I

neutics
THE HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD age," cI
comest
David Kennedy ated thr·
ofhenn
The first principle of a hermeneutical ap- child and adult, has certain universal, and historic.
proach to childhood is a recognition of the certain historical and epochal configura- the "mc
mutual necessity of the tenos "adult" and tions. As for the latter, what has recently of self to
"child," Logically, the child is by definition come to be known in the West as the "inven- reapprol
anot-adult, and the adult a not-child. In linear tion of childhood" is also, in keeping with the dialogue
time, the child is a not-yet adult, and the adult principle stated above, the invention of adult- For tl
a once-was child. But the law of contradic- hood. The modernist progress narrative of a moment
tion does not cover the adult-child economy, cultural "growing up" or "coming of age," is tated dir
for as Nandy has said of what Freud taught also the story of an existential and ideologi- moment
us: "Childhood and adulthood [are] not two standing
cal separation of child and adult. As the story
fixed phases of the human life-cycle (where individu:
goes, modem man, armed with science,
the latter [has] to inescapably supplant the logical IT
threw off superstition, and in so doing, he
former), but a continuum which, while moment,
also threw off childhood. But if child and
diachronically laid out on the plane of life myself tl
adult are a mutually necessary, contrastive
history, [is] always synchronically present in know led,
pair, he could not throw off childhood, but
each personality.,,1 refers to
only repress it and project it onto an Other.
Self is a conununity in which all the ep- So in attempting to eradicate the mythic or
in hermel
ochs of the life cycle, the future as well as the "childish" dimensions of consciousness, can say'
past-birth, childhood, youth, middle age, childhood was "invented" during the 16th process
old age, and death-are always present, but and 17th centuries by being isolated in chil- modes of
continually being reinterpreted, from what- dren, then reified in age-graded institutions, the subje l

self.,,6 W(
ever point at which self stands. We are, as universal schooling, and new, "adult" defini-
Walter Misgeld has pointed out, always chil- tions of public behavior, or civilite. 3 relationsl
dren to the extent we are still in the process always e
As for the universal configurations of the
of becoming adults: "being an adult, if adult-child pair, childhood was fraught with somepeo
treated as a matter to be achieved again and symbolic significance for the life-cycle long largemen
again, makes us take note that we, as adults, before Western modernism-witness Lao oity/mate
must think of ourselves as being like children Tzu's 'infant, the child hero of myth and whole unl
in order for us to be able to say that we are tivity is ft
folktale, man's entrmce into Plato's age of
adults. ,,2 ence of bl
Saturn as a little child, and the paidion of the
So the adult-child economy is a central, Jesus sayings. 4 But the universal theme may " Neilher
continuously shifting balance in the ecology be said to have first entered history in the ofk,noy
of the self, and of primary importance to any modem West, where it has played a key role child..
model of self-construction in which our ma- in the development of ideas about selthood, child. P
turity is always in question, and never there . about the meaning of the human life cycle, whowt
as a matter of course, or fixed once and for and about human forms of knowledge. This of the I
all as an end-point. If this is the case, any special concern with childhood was only this "I ~
philosophy of childhood is also a philosophy made possible because of an mitial rupture: In tram
of adulthood. it was the very distanciation of adult and since tl
7
The relationship between the two terms, child in modernism which founded a herme- son.

PHlLOSOPHY TODAY SPRING 1992.

