Realized Eschatology

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena Iara has come to love the anticipation of things as much as the things themselves: sometimes even more.  For instance, she (like many babies) loves zrrrbts, the release of air against her stomach or another big space of skin, but now she smiles and laughs even more as I breathe in, breathe out, come close, pull away... play the game of "zrrrbt coming!"  In the same way, she has long loved to hear a fake sneeze, finds it hilarious, but now she giggles even more in the "ah, ah, ah, ah..." that comes before the "choo" of the expelled sneeze.

So today, she and I talked about the idea of realized eschatology in early Christian thought, something we find in both Paul and John (no, not the Beatles, the Apostles...), expressed perhaps most clearly in the phrase "The Kingdom of God is among you."  (Luke 17:21)  The idea is that the Kingdom of God (generally understood in that time as a kind of worldly utopia of justice and peace, not, as in post-Constantine Christianity, as heaven after death), is a promise of a just future, but also something present in the community that is struggling for that justice.  If you have ever been inspired by a civil rights march or a rousing folk song by Pete Seeger, you probably understand what I mean: people come together to struggle for justice in the future, but as they come together, they have the sense of solidarity and joy that they hope such a future will bring everyone.

Paul talks about politics and religion, but for Helena Iara, the same is true of a funny sneeze: the future begins to colonize the present, and we get the joy of the anticipated result long before the thing itself.  As I told Helena, it reminds me of the way my father always thought about vacations: he would sit over books and guides and photos for months before we left home, not so much because he wanted to make the trip error-free, but because he loved the anticipation of the trip as much as the trip itself.

I think Helena's joy may explain why Buddhism never really tempted me with its condemnation of desire.  Buddha said, quite correctly, that suffering comes from desire, because we almost never get what we want, and when we do, it turns out to be something different that we thought it would be.  As such, to be happy, we must overcome desire.  I think, though, he missed the joy of realized eschatology, the giggle we see on Helena's face as she waits for the fake sneeze to come.  Desire and struggle isn't just something for the future: it's the way the joy we want from the future can touch the present.

Wind

As Helena and I walked to buy vegetables a couple of days ago (well, I suppose as I walked and carried her, and she entertained herself by watching the world go by and kicking her legs), a strong wind came down from the northeast.  Helena hasn't faced much wind in her life, and she didn't like it.  Or perhaps more accurately, she complained and was fascinated at the same time, wanting to understand what it was that was beating against her face and making her cold.

It seemed like a good time to give an etymology of wind, an idea that plays a much bigger role in the history of religion and philosophy than most people realize.  In Hebrew, the word for wind is ru'ah; in Greek, pneuma, and in Latin, spiritus; in all three languages, the word also means two other things.  First, rather like the English phrase "he got his wind back," or "she ran faster after she got her second wind," all of those words also mean "breath."  But more significantly, all of them have also been translated as "spirit", that essential word in the history of western religion.

I explained to Helena Iara that spirit, like wind, is something you can't see, at least not directly.  You can only see its effects and consequences.  Helena loves to watch the trees blow in the wind, for instance, or to watch a stormcloud roll over the house.  In the same way, many ancient peoples believed that you can't see spirit, but that doesn't make it any less present; its effects are obvious.  And spirits/winds can be both good and bad, blowing the clouds away to show the sun, bringing clouds and rain to water the crops, but also the cold wind of winter that bites our faces, and the drafts that almost every traditional people believes is the origin of colds and the flu.  Good and evil winds, good and evil spirits.

Spirituality, on the other hand, seems impoverished and new age in contrast to the raw power of wind.  Maybe it's because we're too German, where spirit is Geist, a cognate of ghost: it seems like what is left over when the body is gone, a soul that floats up to heaven.  But like most religious concepts, spirit starts out as something very material, like the sun (Apollo, Ra) that burns and makes the plants grow.  You feel it in your face, use it, curse it, struggle against it...

And as we walked back from the market, the wind at our backs, Helena seemed much more content.

The semiotics and social agency of eating

People without babies (OK, me, before we had Helena) often mistake the real challenges of caring for an infant.  I had always imagined that "sleeping like a baby" had some basis in truth, for instance but teaching Helena Iara to sleep has been one of the most difficult challenges we have faced.  And food... we all need food, right?  People like to eat.  The problem with most Americans is that we eat too much, after all.  In fact, however, teaching Helena Iara to eat has also been a challenge.


