THE HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD

PHILOSOPHY TODAY 35,4 (SPRING 1992)DAVID KENNEDYTHE HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD

ABSTRACT:

For the Western adult, separated from childhood by the culturaland psychological "coming of age" of modernism, childhood is aonce-familiar text become strange, which can only bereappropriated through dialogue, both with real children and withthe "child within." In the Western iconography of self, childhoodhas come to represent an end point, a spiritual goal of unitywith self and world, a reappropriation of nature and theunconscious of which the experience of childhood itself is not somuch exemplary as prophetic. The reappropriation of childhood isthus a dialectical one, of which the journey into alienationrepresented by adulthood is a necessary moment. Thus childhoodoccupies a central place in the Western mythology of self, whichis construed as a voyage out of unity into multiplicity, andtoward a unity painfully regained on a higher level. Theimplicit telos of this historical myth is the end of history, forit is repression, division, and self-alienation which generatehistorical time, and the utopia of a recovered childhood, inrecovering the primary narcissism of the childhood experience,passes beyond repression to the "heaven" of instinctualliberation.

The first principle of a hermeneutical approach to childhoodis a recognition of the mutual necessity of the terms "adult" and"child." Logically, the child is by definition a not-adult,and the adult a not-child. In linear time, the child is a not-yetadult, and the adult a once-was child. But the law ofcontradiction does not cover the adult-child economy, for asNandy has said of what Freud taught us: "Childhood and adulthood[are] not two fixed phases of the human life-cycle (where thelatter [has] to inescapably supplant the former), but a continuumwhich, while diachronically laid out on the plane of lifehistory, [is] always synchronically present in each personality."

KENNEDY THE HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD

Self is a community in which all the epochs of the lifecycle, the future as well as the past--birth, childhood, youth,middle age, old age, and death--are always present, butcontinually being reinterpreted, from whatever point at whichself stands. We are, as Walter Misgeld has pointed out, alwayschildren to the extent we are still in the process of becomingadults: " . . . being an adult, if treated as a matter to beachieved again and again, makes us take note that we, as adults,must think of ourselves as being like children in order for us tobe able to say that we are adults." So the adult-child economyis a central, continuously shifting balance in the ecology of theself, and of primary importance to any model of self-constructionin which our maturity is always in question, and never there as amatter of course, or fixed once and for all as an end-point. Ifthis is the case, any philosophy of childhood is also aphilosophy of adulthood.

The relationship between the two terms, child and adult, hascertain universal, and certain historical and epochalconfigurations. As for the latter, what has recently come to beknown in the West as the "invention of childhood" is also, inkeeping with the principle stated above, the invention ofadulthood. The modernist progress narrative of a cultural"growing up" or "coming of age," is also the story of anexistential and ideological separation of child and adult. As thestory goes, modern man, armed with science, threw offsuperstition, and in so doing, he also threw off childhood. Butif child and adult are a mutually necessary, contrastive pair, hecould not throw off childhood, but only repress it and project iton to an Other. So in attempting to eradicate the mythic or"childish" dimensions of conciousness, childhood was "invented"during the 16th and 17th centuries by being isolated in children,then reified in age-graded institutions, universal schooling, andnew, "adult" definitions of public behavior, or civilite.

As for the universal configurations of the adult-child pair,childhood was fraught with symbolic significance for the life-cycle long before Western modernism--witness Lao Tzu's infant,the child hero of myth and folktale, man's entrance into Plato'sage of Saturn as a little child, and the paidion of the Jesussayings. But the universal theme may be said to have first

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entered history in the modern West, where it has played a keyrole in the development of ideas about selfhood, about themeaning of the human life cycle, and about human forms ofknowledge. This special concern with childhood was only madepossible because of an initial rupture: it was the verydistanciation of adult and child in modernism which founded ahermeneutics of childhood. For those "come of age," childhood isa once-familiar text become strange, which can only bereappropriated through dialogue. From the standpoint ofhermeneutic theory, the separation is the historical equivalentof what Ricoeur calls the "moment of distanciation in therelation of self to itself," which makes possible thereappropriation which is the outcome of the dialogue betweenreader and text.

For the hermeneutics of childhood, the moment of separationoperates in two, related dimensions. It is a cultural-historicalmoment in the life of Western self-understanding, and a moment inthe life of each individual person in the process ofpsychological maturation. As for the psychological moment, it isthrough the process of exposing myself to the "text" of thechild's form of knowledge that I experience what Ricoeur refersto as an "enlarged self." For the adult in hermeneuticalrelation with childhood, we can say with Ricoeur, "Appropriationis the process by which the revelation of new modes ofbeing . . .new forms of life . . .give the subject new capacitiesfor knowing himself." We can assume that this hermeneuticalrelationship between adults and children has always existed insome form and among some people. Most parents know about"enlargement of self" through self-loss in paternity/maternity.As Levinas points out, our whole understanding of the nature ofsubjectivity is fundamentally altered in the experience of beinga parent:

Neither the categories of power nor those of knowledgedescribe my relation with the child. . . . I do not have mychild; I am my child. Paternity is a relation with astranger who while being Other . . . is me, a relation ofthe I with a self which yet is not me. In this Ì am' being

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is no longer Eleatic unity. In transcendence the I is notswept away, since the son is not me; and yet I am my son.

As for the cultural-historical moment in Western self-understanding, it follows the rise of what might be calledadultism--the secularism, individualism, and positivism of themodernist revolution, spearheaded by the hegemony of theCartesian subject as a way of understanding self and world--resulting in the "invention of childhood," i.e. the reificationof the child as a special life-form separated from adults. Thedialogue with the child and childhood which emerged dialecticallyfrom this separation leads, in culture and in thought, to an"enlargement" in at least two forms: a more profound andempathetic understanding of children themselves; and a moreinclusive understanding of the role of childhood in adult self-understanding, which is above all a reclamation of what Merleau-Ponty called "a dimension of being and a type of knowledge which[adult] man forgets in his natural attitude." This, in turn, isconnected with what, in the same volume, he calls "the task ofour century, . . . the attempt to explore the irrational andintegrate it into an expanded reason."