44
 neutics of childhood. For those "come of As for the cultural-historical moment in
~OD age," childhood is a once-familiar text be-
come strange, which can only be reappropri-
Western self-understanding, it follows the
rise of what might be called aduJtism-the
mnedy ated through dialogue. From the standpoint secularism, individualism, and positivism of
of hermeneutic theory, the separation is the the modernist revolution, spearheaded by the
historical equivalent of what Ricoeur caBs hegemony of the Cartesian subject as a way
;al, and
the "moment of distanciation in the relation of understanding self and world 8-resulting
Lfigura-
of self to itself:>5 which makes possible the in the "invention of childhood," i.e., the rei-
'ecently
reappropriation which is the outcome of the fication of the child as a special life-form
"inven-
dialogue between reader and text. separated from adults. The dialogue with
with the
For the hermeneutics of childhood, the the child and childhood which emerged dia-
,fadult-
moment of separation operates in two, re- lectically from this separation leads, in cul-
ive ofa
lated dimensions. It is a cultural-historical ture and in thought, to an "enlargement" in at
age," is least two forms: a more profound and empa-
moment in the life of Western self-under-
leologi- thetic understanding of children themselves;
standing, and a moment in the life of each
~estory
individual person in the process of psycho- and a more inclusive understanding of the
:cience, role of childhood in adult self-understanding,
logical maturation. As for the psychological
ling, he which is above all a reclamation of what
moment, it is through the process ofexposing
lild and Merleau-Ponty,called "a dimension of being
myself to the "text" of the child's form of
Itrastive and a type of knowledge which [adult] man
knowledge that I experience what Ricoeur
lod, but forgets in his natural attitude.,,9 This, in tum,
refers to as an "enlarged self." For the adult
1 Other. is connected with what, in the same volume,
in hermeneutical relation with childhood, we
ythic or he calls "the task of our century. . . the
can say with Ricoeur, "Appropriation is lhe
usness, attempt to explore the irrational and integrate
process by which the revelation of new
~e 16th it into an expanded reason." I!)
modes of being ... new forms of life ... give
in chil-
the subject new capacities for knowing him-
tutions, Historical Perspectives: The Two Teleologies
self. ,,6 We can assume that this hermeneutical
, defmi-
relationship between adults and children has
The hermeneutics of childhood is, as has
always existed in some form and among
IS of the already been indicated, an originary theme in
some people. Most parents know about "en-
~ht with human self-understanding, found in some
largement of self' through self-loss in pater-
ele long form across culture and through history. Its
nity/maternity. As Levinas points out, our
~ss Lao Western narrative is initiated in the West's
whole understanding of the nature of subjec-
yth and founding text, the Bible. Both meaning poles
tivity is fundamentally altered in the experi-
; age of of the relation adult-child are given in the
ence of being a parent:
lnofthe "great code" from the start, and become, in
me may Neither the categories of power nor those time, two disparate developmental goals for
y in the of knowledge describe my relation with the the Western life cycle, in ambivalent coexis-
k.ey role child.... I do not have my child; I am my tence. Jesus says: become like little children
~Uhood, child. Paternity is a relation with a stranger and you will know what I know, which is
e cycle, who while being Other ... is me, a relation different and more important than what
ge. This of the I with a self which yet is not me. In adults know, and which will save you. Paul
as only this "I am" being is no longer Eleatic unity. says: be no more like children, who are weak,
rupture: In transcendence the I is not swept away, ignorant, and easily tempted by sin, but grow
lult and since the son is not me; and yet I am my up into the full stature of mature, sober, man-
7
I herme-
son. hood, We can find these two contradictory

HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD
G 1992-
45
 14
themes stated and developed consistently in the late eleventh and twelfth centuries. St. and proc
the West. Francis above all instantiated the Chris- Paul'~
Jesus' theme is older than he is. Even the tian/platonic view of knowledge which un- hand, th
Greeks, who lumped children with slaves derstood the world as being turned upside modem
and women, associated them with nature and down, and the wisdom of God regarded as Old Test
the gods. Like the fool, the madman, and foolishness by "reasonable" men: in a world derstand
those under the influence of soma, the child where doxa and even ratio rule, the higher heart of
is sacred: "Wine and children tell the truth." knowledge (noesis or intellectus) , appre- children
Children served as intermediaries between hended non-discursively, becomes subver- presump
initiates and the god in the Eleusian myster- sive. Francis's childlike "foolishness for the disjl
ies, since their very marginality was a "status Christ's sake" looked like it was turning the deeply c
they share with the gods."" The child is a world upside down, but it was actually turn- chy and,
cipher for the contrastive pair sacred/pro-' ing the world right side up again. So in the has poinl
fane-a meaning polarity associated with the Western Christian knowledge tradition we 'girl,' fOI
mysterious subversion of established order have a first epistemology of childhood, re- mean's
expressed in all taboo people. Jung called lated to the epistemology not only of the fool Arabic,
this projective image the "archetype of the and the madman, but of the saint. IS guages.'
divine child," and described it as repre- This lradition, which understood what non-citi.
