What does a Teddy Bear see?

Several days ago, Helena set her two stuffed "kitty cats" (she actually says "killy cat," but I think that's just a problem with diction, not a statement about their carnivorous nature) in her art corner and began to draw, paste, and put stickers on a piece of paper, an event not much different than most days she decided she wants to "paint."  However, this time, after each stroke she made with a pen or each sticker she placed on the paper, she turned to the two cats and said, "Viu, gatinho?" (did you see, little kitty?)  She continued to ask the same question until she was sure that they had agreed with her, or until I imitated a cat's voice to say, "Wow, cool."

Children need to be seen: that's no surprise to anyone who has spent time on the edge of a swimming pool as kids shout "look at me, Mom!" and then jump into the water.  I had never realized before, however, that it's not just other human beings that can see and recognize: apparently, toys and dolls can do it, too. (There is, of course, the question of whether small children distinguish between toys, animals, and people, but I'll leave that issue to the developmental psychologists).

Now, the toy that is able to see a baby play is nothing more than the baby herself.  Toys do have souls (as any reader of The Velveteen Rabbit surely knows), but they are invested with these souls only by the children who play with them, and by the connivance of adults who play along..  After "Jackie Paper came no more," Puff the Magic Dragon was forever condemned to the unreality of his cave.  So in fact, the toy recognizing the child is only the child recognizing the child.  So why are the eyes of the kitty cat doll in any way important?  Why not skip the step and just recognize oneself?

Strangely enough, this is one of the biggest all-time questions of theology.  Why would a perfect God want to create human beings to worship Him?  If he's perfect, why not just stay that way?  One answer that appears, first in the Islamic philosopher Ibn Al-Arabi, who lived in Spain in the 12th and 13th century.  Before creating the world, Al-Arabi said, God was indeed perfect, but He was not self-conscious, not aware of himself.  Without an other, space, time... there is no way to know that I am there, no stimulus, no input.  By creating the world, God found a kind of mirror, a way to know that He existed.  Hegel picked up the same idea in the 19th century, pointing to this gap between the observer and the observed as not only the fundamental motor for self-recognition, but also the way that history itself developed.

I had never realized that playing with toys was such heavy philosophy!

(The attached photos, by the way, come from a not-very successful attempt to play with the camera on the computer, and some software that puts in false backgrounds.  Another interesting example of the false or created other as a route to self-consciousness...)

Jokes

Babies do lots of funny things, and when they laugh, it is contagious.  None the less, I hadn't really expected that Helena Iara would be able to tell jokes, not until she came up with two in the last couple of days.

The first joke came as we were getting ready to leave to go to the playground.  Over the last couple of months, since we first came to the US, then went to Los Angeles, and are now back in Santa Fe, she has adopted the habit of taking toys with her wherever we go; it seems to be a way to feel secure in the face of so many moves, so many new places to sleep.  So a couple of days ago, she carried a doll over to me and said, "Take [it with us]."

"No," I said, "why not..."


Helena interrupted me with her stuffed duck, Pato, half as big as she is.  "Take."

"No," I said again, trying to push her to take one of her finger puppets, or maybe the little stuffed dog she calls Bow-Wow.

With a huge smile on her face, the ran over to her play kitchen, and said again, "Take!" She burst out laughing.

OK, it's not the deadpan delivery of classic comedy, but she was trying to be funny, and there was a certain ironic wit in the exchange.  Freud says that humor comes from the unexpected juxtaposition of concepts in the unconscious, and her inversion of what it was possible to take along seemed to work there.  She might not know the English phrase about "taking everything but the kitchen sink" on a trip, but if she did, the joke would have been even better.

She has also produced word-play that seems rather like a pun.  One of her favorite songs begins, "Cai cai, balão, cai cai balão..." (Fall fall balloon, fall fall balloon), which she adapted to be "Cai cai, Papai," (fall fall Daddy), which actually has a better rhyme to it than the original.  And then yesterday, as I was reading in my favorite chair (which has recently become one of the places she most likes to play), she changed it to "Sai sai, Papai," with the same melody and rhyme, but now meaning "leave leave, Daddy."

