theater, or a person walking though a deserted building without the echoing of footsteps.  I have made enough films to know that when you record sound as you film, you don't get it right.  The steps are too loud or too soft, the wind distracting...  In the end, the sound that we record in reality just doesn't sound right on film, so we have to re-create it.  It's not a deception, but a way of learning to see in a new place (in front of a movie screen, a TV, the computer...).

Immanuel Kant based his epistemology, the basic rules for how we know the world, on two premises: first, that we somehow understand space and time before we ever experience it, that it is a part of our mental make up.  And second, he insisted on the "systematic coherence of apperception", a really confusing way of saying that all of our senses have to agree on something for us to feel that it's part of the world.  If we hear a coffee grinder but don't catch the smell of beans and don't see the whirl of the machine, we know that something is wrong.  When the whole shebang of lots of different sensations comes together, we feel more confident about reality.

Film -- or any kind of play, like a teeter-totter -- is often lacking a couple of senses.  It isn't quite real: that's what gives art and play the chance for creativity, humor, and critical distance.  At the same time, it can make everything feel kind of empty.  So boys invent the sounds of laser guns and sword clatter as they play their war games.  We fake the sounds of falling as we climb in a tree or drop rocks off a bridge into a stream.  And we create sound effects on the computer for the movies we invent.

How many whales?

We are back in Los Angeles, where Rita continues to work on research for her post-doc, so Helena has to deal with lots of new places again.  In the hotel where we are staying, there are whales on the bottom of the bathtub, and when she got ready for her bath last night, she took an unmistakable joy in counting them: "Uma, duas, três, quatro baleias..." and then in English: "One, two three, four whales."  Her counting has gotten quite good of over the last couple of weeks, and she normally makes it to about 14 without a mistake (though seven often gets skipped, for no very clear reason.).

Lots of experts in child development say that children don't really understand numbers until they are much older, so I have spent quite a lot of time with Helena trying to get at how she thinks about counting.  At first, it seemed that she understood numbers not really as numbers, but as a series: just in the same way that she has stacking bowls, where the one marked with a bird must come first, followed by the caterpillar and the bunny, one, two, and three are a series.  That is, after all, what counting is about.

Does she understand, though, that there are four whales, and not just that the word "four" is attached to the last of the whales that she counts in her series?  The classic test with children is to ask them how many things there are, and not to allow them to count one by one: evidently, most kids just say one, two, or "lots."  Helena doesn't seem to accept this test, though (or I don't know how to do it): she always goes back and counts.

Now, Immanuel Kant at one point set off to see if any human knowledge was truly a priori, by which he meant that it was guaranteed to be true without us having to trust our unreliable senses.  He looked to math as an example, and came to claim that math doesn't really require any inputs from the world.  All math, he says, is based on sequence (basically what Helena does as she counts), and sequence is based on time.  Since time is one of the universal, transcendental characteristics of the interaction of all human minds with the world, we can say that mathematical truths are a priori.  (Since space is also one of those transcendental categories, Kant also believes that geometry is a priori, but non-Euclidian thinking might make that a harder argument to accept).

In the end, I think that Helena, even if she is "just" counting a series, is doing math.  But she is also using these series, like any other way of organizing the relationship between her thoughts and the world, as a way to deal with the unknown: a new place, full of new things.  When there are "four" whales instead of "a lot", she can find a big, unknown world just a little easier to understand and deal with.

I'll take care of you

One of Helena's favorite Christmas presents was a book by Richard Scarry, whom I also remember loving when I was a kid.  Toward the end of the book, the Cat Family is reading nursery rhymes, of which one is the encomium on sexual assault,

"Georgie Porgie, puddin' and pie,

Kissed the girls and made them cry.

When the boys came out to play,

Georgie Porgie ran away."

The portrait shows two girl cats by the side of a big boy cat, both of the girls crying as the boy tries to kiss them.

Yesterday, Helena began to talk to the girl cats: "Não chora,  Bebê cuida." (Don't cry, the baby (i.e., I) will care for you).  I was very excited to see empathy spring forth at such a young age.  Then, today, she began to point her finger at the boy cat: "No, no, no!"  Empathy had moved on very quickly to a sense of justice, or at least of prevention.