senting a "paradoxical union between the H6lderlin called the "Edenic self-unity of are impl
lowest and the highest," and an original and childhood"'6 to be prophetic of a higher ory, whit
terminal unity of conscious and uncon- knowledge which must be regained by the of a bart
scious,l2 As in Jung's thought, so in the Jesus adult in the course of development, found or adultl
sayings the "little child" represents an ex- new expression in the iconography of Ren- tory eith
cluded fonn of knowledge. Not yet trapped aissance art, where the divine child became golden"
in the separative individualism and stereo- a powerful symbol of the reconciliation of progres~

typic sedimentations of adulthood, the child opposites--Qf heaven and earth, Christ and childho(
represents the unity of knowledge and being, Dionysius, eros and agape. In his role as definitic
a fundamental paradigm of the structure of spouse-child of the queen of heaven, the of this
presence, and thereby is an involuntary wit- naked, playing, infant Christ/Amor presents which f
ness to the truths of nature and of spirit. But us wilh an image of edenic sexuality-what edge as
this too is simply thedefmitive Western state- Freud called, in a perversely adultomorphic "theolo!
ment of an idea already present from ancient tum of phrase, the "polymorphous perverse." cit" moc
times-for example, "Above the heavens is II was the mystery of the incarnation, of the as a not·
Your majesty chanted by the mouths of chil- flesh of God which so fascinated the Renais- essoftu
dren," or "He who is in harrnony...with the Tao sance Christian,17 and the union of imma- It is ex
is like a new born child."I) nence and-trans~endence of the Incarnation psychol,
What the near universal acceptance of the was best represented by a child, who wa'Snot- be calle
Gospels as the grounding text for early Euro- yet a divided being. Thus even at the gates of which a
pean self-understanding did was to place this modernism the archetype of the divine child ment 01
theme in the forefront. "Unless you tum and has an iconic power, a symbolic meaning investig
become as a little child, you will never enter penetrating to what Gombrich calls "new and classes
the kingdom of heaven," became the guid- unexpected categories of experience." The childho'
ing image for adult development. It was cen- Child is a prime example of the Renaissance peoples
tral to the spirituality of Bernard and his neo-Platonic understanding of the symbol in ingto N
Cistercians, which shaped the "new piety" of art as a kind of magic sign which "both hides calimm
PHILOSOPHY TODAY
46
;.H St. and proclaims. ,,18 inferiority." As he points ou t, childhood, like
:::hris- Paul's part of the tradition is, on the other primitive culture, becomes for the modem
:h un- hand, the kernel for the epistemology of adult an occasion for "terror,,,n a lost para-
Ipside modem adultism. It is connected with the dise of instinctual liberation from a condi-
led as Old Testament Hebraic tradition which un- tion of extreme rationalization, which is both
world derstands "foolishness to be bound up in the feared and longed for-a boundary cond ition
ligher heart of the child," and the Greek view of of love and death.
lppre- children as being citizens (i.e. humans) "by These two understandings of childhood-
Ibver- presumption only."'9 This founding view of as representing a pre- (and implicitly post-)
;s for the disjunction between adult and child is adult unity of knowledge and being, and as
19 the deeply connected with the history of hierar- subhuman-make their way together into
. turn- chy and domination in the West. As Boswell modem thought, where their ambivalence
in the has pointed out, 'Tenns for 'child,' 'boy: and informs our narratives about self and its ori-
In we 'girl,' for example, are regularly employed to gins. Freud exemplifies this ambivalence
d, re- mean 'slave' or 'servant' in Greek, Latin, most dramatically: his narrative of self-for-
e fool Arabic, Syriac, and many medieval lan- mation exudes a grim realism, which sees
guages."20 Modem analogues of "child" as repression of the overwhelming sexual and
what non-citizen, as part animal and part human. aggressive drives of the child as necessary to
Ity of are implicit in 19th century evolutionary the- civ ilization; but its barely hidden subtext
,igher ory, which saw the human race as moving out urges romantic rebellion against repression,
'y the of a barbaric "childhood" into "civilization" in the interests of instinctualljberation. This
found or adulthood. Whereas the ancients saw his- inherent contradiction in his thought is exem-
Ren- tory either as cyclical or as a decline from a plified in the "normal" neurosis of the Freu-
