I}

THE HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD

The first principle of a hermeneutical ap­proach to childhood is a recognition of themutual necessity of the tenos "adult" and"child," Logically, the child is by definitionanot-adult, and the adult a not-child. In lineartime, the child is a not-yet adult, and the adulta once-was child. But the law of contradic­tion does not cover the adult-child economy,for as Nandy has said of what Freud taughtus: "Childhood and adulthood [are] not twofixed phases of the human life-cycle (wherethe latter [has] to inescapably supplant theformer), but a continuum which, whilediachronically laid out on the plane of lifehistory, [is] always synchronically present ineach personality.,,1

Self is a conununity in which all the ep­ochs of the life cycle, the future as well as thepast-birth, childhood, youth, middle age,old age, and death-are always present, butcontinually being reinterpreted, from what­ever point at which self stands. We are, asWalter Misgeld has pointed out, always chil­dren to the extent we are still in the processof becoming adults: "being an adult, iftreated as a matter to be achieved again andagain, makes us take note that we, as adults,must think ofourselves as being like childrenin order for us to be able to say that we areadults. ,,2

So the adult-child economy is a central,continuously shifting balance in the ecologyof the self, and of primary importance to anymodel of self-construction in which our ma­turity is always in question, and never there .as a matter of course, or fixed once and forall as an end-point. If this is the case, anyphilosophy of childhood is also a philosophyof adulthood.

The relationship between the two terms,

PHlLOSOPHY TODAY

44

David Kennedy

child and adult, has certain universal, andcertain historical and epochal configura­tions. As for the latter, what has recentlycome to be known in the West as the "inven­tion ofchildhood" is also, in keeping with theprinciple stated above, the invention ofadult­hood. The modernist progress narrative of acultural "growing up" or "coming of age," isalso the story of an existential and ideologi­cal separation of child and adult. As the storygoes, modem man, armed with science,threw off superstition, and in so doing, healso threw off childhood. But if child andadult are a mutually necessary, contrastivepair, he could not throw off childhood, butonly repress it and project it onto an Other.So in attempting to eradicate the mythic or"childish" dimensions of consciousness,childhood was "invented" during the 16thand 17th centuries by being isolated in chil­dren, then reified in age-graded institutions,universal schooling, and new, "adult" defini­tions of public behavior, or civilite.3

As for the universal configurations of theadult-child pair, childhood was fraught withsymbolic significance for the life-cycle longbefore Western modernism-witness LaoTzu's 'infant, the child hero of myth andfolktale, man's entrmce into Plato's age ofSaturn as a little child, and the paidion of theJesus sayings.4 But the universal theme maybe said to have first entered history in themodem West, where it has played a key rolein the development of ideas about selthood,about the meaning of the human life cycle,and about human forms of knowledge. Thisspecial concern with childhood was onlymade possible because of an mitial rupture:it was the very distanciation of adult andchild in modernism which founded a herme-

SPRING 1992.

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neutics of childhood. For those "come ofage," childhood is a once-familiar text be­come strange, which can only be reappropri­ated through dialogue. From the standpointof hermeneutic theory, the separation is thehistorical equivalent of what Ricoeur caBsthe "moment of distanciation in the relationof self to itself:>5 which makes possible thereappropriation which is the outcome of thedialogue between reader and text.

For the hermeneutics of childhood, themoment of separation operates in two, re­lated dimensions. It is a cultural-historicalmoment in the life of Western self-under­standing, and a moment in the life of eachindividual person in the process of psycho­logical maturation. As for the psychologicalmoment, it is through the process ofexposingmyself to the "text" of the child's form ofknowledge that I experience what Ricoeurrefers to as an "enlarged self." For the adultin hermeneutical relation with childhood, wecan say with Ricoeur, "Appropriation is lheprocess by which the revelation of newmodes of being ... new forms of life ... givethe subject new capacities for knowing him­self. ,,6 We can assume that this hermeneuticalrelationship between adults and children hasalways existed in some form and amongsome people. Most parents know about "en­largement of self' through self-loss in pater­nity/maternity. As Levinas points out, ourwhole understanding of the nature of subjec­tivity is fundamentally altered in the experi­ence of being a parent:

Neither the categories of power nor thoseof knowledge describe my relation with the

child.... I do not have my child; I am my

child. Paternity is a relation with a strangerwho while being Other ... is me, a relation

of the I with a self which yet is not me. Inthis "I am" being is no longer Eleatic unity.

In transcendence the I is not swept away,

since the son is not me; and yet I am my7

son.

As for the cultural-historical moment inWestern self-understanding, it follows therise of what might be called aduJtism-thesecularism, individualism, and positivism ofthe modernist revolution, spearheaded by thehegemony of the Cartesian subject as a wayof understanding self and world8-resultingin the "invention of childhood," i.e., the rei­fication of the child as a special life-formseparated from adults. The dialogue withthe child and childhood which emerged dia­lectically from this separation leads, in cul­ture and in thought, to an "enlargement" in atleast two forms: a more profound and empa­thetic understanding of children themselves;and a more inclusive understanding of therole ofchildhood in adult self-understanding,which is above all a reclamation of whatMerleau-Ponty,called "a dimension of beingand a type of knowledge which [adult] manforgets in his natural attitude.,,9 This, in tum,is connected with what, in the same volume,he calls "the task of our century. . . theattempt to explore the irrational and integrateit into an expanded reason." I!)

Historical Perspectives: The Two Teleologies

The hermeneutics of childhood is, as hasalready been indicated, an originary theme inhuman self-understanding, found in someform across culture and through history. ItsWestern narrative is initiated in the West'sfounding text, the Bible. Both meaning polesof the relation adult-child are given in the"great code" from the start, and become, intime, two disparate developmental goals forthe Western life cycle, in ambivalent coexis­tence. Jesus says: become like little childrenand you will know what I know, which isdifferent and more important than whatadults know, and which will save you. Paulsays: be no more like children, who are weak,ignorant, and easily tempted by sin, but growup into the full stature of mature, sober, man­hood, We can find these two contradictory

HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD

45

themes stated and developed consistently inthe West.