Historical Perspectives: The Two TeleologiesThe hermeneutics of childhood is, as has already been

indicated, an originary theme in human self-understanding, foundin some form across culture and through history. Its Westernnarrative is initiated in the West's founding text, the Bible.Both meaning poles of the relation adult-child are given in the"great code" from the start, and become, in time, two disparatedevelopmental goals for the Western life cycle, in ambivalentcoexistence. Jesus says: become like little children and you willknow what I know, which is different and more important than whatadults know, and which will save you. Paul says: be no more likechildren, who are weak, ignorant, and easily tempted by sin, butgrow up into the full stature of mature, sober, manhood. We canfind these two contradictory themes stated and developedconsistently in the West.

Jesus' theme is older than he is. Even the Greeks, wholumped children with slaves and women, associated them with

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nature and the gods. Like the Fool, the madman, and those underthe influence of soma, the child is sacred: "Wine and childrentell the truth." Children served as intermediaries betweeninitiates and the god in the Eleusinian mysteries, since theirvery marginality was a "status they share with the gods." Thechild is a cipher for the contrastive pair sacred/profane--ameaning polarity associated with the mysterious subversion ofestablished order expressed in all taboo people. Jung called thisprojective image the "archetype of the divine child," anddescribed it as representing a "paradoxical union between thelowest and the highest," and an original and terminal unity ofconscious and unconscious. As in Jung's thought, so in the Jesussayings the "little child" represents an excluded form ofknowledge. Not yet trapped in the separative individualism andstereotypic sedimentations of adulthood, the child represents theunity of knowledge and being, a fundamental paradigm of thestructure of presence, and thereby is an involuntary witness tothe truths of nature and of spirit. But this too is simply thedefinitive Western statement of an idea already present fromancient times--for example, "Above the heavens is Your majestychanted by the mouths of children," or "He who is in harmony withthe Tao is like a new born child." What the near universal acceptance of the Gospels as thegrounding text for early European self-understanding did was toplace this theme in the forefront. "Unless you turn and becomeas a little child, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven"became the guiding image for adult development. It was centralto the spirituality of Bernard and his Cistercians, which shapedthe "new piety" of the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. St.Francis above all instantiated the Christian/Platonic view ofknowledge which understood the world as being turned upside down,and the wisdom of God regarded as foolishness by "reasonable"men: in a world where doxa and even ratio rule, the higherknowledge (noesis or intellectus), apprehended non-discursively,becomes subversive. Francis's childlike "foolishness for Christ'ssake" looked like it was turning the world upside down, but itwas actually turning the world right side up again. So in theWestern Christian knowledge tradition we have a first

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epistemology of childhood, related to the epistemology not onlyof the fool and the madman, but of the saint.

This tradition, which understood what Holderin called the"Edenic self-unity of childhood" to be prophetic of a higherknowledge which must be regained by the adult in the course ofdevelopment, found new expression in the iconography ofRenaissance art, where the divine child became a powerful symbolof the reconciliation of opposites--of heaven and earth, Christand Dionysius, eros and agape. In his role as spouse-child of thequeen of heaven, the naked, playing, infant Christ/Amor presentsus with an image of edenic sexuality--what Freud called, in aperversely adultomorphic turn of phrase, the "polymorphousperverse." It was the mystery of the incarnation, of the fleshof God which so fascinated the Renaissance Christian, and theunion of immanence and transcendence of the Incarnation was bestrepresented by a child, who was not yet a divided being. Thuseven at the gates of modernism the archetype of the divine childhas an iconic power, a symbolic meaning penetrating to whatGombrich calls "new and unexpected categories of experience."The Child is a prime example of the Renaissance neo-platonicunderstanding of the symbol in art as a kind of magic sign which"both hides and proclaims."

Paul's part of the tradition is, on the other hand, thekernel for the epistemology of modern adultism. It is connectedwith the Old Testament Hebraic tradition which understands"foolishness to be bound up in the heart of the child," and theGreek view of children as being citizens (i.e. humans) "bypresumption only." This founding view of the disjunction betweenadult and child is deeply connected with the history of hierarchyand domination in the West. As Boswell has pointed out, "Termsfor `child,' `boy,' and `girl,' for example, are regularlyemployed to mean `slave' or `servant' in Greek, Latin, Arabic,Syriac, and many medieval languages." Modern analogues of"child" as non-citizen, as part animal and part human, areimplicit in 19th century evolutionary theory, which see the humanrace as moving out of a barbaric "childhood" into "civilization"or adulthood. Whereas the ancients saw history either as cyclicalor as a decline from a golden age of childhood, modernism positsprogress as an increasing distantiation from childhood through

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an increasingly narrow definition of reason. The most blatantform of this hyper-rationalization is Comte's, which foreverbrands the forms of knowledge associated with childhood as merely"theological." This accompanies the "deficit" model of the child,the child understood as a not-yet-adult, a lower stage in theprocess of turning into a completed human being. It isexemplified in Freud's remark: "The psychology of children, in myopinion, is to be called upon for services similar to those whicha study of the anatomy and development of the lower animalsrenders to the investigation of the structure of the highestclasses of animals." The deficit model of childhood was alsoused against colonial peoples and non-Western cultures as,according to Nandy, a "design of cultural and politicalimmaturity or, it comes to the same thing, inferiority." As hepoints out, childhood, like primitive culture, becomes for themodern adult an occasion for "terror," a lost paradise ofinstinctual liberation from a condition of extremerationalization, which is both feared and longed for--a boundarycondition of love and death.