came golden age of childhood, modernism posits dian modal adult personality, who is by defi-
on of progress as an increasing distantiation from nition in con flict with his own childhood, and
:t and childhood through an increasingly narrow still Jjving his childhood conflicts. On the
>Ie as definition of reason. The most blatant form one hand, the only cure for Freud's norma)
I, the of Ihis hyper-rational ization is Comte's, neurotic is "education," i.e., the eradication
:sents which forever brands the fonns of knowl- of childhood through progressive rationali-
23
-what edge associated with childhood as merely zation. On the other hand, the impIlcit mes-
Irphic "theological." This accompanies the "defi- sage of the Freudian mythos is that instinc-
~rse." cit" model of the child, the child understood tualliberation represents the longed for para-
)f the as a not-yet-adult, a lower stage in the proc- dise of primary process, that total unity of
:nais- ess of turning into a completed human being. subject and object where aU my objects are
nma- It is exemplifed in Freud's remark: "The also my inner projections, and hence a state
laLion psychology of children, in my opinion, is to of psychological uni ty, and thereby
lSl10r-- be called upon for services similar to those "heaven," if the heaven of hallucinatory om-
tes of which a study of the anatomy and develop- nipotence. This is taken very seriously by
child ment of the lower animals renders to the certain of Freud's disciples-Brown and
24
lining investigation of the structure of the highest Marcuse in particular -and has tremen-
Nand classes of animals. ,,21 The deficit model of dous influence on the late 20th century cul-
The childhood was also used against colonial tural revolution in mores.2.I And this primary
;ance peoples and non-Western cultures as, accord- narcissism, which has become the implicit (if
)01 in ing to Nandy, a "design of cultural and politi- tragically unattainable) form of salvation for
hides cal immaturity or, it comes to the same thing, an atheistic, secular culture, is the domain of
HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD
47
the child. in the Cartesian cogito, and the Baconian Tral
attempt at mastery. 29 hood i:
Childhood and the Crisis of Modernism So he says of the child Mary: knowl(
'Tis She that to these Gardens gave sion, bl
Freud's narrative teaches us that, as Lip-
That wondrous Beauty which they have; a reall]
pitz says, "my childhood is never a closed
She streightness on the Woods bestows; sion if
chapter in the story of my development."u
To Her the Meadow sweetness owes; Words
My identity as an adult is detennined by the
Schelli
child that I still am, as the child's identity is Nothing could make the River be SchilLeJ
determined by the adult he or she will be. So Chrystal-pure but only She;
Childhood is in me a form of know ledge. As TheRo
She yet more Pure, Sweet, Streight, and
a modem, rationalized adult, it is a form of has call
Fair,
knowledge from which I have distanced my- a fall fr
Then Gardens, Woods, Meads, Rivers
self in my approach to objects, to time, to the JO This idl
are.
body, and to the other. As an excluded form narrativ
of knowledge-"disowned and repressed" But Mary, like aU children, lives, even at quest 01
as Nandy calls it-it represents for modern- the height of her power, under the sign of homew
ism a "persistent, living, irrepressible criti- childhood's end; this irony, which Marvell evolutic
cism of our 'rational,' 'normal,' 'adult' vision playfully explores, has become a fuD-blown the sciel
of desirable societies. ,,7:7 tragic theme one hundred years later, in growth
Gray's "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton cept wh:
lhis persistent criticism is clearly marked
in the mainstream Western literary tradition, College." Here adulthood and civilization lague in
and bears tracing out. It is frrst strongly ar- are clearly associated with doom and a fallen Il will b
ticulated in the poets of childhood of 17th condition, and childhood becomes, as Patti- another
century England. In Henry Vaughan adult- son says, "a vehicle for investigating the except t
hood represents an epistemological narrow- original condition of society and ascertaining "Infant-I
ing beyond which childhood as a fonn of the fWlCiamentals of man's role within civili- instinct-
lmowledge has escaped: "I cannot reach it; zation.',31 dam fror
and my striving eyelDazzles at it, as at eter- Thomas Traheme, on the other hand, al- and the
ni~. ,,28 For Andrew Marvell, poet of the cun- though accepting the fact of distantiation, dominati
ning ironies of modem adult-child distancia- explores the epistemology, not only of child- ture.
