The Allegory of the Cave

2:45 AM after a hard day with Helena Iara.  She had fussed all day long, and then at about 9, began to scream as loudly as she ever had, complaining of gas in her stomach.  After a couple of hours of comforting, she got to sleep and had slept well until 2AM, when she woke to eat.  And after the midnight snack, the worst vomiting episode yet.

After we got her cleaned up, Helena was calm and even happy: vomiting often seems to relieve the pressure in her tummy.  And as Rita went to the bathroom to clean herself up, Helena started to admire the shadows cast by me, the bed, and the mosquito net playing on the wall.  She smiled, fascinated.

So, of course, I had to tell her about Plato's allegory of the cave.

Behold! human beings living in an underground den, which has a mouth open towards the light and reaching all along the den; here they have been from their childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the puppets.

And do you see, I said, men passing along the wall carrying all sorts of vessels, and statues and figures of animals made of wood and stone and various materials, which appear over the wall? Some of them are talking, others silent.

And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now, when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence, he has a clearer vision,--what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them,--will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?

And if he is compelled to look straight at the light, will he not have a pain in his eyes which will make him turn away to take refuge in the objects of vision which he can see, and which he will conceive to be in reality clearer than the things which are now being shown to him?

And suppose once more, that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he is forced into the presence of the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated? When he approaches the light his eyes will be dazzled, and he will not be able to see anything at all of what are now called realities.

This entire allegory, I said, you may now append, dear Glaucon, to the previous argument; the prison-house is the world of sight, the light of the fire is the sun, and you will not misapprehend me if you interpret the journey upwards to be the ascent of the soul into the intellectual world according to my poor belief, which, at your desire, I have expressed--whether rightly or wrongly God knows. But whether true or false, my opinion is that in the world of knowledge the idea of good appears last of all, and is seen only with an effort; and, when seen, is also inferred to be the universal author of all things beautiful and right, parent of light and of the lord of light in this visible world.

I didn't tell the story in Plato's words.  That would bore the little girl stiff.  But the basic elements were all there.

Now, just about everyone in the history of philosophy interprets this story as a metaphor for the search for knowledge, for coming to value what is true (the sun) and not simply what appears.  But I wonder if there might not be a better way to think about it, as a metaphor for learning and education (after all, one of the prime themes of the Republic).  Babies love shadows and shadow play; it is one of the first things that surprises them and helps them learn how light and matter and physics work.  We'll see what it takes for her to understand that there is a light somewhere that causes the shadow...

And as for Plato's silly sun-mysticism, I'll deal with that another night when she can't sleep.

The Principle of Hope

Last night, Rita had spent a good hour with Helena Iara, trying to calm her colic pains before we could go to sleep.  Rita is very good at that sort of comforting, but she hadn't had much luck with all of the different things she did.  Finally, I asked her to pass the baby to me (I had just gotten back from a soccer game), and made a couple of waltz steps.  Within seconds, Helena was calm and had stopped crying.

Now, I suppose we could analyze this story as a kind of emotional pickle jar; you know, when you have spent fifteen minutes trying everything to open a jar, and then you pass it to someone else who opens it on the first try.  Your efforts had gotten the lid to the last step, and you just had to try once more.  Rita, in fact, had done all the work with Helena, and I got the joy of hearing her stop crying, just by chance.

However, I shared another hypothesis with Helena Iara as we rocked on the hammock (and occasionally stood or waltzed as she got fussy), one based on the ideas of Ernst Bloch, a German philosopher whp fled the Nazis and became an important in the development of Latin American thought, though he may not be very well known in the US.  His most important book, the Principle of Hope, tries, like the ideas of Franz Hinkelammert I presented in my last post, to defend the value of utopia as a political category.

Hope, for Bloch, is not simply about waiting with bated breath, as we might mean when we say, "I hope it doesn't rain tomorrow."  Hoping is not passive, nor is it basically mental or emotional: hope is the foundation upon which action is built.  We hope that something will be better, and that hope gives us the strength to work to make it better, the faith that our efforts might have real results.  Hope is active and hope is subversive of what is.