Jesus' theme is older than he is. Even theGreeks, who lumped children with slavesand women, associated them with nature andthe gods. Like the fool, the madman, andthose under the influence of soma, the childis sacred: "Wine and children tell the truth."Children served as intermediaries betweeninitiates and the god in the Eleusian myster­ies, since their very marginality was a "statusthey share with the gods."" The child is acipher for the contrastive pair sacred/pro-'fane-a meaning polarity associated with themysterious subversion of established orderexpressed in all taboo people. Jung calledthis projective image the "archetype of thedivine child," and described it as repre­senting a "paradoxical union between thelowest and the highest," and an original andterminal unity of conscious and uncon­scious,l2 As in Jung's thought, so in the Jesussayings the "little child" represents an ex­cluded fonn of knowledge. Not yet trappedin the separative individualism and stereo­typic sedimentations of adulthood, the childrepresents the unity of knowledge and being,a fundamental paradigm of the structure ofpresence, and thereby is an involuntary wit­ness to the truths of nature and of spirit. Butthis too is simply thedefmitive Western state­ment of an idea already present from ancienttimes-for example, "Above the heavens isYour majesty chanted by the mouths of chil­dren," or "He who is in harrnony...with the Taois like a new born child."I)

What the near universal acceptance of theGospels as the grounding text for early Euro­pean self-understanding did was to place thistheme in the forefront. "Unless you tum andbecome as a little child, you will never enterthe kingdom of heaven," became the guid­ing image for adult development. It was cen­tral to the spirituality of Bernard and hisCistercians, which shaped the "new piety" of

PHILOSOPHY TODAY

46

the late eleventh and twelfth centuries.14

St.Francis above all instantiated the Chris­tian/platonic view of knowledge which un­derstood the world as being turned upsidedown, and the wisdom of God regarded asfoolishness by "reasonable" men: in a worldwhere doxa and even ratio rule, the higherknowledge (noesis or intellectus) , appre­hended non-discursively, becomes subver­sive. Francis's childlike "foolishness forChrist's sake" looked like it was turning theworld upside down, but it was actually turn­ing the world right side up again. So in theWestern Christian knowledge tradition wehave a first epistemology of childhood, re­lated to the epistemology not only of the fooland the madman, but of the saint. IS

This lradition, which understood whatH6lderlin called the "Edenic self-unity ofchildhood"'6 to be prophetic of a higherknowledge which must be regained by theadult in the course of development, foundnew expression in the iconography of Ren­aissance art, where the divine child becamea powerful symbol of the reconciliation ofopposites--Qf heaven and earth, Christ andDionysius, eros and agape. In his role asspouse-child of the queen of heaven, thenaked, playing, infant Christ/Amor presentsus wilh an image of edenic sexuality-whatFreud called, in a perversely adultomorphictum ofphrase, the "polymorphous perverse."II was the mystery of the incarnation, of theflesh of God which so fascinated the Renais­sance Christian,17 and the union of imma­nence and-trans~endenceof the Incarnationwas best represented by a child, who wa'Snot­yet a divided being. Thus even at the gates ofmodernism the archetype of the divine childhas an iconic power, a symbolic meaningpenetrating to what Gombrich calls "new andunexpected categories of experience." TheChild is a prime example of the Renaissanceneo-Platonic understanding of the symbol inart as a kind of magic sign which "both hides

and procPaul'~

hand, thmodemOld Testderstandheart ofchildrenpresumpthe disjldeeply cchy and,has poinl'girl,' fOImean'sArabic,guages.'non-citi.are implory, whitof a bartor adultltory eithgolden"progres~

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and proclaims. ,,18

Paul's part of the tradition is, on the otherhand, the kernel for the epistemology ofmodem adultism. It is connected with theOld Testament Hebraic tradition which un­derstands "foolishness to be bound up in theheart of the child," and the Greek view ofchildren as being citizens (i.e. humans) "bypresumption only."'9 This founding view ofthe disjunction between adult and child isdeeply connected with the history of hierar­chy and domination in the West. As Boswellhas pointed out, 'Tenns for 'child,' 'boy: and'girl,' for example, are regularly employed tomean 'slave' or 'servant' in Greek, Latin,Arabic, Syriac, and many medieval lan­guages."20 Modem analogues of "child" asnon-citizen, as part animal and part human.are implicit in 19th century evolutionary the­ory, which saw the human race as moving outof a barbaric "childhood" into "civilization"or adulthood. Whereas the ancients saw his­tory either as cyclical or as a decline from agolden age of childhood, modernism positsprogress as an increasing distantiation fromchildhood through an increasingly narrowdefinition of reason. The most blatant formof Ihis hyper-rational ization is Comte's,which forever brands the fonns of knowl­edge associated with childhood as merely"theological." This accompanies the "defi­cit" model of the child, the child understoodas a not-yet-adult, a lower stage in the proc­ess of turning into a completed human being.It is exemplifed in Freud's remark: "Thepsychology of children, in my opinion, is tobe called upon for services similar to thosewhich a study of the anatomy and develop­ment of the lower animals renders to theinvestigation of the structure of the highestclasses of animals. ,,21 The deficit model ofchildhood was also used against colonialpeoples and non-Western cultures as, accord­ing to Nandy, a "design of cultural and politi­cal immaturity or, it comes to the same thing,

inferiority." As he points out, childhood, likeprimitive culture, becomes for the modemadult an occasion for "terror,,,n a lost para­dise of instinctual liberation from a condi­tion of extreme rationalization, which is bothfeared and longed for-a boundary cond itionof love and death.

These two understandings of childhood­as representing a pre- (and implicitly post-)adult unity of knowledge and being, and assubhuman-make their way together intomodem thought, where their ambivalenceinforms our narratives about self and its ori­gins. Freud exemplifies this ambivalencemost dramatically: his narrative of self-for­mation exudes a grim realism, which seesrepression of the overwhelming sexual andaggressive drives of the child as necessary tociv ilization; but its barely hidden subtexturges romantic rebellion against repression,in the interests of instinctualljberation. Thisinherent contradiction in his thought is exem­plified in the "normal" neurosis of the Freu­dian modal adult personality, who is by defi­nition in conflict with his own childhood, andstill Jjving his childhood conflicts. On theone hand, the only cure for Freud's norma)neurotic is "education," i.e., the eradicationof childhood through progressive rationali­zation. 23 On the other hand, the impIlcit mes­sage of the Freudian mythos is that instinc­tualliberation represents the longed for para­dise of primary process, that total unity ofsubject and object where aU my objects arealso my inner projections, and hence a stateof psychological uni ty, and thereby"heaven," if the heaven of hallucinatory om­nipotence. This is taken very seriously bycertain of Freud's disciples-Brown andMarcuse in particular24-and has tremen­dous influence on the late 20th century cul­tural revolution in mores.2.I And this primarynarcissism, which has become the implicit (iftragically unattainable) form of salvation foran atheistic, secular culture, is the domain of

HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD

47

the child.