At the end of the 18th century, moral philosophy saw an important debate between Emmanuel Kant and the Scottish Enlightenment.  For the Scots (people like Thomas Reed, but also the young Adam Smith), moral feelings needed be be culled and trained: empathy and a sense of justice might be natural in many people, but they were like small, weak plants in the jungle, and people needed to learn how to give them food and light so they could grow.  That way, our "natural" dispositions (in fact, trained dispositions) would direct us to act for the good.  Kant, in contrast, declared that any act based on a natural disposition, or in fact on any motivation other than duty, could not be called moral.

Now, when I was a Freshman in college, I loved Kant's moral theory.  It was hard, challenging, and logically rigorous, something that would set the moral people apart from the chaff.  As I've grown up, I have to say I'm much more convinced by Thomas Reed and his friends: though they may lack the logical and moral rigor of Kant's German thought, their ideas seem to bring more good into the world.

Why does any of this matter?  Because Helena is beginning to develop those moral seeds: the care for others who suffer (even if they are crying cats in a book), a sense of empathy for children who have lost their mothers, a rejection of the abuse of power in Georgie Porgie.  Kant would insist that there is no virtue in these young sprouts of ethics: if she is to be a good person, Helena must learn to defend the girls against Georgie because it is against the moral law exposed by our reason... not because she feels sorry for them.  Honestly, I think Rita, who sits with Helena and the book and talks her through the images, is a much wiser philosopher than Kant here.  As she talks about the girls and their tears, she trains Helena's sentiments to be just.  And that training, soon to become instinct, is better than any moral law out there.

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.

More Mar

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena Iara has developed a series of emotions that seem almost existential. She asks to see a little angel statue that she broke (the wings came off when she dropped it on the floor) and then goes, "ohhhh" and makes a sad face.  "More" has become a common word, but most often referred to experiences, not things (more riding on the bicycle, more time on the beach).  But the most touching existential desire is for the "Mar," a word she says many times a day, and then points to the beach.

Our house here in Brazil is on an island, and it's only a five minute bike ride to get to a spectacular beach, so I suppose that her demands for more mar aren't completely unexpected.  Even so, it's striking to see this love of the sea develop.  As we head downtown in the car, she knows that the bay will appear soon, and she begins to ask for it.  Today on the bike, as we headed down the hill, she asked plaintively, "mar?"

It isn't simply that Helena loves the ocean, nor does she really want to get it.  It's still winter here in Brazil, and though that doesn't make the sea as cold as it might be in February in Boston, only the hard core surfers and kiteboarders are out on the waves.  Helena is even a little afraid of the ocean, and if the waves lap too close to her, she runs back to embrace my legs or ask to get up.

Maybe what fascinates her is what Kant called the sublime, something that is striking and attractive, but also out of control: a roaring river, a pounding waterfall, the break of waves on rocks.  Though we might call it beautiful, the raging sea is something very different from the beauty of a well tended garden or an English brook where one goes punting.  It attracts and frightens... not unlike a dog or the wind in the trees or being thrown into the air, other things that she loves.

We adults like to manage things.  Babies seem to have a rather more healthy love and fear of beautiful things that they can't control.

Language(s)

There are loads of differences between when I grew up and now, and I certainly don't mean to belabor them with tales of walking 10 miles through the snow on the way to school, uphill both ways.  But one thing that does really strike me is how easy it has become to be a cosmopolitan baby (which I mean in the Kantian, not the fashion magazine, sense): to live across borders.  Helena does that literally whenever we fly from Brazil to the US or back, but she also does it every night.

Rita is getting Helena ready for bed as I write, singing this lullaby we ran across on youtube, purely by chance:

Neither Rita nor I have learned the lyrics in Turkish very well, but we can at least do the "Dandini, Dandini" bit enough for Helena to calm down as night approaches.  Helena's other favorite videos are mostly Italian, like Il Katalikammello and Il Gato Puzzilone.

I compare this to a story my mother tells about a trip she took into Cincinnati with her grandmother; both lived in small town Kentucky, and the "big city" was out of the usual.  My great-grandmother saw two Mexican kids on the street speaking Spanish and said, "Wow, those kids are so smart!"

"Why do you say that?" my mother asked.

"Only two or three years old, and already speaking a foreign language."