So this brings be back to several curious things about Helena.  For instance, if she is crying and you lay her down on the changing table, she stops crying long before you take her diaper off.  When she suffers from colic, just passing her from one set of hands to another will often quiet her.  Taking her clothes off before a bath, and she begins to smile.  The future begins to take effect before it arrives, if that makes sense: she is calmed and made happy by trusting that what will come will make her life better.  She feels hope, and the mere existence of that hope gives her the strength to deal with what she dislikes.

Even for a baby, the present is imbued with the future.

Dreams

One of the most striking things I have observed about Helena Iara is that when she is asleep, her facial expressions seem much more mature an profound than when she is awake.  She laughed asleep before she laughed awake.  I see in her mouth irony, the expression Brazilians call "safado" (which in a child is something of the nautiness we might associate with Denis the Menace or Calvin), a kind of existential exhaustion, a thoughtful melancholy... As I mentioned many blogs ago, we can doubt whether these expressions "express" some kind of external emotion or in fact begin to constitute them, but the face is clearly engaged in something profound.  And here, more significantly, I want to think about what dreams these sleeping expressions might imply.

One afternoon this week, as colic kept Helena Iara from sleeping, I talked to her about one of the more obscure thinkers who've yet appeared on this blog, but also one of my favorites: the German-Chilean philosopher-economists (yes, lots of hyphens in an interesting hybrid) Franz Hinkelammert.  Hinkelammert also talks about dreams, though in their political form as utopia, and his thoughts may help to think about why babies "express" more profound emotions as they sleep.

Over the last twenty years, since the fall of the Berlin Wall, it has become part of the conventional wisdom that utopian dreams lie at the base of totalitarianism.  The Nazis, the Russian Communists, Pol Pot and others wanted to "perfect" humanity, but the result was the extermination of anything that didn't fit (Jews, Kulaks, intellectuals, political opponents) and ruthless imposition of the will of the few over the many.  These ideas were first expressed by Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper fifty years ago, but have since become part of the "common sense" of politics.  Dreams are dangerous, they say. 

Hinkelammert's thought emerges in opposition to this anti-utopianism.  Utopia and dreams, he says, must be conceived of not as some reality for which we strive, but as criteria by which we can evaluate the present.  The worst conditions of oppression and misery can seem absolutely normal and inevitable: after a few generations of slavery, slaves may come to think that there is no other way to live in the world.  Medieval peasants came to expect that the lord would get the first night with their new wives.  People might not like their lives, but it seems that there is no other way.  

Walter Benjamin insisted on memory as a way to judge the present -- a better or more just past, memory of previous struggles -- but Hinkelammert sees these criteria in the future.  And more significantly, judging the present based on the future avoids the conservatism that Benjamin's ideas can inspire, the idea that all struggles are to regain the good of the past instead of to create something new.  When we dream of a utopia, Hinkelammert says, we win a way to see the present with new eyes: to say where it fails, and to think critically about ways to make the world better.  Not necessarily to construct that exact utopia, but to change what is wrong about this world.

The upshot of these ideas is that we need to live the future before we live the present.  And that brings us back to Helena and her sleeping expressions: could it be that dreams allow us to practice life, its emotions and experiences and judgments, before we live it?  That babies dream as a way to get a little critical distance on their world, and thus evaluate it?   

Deconstructing childhood

I've never been much of a fan of lullabies, but Helena Iara like singing, so I have been trying lots of different types of music.  Today I sang her several classic bossa novas: The Girl from Ipanema, Corcovado, Só tinha de ser com você.  The I added some Louis Armstrong, just to sing something in English.  The rhythm of old love songs seems to calm her, and she looks straight into my eyes as she hears the words.  And as I sing songs composed about romantic love, it's fascinating to see how most all of them can also apply to the love for a little baby.

So this brings me to Derrida, about whom Helena Iara and I talked yesterday morning so that Rita could have a couple more hours of sleep.  I had thought about giving a whole history of structuralism and post-strructuralism, from de Saussure on through Derrida, but she wasn't impressed with what I had to say about linguistics and anthropology, so I went straight to Derrida's theory about speech and writing, which serves as a pretty good introduction to any of his deconstructions.