Childhood and the Crisis of Modernism

Freud's narrative teaches us that, as Lip­pitz says, "my childhood is never a closedchapter in the story of my development."uMy identity as an adult is detennined by thechild that I still am, as the child's identity isdetermined by the adult he or she will be.Childhood is in me a form of knowledge. Asa modem, rationalized adult, it is a form ofknowledge from which I have distanced my­self in my approach to objects, to time, to thebody, and to the other. As an excluded formof knowledge-"disowned and repressed"as Nandy calls it-it represents for modern­ism a "persistent, living, irrepressible criti­cism ofour 'rational,' 'normal,' 'adult' visionof desirable societies.,,7:7

lhis persistent criticism is clearly markedin the mainstream Western literary tradition,and bears tracing out. It is frrst strongly ar­ticulated in the poets of childhood of 17thcentury England. In Henry Vaughan adult­hood represents an epistemological narrow­ing beyond which childhood as a fonn oflmowledge has escaped: "I cannot reach it;and my striving eyelDazzles at it, as at eter­ni~. ,,28 For Andrew Marvell, poet of the cun­ning ironies of modem adult-child distancia­tion, childhood represents an Edenic state,doomed to loss through simply growing upand entering the human legacy of sexualpassion, decay, and death. Even when, as in"Upon Appleton House," he returns to Edenand experiences the psychological unity as­sociated with childhood for a moment, hisparadise quickly turns into a prison fromwhich he is eager to escape. Marvell alsointroduces the modem theme of the reversalof adult and child: the child is an unconsciousmaster, involuntary instructor in the state ofimmediacy. She lives the lordship over na­ture which is the result of participatoryknowing, rather than the separation implicit

PHll..OSOPHY TODAY

48

in the Cartesian cogito, and the Baconianattempt at mastery.29

So he says of the child Mary:

'Tis She that to these Gardens gaveThat wondrous Beauty which they have;She streightness on the Woods bestows;To Her the Meadow sweetness owes;

Nothing could make the River beSo Chrystal-pure but only She;She yet more Pure, Sweet, Streight, andFair,Then Gardens, Woods, Meads, Rivers

JOare.

But Mary, like aU children, lives, even atthe height of her power, under the sign ofchildhood's end; this irony, which Marvellplayfully explores, has become a fuD-blowntragic theme one hundred years later, inGray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of EtonCollege." Here adulthood and civilizationare clearly associated with doom and a fallencondition, and childhood becomes, as Patti­son says, "a vehicle for investigating theoriginal condition ofsociety and ascertainingthe fWlCiamentals of man's role within civili­zation.',31

Thomas Traheme, on the other hand, al­though accepting the fact of distantiation,explores the epistemology, not only of child­hood. but of the recovery of childhood InVaughan, Marvell, and Gray this theme ofrecovery is certainly not forgotten, but itbecomes dark and ironic, beset by the trag­edy of the West's loss of innocence in gen­eral. Traheme's spiritual experience and hisreligious tradition drive him beyond the m0­

ment of distantiation, towatds reappropria­tion. Infant intentionality becomes associ­ated with an original vision, one accom­plished in adulthood only through spiritualcatharsis, and the restoration of the unity ofknowledge and being, wherein creation isunderstood again as fully animate, an expres­sion of the glory of God.

Tralhood i:knowl(sion, bla reall]sion ifWordsSchelliSchilLeJTheRohas calla fall frThis idlnarrativquest 01homewevoluticthe scielgrowthcept wh:lague inIl will banotherexcept t

"Infant-Iinstinct­dam frorand thedominatiture.

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Traheme's notion that the task of adult­hood is a nature returned to itself, a kind ofknowledge which is not the result of a divi­sion, but an expression or an apprehension ofa real unity, finds a new, naturalistic expres­sion in Romantic art and philosophy­Wordsworth and Coleridge, Novalis,Schelling's philosophy of identity, andSchiller's philosophy of genius and of play.The Romantic theme of what Charles Taylorbas called "the spiral vision of history:' findsa fall from unity necessary to development.This idea, which informs not only Hegel'snarrative of the journey/quest of Geist-aquest of the spirit to recover itself, to be "athome with itself in its otherness"n-but alsoevolutionary and developmental thought inthe sciences (for example, Piaget's notion ofgrowth as constant restructuring), is a con­cept which has a historical and cultural ana­logue in the loss and recovery of childhood.It will be repeated. in another genre and inanother register in Freud and his followers,except that there the heaven of Traheme's"Want-Ey"n is replaced by the heaven ofinstinct-i.e., primary narcissism, the free­dom from the tyrrany of genital organizationand the Oedipus complex, with their crueldomination of human relationships and cul­ture.

Thus, beginning even in the mid 17th cen­tury, the teleology of adulthood expressed inBaconian science, in the grave seriousness ofreformed pietism, and the new idea of adultcivilite,34 has come to be seen as a prison ofconsciousness. The writings of Rousseau(who is almost an exact contemporary ofThomas Gray) on childhood and children, soprofoundly influential in the West, expresswith a new poignancy what has been de­scribed as a culture aware of having reacheda "turning point in its development" associ­ated with the crisis of modernism. JS Rous­seau directly questions the VIability of theWestern adult. For Rousseau, one cannot be

both "man" and "citizen." In order to exist,the "citizen" must exclude nature and theunconscious, both of which coine increas­ingly to be associated with childhood. Reap­propriating nature and the unconscious isanalogous to reappropriating childhood,which thus becomes the strongest symbol forthat return to a fundamental form of inten­tional unity which constantly eludes theWestern adult. Childhood comes to lie, indi fferent modalities, both before and beyondadulthood. Thus Hegel: "The harmonious­ness of childhood is a gift of the hand ofnature: the second harmony must springfrom the labour and culture of the spirit.',)6

In this necessary voyage out of unity intomultiplicity, and towards a unity painfullyregained on a higher level, there is implicitthe possibility of "the end of history," for itis repression (i.e. division, self-alienation)which generates historicaJ time.37 The recov­ery of childhood promises, if as an eternallyreceding goal, a utopia based on the adultreappropriation of all the elements of thechild's form of life, and therefore based, asReinhard Kuhn puts it, on "the transparenceof its inhabitants and the subsequent perfec­tion of their interrelationship. This ideaJ har­mony would make possible the abolition ofthe rules of civilization and would resull in a'humanity without aesthetic and sociallaws. ",3~ In this countermodem, post-adultutopia, as in early childhood, the disti.nctionbetween public and private self is abolished,we "live and feel in the present," and live a"unitary, undivided existence." The polari­ties which make for the "dividedness, aliena­tion, and inner deadness of modernity"­between spirit and maller, mind and nature,desire and necessity-are broken. This new,high Romantic mediation between thoughtand feeling takes the child and the artist as itsexemplary symbols.

Significantly enough. this moment of ide­alization of childhood as a boundary condi-

HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD

49

~.

tion corresponds with the rise of the "Child­hood" in autobiography, which began tocrystalize as a literary genre around 1835.39

The writer of the Childhood may be charac­terized as the "citizen" in search of the"man," of an originaJ, lost identity. He or shelooks to the founding, sacramental cosmos ofthe child in a "quest for patterns and mean­ings of existence. ,,40

As a historical marker the Childhood sig­nals the complete separation of adult andchild, for as Coe, in his study of the genre,has pointed out, "to write about himself as achild the author must have ceased to be achild. ,,41 It is an artifact of the moment ofgreatest distanciation from childhood, whichis also the moment of the initiation of dia­logue with the knowledge ofchildhood. ThusCoe can say, "The Child began to be treatedseriously when the Man was forced to stopfmding the same kind of delight in the worldas he had done when a child; that is, when allmen save tile poets were forbidden to shapeany save the most marginal fragments oftheir adult lives around the 'other-dimen­sionality' of childhood.,,42