These two understandings of childhood--as representing apre- (and implicitly post-) adult unity of knowledge and being,and as subhuman--make their way together into modern thought,where their ambivalence informs our narratives about self and itsorigins. Freud exemplifies this ambivalence most dramatically:his narrative of self-formation exudes a grim realism, which seesrepression of the overwhelming sexual and aggressive drives ofthe child as necessary to civilization; but its barely hiddensubtext urges romantic rebellion against repression, in theinterests of instinctual liberation. This inherent contradictionin his thought is exemplified in the "normal" neurosis of theFreudian modal adult personality, who is by definition inconflict with his own childhood, and still living his childhoodconflicts. On the one hand, the only cure for Freud's normalneurotic is "education," i.e. the eradication of childhoodthrough progressive rationalization. On the other hand, theimplicit message of the Freudian mythos is that instinctualliberation represents the longed for paradise of primary process,that total unity of subject and object where all my objects arealso my inner projections, and hence a state of psychological

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unity, and thereby "heaven," if the heaven of hallucinatoryomnipotence. This is taken very seriously by certain of Freud'sdisciples--Brown and Marcuse in particular--and has tremendousinfluence on the late 20th century cultural revolution in mores.And this primary narcissism, which has become the implicit (iftragically unattainable) form of salvation for an atheistic,secular culture, is the domain of the child.

Childhood and the Crisis of Modernism Freud's narrative teaches us that, as Lippitz says, "my

childhood is never a closed chapter in the story of mydevelopment." My identity as an adult is determined by the childthat I still am, as the child's identity is determined by theadult he or she will be. Childhood is in me a form of knowledge.As a modern, rationalized adult, it is a form of knowledge fromwhich I have distanced myself in my approach to objects, to time,to the body, and to the other. As an excluded form ofknowledge--"disowned and repressed" as Nandy calls it--itrepresents for modernism a "persistent, living, irrepressiblecriticism of our `rational', `normal', àdult' vision ofdesirable societies."

This persistent criticism is clearly marked in themainstream Western literary tradition, and bears tracing out. Itis first strongly articulated in the poets of childhood of 17thcentury England. In Henry Vaughan adulthood represents anepistemological narrowing beyond which childhood as a form ofknowledge has escaped: "I cannot reach it; and my strivingeye/Dazzles at it, as at eternity." For Andrew Marvell, poet ofthe cunning ironies of modern adult-child distanciation,childhood represents an Edenic state, doomed to loss throughsimply growing up and entering the human legacy of sexualpassion, decay, and death. Even when, as in "Upon AppletonHouse," he returns to Eden and experiences the psychologicalunity associated with childhood for a moment, his paradisequickly turns to a prison from which he is eager to escape.Marvell also introduces the modern theme of the reversal of adultand child: the child is an unconscious master, involuntaryinstructor in the state of immediacy. She lives the lordshipover nature which is the result of participatory knowing, rather

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than the separation implicit in the Cartesian cogito, and theBaconian attempt at mastery. 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, and Fair,Then Gardens, Woods, Meads, Rivers are.

But Mary, like all children, lives, even at the height of herpower, under the sign of childhood's end; this irony, whichMarvell playfully explores, has become a full-blown tragic themeone hundred years later, in Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect ofEton College." Here adulthood and civilization are clearlyassociated with doom and a fallen condition, and childhoodbecomes, as Pattison says, "a vehicle for investigating theoriginal condition of society and ascertaining the fundamentalsof man's role within civilization."

Thomas Traherne, on the other hand, although accepting thefact of distanciation, explores the epistemology, not only ofchildhood, but of the recovery of childhood. In Vaughan, Marvell,and Gray this theme of recovery is certainly not forgotten, butit becomes dark and ironic, beset by the tragedy of the West'sloss of innocence in general. Traherne's spiritual experienceand his religious tradition drive him beyond the moment ofdistanciation, towards reappropriation. Infant intentionalitybecomes associated with an original vision, one accomplished inadulthood only through spiritual catharsis, and the restorationof the unity of knowledge and being, wherein creation isunderstood again as fully animate, an expression of the glory ofGod.

Traherne's notion that the task of adulthood is a naturereturned to itself, a kind of knowledge which is not the resultof a division, but an expression or an apprehension of a realunity, finds a new, naturalistic expression in Romantic art andphilosophy--Wordworth and Coleridge, Novalis, Schelling's

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philosophy of identity, and Schiller's philosophy of genius andof play. The Romantic theme of what Charles Taylor has called"the spiral vision of history," finds a fall from unitynecessary to development. This idea, which informs not onlyHegel's narrative of the journey/quest of Geist--a quest of thespirit to recover itself, to be "at home with itself in itsotherness,"--but also evolutionary and developmental thought inthe sciences (for example, Piaget's notion of growth as constantrestructuring), is a concept which has a historical and culturalanalogue in the loss and recovery of childhood. It will berepeated in another genre and in another register in Freud andhis followers, except that there the heaven of Traherne's"Infant-Ey" is replaced by the heaven of instinct--i.e. primarynarcissism, the freedom from the tyrrany of genital organizationand the Oedipus complex, with their cruel domination of humanrelationships and culture.

Thus, beginning even in the mid 17th century, the teleologyof adulthood expressed in Baconian science, in the graveseriousness of reformed pietism, and the new idea of adult civilite,has come to be seen as a prison of consciousness. The writingsof Rousseau (who is almost an exact contemporary of Thomas Gray)on childhood and children, so profoundly influential in the West,express with a new poignancy what has been described as a cultureaware of having reached a "turning point in its development"associated with the crisis of modernism. Rousseau directlyquestions the viability of the Western adult. For Rousseau, onecannot be both "man" and "citizen." In order to exist, the"citizen" must exclude nature and the unconscious, both of whichcome increasingly to be associated with childhood.Reappropriating nature and the unconscious is analagous toreappropriating childhood, which thus becomes the strongestsymbol for that return to a fundamental form of intentional unitywhich constantly eludes the Western adult. Childhood comes tolie, in different modalities, both before and beyond adulthood.Thus Hegel: "The harmoniousness of childhood is a gift of thehand of nature: the second harmony must spring from the labourand culture of the spirit."

