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."

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.

Milk?

Anyone have an idea of why Helena Iara laughs her head off when I say the word "Milk?"

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.

Photos of spring

Playing

When Helena was six or seven months old, my parents bought a Johnny Jump-Up for her; in fact, the thing is called a Sassy Seat, but the basic idea is the same: a baby sits in a harness hanging from a door frame, and jumps and swings.  To me, it always looked like great fun.

Back then, Helena liked the toy.  Liked it, but wasn't fascinated by it.  She would sit and hang in it from time to time, enjoying swinging back and forth, but there wasn't much jumping.  I put the seat away in the box that said "Made so that babies can strengthen their legs for walking and running, and improve balance and coordination."

Last week, Helena saw the Johnny Jump-Up, now stored away in her room here in Brazil, and then pointed to it.  "You want to play in that?" I asked, to which she nodded enthusiastically.  I set it up, she got in, and jump, jump, jump, with huge smiles on her face.  Now that the toy was part its date, past the time when she needed to "strengthen her legs for waling and running," now the toy made for joyful fun.

Perhaps I'm generalizing from scant evidence (though, after all, what is this blog, if not that?), but I wonder if the story of the Johnny Jump-Up doesn't tell us something really important about play and learning.  Today, in the United States at least, toys have to be for something.  They teach some skill, strengthen muscles, make babies more intelligent... the whole propaganda campaigns of toy companies are now built around the pedagogical capacity of things kids once just did for fun.  And it isn't just the US: I don't know how many school reform books I've read in Latin America about how kids have to "play to learn."

Here's the problem, though: the basic point of play is that it is pointless.  Not that we don't have reasons or goals within the game, nor that it is senseless, but it is play exactly because it is sufficient until itself.  I play because I like it, because it makes me smile; sometimes, I just play because I play.  When there is a goal outside the game, it actually detracts from play: if I play soccer just so I can get a scholarship to college, it's almost like I'm breaking the rules.  The pointless nature of play is one of the major points of genius of Calvin and Hobbes, especially the sport of Calvinball.

None of this is to say that play and games don't have consequences: they do.  They strengthen legs and teach coordination and keep us from dying of heart disease.  Soccer probably helped me get into college at Williams, made me friends at Harvard and in favelas all over Latin America... but these are all by-products.  In philosophical jargon, they ensue, but they cannot be pursued.  The moment these things become the point of play, the goal of the game, then the game is no longer self-sufficient, no longer complete... no longer fun.

When Helena started to play in the Johnny Jump-Up, she loved it because now she was competent in balance and strength, because she knows how to run and jump.  She loved to play in it because she no longer needed it.

There's something in this experience to teach me about my work, too.  When any of us in the non-profit world write a proposal for funding, we have to say what we're going to do and what the results will be.  Not a bad exercise; it makes us think and plan.  But this year, I did a major evaluation of Shine a Light's work over the last decade, and it's fascinating to see that we did most of what we proposed... but of the real impact on kids' lives, on public policy, on the organizations we worked with, we didn't play for any of it.  It ensued as a by-product, a by-product that turned out to me more important than anything we had planned for.

I like to think that education should always be like that.  There are plans, but in the end, the lessons will surprise everyone, even the educator.

"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.