I don't think that Helena will even grow up with the idea of "mine" as opposed to "foreign."  Her world is different.  How, I'm not entirely sure, but very different.

"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.

Isn't she just a doll?

On our recent trip to Salvador and Recife, Helena Iara heard one comment time and time again: "Isn't she just a little doll?" ("É como uma bonequinha!")  Helena is a cute baby, but what really attracted interest was how blond she is: in the very African cities of Brazil's northeast (and where the harsh sun burns everyone black pretty soon), such a white baby is shocking.  I'm not exaggerating when I say she stopped traffic on downtown streets.


I began to tell Helena a little more about the philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, which seemed quite apropos... Baudrillard's basic idea is that in post-modernity, the sense of reference is lost.  Instead of a picture signifying some real thing "behind" it, representation develops a new relationship to reality.  What, he asks, does the China exhibition at Epcot Center have to do with China?  He defines the simulacrum as a "Copy for which there is no original."

As I explained to Helena, it seemed even more perverse the doll -- originally a signifier of a baby, but now a kind of simulacrum -- would now become the reference by which real babies are judged.  If a baby is "like a doll", then she is pretty and good. Certain other comments we heard on the street also made it clear that the comparison had to do with wealth: several women declared "She looks like a soap opera baby!" while one street boy innocently spoke the truth that lies behind all of these comments: "She looks almost like a baby of the rich people!"  The rich, like a doll, are unreal and perfect, powerful but untouchable.

Fortunately, Rita was listening to my diatribe and stopped me before it got out of hand.  She explained to Helena that the real problem wasn't ontological, but practical.  When people describe a baby as a doll, they may also treat the girl as a thing.  The cheek-pinching, hair-mussing, and invasive stares she got from people she had never seen before and would never see again served as very good evidence of this fact.

In the end, I still contend that issues of the constitution of being in postmodernity are important... but Rita is basically right.  The real issue with seeing the other was a doll is that she becomes a thing.  Prized and treasured, perhaps, but basically an object.  Instead of another subject with whom I interact, people on the street wanted an object with which they could play.

Toys, Gravity, Kant

This morning after breakfast, Helena Iara sat in her high chair, throwing one toy after another to the ground, excited to hear the sound of the plastic hitting the tile floor, powerful knowing that either Rita or I would reach down and pick the toys up.  "One down, two down, three down," I joked as I picked up yet another plastic block.

"Good thing," Rita replied.  "Think of what would happen if Helena were in outer space, with no gravity at all."  An image of Helena outside a spaceship, throwing her toys left and right and "up" and "down" (categories that don't make much sense without gravity), with nothing ever to stop them, flying off into infinity where Helena could never see them or play with them again.

Emmanuel Kant said something very similar, about how what we think of as a problem to do something, may be exactly what makes doing that thing possible: "The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space."  The dove longs for an easier passage through the air, resenting the friction of each passing atom of oxygen... without recognizing that it's exactly that air that makes his flight possible.  In the same way, I get tired of the force of gravity which forces me to bend down and pick up yet another toy, without recognizing how much worse it would be otherwise.

Slavoj Zizek defines this process as the goal of psychoanalysis: seeing that what seem to be the "conditions of impossibility" of an action are really "its conditions of possibility," what seems like a barrier to what I want is in fact essential to doing it.

 It seems like a key lesson to fatherhood, a way to look at the sleepless nights and stomach aches and vomit after eating an apple.  Without these things, without the needs a child has of her parents, we would never construct love, family, all of the things that we want from parenting.  It's all air to a dove.

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?

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 world cup

The world cup here in Brazil is quite something: it's basically a month long vacation with soccer four and a half hours a day, and when the Brazilian national team plays, everything shuts down.  Everything: including health centers and even most of the police.  So as one might imagine, Helena Iara has seen a lot of soccer in the last two weeks; or perhaps to put it better, she has been with me as I have been watching  lot of soccer.