The increasingly manneristic treatment ofchildhood in later bourgeois Victorian senti­mentaJism about the innocence of childrenshould not blind us to the seriousness of thistheme for the teleology of modem adulthood.The hermeneutics of childhood in Schiller,Wordsworth and Coleridge, Blake, Holderin,Novalis and others, who bring what is incho­ate in Rousseau to new clarity, are concernedwith the fusion of horizons with childhood inthe interests of a developmental (and there­fore educational) ideaL The goal of success­ful development is to "carry on the feelingsof childhood into the powers of manhood. ,,43

In fact the drive to integrate the "physical andpsychological density of the childhood expe­rience',44 into the mature psyche representsthe modem version of the fulfillment of theGospel command: the Saved is he or she who

PHILOSOPHY TODAY

50

has not lost---{)r has regained--childhood.As Kuhn says of Wordsworth's vision: 'Thechildhood paradise is no longer a transientphase through which one passes on the wayto the miseries or to the joys of adulthood. Itis an omnipresent reality that can shape ourwhole existence and that makes possible thepoetic act''''s There is clearly a connectionbetween this project and the phenomenologi­cal project as expressed in Merleau-Pontyand Marcel, who are in search of an "ex­panded reason," as well as in the postrnodernproject, which though its primary metaphoris transgression rather than dialecticaJ return,yet aspires equally to "that freshness of sen­sation" identified by Coleridge as the ear­mark of appropriation.46 In fact, postrnod­ernism may be seen as a sort of libertinegnostic Romanticism,47 an approach to theorigins represented by childhood through a"disordering of all the senses," which,though it renders the origins a boundary andan abyss, yet still aspires to dance above theabyss like a child. So Nietzsche, speaking ofthe three "metamorphoses" of the spirit ofman: "The Spirit becomes a camel; and thecamel, a lion; and the lion, fmally, a cbild. ,,48

The Well of Being

Por an archeology of lived experience,child,hood intentionality is at least analogousto the concrete, pre-reflective unity, or "phe­nomenal body" which undergirds reflection.Affectively, it is often spoken of as a kind ofjoy, a sense of what Coleridge called "LifeUnconditioned,''''9 a basic trust of the uni­verse, and a sense ofpersonal integrity whichtranscends any rational explanation. This isat least one aspect of the "enlarged self," and"the attempt to explore the irrational andintegrate it into an expanded reason." But aswe have seen, and perhaps best representedin Freud, it is aLso affect-laden with terror­the terror associated with the loss of self'sboundaries, and the contrastive pair

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heaven/hell which characterizes the life ofpure desire, or primary process. The latter isa theme in the postmodern deconstruction ofsubjectivity, and in the postmodern meta­physics of transgression, for which child­hood becomes, with bestiality and divinity,a marker for pure presence, or "life withoutdifferance." Thus, the postmodem herme­neutics of childhood is a "tum" from thephenomenological hermeneutics of child­hood, for which childhood grounds ratherthan destroys self. ] will take each of thesenarratives in turn.

In tihe phenomenological tradition, Marcelspeaks of a "secondary reflection," whichmoves to recover the unity, the level of"par­ticipation" which "primary reflection," inbreaking the link with body and world, dis­perses.~o Similarly, Merleau-Ponty under­takes a "radical" or "hyper-reflection,"which is concerned to search out "a morefundamental Logos than that of objectivethought, one which endows the latter with itsrelative validity, and at the same time assignsto it its place. ,,~I Radical reflection is a "re­flection open to the unreflective, the reflec­ti ve assumption of the unreflective.',s2Through it Merleau-Ponty uncovers an on­tology of the body for which the child is asort of proof tex.t.

The unreflective cannot be "known" in theadult sense of the term, which implies adoubling of consciousness-knowing thatyou know. Once a person is in a position toreflect on the forms of knowledge of child­hood, he or she is by defmition no longer achild, and therefore no longer lives in thatform of knowledge. 'DIe unreflective imme­diate can only be assumed, and thereforeexists for adults as a limit condition. As Mec­leau-Ponty says, "A lost immediate, arduousto restore, will, ifwe do restore it, bear withinitself the sediment of the critical proceduresthrough which we will have found it anew; itwill therefore not be the immediate."53 The

process of reflexivity is irreversible. Thechild, like the human life-cycle itself, is fate­fully ordered toward reflection, and the sub­ject-object separation implicit in adult"knowledge."

Thus for the not-child, the adult, there areno longer any words which refer directly tothe child's form of knowledge. Bernanossays, "The deadest of the dead is the little boyI used to be." But the hermeneutical relationof the adult with childhood and the childplaces, through a dialectical process of reap­propriation, that lost form of knowledge inthe adult's future. Thus Bemanos can add,"but when the time comes it is he who willresume his place at the head of my life." AndHtilderin states plai nly, 'The intimations ofchildhood must be resurrected as truth in thespirit of man. ,,54 The "more fundamental Lo­gos" of which Merleau-Ponty speaks may becharacterized as, rather than a synthetic ac­tivity of the subject, a perpetual ekstasis,wherein subject and object are "two abstract'moments' of a unique structure which ispresence.'.55 He has described it as the expe­rience of"that oneness of man and the world,which is not indeed abolished, but repressedby everyday perception or by objectivethought...~6 This form of subjectivity is time­less, because it is the time of body and world.Insofar as the body lives in time, it lives selfas present, for it is always co-original withthe world which it also is, with which it is ina state of mutual generation.~7 Merleau­Ponty says:

We are forced to recognize the existence ofa consciousness having behind it no con­sciousness to be conscious of it which,consequently, is not arrayed out in time,and in which being coincides with being foritself. We may say that ultimate conscious­ness is "timeless" (zeitlose) in the sensethat it is not intratemporal ... to be now isto be from always and for ever. Subjectiv­ity is not in time, because it takes up or lives

HERMENEUTICS OF CHlLDHOOD

51

~.~

time, and merges with the cohesion of alife.

58

Ekstasis as a characteristic form ofknowl­edge in early childhood is in fact the testi­mony of many authors of childhood mem­oirs, who characterize (he "fear and theglory" ofchildhood as a relationship with theinanimate world which is qualjtatively dif­ferent from the typical adult's. In his studyof the experience of childhood, eoe foundthat "In a significantly large number ofcases,the supreme ecstasies of childhood arise outofcontact with the inanimate-not with doUsor other toys which are simulations ofknown,living beings, not even (although thisis encountered more frequently) with naturalphenomena such as trees or sunsets-butwith bricks or snowflakes or pebbles." Theyare often described as "magical, not in thesense of wands or wizardry, but in the sensethat pure existence in itself is magical andmiraculous.,,59 Although the child, as Tra­

heme says, is "dumb," and lives before hu­man language, perception itself is interlocu­tive.60 In fact the child knows no distinctionbetween speech and silence, for the worldspeaks to childhood intentionality in its owntongues. Nor has this interlocutive world al­ways been limited to children; it is in fact thesame preliterate, oral cosmos which pre­ceded that reification of childhood in chil­dren which accompanied the West's comingof age.61 It is the world of mysterious corre­spondences, of pars pro toto, and of theconcrete universal. As Traheme sings it:

. . . evry Stone, and Evry Star a Tongue,And evry Gale of Wind a Curious Song.The Heavens were an Orakle, and spakeDivinity: The Earth did undenakeThe office of a Priest; and I being Dum(Nothing besides was dum;) All things didcomWith Voices and Instructions; but when IHad gaind a Tongue, their Power began to

PHILOSOPHY TODAY

52

d' 62Ie.