In this necessary voyage out of unity into multiplicity, andtowards a unity painfully regained on a higher level, there is

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implicit the possibility of "the end of history," for it isrepression (i.e. division, self-alienation) which generateshistorical time. The recovery of childhood promises, if as aneternally receding goal, a utopia based on the adultreappropriation of all the elements of the child's form of life,and therefore based, as Reinhard Kuhn puts it, on "thetransparence of its inhabitants and the subsequent perfection oftheir interrelationship. This ideal harmony would make possiblethe abolition of the rules of civilization and would result in a`humanity without aesthetic and social laws' . . ." In thiscountermodern, post-adult utopia, as in early childhood, thedistinction between public and private self is abolished, we"live and feel in the present," and live a "unitary, undividedexistence." The polarities which make for the "dividedness,alienation, and inner deadness of modernity"--between spirit andmatter, mind and nature, desire and necessity--are broken. Thisnew, high Romantic mediation between thought and feeling takesthe child and the artist as its exemplary symbols.

Significantly enough, this moment of idealization ofchildhood as a boundary condition corresponds with the rise ofthe "Childhood" in autobiography, which began to crystalize as aliterary genre around 1835. The writer of the Childhood may becharacterized as the "citizen" in search of the "man," of anoriginal, lost identity. He or she looks to the founding,sacramental cosmos of the child in a "quest for patterns andmeanings of existence." As a historical marker the Childhoodsignals the complete separation of adult and child, for as Coe,in his study of the genre, has pointed out, "to write abouthimself as a child the author must have ceased to be a child."It is an artifact of the moment of greatest distanciation fromchildhood, which is also the moment of the initiation of dialoguewith the knowledge of childhood. Thus Coe can say, "The Childbegan to be treated seriously when the Man was forced to stopfinding the same kind of delight in the world as he had done whena child; that is, when all men save the poets were forbidden toshape any save the most marginal fragments of their adult livesaround the òther-dimensionality' of childhood."

The increasingly manneristic treatment of childhood in laterbourgeois Victorian sentimentalism about the innocence of

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children should not blind us to the seriousness of this theme forthe teleology of modern adulthood. The hermeneutics of childhoodin Schiller, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Blake, Holderin, Novalisand others, who bring what is inchoate in Rousseau to newclarity, are concerned with the fusion of horizons with childhoodin the interests of a developmental (and therefore educational)ideal. The goal of successful development is to "carry on thefeelings of childhood into the powers of manhood." In fact thedrive to integrate the "physical and psychological density of thechildhood experience" into the mature psyche represents themodern version of the fulfillment of the Gospel command: theSaved is he or she who has not lost--or has regained--childhood.As Kuhn says of Wordsworth's vision: "The childhood paradise isno longer a transient phase through which one passes on the wayto the miseries or to the joys of adulthood. It is anomnipresent reality that can shape our whole existence and thatmakes possible the poetic act." There is clearly a connectionbetween this project and the phenomenological project asexpressed in Merleau-Ponty and Marcel, who are in search of an"expanded reason," as well as the postmodern project, whichthough its primary metaphor is transgression rather thandialectical return, yet aspires equally to "that freshness ofsensation" identified by Coleridge as the earmark ofappropriation. In fact, postmodernism may be seen as a sort oflibertine gnostic Romanticism, an approach to the originsrepresented by childhood through a "disordering of all thesenses," which, though it renders the origins a boundary and anabyss, yet still aspires to dance above the abyss like a child.So Nietzsche, speaking of the three "metamorphoses" of the spiritof man: "The Spirit becomes a camel; and the camel, a lion; andthe lion, finally, a child."

The Well of BeingFor an archeology of lived experience, childhood

intentionality is at least analogous to the concrete, pre-reflective unity, or "phenomenal body" which undergirdsreflection. Affectively, it is often spoken of as a kind of joy,a sense of what Coleridge called "Life Unconditioned," a basictrust of the universe, and a sense of personal integrity which

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transcends any rational explanation. This is at least one aspectof the "enlarged self," and "the attempt to explore theirrational and integrate it into an expanded reason." But as wehave seen, and perhaps best represented in Freud, it is alsoaffect-laden with terror--the terror associated with the loss ofself's boundaries, and the contrastive pair heaven/hell whichcharacterizes the life of pure desire, or primary process. Thelatter is a theme in the postmodern deconstruction ofsubjectivity, and in the postmodern metaphysics of transgression,for which childhood becomes, with bestiality and divinity, amarker for pure presence, or "life without differance." Thus, thepostmodern hermeneutics of childhood is a "turn" from thephenomenological hermeneutics of childhood, for which childhoodgrounds rather than destroys self. I will take each of thesenarratives in turn.

In the phenomenological tradition, Marcel speaks of a"secondary reflection," which moves to recover the unity, thelevel of "participation" which "primary reflection," in breakingthe link with body and world, disperses. Similarly, Merleau-Pontyundertakes a "radical" or "hyper-reflection," which is concernedto search out "a more fundamental Logos than that of objectivethought, one which endows the latter with its relative validity,and at the same time assigns to it its place." Radicalreflection is a "reflection open to the unreflective, thereflective assumption of the unreflective." Through it Merleau-Ponty uncovers an ontology of the body for which the child is asort of proof text.

The unreflective cannot be "known" in the adult sense of theterm, which implies a doubling of consciousness--knowing that youknow. Once a person is in a position to reflect on the forms ofknowledge of childhood, he or she is by definition no longer achild, and therefore no longer lives in that form of knowledge.The unreflective immediate can only be assumed, and thereforeexists for adults as a limit condition. As Merleau-Ponty says, "Alost immediate, arduous to restore, will, if we do restore it,bear within itself the sediment of the critical proceduresthrough which we will have found it anew; it will therefore notbe the immediate." The process of reflexivity is irreversible.The child, like the human life-cycle itself, is fatefully ordered

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toward reflection, and the subject-object separation implicit inadult "knowledge."

Thus for the not-child, the adult, there are no longer anywords which refer directly to the child's form of knowledge.Bernanos says, "The deadest of the dead is the little boy I usedto be . . ." But the hermeneutical relation of the adult withchildhood and the child places, through a dialectical process ofreappropriation, that lost form of knowledge in the adult'sfuture. Thus Bernanos can add, ". . . but when the time comes itis he who will resume his place at the head of my life." AndHolderin states plainly, "The intimations of childhood must beresurrected as truth in the spirit of man."

