Fear

Helena is afraid.  Or more accurately, she tells us she is afraid.  She certainly doesn't fear the things she should, like climbing down the stairs alone or falling into deep water at the lake, but from time to time the movement of shadows under a tree or the sight of a leaf that looks like a spider will inspire her to say, "fear," and shy away.

There is a wonderful passage in the Philosophical Investigations, where Wittgenstein addresses the analytic philosophers of his day (heirs of Hume and other radical empiricists), who insisted that because we cannot feel the pain of other people, we can't know that what they call pain is the same as what I can pain.  "Just try for a moment," Wittgetstein ironizes, "to think that someone is not in pain when they wince in front of you."  Pain is not, in fact, a personal thing contained only in my body; it is social.  We know that other people are in pain and, as Bill Clinton famously said, we actually feel that pain.

I think I understand how a baby comes to understand what "pain" means, seeing how others react when a hammer falls on their feet, and then feeling the same thing.  Fear, though, strikes me as something different, perhaps because it is much less quotidian: Rita and I don't feel fear on a daily basis.  Jaguars and FBI agents don't surround the house to inspire such feelings so that Helena would know the social element of fear.

She started to talk about fear after we read Little Yellow Riding Hood, a fantastic book by the Brazilian poet and musician Chico Buarque, to her.  The story is about a little girl who is afraid all the time, and of everything... but especially of the big bad wolf, though she has never seen the beast, and it probably only exists in the mountains of Germany.  But because she fears the wolf so much, one day she conjures it up, and it really appears... and the reality is, of course, no where near as bad as her fears.

There's an easy Foucauldian lesson here: just as all prohibition actually inspires the desire to break the law, a book that tries to calm fears may actually inspire them.  But I don't think that's what is really going on.  I think the book taught Helena that fear is an important category of human (or childhood) existence, so she has to figure it out.  And since she doesn't have frightened adults around her on a regular basis, she has to do experiments.

Human feelings are confused and diverse.  "Fear" isn't so much a description of any singular sensation, as it is an umbrella under which we put lots of different feelings.  So Helena tries something out: she's confused by the play of shadows, and that messes with something in her belly; she calls it fear.  Rita and I say, "No, there's nothing to be afraid of," so she sets that category aside as a failed experiment.  "Fear," she says when she sees something that looks like a snake, and I say, "Don't worry, that's not a snake."  She reads that as, "you don't need to be afraid right now," but also as "Snakes are something that should cause fear."  And gradually, she learns how people use words to describe complicated emotions.

I just hope it's a while before she needs to understand "anxiety" and those other heavy words!