The adult sees and remembers and imag­ines the child as living at the "ultimate bar­rier" between self and not-self.63 It is thatbarrier that the modem adult is drawn to asto a distant freedom. Infancy is a marker fora form of subjectivity wruch, in distinctionfrom the transcendental synthetic activity ofthe Kantian subject. is always already therein the world. The Kantian adult, who hasretreated into the categories, from wruch heconstructs the world, feels this form of sub­jectivity as a threat; he is powerfully drawnout of himself, whether toward anni.hilationor a "hidden noumenal reaJity,,64 is neverclear. In David Malou f's novel An ImaginaryLife the adult character, out wandering to­ward his own death on the vast Caucasianplains, accompanied by a "wild child," fmdshimself at the barrier:

f try to preCIpItate myself into his con­sciousness of the world ... but fail. Mymind cannot contain him. I try to imaginethe sky with all its constellations, the Dog,the Bear, the Dragon and so on, as anextension of myself, as pan of my furtherbeing. But my knowing that it is sky, thatthe stars have names and a history, preventsmy being the sky. It rains and I say, it rains.

It thunders and I say, it thunders. TheChi Id is otherwise. J try to think as he must:I am raining, I am thundering, and amimmediately struck with panic, as if, inlosing hold of my separate and individualsoul, in shaking the last of it off my little

finger, I might find myself lost out there inthe multiplicity of things, and never getback.65

As Malouf's adult implies, the irony of theadult-chiLd economy is that the form of lifeof the child can never be experienced by onewho knows he is experiencing it. The childwho knows he is a child already has the pointof view of the adult: adulthood is a horizon

toward \

The adlwithin, 'he neve)

zon ofdage, whisees hirr.

The awith chiIytical echaracte:ofa"weIship behboth a rllife," anewhkh istanceof,as the "aprinciplemony wirung ... <

... archa"with ch"astonishof wondelandabov(being," arrespondewhere "iliworld," ~me," andlife.',66 TIMerJeau­world, th~

~cit cogilleveL of illperceptiorexpressiorthought anondary" qlmension 0

the world.

qua embocommune'precisely a

imag­e bar­s thatI to as~er forn.ctionlily ofI there10 hasich heIf sub­drawnilationnever

ginaryng to­.casian" finds

(;on-My

gineJog,:; an

rtherthat

'entsrJins.

Thenust:

I amIf, iniduallittle:re inr gel

Iy of the1 of lifeI by oneIle child~e pointhorizon

toward which he travels, and thus already is.The adult carries this Child as a horizonwithin, toward which he travels, but whichhe never reaches. The child carries the hori­zon of the adult within himself from an earlyage, which he does reach, passes beyond, andsees himself again in the distance.

The adult's movement through dialoguewith childhood beyond the separative, ana­lytical ego-ideal of primary reflection ischaracterized by Bachelard as an uncoveringofa "well ofbeing"-a transformed relation­ship between knower and known, which isboth a return to an original, "monumentallife," and a move forward into that integritywhich is connected in adults with the accep­tance of death. Bachelard refers to childhoodas the "archetype of simple happiness ... aprinciple of deep life, of life always in har­mony with the possibilities of a new begin­ning ... a pure threshold of life, original life... archaic being." We love things, he says,"with childhood." Childhood is itself the"astonishment of being"; it is "under the signof wonder." Ontologically, it is "below beingand above nothingness," "the antecedence ofbeing," an "anonymous" place of"secret cor­respondences" between self and world,where "the I no longer opposes itself to theworld," where "everything I look at looks atme," and "everything lives with a secretlife.'>66 The well of being is equivalent toMerleau-Ponty's logos of the aestheticworld, the lived chiasm of the anonymous,tacit cogito, or phenomenal body. At thislevel of intentionality, the world is still one;perception is always also the spontaneousexpression of meaning. Any separation ofthought and being, or of "primary" and "sec­ondary" qualities is unthinkable. In this di­mension of subjectivity, I am an "openjng tothe world." As Zaner says: "Not only am 1,qua embodied, with things, but also theycommune with me, are with me-for they areprecisely at once inexhaustible, having their

own propet ecceity, and they are significa­tions for me endowed by means of my em­bodied acti'lity on and with th.,em.'t61 Here,indeed, the human subject does not bestowor construct meaning, nor is meaning "hid­den behind" anything, but is an essentialelement of the structure of existence. In thisdimension of subjectivity, there is no distinc­tion between knowing and being.

Bachelard's ontology of what he calls the"permanent child" is confinned in lung'spsychological analysis of the child arche­type. He calls the child archetype an "ele­ment of our psychic structure" which, in itsemergence in dream, fantasy, art, and reflec­tion, signals a process of integration of con­scious and unconscious elements of person­aJjty, the onset of the "shifting of the centreof the personaJjty from the ego to the self.""Self," in Jung's terminology, is the "goal ofthe individuation process," a synthesis, infact a unity of opposites in the personality,whereby there is experienced "a wholenessthat transcends consciousness." The childarchetype is thus a "unifying symbol," a"link with that original condition," in lung'sterms, a bringing of unconscious elements ofpersonality into harmony with the relativelynarrow forms of reflective consciousness.Thus, for psychoanalysis, "child" symbol­izes "the all-embracing ni\ture of psychicwholeness," or "pre-conscious" and "post­conscious" state, "both begmnmg and end.""It is a personification of vital forces quiteoutside the limited range of our consciousmind; of ways and possibilities of which ourone-sided conscious mind knows nothing; awholeness which embraces the very depthsof nature.',68 On this account, childhood isthen "an anticipation by analogy of life afterdeath," a limit condition representing im­mortality in that it stands for the return to theunconscious, which is eternity, the realm ofthe timeless, the sacred, or pure presence, theunity of knower and known which is prom-

HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD

53

(

r

ised in consciousness, but which is con­stantly eluding the adult who is cut off fromhis source. It also armounces that enJargedsubjectivity., the integration of the irrationalinto an expanded reason, represented byJung's Self, which is the place of consciousand unconscious integration. As such, it alsostands for the abolition of repression, thatpossibility which always haunts adult con­sciousness.

The Hermeneutics of Childhood and Post­modernism

The paradoxes expressed in the two con­tradictory views of childhood describedabove are part of a larger modernist narrativeabout the epistemological conflict betweenEnJightenment and Romanticism. From thepoint of view of the henneneutics of child­bood, the Romantic project of the recoveryof childhood is actually a dialectical move of"overcoming" or sublation of Enlighten­ment, because it represents a new self-under­standing through the appropriation that fol­lows from the distanciation from lived expe­rience, and the narrowing of the defmition ofreason which characterized Enlightemnent.