The "more fundamental Logos" of which Merleau-Ponty speaksmay be characterized as, rather than a synthetic activity of thesubject, a perpetual ekstasis, wherein subject and object are "twoabstract `moments' of a unique structure which is presence." Hehas described it as the experience of "that oneness of man andthe world, which is not indeed abolished, but repressed byeveryday perception or by objective thought." This form ofsubjectivity is timeless, because it is the time of body andworld. Insofar as the body lives in time, it lives self aspresent, for it is always co-original with the world which italso is, with which it is in a state of mutual generation.Merleau-Ponty says:

We are forced to recognize the existence of a consciousnesshaving behind it no consciousness to be conscious of itwhich, consequently, is not arrayed out in time, and inwhich being coincides with being for itself. We may saythat ultimate consciousness is "timeless" (zeitlose) in thesense that it is not intratemporal. . . to be now is to befrom always and for ever. Subjectivity is not in time,because it takes up or lives time, and merges with thecohesion of a life. Ekstasis as a characteristic form of knowledge in early

childhood is in fact the testimony of many authors of childhoodmemoir, who characterize the "fear and the glory" of childhood asa relationship with the inanimate world which is qualitativelydifferent from the typical adult's. In his study of the

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Childhood, Coe found that "In a significantly large number ofcases, the supreme ecstasies of childhood arise out of contactwith the inanimate--not with dolls or other toys which aresimulations of known, living beings, not even (although this isencountered more frequently) with natural phenomena such as treesor sunsets--but with bricks or snowflakes or pebbles." They areoften described as "magical, not in the sense of wands orwizardry, but in the sense that pure existence in itself ismagical and miraculous." Although the child, as Traherne says,is "dumb," and lives before human language, perception itself isinterlocutive. In fact the child knows no distinction betweenspeech and silence, for the world speaks to childhoodintentionality in its own tongues. Nor has this interlocutiveworld always been limited to children; it is in fact the samepreliterate, oral cosmos which preceded that reification ofchildhood in children which accompanied the West's coming of age.It is the world of mysterious correspondences, of pars pro toto,and of the concrete universal. As Traherne tells 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 undertakeThe office of a Priest; and I being Dum(Nothing besides was dum;) All things did comWith Voices and Instructions; but when IHad gaind a Tongue, their Power began to die.

The adult sees and remembers and imagines the child asliving at the "ultimate barrier" between self and not-self. Itis that barrier that the modern adult is drawn to as to a distantfreedom. Infancy is a marker for a form of subjectivity that, indistinction from the transcendental synthetic activity of theKantian subject, is always already there in the world. TheKantian adult, who has retreated into the categories, from whichhe constructs the world, feels this form of subjectivity as athreat; he is powerfully drawn out of himself, whether towardsannihilation or a "hidden noumenal reality" is never clear. InDavid Malouf's novel An Imaginary Life the adult character, out

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wandering toward his own death on the vast Caucasian plains,accompanied by a "wild child," finds himself at the barrier:

I try to precipitate myself into his consciousness of theworld . . . but fail. My mind cannot contain him. I try toimagine the sky with all its constellations, the Dog, theBear, the Dragon and so on, as an extension of myself, aspart of my further being. But my knowing that it is sky,that the stars have names and a history, prevents my beingthe sky. It rains and I say, it rains. It thunders and Isay, it thunders. The Child is otherwise. I try to thinkas he must: I am raining, I am thundering, and amimmediately struck with panic, as if, in losing hold of myseparate and individual soul, in shaking the last of it offmy little finger, I might find myself lost out there in themultiplicity of things, and never get back.

As Malouf's adult implies, the irony of the adult-childeconomy is that the form of life of the child can never beexperienced by one who knows he is experiencing it. The child whoknows he is a child already has the point of view of the adult:adulthood is a horizon toward which he travels, and thus alreadyis. The adult carries this Child as a horizon within, towardwhich he travels, but which he never reaches. The child carriesthe horizon of the adult within himself from an early age, whichhe does reach, passes beyond, and sees himself again in thedistance.

The adult's movement through dialogue with childhood beyondthe separative, analytical ego-ideal of primary reflection ischaracterized by Bachelard as an uncovering of a "well ofbeing"--a transformed relationship between knower and known,which is both a return to an original, "monumental life," and amove forward into that integrity which is connected in adultswith the acceptance of death. Bachelard refers to childhood asthe "archetype of simple happiness . . . a principle of deeplife, of life always in harmony with the possibilities of a newbeginning . . . 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

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sign of wonder." Ontologically, it is "below being and abovenothingness," "the antecedence of being," an "anonymous" place of"secret correspondences" between self and world, where "the I nolonger opposes itself to the world," where "everything I look atlooks at me," and "everything lives with a secret life." Thewell of being is equivalent to Merleau-Ponty's logos of theaesthetic world, the lived chiasm of the anonymous, tacit cogito, orphenomenal body. At this level of intentionality, the world isstill one; perception is always also the spontaneous expressionof meaning; any separation of thought and being, or of "primary"and "secondary" qualities is unthinkable. In this dimension ofsubjectivity, I am an "opening to the world." As Zaner says: "Notonly am I, qua embodied, with things, but also they commune withme, are with me--for they are precisely at once inexhaustible,having their own proper haecceity, and they are significationsfor me endowed by means of my embodied activity on and withthem." Here, indeed, the human subject does not bestow orconstruct meaning, nor is meaning "hidden behind" anything, butis an essential element of the structure of existence. In thisdimension of subjectivity, there is no distinction betweenknowing and being.