So here's the argument, more or less as I presented it to Helena Iara.  Through most of western philosophy, thinkers have privileged speech over writing, saying that because the listener must be in the presence of the speaker, the interpretation of speech will be closer to the speaker's intended meaning.  Writing, in contrast, can always be taken out of context, read against the intentions of the writer, and be mis-interpreted much more easily.  Just look, for instance, at the original intentions of Homer (or the many sages who wrote the Illiad) and the moral I took from the same story when I told it to Helena Iara a couple of weeks ago.

Derrida takes this dichotomy between speech and writing, where people have traditionally said that speech is better, and shows that speech falls into the same traps as writing.  For instance, the listener is never truly "present" to the speaker: they may be close to each other, but they come to the encounter with such different experiences and expectations that the words they share don't mean the same thing.  And, Derrida insists, speech can also be taken out of context, quoted, repeated, disseminated.  Just as some philosophers have contended that writing is an inferior derivative of speech, Derrida contends that  speech is actually a sub-category of writing.

On top of that, Derrida thinks that the ability to take out of context is what makes both speech and writing so wonderful.  Think about those old love songs I was singing to my daughter.  Were I obliged to interpret the music in its "proper context", I certainly couldn't use old bossa novas to sing to a little girl.  But when singing the first line of the Girl from Ipanema, the lyrics take on a wonderful new flavor when sung to a beautiful baby: "Olha, que coisa mais linda, mais cheia de graça, é ela a menina que vem e que passa...", "Look, what a beautiful thing, how full of grace; she is the girl who comes and passes by..."  The lines are as true of a little girl as of a woman on the beach in Rio de Janeiro.  Or "Eu fui sempre só de você, e você sempre foi só de mim..." -- "I have always been yours, and you always mine" -- a sentiment perhaps more honest in regard to father and daughter than to two lovers.  Or, "Unforgettable, that's what you are... that's why darling, it's incredible, that some one so unfortgettable, thinks that I am unforgettable too."

To a certain degree, this who exercise is about that wonderful power of language to leave its context, for a thought or phrase or poem to mean something more than what its inventor meant.

More photos

Helena Iara and I haven't talked much this week: she's in the middle of a growth spurt, and prefers her mom's milk to my philosophical pablum.  So... I'll just include some photos today.

The evolution of hiccups

Helena Iara suffered badly from hiccups a couple of nights ago, and though she is much more patient with them than Rita and I are, she isn't able to sleep as she hics and hics.  At least I could sit with her and pass the time until she got over the hiccups.

Now, whether this story is true of not, I'm not sure: at least it gave a good narrative as I spoke with her.  Supposedly, the hiccup is an evolutionary remnant, sort of like the appendix, which continues in our genetic structure because it doesn't cause ay major problems, just the occasional inconvenience.  Fish do something similar to the hiccup as they pass water through their gills, which suggests that the reaction might be a kind of holdover.

Helena Iara didn't seem as interested as I talked about the Beagle and Darwin's voyage to the Galápagos, the finches and everything else we learn in hight school about the origins of the science of evolutionary biology.  But maybe that's just because the hiccups had begun to pass and she dozed off...

Russian theater theory

I'm afraid I am getting a little behind on relating my conversations with Helena Iara... my only excuse is that I am spending more time with her and less with the computer.  In any case, I have to go back to Saturday for this story.

As the early morning sun came into our bedroom Saturday morning, Helena and I played one of those silly games that parents play with their little babies, making strange faces at each other.  I'm not sure who was imitating whom, quite frankly, but we went through the same toolbox of exaggerated expressions, and I ended up laughing quite a lot.  She didn't exactly laugh, but she seemed to smile, and definitely enjoyed the game, because she wanted to keep playing.

As Rita took a shower, I brought Helena Iara downstairs and put her in her cradle and rocked her lightly as she dozed.  Since we had talked about William James and his ideas of emotions before, I started to talk about theater theory, particularly the difference between the ideas of Constantin Stanislavsky and Vsevelod Meyerhold, two leading directors who worked in Russia during the time of the revolution.