The henneneutics of childhood in post­modernity offers a further turn in the plot ofthe narrative. This tum has one precursor inFreud, whose thought plays within the dia­lectical tensions and secret correspondencesbetween Enlighterunent and Romanticism.69

Freud's narrative of early childhood, whichhinges on the conflict between primary proc­ess and the reality principle, is also about theconflict between reason and nature. Theirconflict is tragic, in that becoming an adultmeans "overcoming the residues of child­hood,,70 through the "educatio~" of psycho­analysis, i.e. reason overcoming nature. Butthe adult is never free of a nostalgia for andan involuntary belief in the possibility of lifebefore (or after) repression, of nature uncon­strained, without "that sense of shame which

PHILOSOPHY TODAY

54

-expelled man from paradise,,,7. which is a

classic Romantic ideal. In Freud's Romanticfollowers, the global, narcissistic eroticismof the infant organization of desire becomesboth the promise of this state and the proof­text of its downfall in human family andcivilization, where the hope it represents forinstinctual liberation is continually betrayed

Postmodernism is a radicalization of theterms of the EnlightenmentlRomantic para­dox, and a Promethean assumption of itstragic conflict. On the Enlightenment side, itrepresents a fmal separation of reason fromnature, initiated in Kant and carried to anextreme in Nietzsche and his followers. 72 Forpostmodemism, "nature" is a production ofsupplementarity, which, analogous toHegel's Reason, creates such pretexts in theinterests of its own (goals). That supplemen­tarity is not Reason, but Reason decon­structed makes it no less an all encompassingrationalization, which replaces logos withgrarrunar, and foundation with inscriptionscreated by the play of differance.

Accordingly"-as for Enlightenment sofor deconstruction-childhood is not a posi­tive state, but merely a deficit. Like "nature"and "God," "childhood" is a concept whichsupplementarity uses to defme itself, but, likeKant's noumenal, it is a limit condition, andhas no truth value in itself. Thus postrnod­ernism tends to view children in the classicalrationalist tradition as not-yet human crea­tures. Derrida's child, like Aristotle's, is"sometimes on the side of animality, some­times on the side of humanity_ ,,13 For Derrida,childhood, far from exemplifying a funda­mental human nature, is "the first manifesta­tion of the deficiency which, in Nature, callsfor substitution,,74 in the form of education

and training in order to become an adult.Childhood is the weakness, the fault, whichdemonstrates that nature is not "pure pres:ence," but just one among the play of signi­fiers of (adult) supplementarity. Far from the

"meaninjence ofcticipate ilthereforetexte." 51become;into a us(ity-"hehow to ~

acquiredlike natuhood, is;

On tllrepresenagainst 1

maintainof the atdialectic:mental Iipostrnodogy or dthe monlTheprirris only athe patri.gin), aniimaginalrepressicnificantand the cof the hIBataillegressionfor 'the (murdero

h the mate

where ttlliberatedimposedThe chiFreud's.bivalentconsciOl

Thuspostmod

vhich is aRomanticeroticism

~ becomesthe proof­unily and'esentS for,betrayed.ion of theIntic para­ion of itsent side, itason fromned to anvers.72 For:luction ofogous to~xts in thelpplemen­In decon­Impassing)gos withIScriptions

:oment solot a posi­e "nature"ept whichf, but, likeLition, andpostrnod­

e classicalman crea­totle's, isity, some­Ir Derrida,: a funda­nanifesta­lture, callseducationan adult.

ult, which?ure pres­Vof signi­,r from the

"meaningless [sic] ofthe supposed full pres­ence of childhood ,,,75 the child does not par­ticipate in the "order of the supplement," andtherefore is not a human being-she is "horstexte." She will only be human when she hasbecome an adult, i.e. when she has enteredinto a use of language which shows retlexiv­ity-"he will no longer weep, he will knowhow to say 'I hurt,,'76-i.e., when she has

acquired the adult horizon. The prereflective,like nature, like pure presence, like child­hood, is a construct, without truth value.

On the Romantic side, postmodemismrepresents a radicalization of the revoltagainst repression, and the reason whichmaintains it. Whereas the Romantic notionof the abolition of repression involves thedialectical recovery of an originary, "monu­mental life," leading to an "enlarged" reason,postrnodemism has done away with teleol­ogy or dialectic, and thus can only recoverthe monumental life through transgression.The primal paradise of the pleasure principleis only attained by a crime-the murder ofthe patriarch, the self-severing from an (ori­gin), and self-creation through art or theimagination. For this ideal of liberation fromrepression and sublimation, childhood is sig­nificant because, like madness, bestiality,and the divine, it represents a limit conditionof the human. Marchak, in her analysis ofBataille and Kristeva, describes the trans­gression of those limits as a "ceaseless searchfor 'the desirable, terrifying, nourishing andmurderous, fascinating and abject inside ofthe maternal body, '" i.e., primary narcissism,where the ego is all instinctual body, and isLiberated from the super-ego of "paternally­imposed prohibitions, taboos, and law."nThe child ceaselessly sought for here isFreud's and Melanie Klein's cauldron of am­bivalent instinct, projected as the goal ofconsciousness.

Thus either way childhood is construed inpostmodemism, whether on the EnJighten-

ment side or the Romantic side, it disappearsinto a limit condition. Indeed, to the degreethat postmodemism represents the death ofthe subject, it is also the death of childhood,because the child's su~jectivity is found be­fore language, in nature and the body, in the"logos of the aesthetic world." The state ofimmediacy ("pure presence") represented bychildhood, in that it is a state outside the playof supplementarity, an "excluded other," alimit condition, is also a nihilation, a not-hu­man. So Marchak can say, " ... in that placebeyond, 'man' disappears.,,78 The Romanticseeks to reappropriate a lost immediatethrough dialogue with those other forms ofknowledge represented by chil~hood, mad­ness, the primitive, etc., and integrate it intoan "enlarged" subjectivity. Postmodernismcannot allow for the moment of appropria­tion, because both the self and the "structureof presence" are merely inscriptions pro­duced by the play of differance. 79 Havingdeconstructed the subject, the postrnodemindividual can only find that monumental lifethrough the violation of supplementarity it­self. Hence what Marchak describes as the"joy of transgression," the "journey to theend of the possible in man ... where ulti­mately subject and object become fused, in­extricable, in ecstasy and anguish," whichinvolves the liberation of "outlawed (sponta­neous) drives.',81J This theme is also present

in Derrida's thought:

"Man calls himself man only by drawinglimits excluding his other from the play ofsupplementarity: the purity of nature, ofanimality. primitivism. childhood. mad­ness, divinity. The approach to these limitsis at once feared as a threat of death anddesired as access to a life without dif­jerance."SI

The postmodem project, rather than one ofexpansion of the notion of reason throughincorporation of the irrational, requires a

HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD

55

I·

break into the irrational, in order to eseape and accomplished "the Oedipal project ofthe hegemony of supplementarity. Only becoming father of oneself,',s4 Lives apartthrough violation is it possible "to rise above from becoming and contradiction, in a statehis [man's] subordination, to break out of the of pure play, of suspension from goal. Thislaw of reason,..82 to go beyond language, state, like the archetype of the divine child,beyond supplementarity, beyond the human. is both pre-human and posthuman, but, in

The postmodern project is thus an anti-hu- deconstruction, assumes the death of the sub­manism, the project ofbecoming both divine jeet, rather than the enlargement of subjec­and bestial. As Harvey says: 'We have ex- tivity through dialogue. It is associated withtended the field beyond the subject, beyond the primary narcissism of childhood, and thethe object, beyond the sayable as such, be- heaven of instinctual Liberation, but only asyond the as such and therefore must ap- another mark of its otherness, of its locationproach animality on the one hand and divin- "beyond the boundaries." It also does awayity on the other." This extension of the field with a hermeneutics of childhood. The gods,beyond the human subject is associated with after all, although they are eternal children,the end of history:83 the animal/god, having have no childhood, nor do they have chiJ­done away with repression and sublimation, dren.

ENDNOTES

and a

of SOl

ing a

politil

mall.y

durinl

ups epopuJ

status

they I

lord,

them

lIren"

pcrsOi

"child

Middl

(New

21. QUOle

Child

Unive

I. F. Ashis Nandy. "Reconstructing Childhood: A Critique of

the Ideology of Adulthood," in Tradirions, Tyranny, and

Uropias (Delhi: Oxford Universiry Press, 1981) p. 71.

2. Walter Misgeld, "Self-Reflection and Adult Maruriry: AduJt

and OtiJd in Hermeneutical and Critical Reflection," PIu!­

nomenology + Pedagogy 3:3 (1985): 93.

3. For an account of the origins of the modem instinuionali­

zalion of childhood. see Philippe Aries, Cenruries of

Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Robe.r1

Baldick,lrans. (New York: Knopf. 1962). For an account

of the rise of civilite, and its relation to the "growing

distance between adults and children," see Norben EI ias,

The Civilizing Process: The Hisrory of Manners (New

Yoric Urizen Books, 1978).

4. See Tao Te Ching, trans. Stephen MilcheU (New York:

Harpu& Row, 1988), verses 20, 28,52,55.68; C. G. Jung

and e. Kerenyi. Essays on a Science of Mythology: The

Myrh of rhe Divine Child and rhe Mysreries of £lellSis

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969); Plato's

Politicus. cited in KathJeen Raine, Blake and Antiquity

(Princeton: Princeton Universiry Press, BoUingen. 1977).

pp. 57~; Matt.18:2~.

5. Paul RicoclU. Hermeneurics and rhe Human Sciences

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Prc8s, 1981), p. 144.

6. Ibid, p. 192.

7. Enunanuel Levinas, Torality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso

Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Universiry Press, 1969), p.

277.

PHILOSOPHY TODAY

56

8. "For Descartes and Malebranche. the child was a failed

adult." Richard Cae, When rlie Grass Was Taller: Aurobi­

ography and rhe Experience of Childhood (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 1984), p. 18.

9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston:

Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 92.

10. Ibid., p. 63.

II. Mark Golden, Children and Childhood in C/as.,ical Arh­

ens (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1990),

pp. 10, 11.44.

12. Jung and Kerenyi, pp. 79 ff.

13. Psalm 8:2 (see also Matt. 21:14-16); Tan Te Ching. Verse

55.

14. Mary M. Mclaughlin, "Survivors and Surrogates: Parents

and Children from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Centuries,"

in Lloyd deMause. ed., The History of Childhood (New

York: Harper & Row, 1974). p. 133.

15. See David Kennedy. "Fools, Young Children. and Philoso­

phy," Thinking 8:4 (1990): 2-6.

16. M. H. Abrams, Narural Supernaruralism: Tradirion and

Revolution in Romaneic Literarure (New Yorle: Norton,

197\), p. 239.

17. Leo Stein.be.rg, TIu! Sexuality ofChrisr in Renaissance Arc

and in Modern Oblivion (New York: Pantheon, 1983).

18. E. H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in rhe Arr of

Ihe Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1972), p. 168.

19. Golden. p. 39.

20. And Boswell. continues: "This is a philological subtlety

22. Nand

23. Freul

educa

childh

chey, '

logiet

HogllJ

24. "The

sion.'·

choa,.,

Wesle

has to

could

A PhI

Press.

25. The iJ

by the

Freud

oofoun<

ended

all soc

26. Wilfri

ing WI

Befon

4:3 (I'

27. Nandl

28. From

L.e. ~

ofJart

latebisild,,mub­ec­liththe, as

ionvayIds,en,:lil-

liled

'obi-

yen:

:ton:

Ath­

'90),

erse

'Cnts

les.'·

\jew

oso-

and

10n.

~ Art

l.

rt of

uety

and a social one. In modem Western democracies everyone

of sound mind achieves independent adult status on attain­

ing a prescribed age: the primary distinction in social and

political capacity is between children and adults. and nor·

mally everyone occupies each position in succession. But

during most of Western history only a minority of grown·

ups ever achieved such independence: the rest of the

population remained throughout their lives in a juridical

status more comparable to "childhood." in the sense that

they remained under someone else's control-a father. a

lord. a master. a husband, etc.... [these] social roles

themselves (slave. serf, servant, etc.) were those of "chil­

dren" in terms of power and juridical standing, whether the

person discharging them was young or old. Words for

"children" designate servile adults well into the High

Middle Ages. John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers

(New York: Pantheon. 1988). pp. 27-28.

21. Quoted in Reinhard Kuhn. Corruption in Paradiu: The

Child in Western Literature (Hanover. NH: New England

University Press, 1982), p. 12.

22. Nandy, pp. 57, 58.

23. Freud described psychoanalysis as "a prolongation of

education for the purposes of overcoming the residues of

childhood." Five Lectures 011 Psychoanalysis. In J. SITa­

chey, cd.. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho­

logical Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London:

Hoganh Press. 1957), Vol. 11, p. 48.

24. 'The question facing mankind is the abolition of repres­

sion." Norman O. Brown. Life Against Death: The Psy­

choanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, Cf:

Wesleyan University Press, 1959), p. 308. "Civilization

has to defend itself against the spectre of a world which

could be free." Herben Marcuse. Eros and Civilization:

A Philosophical InqUiry Into Freud (Boston: Beacon

Press, 1955), p. 93.

25. The influence on late 20th century mores is complicated

by the fact that it is confused with the other stream of post­

Freudian soteriology exemplified in Wilhelm Reich, who

"foundered on the theory of infantile sexualily ... and

ended up in glorification of lIle orgasm as the solution to

all social and bodily ailments" (Brown. p. 29).

26. Wilfried Lippitz, "Understanding Children, Communicat­

ing with Children: Approaches 10 the Child Within Us,

Before Us. and With Us," PhellOmenology + Pedagogy

4:3 (1986): 59.