Bachelard's ontology of what he calls the "permanent child"is confirmed in Jung's psychological analysis of the childarchetype. He calls the child archetype an "element of ourpsychic structure" which, in its emergence in dream, fantasy,art and reflection, signals a process of integration of consciousand unconscious elements of personality, the onset of the"shifting of the centre of the personality from the ego to theself." "Self," in Jung's terminology, is the "goal of theindividuation process," a synthesis, in fact a unity of oppositesin the personality, whereby there is experienced "a wholenessthat transcends consciousness." The child archetype is thus a"unifying symbol," a "link with that original condition": inJung's terms, a bringing of unconscious elements of personalityinto harmony with the relatively narrow forms of reflectiveconsciousness. Thus, for psychoanalysis, "child" then symbolizes"the all-embracing nature of psychic wholeness," or "pre-conscious" and "post-conscious" state, "both beginning and end.""It is a personification of vital forces quite outside the

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limited range of our conscious mind; of ways and possibilities ofwhich our one-sided conscious mind knows nothing; a wholenesswhich embraces the very depths of nature." On this account,childhood is then "an anticipation by analogy of life afterdeath," a limit condition representing immortality in that itstands for the return to the unconscious, which is eternity, therealm of the timeless, the sacred, or pure presence, the unity ofknower and known which is promised in consciousness, but which isconstantly eluding the adult who is cut off from his source. Italso announces that enlarged subjectivity, the integration of theirrational into an expanded reason, represented by Jung's Self,which is the place of conscious and unconscious integration. Assuch, it also stands for the abolition of repression, thatpossibility which always haunts adult consciousness.

The Hermeneutics of Childhood and PostmodernismThe paradoxes expressed in the two contradictory views of

childhood described earlier are part of a larger modernistnarrative about the epistemological conflict betweenEnlightenment and Romanticism. From the point of view of thehermeneutics of childhood, the Romantic project of the recoveryof childhood is actually a dialectical move of "overcoming" orsublation of Enlightenment, because it represents a new self-understanding through the appropriation that follows from thedistanciation from lived experience, and the narrowing of thedefinition of reason that characterized Enlightenment.

The hermeneutics of childhood in postmodernity offers afurther turn in the plot of the narrative. This turn has oneprecursor in Freud, whose thought plays within the dialecticaltensions and secret correspondences between Enlightenment andRomanticism. Freud's narrative of early childhood, which hingeson the conflict between primary process and the realityprinciple, is also about the conflict between reason and nature.Their conflict is tragic, in that becoming an adult means"overcoming the residues of childhood" through the "education" ofpsychoanalysis, i.e. reason overcoming nature. But the adult isnever free of a nostalgia for and an involuntary belief in thepossibility of life before (or after) repression, of natureunconstrained, without "that sense of shame which expelled man

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from paradise," which is a classic Romantic ideal. In Freud'sRomantic followers, the global, narcissistic eroticism of theinfant organization of desire becomes both the promise of thisstate and the proof-text of its downfall in human family andcivilization, where the hope it represents for instinctualliberation is continually betrayed.

Postmodernism is a radicalization of the terms of theEnlightenment/Romantic paradox, and a Promethean assumption ofits tragic conflict. On the Enlightenment side, it represents afinal separation of reason from nature, initiated in Kant andcarried to an extreme in Nietzsche and his followers. Forpostmodernism, "nature" is a production of supplementarity,which, analogous to Hegel's Reason, creates such pretexts in theinterests of its own (goals). That supplementarity is not Reasonbut Reason deconstructed makes it no less an all-encompassingrationalization, which replaces logos with grammar, andfoundation with inscriptions created by the play of differance.

Accordingly, as for Enlightenment so for deconstruction,childhood is not a positive state, but merely a deficit. Like"nature" and "God," "childhood" is a concept whichsupplementarity uses to define itself, but, like Kant's noumenal,it is a limit condition, and has no truth value in itself. Thuspostmodernism tends to view children in the classical rationalisttradition as not-yet human creatures. Derrida's child, likeAristotle's, is "sometimes on the side of animality, sometimes onthe side of humanity." For Derrida, childhood, far fromexemplifying a fundamental human nature, is "the firstmanifestation of the deficiency which, in Nature, calls forsubstitution" in the form of education and training in order tobecome an adult. Childhood is the weakness, the fault, whichdemonstrates that nature is not "pure presence," but just oneamong the play of signifiers of (adult) supplementarity. Far fromthe "meaningless [sic] of the supposed full presence ofchildhood," the child does not participate in the "order of thesupplement," and therefore is not a human being--she is "horstexte." She will only be human when he has become an adult, i.e.when she has entered into a use of language which showsreflexivity--"he will no longer weep, he will know how to say Ìhurt'"--i.e. when she has acquired the adult horizon. The

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prereflective, like nature, like pure presence, like childhood,is a construct, without truth value.

On the Romantic side, postmodernism represents aradicalization of the revolt against repression, and the reasonwhich maintains it. Whereas the Romantic notion of the abolitionof repression involves the dialectical recovery of an originary,"monumental life," leading to an "enlarged" reason, postmodernismhas done away with teleology or dialectic, and thus can onlyrecover the monumental life through transgression. The primalparadise of the pleasure principle is only attained by a crime--the murder of the patriarch, the self-severing from an (origin),and self-creation through art or the imagination. For this idealof liberation from repression and sublimation, childhood issignificant because, like madness, bestiality, and the divine, itrepresents a limit condition of the human. Marchak, in heranalysis of Bataille and Kristeva, describes the transgression ofthose limits as a "ceaseless search for `the desirable,terrifying, nourishing and murderous, fascinating and abjectinside of the maternal body'," i.e. primary narcissism, where theego is all instinctual body, and is liberated from the super-egoof "paternally-imposed prohibitions, taboos, and law." The childceaselessly sought for here is Freud and Melanie Klein's cauldronof ambivalent instinct, projected as goal of consciousness.