Now, most of us know at least a parody of Stanislavsky because of movies about acting: the pretentious actor always asking "What's my motivation?" is asking a fundamental question for the Method.  Stanislavsky challenged his actors to create the internal feeling that their parts should experience, to live the emotion of their part, believing that the expressions of their face and body would then reflect or represent these inner states.  Meyerhold presented the opposite hypothesis, insisting on intense discipline of the surface of the body, so that an actor would work from the outside-in. (It's worth noting that Meyerhold was Jewish and worked at the National Yiddish Theater, and this idea of ortho-praxis, perfecting the externality, fits very well with Judaism, while starting in and moving out is a much more traditionally Christian way of thinking ethics and behavior)

In fact, the game that Helena Iara and I had been playing that morning is something that almost any theater student would recognize: an exercise where one actor stands face to face with another, imitating every detail and gesture in the face and body of the other.  The theater game comes more out of the Meyerhold tradition than from the Method, and many organizations that work with social theater think it fundamental for building empathy and understanding of the other.  When a boy mirrors a girl or a white a black, you stand in the shoes of the other for a moment.

With the dominance of film in the world of acting, Stanislavsky seems to have won the battle for drama training, but I wonder if the game that Helena and I were playing doesn't suggest that Meyerhold was right on the way that people learn emotions and grow.  We'll see what happens as Helena Iara grows up.

A Waltz

Yesterday afternoon, Helena Iara suffered badly from an upset stomach, but if I carried her around the house, I found that she calmed down at least a little bit.  Rita had put some music on the stereo, and suddenly, one of my favorite songs came up, "Qué bonita es esta vida," by the Colombian vallenato singer Jorge Celedon.  (I was introduced to the song by the child soldiers with whom Rita and I worked to produce the film Life's Roulette, and I was always stunned by the enthusiasm with which they gave praise to the joy of life, given how much misery it had brought them.  You can see that excitement (and hear the song) at the beginning of the documentary we made about making the movie)

I mention the music because it seems to illustrate something about what I am trying to do with this blog: hearing the music, I began to move with Helena, knowing that she likes the swaying movement of dance.  And suddenly, I realized that a song I had heard hundreds of time was not, in fact, a vallenato (a rhythm based on the Colombian cumbia) as I had always thought.  It was a waltz.  My feet knew the fact before I did, and Helena thanked me for it instantly: the waltz made her stop crying, as she had not done all afternoon.

What's the point here?  Babies teach us.  Not because Helena could tell me, "listen to the 3/4 measure, Dad!", but simply because around her, I reacted in a different way, cared about different things, paid attention to other aspects of the music.  Before I had listened to the lyrics, thought of the child soldiers, imagined the bright sun of the morning and the smell of colombian coffee that the words evoke... but only with her and her upset stomach did I dance.

Something similar happens with these talks on philosophy.  I don't have any illusions that she'll understand.  But I know that she likes my voice, and that she likes to look into my eyes as I look into hers.  And I learn something, simply because she is there.  I have to tell the story a different way, look at the moral differently, try on a different perspective.  And whether it's a waltz or poststructuralarist French philosophy, I learn something in the process.

William James

The last several nights have involved more crying and less philosophy than I might have liked.  After a couple of weeks of great digestion, it seems that Helena Iara has run into some bad colic.  Today, however, as we rocked back and forth on the hammock, I was able to get her to calm down as she listened to my voice, as I sang bossa nova and eighties rock (I don't have much of a repetoire of lullabies), and when I failed to have any more songs, I talked about whatever came into my head.  In this case, the psychology of William James.

Helena Iara already has an immense archive of facial expressions, ranging from the obvious and simple (the sucking movements that indicate hunger, a certain kind of cry for colic) to what seem much more complex and nuanced: many shades of happiness, a kind of curiosity, an introspective gaze, and several looks that seem rather like existential dread.  Now, not only will most experts in child neurological development insist that introspection is far beyond a baby of two weeks old, they will say that even smiles at this age are simple a reflex, not an expression per se.