A couple of nights ago as I tried to entertain Helena for a bit (she wasn't sleepy, but everyone else was!), I started off quoting Sartre on soccer, and then wove an argument that I found interesting, and which kept her looking in my eyes attentively.  "In football everything is complicated by the presence of the other team," he declared, and anyone who sits through a 0-0 tie, suffering with a team that simply can't penetrate the other defense, will sympathize with the great existentialist.  On the other hand, talking with a baby, somehow that didn't quite makes sense, or perhaps it just reminded me of another and more thoughtful comment, this one by Emmanuel Kant:

The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. (From the Critique of Pure Reason)

In fact, Kant is suggesting, the things that we imagine are barriers to what we want, are in fact exactly what we need to get that result: to use a phrase beloved by Zizek, "the conditions of impossibility are truly the conditions of possibility."  The bird needs the air that seems to hold him back, while the soccer team needsa strong opponent in order to play well, to challenge it to do something better: compare Brazil's performance against North Korea to its elegant soccer against Ivory Coast.

Now, what does this have to do with children?  How did I talk about this issue with Helena Iara?  Well, there is a similar kind of common sense about infancy, that life would be much easier if we came out of the womb like a horse, all ready to run.  Instead, we have to teach Helena almost everything: walking and talking and thinking and running (and in a couple of years, playing soccer...).  We even have to teach her to sleep!  Wouldn't it be easier if humans were just born with these capacities?  Especially this week, as we have tried to teach Helena to sleep on her own, I'm very sympathetic with the Sartrean perspective on soccer.

But what would humanity be if we were born with all of these skills?  According to Giorgio Agamben,

Imagine a man already equipped with language, a man who already possessed speech.  For such a man without infancy, language would not be a pre-existing thing to be appropriated, and for him there would neither be any break between language and speech nor any historicity of language.  But such a man would thereby be at once united with his nature; his nature would already pre-exist, and nowhere would he find any discontinuity, any difference through which any kind of history could be produced.  Like the animal, whom Marx describes as "immediately at one with its life--activity", he would merge with it and never see it as an onject distinct from himself. (From Infancy and History)

What does it mean to be human?  According to Aristotle, man is the logicoon zoon, the being with speech... yet we are born without speech.  We come into our essence, we aren't born with it.  So in the end, though Helena challenges us with her inabilities, she also shows us what it means to be incomplete, lacking... human.

Tupi-Guarani Philosophy and a good night's sleep

Helena Iara's first name is, of course, Greek, so it made sense that she would enjoy talks about the pre-socratic philosophers of Ionia, where her namesake fled with Paris almost three thousand years ago.  Iara, though, is a Tupi-Guaraní name, for which it seems that everyone has a different intepretation (when Rita and I did a pair of films with Guaraní Indians in Paraguay last year, as we tried to write the subtitles, we were stunned by how polysemic the language was, where one phrase could have half a dozen radically different translations into Spanish).


In any case, last night as I tried to convince her to relax and sleep, I sat in the hammock, rocked her, and talked about Tupi-Guaraní philosophy.  She enjoyed it so much that she slept almost instantly... though probably more because of the smooth swings of the hammock than because of anything I had to say.  She ended up sleeping until two in the morning, and then after a quick nurse and cry, slept again until eight this morning.


Among the tribes of the Amazon and Paraná river basins, philosophy proposes a radically different road to truth, not an attempt at objective knowledge, but at plural subjectivities.  For many of these tribes, one of the fundamental goals of life is to see through the eyes of the other: cannibalism after battle, for instance, symbolically allows the warrior to ingest the perspective of the enemy.  Similarly, shamanism serves as a path to see the world through the eyes of a jaguar or a caiman.  The sacred songs of many Amazonian and Orinocan cultures are the ones they have stolen from their enemies, a way to capture the world others see.  

In the "dialogue" with Helena Iara as she fell asleep, I had to wonder what could make it possible to see through the eyes of a baby, to imagine a world without hard lines, with only two dimensions, where colors are only barely coming into definition, where sounds can't be broken down one from another.  I don't know that Rta or I (or any other parent) can achieve that.  But we can share one of the experiences of shifting perspectives that a baby likes: rocking.  Swinging back and forth in the hammock is a kind of parallax (the word that Emmanuel Kant chose for this idea of shifting perspectives, and which came to be central to his epistemology), if only a small one, as one moves from one point of view to another.  Babies love the motion... because it helps them digest, because it reminds them of the mother's womb, but also, I think, because they love the new while at the same time, they want repetition. 


Rocking with a baby in the hammock may be the best lesson possible in Tupi-Guaraní philosophy, and a real way to share it with her.