The problem with food, as I explained to Helena a couple of days ago, seems to be more about semiotics than about taste.  Semiotics? you ask (and certainly Helena would have asked, could she speak).  The science of symbols?  What does that have to do with food?  Well, I explained to her, she had seen a spoon before, because we use it to give her medicine.  She doesn't like medicine, whether because it tastes bad or because it's associated with when her belly hurts, so the spoon has become a symbol associated with something she doesn't like.  It doesn't matter what the spoon has in it: it carries more than just food, it carries meaning.  Give Helena orange juice in a spoon, and she'll spit it out.  Give it to her in an adult's cup, and she'll plead for more.

And that's the point of semiotics: symbols and signs matter.  They don't just refer to things, but they bleed into those things, imbuing the signified with the taste of the signifier, the thing with the sound and associations of the word.  The Danes named the beautiful island they found in the north Atlantic "Iceland", and the terrible, glaciated place "Greenland", largely so that other countries would think that the sign described the place, and leave them alone on their wonderful geyser and hot spring paradise.  Much of marketing is based on the same premise: associate the right words and signs with a thing, and people will come to like even something as nasty as Coca Cola or Cognac.



But there's another issue behind the spoon, too.  Adults hold the spoon, and we give it to babies.  They aren't the actors of the action, not the protagonists of the story.  Since helping children to see themselves as protagonists, as actors on the world stage, is what most of Rita and my work and mature writing has been about, I suppose it makes sense that I would talk with Helena about that problem, too.  She wants to feel like she is the agent, that she is the one doing the eating (and the choosing, the chewing, everything).  Almost all adults have come to wonder at and fear that one simple, infantile phrase, "I can do it myself," and Helena has already reached it at six months, long before she is able to speak.

Smashed banana and applesauce are the foods that start most babies on the road to eating, but Helena hates them, they literally make her vomit.  The foods come on a spoon that also carries meanings she doesn't like, and she doesn't control the process.  But hand her a piece of a ripe pear, and she'll gum away at it contentedly.  The same with a peeled half of an orange.  And yesterday, Rita pierced the grains on a corn on the cob, and Helena eagerly sucked out the marrow.  It was a messy process, but a wonderful one, and she smiled and laughed and ate with real gusto.


In fact, Helena loves to eat.  It's just that she want so eat the right symbols along with her food, and she wants to do it herself.

Cause and Effect

Helena loves the bathroom sink.  I've mentioned that in other blog posts, but she loves it so much it bears repeating.  And in the last several days, to her surprise and joy, she has learned to turn the water on: she stands before the mirror, by the sink, and throws herself toward the mirror, as if to embrace her own image.  As her belly hits the handle on the faucet, the water flows on.  She looks toward the spigot, straightens up, and smiles as broadly as a girl can smile.

Though several times Helena has also been able to turn the water on with her hand, it seems that she thinks that the cause of the water flow is her lunge to touch her own image, a fact that inspired a conversation about magical thinking and the philosophy of David Hume.  As much as we might like to dismiss magic in current rationalist discourse, we can actually see it as an important precursor for modern science, because magic is basically an attempt to understand cause and effect.  I got sick, and I don't know why.  On the other hand, when I get a bruise, I know why: it's because I got in a fight and my enemy hit me.  Under the same logic, then, if I am hurt by illness, it must be because my enemy did it.  Magic serves as the connection to explain how my enemy was able to affect me at a distance.

Helena isn't thinking magically, but she is trying to connect cause and effect: Whenever I lunge at the mirror, the water turns on, so she thinks the lunge is the cause of the water.  To a certain degree, it is, but only when mediated by her belly striking the handle, the essential element she may not yet have grasped.  The point is that she is researching her world, and trying to find ways to test her hypotheses.  When she tries the same thing with another bathroom mirror, and the water doesn't turn on because the handle for the sink is somewhere else, she'll have to develop new hypotheses.

By seeing people's failure to connect causes and effects (or their recognition that they had the wrong cause for the observed effect), the Scottish philosopher David Hume developed a skepticism about the intrinsic connection between cause and effect.  We may assume that the lunge at the mirror causes the water to flow (or that the rotation of a key causes the car to start), but we never know if we are actually right.  It may be that we just haven't found the case where it doesn't work, or the intermediary step that is truly essential (turning the handle).  This skepticism did great things for philosophy and science, forcing Kant to develop his categories of apperception and bringing the scientific method of trial and error closer to its modern form.

At least that's why I explained to Helena Iara.  She wasn't that interested.  She just wanted to turn the water on again.

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.