27. Nandy. pp. n. 58.

28. From Henry Vaughan. "Childe-hood," in Works. 2d ed.,

L.C. Martin. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 520.

29. It is of at least passing interest 10 note that even Bacon's

project, which we associate with Western adult hostility

towards nature, is predicated on a "return to the condition

of the original Eden by way of man's resumption of the

"purity and integrity" of the mind of the child: with "the

understanding thoroughly freed and cleansed. the entrance

into the k.ingdom of man. founded on the sciences," is "nol

much other than the entrance into the kindgdom of heaven.

where into none may enter except as a little child." Quoted

in Abrams, p. 60.

30. Quoted in Leah S. Marcus, Childhood and Cultural De·

spair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth·Century

Literature (Pinsburgh: University of Pinsburgh Press,

1978), p. 235.

31. Roben Pattison, The Child Figure in English Literafllre

(Athens: University of Georgia Press. 1978), p. 33.

32. QUOled in Abrams. p. 230.

33. See "An Infant-Ey," in The Poetical Works of Thomas

Traherne. ed. Gladys I. Wade (New York: Cooper Square.

1965), p. 104.

34. Elias described the rise of civiliti in Europe as "the

advance of the shame-frontier and the growing distance

between adults and children ... the wall between people,

the reserve, the emotional barrier erected by conditioning

between one body and another, grows continually" (p.

168).

35. Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art. vol. 2 (New

York: Vintage, 1951). p. 167. And see Joseph Feather·

stone. "Rousseau and Modernity," Daedalus-I 07 (Summer

1978); 167-92.

36. Quoted in Abrams, p. 380.

37. Btown. p. 93.

38. Kuhn. p.229.

39. Coc, p. 40.

40. £bid., p. 75.

41. Ibid., p. 77.

42. Ibid .. p. 247.

43. Coleridge, quoted in Judith Plolz, "The Perpetual Messiah:

Romanticism, Childhood, and the Paradoxes of Human

Development:' in Barbara Finkelstein. ed .• Regulated

ChIldren/Liberated C1Ii/dren (New York: Psychohislory

Press. 1977), p. 81.

44. Plotz p. 77.

45. Kuhn. p. 208.

46. Quoted in Abrams. p. 379.

47. Cf. Rosen's loaded statement: "The future of Enlighten­

ment is Romanticism disguised as postmodernism," And

he adds, "No doubt the future of poslmodemism is yet

HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD

57

.t

Northern Michigan University, Marquette, MI 49855

PHILOSOPHY TODAY

58

anOlher disguise of Enlightenmenl." Stanley Rosen, Her­

meneuticsas Politics (New York: Oltford University Press.

1987),p.181.

48. Friedrich Nie17.sche, Thu.s Spake Zorathustra. in The

Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New Yorlr.:

Viking Press, 1954), p. 137.

49. Quoted in Plotz, p. 77.

50. For Gabriel Marcel on secondary renection, see his The

Mystery of Being (Soulll Bend, [N: Gateway, 1951), vol.

I, pp. 77-102; and Homo Viator: Introduction to a Meta­

physics of Hope, uans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Har­

perTorchbook, 1962), p. 100.

51. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,

trans. Colin Smilll. (UJndon: Routledge & Kegan Paul,

1962) p. 365.

52. Ibid, p. 359.

53. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the 'nvisible

(Evanston: Norlllweslem University Press. 1964), p. 122.

54. Bemanos quoted in Kuhn, p. 62; Hlliderin quoted in

Kuhn, p. 169: Hegel quoted in Abrams, p. 380.

55. Merteau·Ponty, Phenomenology ofPerception. p. 430.

56. Ibid, p. 291.

57. R. M. Zaner, The Problem of Embodimell/. 2d I'd. (The

Hague: Maninus Nijhoff, 1971). pp. 187-88.

58. Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 422.

Compare Brown: "If ... we go beyond Freud, and specu­

late seriously on llle possibility of a consciousness nOI

based on repression but conscious of what is now uncon­

scious. lllen it foUows a priori that such a consciousness

would be nOl in time bUI in eternity. And in fact eternity

seems to be Ihe lime in which childhood lives" (p. 94).

59. Coc. p. 113.

60. For a discussion of "how linguistic structures mirror and

analogiz.e the structures of perceptions," see Maurice Mer·

leau·Ponty. ConsciOllsness and the Acquisition of Lan·

guage.trans. Hugh J. Silverman (Evanston: Northwestern

University Press. 1973), p.uiv.

61. See Waller Ong. The Presence of the Word (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press. 1981).

62. Traheme. p. 25 ("Dumnesse").

63. Coc. p. 125.

64. Brown, p. 94.

65. David MaJour. An Imaginary Life (New York: George

Bmjllcr. 1978), p. 96.

66. Gaston Bachelard. The Poerics of Rever;e: Childhood.

Language. and the Cosmos. trans. Damel Russell (BaSIon:

Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 123,125,193,126,116,127,188,

108, III. 125, 135, 162, 193, 197,198, 167, 185, 188.

67. zaner, p. 188.

68. Jung and Kcrenyi, pp. 100,83,97,89.

69. Gadamer approaches this view when he speaks of Roman·

ticism in its project of "retrieval of origins," as a "radicali·

zation of the enlighterunenl." Hans-Georg Gal1amer. Truth

and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1975). p. 244. See

also David Kennedy, "[mages of the Young Child in His·

tory: En[ightenment and Romance," Early Childlwod Re·

search Quarterly 3 (1988): 121-37.

70. See Note 23. above.

71. Brown, p. 31.

72. For an argument for the continuity between Kant and

"Ni~11.sche, see Rosen, pp. 4-5.

73. Jacques Derrida, OfGrammatology (BaJtimore: The Johns

Hopkins Press, 1974). p. 248.

74. Ibid. p. 146.

75. Irene Harvey. Derrida and the Economy of Differance

(Bloominglon: Indiana University Press, (986), p. 223.

76. Derrida. p. 248.

77. Catherine Marchak. "The Joy of Transgression: Bataille

and Kristeva," Philosophy Today 34 (Winter 1990): 360.

78. [bid. p. 361.

79. Gary Brenl Madison makes this point in The Hermeneutics

ofPostmodemiry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1988), p. 115.

80. Man:hak. p. 359.

81. Harvey, p. 186.

82. Marchak, p. 357.

83. "The unrepressed animal carries no instinctual project to

change his own nature; mankind must pass beyond repres­

sion if il is to lind a life not governed by the unconscious

project of fmding another klnd of life .... After man's

unconscious search for his proper mode of being has

ended-after history has ended-particular members of

the human species can lead a IiII' which. like the lives of

lower organisms. individually embodies llle nature of the

species ...an individual life which enjoys full satisfaction

and concretcly embodies the full essence of the species.

and in which fife and death are simultaneously affinned,

because life and death together conSlitute individuality,

and ripeness is all," Brown. p. 106. And see Rosen's

description of Alexander Kojeve' s posthistorical Utopia,

pp. 91-107 and passim.

84. Brown, p. 127.

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