Thus either way childhood is construed in postmodernism,whether on the Enlightenment side or the Romantic side, itdisappears into a limit condition. Indeed, to the degree thatpostmodernism represents the death of the subject, it is also thedeath of childhood, because the child's subjectivity is foundbefore language, in nature and the body, in the "logos of theaesthetic world." The state of immediacy ("pure presence")represented by childhood, in that it is a state outside the playof supplementarity, an "excluded other," a limit condition, isalso a nihilation, a not-human. So Marchak can say, ". . . inthat place beyond, `man' disappears." The Romantic seeks toreappropriate a lost immediate through dialogue with those otherforms of knowledge represented by childhood, madness, theprimitive, etc., and integrate it into an "enlarged"subjectivity. Postmodernism cannot allow for the moment ofappropriation, because both the self and the "structure of

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presence" are merely inscriptions produced by the play ofdifferance. Having deconstructed the subject, the postmodernindividual can only find that monumental life through theviolation of supplementarity itself. Hence what Marchakdescribes as the "joy of transgression," the "journey to the endof the possible in man . . where ultimately subject and objectbecome fused, inextricable, in ecstasy and anguish," whichinvolves the liberation of "outlawed (spontaneous) drives."This theme is also present in Derrida's thought: "Man callshimself man only by drawing limits excluding his other from theplay of supplementarity: the purity of nature, of animality,primitivism, childhood, madness, divinity. The approach to theselimits is at once feared as a threat of death and desired asaccess to a life without differance." The postmodern project,rather than one of expansion of the notion of reason throughincorporation of the irrational, requires a break into theirrational, in order to escape the hegemony of supplementarity.Only through violation is it possible "to rise above his [man's]subordination, to break out of the law of reason," to go beyondlanguage, beyond supplementarity, beyond the human.

The postmodern project is thus an anti-humanism, the projectof becoming both divine and bestial. As Harvey says: "We haveextended the field beyond the subject, beyond the object, beyondthe sayable as such, beyond the as such and therefore mustapproach animality on the one hand and divinity on the other."This extension of the field beyond the human subject isassociated with the end of history: the animal/god, having doneaway with repression and sublimation, and accomplished "theOedipal project of becoming father of oneself," lives apart frombecoming and contradiction, in a state of pure play, ofsuspension from goal. This state, like the archetype of thedivine child, is both pre-human and posthuman, but, indeconstruction, assumes the death of the subject, rather than theenlargement of subjectivity through dialogue. It is associatedwith the primary narcissism of childhood, and the heaven ofinstinctual liberation, but only as another mark of itsotherness, of its location "beyond the boundaries." It is alsodoes away with a hermeneutics of childhood. The gods, after all,

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although they are eternal children, have no childhood, nor dothey have children. ENDNOTES

. Ashis Nandy, "Reconstructing Childhood: A Critique of theIdeology of Adulthood," in Traditions, Tyranny, and Utopias(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987) p. 71.. Dieter Misgeld, "Self-Reflection and Adult Maturity: Adultand Child in Hermeneutical and Critical Reflection,"Phenomenology + Pedagogy, 3, 3 (1985): 193.. For an account of the origins of the moderninstitutionalization of childhood, see Philippe Aries, Centuriesof Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, Robert Baldick,trans. (New York: Knopf, 1962). For an account of the rise ofcivilite, and its relation to the "growing distance betweenadults and children," see Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process:The History of Manners (New York: Urizen Books, 1978).. See Tao Te Ching, Stephen Mitchell, trans. (New York:Harper & Row, 1988), verses 20, 28, 52, 55, 68; C.G. Jung and C.Kerenyi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the DivineChild and the Mysteries of Eleusis (Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1969); Plato's Politicus, cited in KathleenRaine, Blake and Antiquity, Princeton University Press,Bollingen, 1977, pp. 57-60; Matt.18:2-4.. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences,(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) p. 144.. Ibid, p. 192.. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. AlphonsoLingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), p. 277.. "For Descartes and Malebranche, the child was a failedadult." Richard Coe, When the Grass Was Taller: Autobiography andthe Experience of Childhood (New Haven: Yale University Press,1984), p. 18.. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston, IL:Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 92.. Ibid, p. 63.. Mark Golden, Children and Childhood in Classical Athens.(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), pp. 10, 11,44.

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. Jung and Kerenyi, p. 79 ff.

. Psalms 8:2 (see also Matt. 21:14-16); Tao Te Ching, Verse55.. Mary M. McLaughlin, "Survivors and Surrogates: Parents andChildren from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Centuries," in LloyddeMause, ed., The History of Childhood (New York: Harper & Row,1974), p. 133.. See David Kennedy, "Fools, Young Children, and Philosophy,"Thinking, 8 (4):2-6.. M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition andRevolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), p.239.. Leo Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Artand in Modern Oblivion (New York: Pantheon, 1983). . E.H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of theRenaissance (London: Phaidon, 1972), p. 168.. Golden, p. 39.. And Boswell continues: "This is a philological subtlety anda social one. In modern Western democracies everyone of soundmind achieves independent adult status on attaining a prescribedage: the primary distinction in social and political capacity isbetween children and adults, and normally everyone occupies eachposition in succession. But during most of Western history onlya minority of grown-ups ever achieved such independence: the restof the population remained throughout their lives in a juridicalstatus more comparable to "childhood," in the sense that theyremained under someone else's control--a father, a lord, amaster, a husband, etc. . . . [these] social roles themselves(slave, serf, servant, etc.) were those of "children" in terms ofpower and juridical standing, whether the person discharging themwas young or old. Words for "children" designate servile adultswell into the High Middle Ages . . ." John Boswell, The Kindnessof Strangers (New York: Pantheon, 1988), pp. 27-28.. Quoted in Reinhard Kuhn, Corruption in Paradise: The Childin Western Literature (Hanover, NH: New England University Press,1982), p. 12.. Nandy, pp. 57, 58.. Freud described psychoanalysis as "a prolongation ofeducation for the purposes of overcoming the residues of