And that's where we get to William James, who wanted to challenge that simple idea that facial "expressions" are, in fact, expressions or manifestations of some complex inner state.  Our common sense, he said, teaches that we first feel something, and then express this feeling on the surface of our body through gestures and expressions.  James wanted to see the phenomenon in a more materialist way: what if, he said, we think about the smile as the cause of the feeling, as opposed to the other way around?  Or as things that are so intimately linked that we cannot call one of them cause and the other effect?  Try forcing a smile onto your face, for instance, and observing the effect on your emotions; or the next time you jam your toe or hammer your finger, try not to scream.  Separating the "expression" and the "essence" has strange consequences.

The smiles that pass over Helena Iara's face, then... are they "real" expressions?  Or simply reflex?  Or does this reflection on William James let us say that they are both?  Her face moves through any number of gestures and movements as she tries them out and feels the results.  The smiles are not, probably, true expressions of inner happiness, but they may cause brief flutters of that feeling they are said to express.

I had plans to then move on to tell her about the debates in Revolutionary Russia on how to represent emotions on the stage, pitting Stanislavsky against Meyerhold... but her stomach started to hurt her again, so I passed her on to Rita to give the care that only a mother can.

The Moral Life of Babies

It turns out that I am not the only one doing philosophy with babies: and these people are much more professional and scientific, as described in the NY Times Magazine.

Not long ago, a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands. The boy had just seen a puppet show in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the right, who would pass it back. And the center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the left . . . who would run away with it. Then the two puppets on the ends were brought down from the stage and set before the toddler. Each was placed next to a pile of treats. At this point, the toddler was asked to take a treat away from one puppet. Like most children in this situation, the boy took it from the pile of the “naughty” one. But this punishment wasn’t enough — he then leaned over and smacked the puppet in the head.

The Face of a Baby

Two nights ago, Helena Iara wouldn't go back to sleep.  This has become rather common for her, I fear.  She sleeps well through the first half of the night, then wakes and doesn't seem interested in sleeping after her midnight snack.  So that Rita could get a little sleep, I took her out to the hammock, and (yes, the story has become repetitive).

Helena has an immense attention span, especially when she finds colors that she likes (there is a wall downstairs, somewhere between red and brown, that fascinates her) or random movements (light on blowing leaves in the morning).  But what is striking is how long she can stare into one's eyes: with or without focus (there is some debate about this), she can sit and watch and watch and watch as long as I am willing to keep my eyes on hers.

Now, there is an interesting neurology reflection here, given how much of our brains are dedicated to recognizing faces, and it might be worthwhile to suggest that this ability emerges even before a baby is able to focus clearly.  That's not the point of this blog, however.  As we looked into each others eyes in the low light of a single lamp in the middle of the night, I began to think about Emmanuel Levinas.

Like many philosophers influenced by structuralism after the second world war, Levinas was obsessed by the Other, the relationship between the I and the thou.  As a Jew who had just been freed from a concentration camp, he brought an intimate ethical perspective this question, and began to think about a commandment that appears many times in the Torah (though not in the famous 10 Commandments): the requirement that God's people care for the orphan, the widow, and the stranger.  For Levinas, this is the center of Jewish teaching, the responsibility to be open and loving to people who have no social support structure.

Levinas was not, however, by any means naïve.  He had seen too much of the Holocaust for that.  He didn't think that merely talking about this commandment would make people change.  Instead, he began with his own observation: when people have the courage to look each other in the eyes, to recognize the face of the other, they hear a call.  After looking into the eyes of the other honestly and profoundly, I myself am no longer the same: I am called to a relationship to that person, called to justice and kindness (Hesed and Mishpat, the two great Hebrew virtues).

I spend a lot of my time looking into the eyes of the widows, orphans, and strangers of our epoch: street kids, child soldiers, forgotten indigenous people, homeless mothers...  It's my job, but I also like to think that I live up to the Levinasian expectation, and that each one of these encounters leaves me transformed (and, of course, does something for the other, as well).  But to look into the eyes of a baby, of my own daughter... there is something much deeper there.  It isn't about ethics or politics or theology or hesed and mishpat.  All of those words imply love and responsibility, but not to the same degree as is required with this little tiny girl.

Rather intimidating, I have to say I as write this...

Theories of Desire

Babies are desire-machines, who simply want and who don't take no for an answer, so it would make sense to talk about theories of desire with Helena Iara for that reason.  The truth is, though, that last night's conversation, as I tried to keep her occupied a bit so that Rita could have some brief time on her own, was much more solipsistic (one could argue that this entire exercise never goes beyond solipsism, of course, but this seems extreme): I wanted to talk about my own desires about children.

Because here is the truth of the matter: not only did I not ever want to have children, I actively wanted not to have kids.  And yet, having this basic desire negated in the most absolute way (a baby on my lap as we swing on the hammock) has, in fact, made me immensely happy.  So I wanted to think hard about the relationship between desire and satisfaction and happiness, and Helena seemed at least moderately interested in my reflections on Lacan and Buddhism.  At least she kept looking in my eyes, didn't sleep, and didn't cry.

Psychoanalysis has always put desire on the first plane, and with Jacques Lacan, it became the closest the French analyst got to a commandment: "Do not give up on your desire."  Lacan and his followers did not have any illusions that the satisfaction of these desires would make one happy (in fact, philosophers like Slavoj Zizek explicitly reject happiness as a criterion for judgement), nor were they naïve in thinking that any whim that comes into a person's head ("I want a new TV set") rises to this sort of level of ethical imperative.  But desire served as a way to see if a person was being honest with himself, or was selling out on what he truly wanted from life.

Now, on the other hand, Buddhism has the opposite perspective on desire: desire is the origin of suffering, because people suffer when we want something and can't get it.  And since we never really get what we want (and when we get "what we want," we soon find that it isn't what we really wanted, as anyone who ever won the jackpot in the lottery will be quick to show), desiring things makes us miserable.  The only way out, said the Buddha, was to learn to stop desiring, to eradicate wants and wishes from our thoughts.

Babies are much more Lacanian than Buddhist, of course: they want to eat, to be warm, to be changed, and they will not stop crying until they get what they want (fortunately, Helena is great about this: as soon as we figure out her desire and satisfy it, she's a content baby again).  Perhaps my coincidence, Helena was much more attent as I told her about Lacan than as I told her about Buddhism (most likely, she just picked up on my own interested and biases).  But Lacan doesn't really work for the aporia I was trying to work through with Helena Iara: how the absolute negation of my desire could bring me such happiness.

In her brilliant analysis of comedy The Odd One In, Alenka Zupancic notes that both tragedy and comedy depend on the mis-encounter between demand and satisfaction.  Both tragedy and comedy happen when we don't get what we want.  For tragedy, we can think that Hamlet doesn't get revenge, Oedipus gets more than he wanted when the kingdom he desired requires that he kill is father and marry his mother, Antigone can't bury her brother...  In comedy, Cyrano doesn't get Roxanne, and then gets more than he expects; Olivia falls for Cesario, only to find out that "he" is really Viola; Jack Lemmon can only seduce Marilyn Monroe dressed as a girl...  Zupancic proposes to understand the difference between comedy and tragedy as one of point of view: tragedy is this mis-encounter seen from the point of view of desire/before, while comedy is the same mis-encounter, seen from the point of view of satisfaction/after:

"The discrepancy that constitutes the motor of comedy lies not in the fact that satisfaction can never really meet demand, but that demand can never meet (some unexpectedly produced, surplus) satisfaction."

We might be able to describe this better if we think about love: all of us know someone who knows everything he or she wants in a romantic object, so any real person always turns out to be a let-down.  The magic of love is that it satisfies a desire we never had even thought about, never knew we had.

So how to think about this happiness with Helena Iara?  It could easily be a tragedy, the end of so many dreams of travel and instigating revolutions and who knows what other things I thought I needed to be childless for.  That would be seeing from the perspective of desire.  But I think it's much better to look from the point of view of satisfaction, from the feeling of contentment I have with a wonderful little girl on my lap as I rock back and forth on a hammock.  That makes the story a comedy, one that ends in happiness.  Or at least runs with happiness as the moral for a while...