Does it make sense to call these exchanges jokes?  Or wit?  What is certain is that she has observed what she has done in the past to make us laugh, and now does it consciously, making the humor intentional.  Hegel sees this process of coming to be aware of oneself and one's influence on others and then consciously changing intentions based on that, as the essence of the move from the epic to the tragic to the comic in Greek theater.  Hrdy believes that the ability to seduce adults is almost hard-wired into babies, and that children's attempts to make us laugh (along with their extraordinary needs, which no one person can fulfill), lie at the basis of civilization.

I'm not sure I would go that far.  But as Helena learns to make us laugh, and makes this a part of who she is, I feel like something wonderful and important is happening.

No, Baby, No!

Helena Iara is not allowed to climb the stairs in our house alone.  It's a very steep spiral, and though she has become a very good climber, we want to be sure that she doesn't fall.  Several days ago, however, we forgot to close the gate at the bottom of the stair, and Helena saw the error before we did.  She ran to the stairs, and then suddenly stopped.  "No, baby, no!" she declared, looking at Rita.  "Don't climb!"  At which point she moved forward and reached for the first rungs of the stair.  Fortunately, her words had warned us, and I was able to watch after her as she climbed.

We have noticed something similar in many things Helena Iara does.  She first declares what she knows to be the rule, and then goes about breaking it.  It can be about eating, yelling, touching the computer... she knows perfectly well what we say that she should do, but that doesn't stop her from doing what she planned in the first place.

Idealist philosophy of history posits that something similar happens with ideas and events.  Governments and social groups know what they should do long before they actually begin to do it.  Think about the noble principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States: democracy, equality, civil rights... but it took a good two hundred years, a couple of dozen constitutional amendments, a civil war, dozens of supreme court decisions, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the gay rights movement, and only now are we getting anywhere near a coherence between the ideals of the United States and what is actually practiced.  And, of course, in those 200 years, other ideals have changed, and on that front, the US is pretty far behind.

Something similar happens with the discourse of human rights.  When the United Nations included the ideas of basic human rights in its charter -- thanks largely to Eleanor Roosevelt -- I don't think any country imagined that an ex-president of a country would be tried for crimes against humanity, as has happened with Pinochet, Serbian leaders, and African plutocrats.  Had they considered such a thing, few countries would have voted for such an offense to their sovereignty.  But the words were pretty; it would have been hard to justify a no vote at home.  So they accepted the charter, not knowing quite what they were getting into.

Growing up is something like that.  We accept the rules of our family and society "on paper" first (or more exactly, in Helena's mouth), but only later do we realize that we have to be coherent with those ideals.  Babies are hardly hypocrites when they say "don't climb" and then climb.  Maybe we should think that countries and social change work in a similar way.

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.

Philosophy

Anyone who has read this blog for a while has probably noticed some changes in the last couple of months.  I'm posting less often, and when I do, the comments are less explicitly philosophical, or at least have less to do with elaborating the ideas of individual philosophers.  This change doesn't mean that I'm talking less, or less seriously with Helena Iara, but that as she grows up, interests and relationships change.



When Helena Iara was a little baby, she loved the sound of a voice: intonation, rises and falls, the sound of funny or soothing words.  What mattered most to her was the fact of talk, and the joy of looking into someone's eyes; musing about the history of philosophy helped me to find things to talk about as we rocked in the hammock or walked in the deserts of Santa Fe or the jungles of Florianópolis.  Philosophical reflections were really for me, a way to understand what was going on with her, to have the minimal difference of the other that allows thought to happen.

But as Helena has grown up, she now understands what I have to say, or at least a truly surprising amount of it.  Her interests now drive the conversation, and though those interests aren't any less intellectual or stimulating, they don't emerge from a dialogue with Zizek or Kristeva, but with bow-wows and miows and flowers and the other exciting parts of her world.