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childhood." Five Lectures on Psychoanalysis. In J. Strachey,ed., The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works ofSigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), Vol. 11,p. 48.. "The question facing mankind is the abolition ofrepression." Norman O. Brown, Life Against Death: ThePsychoanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, CT: WesleyanUniversity Press, 1959), p. 308. "Civilization has to defenditself against the spectre of a world which could be free."Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical InquiryInto Freud (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 93. The influence on late 20th century mores is complicated bythe fact that it is confused with the other stream of post-Freudian soteriology exemplified in Wilhelm Reich, who "founderedon the theory of infantile sexuality . . . and ended up inglorification of the orgasm as the solution to all social andbodily ailments" (Brown, p.29).. Wilfried Lippitz, "Understanding Children, Communicatingwith Children: Approaches to the Child Within Us, Before Us, andWith Us," Phenomenology + Pedagogy, 4,3 (1986), p. 59.. Nandy, pp. 72, 58.. From Henry Vaughan, "Childe-hood," in Works, 2d ed., L.C.Martin, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 520. . It is of at least passing interest to note that even Bacon'sproject, which we associate with Western adult hostility towardsnature, is predicated on a "return to the condition of theoriginal Eden by way of man's resumption of the "purity andintegrity" of the mind of the child: with "the understandingthoroughly freed and cleansed, the entrance into the kindgdom ofman, founded on the sciences," is "not much other than theentrance into the kindgdom of heaven, whereinto none may enterexcept as a little child." Quoted in Abrams, p. 60.. Quoted in Leah S. Marcus, Childhood and Cultural Despair: ATheme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978), p. 235.. Robert Pattison, The Child Figure in English Literature(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1978), p. 33.. Quoted in Abrams p. 230.

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. See "An Infant-Ey," in The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne,p. 104. Gladys I. Wade, ed. (New York: Cooper Square, 1965).. Elias described the rise of civilite in Europe as "theadvance of the shame-frontier and the growing distance betweenadults and children . . . the wall between people, the reserve,the emotional barrier erected by conditioning between one bodyand another, grows continually" (p. 168).. Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, Vol. 2 (New York:Vintage, 1951), p. 167. And see Joseph Featherstone, "Rousseauand Modernity," Daedalus 107 (Summer 1978): 167-192.. Quoted in Abrams, p. 380.. Brown, p. 93.. Kuhn, p. 229. . Coe, p. 40.. Coe p. 75. . Coe, p. 77.. Coe, p. 247.. Coleridge, quoted in Judith Plotz, "The Perpetual Messiah:Romanticism, Childhood, and the Paradoxes of Human Development,"in Regulated Children/Liberated Children (New York: PsychohistoryPress, 1977), p. 81. . Plotz p. 77.. Kuhn, p. 208. . Quoted in Abrams, p. 379.. Cf. Rosen's loaded statement: "The future of Enlightenmentis Romanticism disguised as postmodernism." And he adds, "Nodoubt the future of postmodernism is yet another disguise ofEnlightenment." Stanley Rosen, Hermeneutics as Politics (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 181. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, in The PortableNietzsche, trans.Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1954),p. 137.. Quoted in Plotz, p. 77.. For Gabriel Marcel on secondary reflection see his TheMystery of Being, 2 vols. (South Bend, IN: Gateway, 1951), 1: 77-102; and Homo Viator: Introduction to a Metaphysics of Hope,trans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Harper Torchbook, 1962), p. 100.. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans.Colin Smith. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962) p. 365.

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. Ibid, p. 359.

. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible(Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 122.. Bernanos quoted in Kuhn, p. 62; Holderin quoted in Kuhn,p. 169; Hegel quoted in Abrams, p. 380.. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 430.. Ibid, p. 291.. R.M. Zaner, The Problem of Embodiment, 2d ed. (The Hague:Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), pp. 187-188.. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, p. 422. CompareBrown: "If . . . we go beyond Freud, and speculate seriously onthe possibility of a consciousness not based on repression butconscious of what is now unconscious, then it follows a priorithat such a consciousness would be not in time but in eternity.And in fact eternity seems to be the time in which childhoodlives" (p. 94).. Coe, p. 113.. For a discussion of "how linguistic structures mirror andanalogize the structures of perceptions," see Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Consciousness and the Acquisition of Language, trans. HughJ. Silverman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1973),p.xxiv.. See Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1981).. Traherne, p. 25 ("Dumnesse").. Coe, p. 125.. Brown, p. 94.. David Malouf, An Imaginary Life (New York: George Braziller,1978), p. 96.. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood,Language, and the Cosmos, trans. Daniel Russell (Boston: BeaconPress, 1971), pp. 123, 125, 193, 126, 116, 127, 188, 108, 111,125, 135, 162, 193, 197, 198, 167, 185, 188.. Zaner, p. 188.. Jung and Kerenyi, pp. 100, 83, 97, 89.. Gadamer approaches this view when he speaks of Romanticism inits project of "retrieval of origins," as a "radicalization ofthe enlightenment." Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (NewYork: Crossroad, 1975), p. 244. See also David Kennedy, "Images

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of the Young Child in History: Enlightenment and Romance," EarlyChildhood Research Quarterly, 3 (1988), 121-137.. See Note 23, above.. Brown, p. 31.. For the continuity between Kant and Nietzsche, see Rosen,pp. 4-5. . Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: The JohnsHopkins Press, 1974), p. 248.. Ibid, p. 146.. Irene Harvey, Derrida and the Economy of Differance(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 223.. Derrida, p. 248.. Catherine Marchak, "The Joy of Transgression: Bataille andKristeva," Philosophy Today 34, 4 (Winter 1990): 360. . Ibid, p. 361.. Gary Brent Madison makes this point in The Hermeneutics ofPostmodernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), p.115.. Marchak, p. 359.. Harvey, p. 186.. Marchak, p. 357.. "The unrepressed animal carries no instinctual project tochange his own nature; mankind must pass beyond repression if itis to find a life not governed by the unconscious project offinding another kind of life . . . . After man's unconscioussearch for his proper mode of being has ended--after history hasended--particular members of the human species can lead a lifewhich, like the lives of lower organisms, individually embodiesthe nature of the species . . .an individual life which enjoysfull satisfaction and concretely embodies the full essence of thespecies, and in which life and death are simultaneously affirmed,because life and death together constitute individuality, andripeness is all." Brown, p. 106. And see Rosen's description ofAlexander Kojeve's posthistorical Utopia, pp. 91-107 and passim.. Brown, p. 127.

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THE HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD