The Dinner Party

A symposium sounds so serious, the kind of thing that one tries to avoid on a university campus, knowing that it will probably be staid old men talking about something you know nothing about.  The word comes down to us from one of Plato's best dialogues, called "The Symposium" in most translations, but which really means "the drinking party" (sym being "together" and posion being "to drink").  Similarly, the central rite of Christianity, the eucharist, is also originally a drinking party, where Jesus and his disciples came together to drink wine, tell stories, and think together.  Eating, drinking, and thinking have long gone together.

(photo by David Shaw)

You can see, then, why I have been so excited about the day that Helena would begin to eat solid foods.  I had no expectations that she would suddenly burst forth with reflections on Diotema and Alcibiades (two of the guests at Socrates's symposium), but there is something wonderful about eating together, about sharing food and a table.

One can imagine my sadness when she not only made a face at the apples that Rita had carefully prepared, but then threw them up, together with all of her milk that morning.  And a houseguest -- Barbara, the wife of my mentor in politics, Scott Armstrong -- had to catch the vomit in her hands.  Not exactly the conviviality for which I had been waiting.

In fact, Helena likes the social practice of eating.  She likes to sit with us, take a spoon in her hand, coo in response to the dinner conversation, and even ask Rita to bring the lip of a water or orange juice cup to her mouth.  Perhaps it is a little like speaking, where she mastered the social conventions of talking and listening long before there is any content to her words, she has learned the social game of eating, the dinner party part, long before she has learned the joy of chewing and ingesting food.

We'll see how she takes to eating over the next couple of weeks.  For now, I'm content that she's good company at our daily symposia at the dinner table.

Questions and Answers

My brother came to Santa Fe this week to meet Helena Iara, so she and I didn't have as much time alone as we often do to talk about philosophy.  This lapse in our conversations allows me to go back to a chat we had almost two months ago, before leaving Brazil, one that says a lot about why I would possibly want to talk philosophy with a girl who almost certainly can't understand most of what I have to say.

We were sitting on the hammock on the front veranda, enjoying one of the first warm days of the Spring in the south of Brazil.  She would say "é" with the intonation of a question, I would respond with "ó" or "é", now more like a statement, and she would respond with another question or what sounded like an answer, and we went on for half an hour like this, just swing back and forth on the hammock as we swung back and forth in the conversation.

Questions and answers, I explained to Helena, are one of the basic issues of hermeneutics (the science of interpretation of texts), especially in the form adapted by Hans-Georg Gadamer.  Gadamer said that the real challenge of any attempt to interpret a book is to find the question to which the book is the answer.  What issues mattered to the author?  Why did he or she address them in that way?  Looking for the question is a way to try to get into the head of the writer (or just someone with whom you are talking), to see the world from his perspective for a second.  In the language of hermeneutics, the challenge is to find the horizon of the other, what is the limit of what he or she can see?  The job of the reader is to try to make his own horizon overlap that of the other, so that there is some kind of an encounter of perspectives on the world.  An exchange of questions and answers: not as in "you ask the questions and I answer," but "I am trying to find out what questions really matter to you."


To a certain degree, Helena and my exchange on the hammock was exactly this kind of negotiation of horizons.  I try to figure out what matters to her, what questions she is asking: it is about the tree moving behind me?  About the light warm wind?  About the shadow of the house moving slowly across the front lawn?  What matters to this baby?

I can't possibly see the world from her perspective.  She has a kind of innocent wonder to which no adult can return, and the raw nature of her perceptions, un-encumbered by the experience that older people have, would be impossible to recover.  But these conversations help me to encounter her horizon, to see what she is capable of seeing, what questions matter to her.


The same is true of this whole blog.  How can my philosophical concerns (my horizon) encounter the limitless curiosity of a baby girl?  From time to time, the encounter is productive.  Other times, it's a dialogue of deaf people.  But that's like almost any encounter, isn't it?

Labels, cast-offs, and the sacred

Helena Iara loves the labels on her stuffed toys.  She often spends more time studying the labels than she actually does playing with Pinkme the Hippopotamus or her various soft and cuddly frogs.  Now, though we could fear this as a sign of consumerism, I think there is something else going on.  So as we were walking to the park this week, I began to talk to her to try to think about why.

The anthropologist Mary Douglass did a fascinating study of the philosophical origins of the purity laws of the Hebrew Torah, and concluded (in good structuralist fashion, but probably correctly), that the Mosaic law is based largely on definition and categorization, and what doesn't fit in the categories, is an "abomination", impure.  For instance, one defines fish as things that live in the ocean and swim, but mollusks and shrimp live in the ocean, but they don't swim.  Outside of the category, they are impure and not kosher.  Similarly, animals are defined by the way they walk and the structure of their hooves, so pig and camels, with feet divided in a different way, cannot be eaten.

More telling to the idea of the label, is the way that Douglass interprets the ritual of circumcision.  Douglass says that the Hebrews considered the foreskin to be something "left over", an excess on the body.  It was neither of the body, nor not of the body: it didn't fit into the categories.  Thus, it had to be cut off.  Since Helena doesn't have the anatomical experience to understand these categories, I doubt she understood what I was talking about... but then again, I'm not sure how much of any of these talks she understands, even as she's approaching six months old.

Several decades after Douglass wrote Purity and Danger, the Bulgarian philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva took up her argument, situating it within wider religious ideas of the ancient world.  In Latin, for instance, the word sacer can mean both "abomination" and "sacred", both what is cast off, and what is most valued.  To a certain degree, this idea makes sense, for though shellfish don't fit in easy categories and definitions, gods don't either.  Bringing the idea of the abomination and the sacred under a single category of misfits, Kristeva talked about the abject, or literally, what is thrown down.

You (and Helena) are almost certainly wondering what any of this has to do with Helena's fascination for the labels on her stuffed animals, but in fact the connection is easier than it appears.  Like the Hebrew idea of the foreskin, the label is something that sticks out, something that doesn't really belong.  It messes up the smooth flow of Pinkme the Hippo's rump.  It isn't part of his body, but it isn't part of the rest of the world, either.  For that reason, it fascinates Helena: not one thing or the other, it defies simple categorization.

I went on to argue to Helena that designer labels serve as our postmodern sacred, and the huge "Dulce and Gabbana" or "Nike" that we wear on our chests stand as a symbol of our fidelity and piety to the great gods of our day, consumption and money.  Maybe or maybe not.  Regardless, labels, the sacred, and the cast off all draw a baby's attention.

Hunger

“Desire is filthy, barefoot, and homeless; it always sleeps in the dirt, in the open air, in doorways and in the street.”

- Diotema, in Plato’s Symposium

Helena has a new favorite song, at least in the morning, when she is elated to be alive.  It's a kind of funk carioca, an adaptation of funk developed in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, but this one for kids.  And, oddly enough, it's about hunger.  You can listen to it here (even if you don't understand the words, the rhythm is catchy enough that you'll understand why Helena likes to dance to it.)

Homelessness and hunger play an important role in a lot of early philosophy, not just Diotema's quote above, which sees the philosopher in a kind of desperate poverty as he desires knowledge and wisdom, but also Socrates himself, who might have been considered homeless (and, quite frankly, crazy) by a lot of professional social workers today.  Diogenes the Cynic (not to be confused with the way we understand cynicism today, Cynicism was actually a very sincere movement, trying to take seriously the idea that the philosopher needed only the love of wisdom, and no possession more, to be happy) even lived in a barrel on the streets of Athens, where he famously insulted Alexander the Great for placing more value on possessions and conquest than on the values taught by his mentor, Aristotle.

I was explaining this to Helena Iara yesterday as we took an afternoon walk to the park, where homeless people in Santa Fe tend to hang out (since the Bush-inspired Great Recession, the number of homeless men and women has skyrocketed in Santa Fe, though (fortunately) the number of kids has not), when we ran across a virulent argument among an Indian woman and a hispanic man, both of whom seemed, from the dress, to lack homes to which they might return.  At first, it appeared that it was merely an angry dispute, full of curses and offense, full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.  I wanted to walk past them quickly.

As we listened, however (unavoidable, because of the volume of the argument), we heard something else: "What, you don't want me to stand up for myself?"

"I meant you should..."

"I should have a backbone, and that means standing up to you, too."

We didn't hear much more.  Standing around to listen would have been rude.  Even so, that brief exchange, for all of the vulgarity I deleted, showed that philosophy is alive on the street.  It's a conversation about dignity, courage, and meaning, however crouched in words that most academic philosophers might not use on a daily basis.

When I left Harvard, largely because I despaired at the lack of intellectual curiosity there, I was excited to see that ideas really mattered to kids living on the street.  When you're fifteen and sleeping under a bridge, you want to know what's the meaning of life to give you a reason to go on another day.  That, I explained to Helena, is why Diotema is talking about hunger, and why a funk song for children might be more than just fun.

Walking in beauty

We have been in New Mexico for almost a month now, and Helena is getting used to the place: the dry, thin air, the cold mornings, the big open vistas.  But as we walked to the Railyard Park today, so that she could meet other kids and play in the playground, I realized that though I have talked to her a lot about Tupi-Guarani philosophy, we've never talked about the native people of her second home.  It was a beautiful morning and we were walking in the shade of the cottonwoods, so it seemed to make sense to talk about the Navajo virtue of "walking in beauty."

The Navajo word hosho doesn't really mean just beauty, I explained to Helena Iara.  It means goodness, happiness, and most of all, balance.  For the navajo, things are beautiful and good when they are in equilibrium, an idea shared by many cultures, but one that it particularly important for people who live by herding sheep in the desert, where a small tip of the delicate natural balance can mean death for a family.

I've never actually studied Navajo philosophy: I worked with a homeless Navajo girl when I first came to Santa Fe, and Rita and I have been out on the Big Rez a couple of times, but like most whites, my contact with the Navajo comes mostly through Sgt. Jim Chee and the Legendary Lieutenant, Joe Leaphorn: yes, the novels of Tony Hillerman.  In fact, though, as I explained to Helena Iara, that makes all the sense in the world given the value that the Navajos place on hosho.  As Agatha Christie once explained in reference to the detective novel, murder disturbs the balance of the world, and the role of the detective is to restore equilibrium by explaining why it happened and by seeing to the punishment of the guilty.  It makes sense that Jim Chee is both a detective and a shaman: both seek to restore a balance that has been lost to illness, crime, or evil.

By the time we had gotten to this idea, Helena Iara and I had reached the playground, so rotation (of the merry-go-round) seemed much more important than the violation and restoration of balance (in Portuguese, by the way, balançar (to balance) also means to swing.  It is one of Helena's favorite verbs, especially given how much she loves to swing and rock).  But finally, as we walked home, I explained the problems of this philosophy of beauty as equilibrium.

The problem is this: both the detective novel and the philosophy of balance suppose that things started balanced, right, beautiful... and that some evil action messed everything up.  Our role as humans is to restore the lost balance: a fundamentally reactionary mission.  We can see this idea in contemporary right wing America, for instance, for whom everything was perfect in the 1950s before the hippies and the commies and the New Left came to screw with America.

In fact, of course, America in the 1950s is not a Paradise Lost, now were things happy and wonderful before the murder that the detective must solve.  Neither history nor justice works as a return to the past, but as a learning that reaches for the future.  Unfortunately, though, as I got to this point in the talk, we made the final turn home and Helena fell asleep in the snuggly, so I didn't get to wax pedantic on the dialectics of history.  Hegel will come another day.

Sleep and dreams

Before having a daughter, I bought into the myth of "sleeping like a baby," but it seems that ll babies have trouble getting to sleep, or at least that's what other parents tell me when I complain (or just mention?) how difficult it is to get Helena Iara to bed.  The world around her is so interesting that she prefers being able to pay attention to everything around her, even when she knows she is tired and grumpy.

For quote a few months, Helena only slept with rocked aggressively in arms or swung in a bassinet (hung by a rope from the ceiling was particularly effective), but recently, Rita has done a wonderful job of helping Helena to sleep without so much external support.  I haven't been as successful, but I have helped her (helped?) by talking a little about the philosophy of sleep.

Though it appears that Helena fully embraces Nietzsche's dictum that "man is not made for sleep," I tried to explain to her that though one should not live for sleep, one can affirm life and still recognize that it is important to rest, so that one can learn and enjoy and drink deeply from the cup... or the breast.  That argument didn't seem to convince her much, but she hasn't really shown much enthusiasm for Nietzsche.  I suppose that's not surprising: Nietzsche has always been a favorite of teenagers, not so much of little babies.

So I moved on to dream metaphors in the Spanish Baroque, especially Calderón de la Barca's idea that La Vida es Sueño, most often translated as "Life is a Dream", but which can also be understood as "Life is sleep."  Like some kinds of Buddhism, Calderón insisted that the phenomenal world around us is nothing more than an illusion, with no more consequence than a dream (which is not, of course, to say that dreams don't have consequences.  They do... just of a different kind that the material cause and effect we find more common).

I'm not sure whether my argument was successful or boring (or perhaps both), but unexpectedly, Helena slept.