 

As Helena and I began these reflections, she taught me by her presence, by what I imagined that she might be thinking.  Now that she can actually tell me what is interesting to her, these lessons are different, less easy to describe in philosophical language... and frankly, more fun to have than to describe.  To paraphrase Marx, "In the past, philosophies have tried to understand babies.  The point, however, is to play with them."

Child labor

Helena Iara wants to help.  We first noticed it the afternoon we were installing the gas line on the new stove, and she wanted to be under the countertop, passing tools to us, or with a hand on the line.  When I led her away, she cried as hard as she has in a long time.  The next day, she wanted to take the laundry off the line, and then the help cut vegetables.  And yesterday, she actually pulled the clean laundry out of the hamper and onto the floor so that she could pass it to us as we hung clothes on the line.  The last was actually pretty fun, and better than kneeling down to grab every scrap from the ground.

Since it's something that Rita and I work on a lot, it seemed to make sense to tell Helena about the history of child labor.  We don't have to accept the most radical of theories of childhood -- like Philipe Ariès, who contends that childhood is really an invention of modernity, and the people before the 18th century saw children as little adults -- to recognize that we see child labor in a very different way today than did a medieval peasant or a the owner of one of the "dark Satanic mills" condemned by Charles Dickens.  First the upper class began to see childhood as a privileged time of learning and play, and that idea gradually became universal: "children's work is learning," as the slogan of one anti-child labor campaign in Latin America put it.

As I explained to Helena on our way to the library today, to say "that idea became universal" makes it seem easy, like some Hegelian hand of History just made it happen.  In the United States, the great change came about not because of the goodness of the elites nor the conscience of intellectuals like Dickens, but because of labor organizers.  The most famous was Mother Jones, the coal mine agitator who organized children from all over the East Coast of the country on a long march at the end of the 19th century, ending in Washington and demanding the abolition of child labor.  If Helena isn't working at five years old, it has a lot to do with good Mother Jones.

On the other hand, working in Latin America has shown the problems with a fundamentalist attitude against children working.  In many indigenous communities, children learn their most important lessons as they work side by side with their parents, who protect them from the hardest labor as they also teach philosophy and physics and weather and farming.  Some of the most able mathematicians I've ever met are child street vendors.  On the other end of the economic scale, some of my most important growing as an adolescent came from jobs coaching soccer to little kids and writing for the local paper, work that would be prohibited as child labor under many laws promoted by UNICEF.

It's a lot to explain to a little girl, but she understood the basic point: she was happy and proud to be able to collaborate with Rita and me in some way (even if, in truth, she mad the work more difficult).  If she continues "working" that way, she'll grow up well.

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all

Helena is walking well these days.  She can stand up on her own for minutes at a time, and walks from one side of the room to the other with very good balance.  Until, that is, she realizes what she is doing.  Then, like Wily E. Coyote running off the edge of a cliff in his vain pursuit or the Roadrunner, she looks at her feet, looks at Rita or me, and falls to the ground.  She can do it only as long as she isn't aware of what she is doing.

Hamlet's famous like that "conscience makes cowards of us all" has become a kind of moral cliché, coming to mean that we would do many more things if our conscience didn't stop us.  In fact, though, conscience has not always referred to that little white angel on the shoulder of a character in a cartoon.  Conscience is awareness, knowledge.  And Helena has found that the moment of self-awareness can be much more fearsome than the thing itself.

Though I don't have much opportunity these days, for many years I loved to rock climb, and as any rock climber can tell you, conscience does make cowards of us all.  I remember one climb in the El Dorado Canyon, west of Boulder, which tested my skills.  Even as I sweated each move, I made my way up the rock, using a wide crack.  Yet the moment I levered myself onto the top of the pitch, clipped into the belay station, and looked down... I knew I'd never be able to climb any higher.  Unthinking, I had been able to make the climb.  Conscious of what I was doing, I had no chance, and somehow I knew I would fall.  I told my brother to lower me down to the ground, and we went home.  A week later, my heart was still beating at an accelerated pace.

I wonder to what degree Hegel's ideas about negation and consciousness have to do with this same phenomenon.  Hegel saw the world before conscience, as somehow present to itself, but the moment that someone becomes aware of the world -- and aware of herself being aware of the world -- it is no longer a seamless whole.  A crack has opened up.  And according to Hegel, this is the beginning of history and, if we think deeply enough, of humanity itself.  Animals don't reflect on the world, don't open up that gap, but people do.  (Perhaps, by the way, this is why we empathize with Wily E. Coyote, and not with the Roadrunner).

So even though I feel sorry for Helena whenever she realizes what she is doing and then falls to the floor, it is also wonderful.  Conscience make make cowards of us all, but it also makes us human.

Entropy

Babies are chaos machines.  Of course, that's the nature of the universe, or at least of the second law of thermodynamics, that entropy tends toward a maximum, that order devolves into disorder.

Helena has always loved to make a mess, but now that she is bigger and more mobile, she is more effective at destruction.  Perhaps her favorite activity in the world right now is tearing down towers that Rita and I build from plastic blocks.  It animates her like noting else, bating her breath, inspiring her to do things she doesn't like to do, like crawl; she's always wanted to walk, but crawling just doesn't do it for her.  Even so, right now, as I am writing, Rita has been building towers, and Helena has convinced herself to crawl just to topple them.

I think, though, that this little experiment shows the conflict between the laws of thermodynamics and the process of human history.  While Helena increases entropy in the world, she's actually building order in herself: she's learning new things, building new neural pathways, and growing up.

Physicists suggest that entropy may be the arrow of time, what makes humans perceive time as passing, and not like the other three dimensions, which we feel as spacial, through which we can move and then return.  But the way we understand time growing up is exactly the opposite, as an increase of order.

All of which, I suppose, returns us to what Helena taught me about Hegel this weekend.  The old German philosopher may be right that that history advances through negative, but it is a very strange sort of negation that does it.  Rather like learning how to crawl in order to tear down a tower so that, to quote Joshua before the battle of Jericho, one stone not lie atop another.

Helena Iara has a new game: "No".  She has come to love shaking her head back and forth with such velocity that trying to imitate her hurts the neck of stiffer, older people, and rotating her body in the opposite direction to keep her balance.  Sometimes, this game of "No, no, no" makes sense as a simple negation, like after she tries to do something dangerous, we tell her no, and then she responds with shakes of her head.  Other times, though, the head movements don't fit into times that we would expect a "no," like when she is standing alone, preparing to take a couple of wobbly steps toward Rita, or when she hears music she likes and begins to dance.

Helena's little game of negation inspired me to talk to her about Hegel... not so much because she would understand (who really understands GWF Hegel, after all?  Not I, not many philosophy professors, probably not the man himself!), but because talking with Helena helps me to get my ideas around messy problems.  That's the goal of this blog, after all, not to create a precocious philosopher, but that looking at the world through Helena's eyes might help me to understand.  And Hegel, who made his whole career around negation, seems like he might be helpful to understand the game of No.

Hegel famously said that history advances through a long series of Noes, of the negation of what is.  Judaism didn't so much create monotheism as a new and independent idea, as the postulation of a new, positive truth, but as the negation of the many gods of the Phoenicians and the Egyptians; this is certainly clear in the story of Elijah, in the book of Kings, and the stories of the reconquest of Judea after exile in Egypt.  Christianity, in its turn, may have tried to present love as central to its message, but that was hardly new to Judaism.  The novelty of the new religion lay in the way it rejected the centrality of Law to Hebrew through.  Luther is a No against Rome, Thomas Münster a No against Luther... and so we continue.

But here's where Helena's game of No helped me.  We often think of negation as that of an angry two year-old, a boy who says, "no, no, no, no!" and refuses to do anything.  This is also the no of Barlelby the Scrivener, Melville's character who simple says that he would "rather not do it."  Helena's "no" isn't that simple kind of negation, though.  She's not just digging herself into the dirt and saying "I will not move," but instead playing with the No, dancing with it.

In this way, resistance isn't just a reactionary, even conservative urge.  It's playful, dancing, maybe even productive.  When Hegel says that History advances through the negative, I think her attitude is exactly what he's talking about.

The Mayas

The last couple of weeks have been a challenge for Helena Iara (and, of course, for her parents): we just flew from Florianópolis to Santa Fe, and though the trip was much better than anyone might have expected with a little baby, it hasn't left much time for blogging -- or even talking about philosophy!  I guess I leave the excuses for the lack of recent posts at that.

One of the wonderful things about parenting is the sense of solidarity with other parents, who know what you are going through, and who often have clothes, toys, and lots of other baby things that their own kids have just grown out of.  So when we got to Santa Fe, we got wonderful presents from friends, including several cloth books.

Most of the books are bound like the books that most of us read, but one of them was bound as a codex, where the sheet folds over on itself to make pages, so one is opened on the left, the next on the right.  Until the end of the middle ages, many European books were bound as a codex (other were in scrolls), but I took advantage of the form of the book to tell Helena about Maya literature.  We have some of the most famous tales from the Maya post-classical period (the Popul Vuh, the Chilam Balam) in codices with beautiful glyphs and illustrations.  I would have liked to tell her the stories, but it has been too long since I have read them, and I didn't want to get them wrong.  So instead, I told her a little about contemporary Mayan philosophy, especially that of the Zapatistas.

It's the nature of American news to cover a story only when there is novelty or tragedy or violence, so when the Zapatistas took San Cristóbal in 1994, it got headlines around the world.  Now, when I tell friends about the Zapatistas, many of them say, "They're still around?"  The truth is, though, that the 1994 revolution gave the Mayas control over a huge territory in the south of Mexico, and though no other country recognizes them as independent, that have basically created their own nation-state.

Helena and I haven't talked political philosophy much, so it takes time to explain how different Zapatista ideas about democracy are from Euro-American ones.  Leaders, for instance, are not elected, but chosen in a lottery (exactly as was done in Athens, lest we think this is a strange idea), and they are obliged to listen to the ideas of all of the people in their village and then implement those idea, whether they like them or not.  All decisions are discussed in detail and at length (a Zapatista joke: "How many Zapatistas does it take to screw in a light bulb?"  Answer: "Come back in a week and I'll tell you after we talk it over."), but not in the way of the English parliament or US congress.  I was struck, for instance, when working with a Zapatista NGO in Chiapas, that the indigenous members of the group would caucus together, then present one coherent idea to the whole group.  Within their caucus, they could debate each other, but when faced with the other (from another village, another social group), they would always stand together.

The fundamental idea of the Zapatistas, something they get from Maya thought and from Liberation Theology, is autonomy, sometimes translated into Tsotsil as Stalel Stuk, or "doing and thinking for oneself."  In the United States, the tradition of protest movements is to demand rights or benefits from the government: the civil rights movement or the women's suffrage movements were all about the fact that women and blacks had been excluded from the state, and needed to be included as a way to be recognized as human beings (a very Hegelian idea) and to gain more prosperity.  The Zapatistas, in contrast, decided to cut themselves off from the Mexican government.  They did not want to gain recognition, rights, or benefits from the state.  They wanted to be left alone, so that they could do it themselves.

And in fact, they have done a better job than the Mexican state: whether we're talking about education (obligatory for Maya kids, available for all of them, and good), agricultural innovation (the Zapatistas set up their own agricultural university), or security (the Zapatista area is one of the few parts of Mexico not demolished by the violence of the drug war), the Zapatistas' autonomy has made life much better for them.  And perhaps more significantly, when you see an indigenous peasant in Chiapas, in Zpatista controlled territory, she'll have a straight back and she'll look you in the eye with pride.  Not many other places in Mexico (or the world) that you could say that.