tion, childhood represents an Edenic state, hood. but of the recovery of childhood In Thus,
doomed to loss through simply growing up Vaughan, Marvell, and Gray this theme of tury, the 1
and entering the human legacy of sexual recovery is certainly not forgotten, but it Baconiar
passion, decay, and death. Even when, as in becomes dark and ironic, beset by the trag- refonned
"Upon Appleton House," he returns to Eden edy of the West's loss of innocence in gen- civilite,J4
and experiences the psychological unity as- eral. Traheme's spiritual experience and his 'consciou:
sociated with childhood for a moment, his religious tradition drive him beyond the m0- (who is
paradise quickly turns into a prison from ment of distantiation, towatds reappropria- Thomas (
which he is eager to escape. Marvell also tion. Infant intentionality becomes associ- profound
introduces the modem theme of the reversal ated with an original vision, one accom- with a m
of adult and child: the child is an unconscious plished in adulthood only through spiritual scribed a1
master, involuntary instructor in the state of catharsis, and the restoration of the unity of a "tumin!
immediacy. She lives the lordship over na- knowledge and being, wherein creation is ated with
ture which is the result of participatory understood again as fully animate, an expres- seau direl
knowing, rather than the separation implicit sion of the glory of God. Western a
PHll..OSOPHY TODAY
48
>nian Traheme's notion that the task of adult-
hood is a nature returned to itself, a kind of
knowledge which is not the result of a divi-
sion, but an expression or an apprehension of
fe; a real unity, finds a new, naturalistic expres-
sion in Romantic art and philosophy-
Wordsworth and Coleridge, Novalis,
Schelling's philosophy of identity, and
Schiller's philosophy of genius and of play.
The Romantic theme of what Charles Taylor
nd
bas called "the spiral vision of history:' finds
a fall from unity necessary to development.
~rs
This idea, which informs not only Hegel's
narrative of the journey/quest of Geist-a
en at quest of the spirit to recover itself, to be "at
~ of home with itself in its otherness"n-but also
lIVell evolutionary and developmental thought in
lown the sciences (for example, Piaget's notion of
:r, in growth as constant restructuring), is a con-
Eton cept which has a historical and cultural ana-
alion logue in the loss and recovery of childhood.
'allen It will be repeated. in another genre and in
Patti- another register in Freud and his followers,
~ the except that there the heaven of Traheme's
ining "Want-Ey"n is replaced by the heaven of
ivili- instinct-i.e., primary narcissism, the free-
dom from the tyrrany of genital organization
i, al- and the Oedipus complex, with their cruel
ltion, domination of human relationships and cul-
:hild- ture.
d. In Thus, beginning even in the mid 17th cen-
lie of tury, the teleology of adulthood expressed in
Rlt it Baconian science, in the grave seriousness of
trag- reformed pietism, and the new idea of adult
gen- civilite,34 has come to be seen as a prison of
ldhis consciousness. The writings of Rousseau
:mo- (who is almost an exact contemporary of
Ipria- Thomas Gray) on childhood and children, so
soci- profoundly influential in the West, express
com- with a new poignancy what has been de-
ritual scribed as a culture aware of having reached
lty of a "turning point in its development" associ-
on is ated with the crisis of modernism. JS Rous-
ptes- seau directly questions the VIability of the
Western adult. For Rousseau, one cannot be
both "man" and "citizen." In order to exist,
the "citizen" must exclude nature and the
unconscious, both of which coine increas-
ingly to be associated with childhood. Reap-
propriating nature and the unconscious is
analogous to reappropriating childhood,
which thus becomes the strongest symbol for
that return to a fundamental form of inten-
tional unity which constantly eludes the
Western adult. Childhood comes to lie, in
di fferent modalities, both before and beyond
adulthood. Thus Hegel: "The harmonious-
ness of childhood is a gift of the hand of
nature: the second harmony must spring
from the labour and culture of the spirit.',)6
In this necessary voyage out of unity into
multiplicity, and towards a unity painfully
regained on a higher level, there is implicit
the possibility of "the end of history," for it
is repression (i.e. division, self-alienation)
which generates historicaJ time. 37 The recov-
ery of childhood promises, if as an eternally
receding goal, a utopia based on the adult
reappropriation of all the elements of the
child's form of life, and therefore based, as
Reinhard Kuhn puts it, on "the transparence
of its inhabitants and the subsequent perfec-
tion of their interrelationship. This ideaJ har-
mony would make possible the abolition of
the rules of civilization and would resull in a
'humanity without aesthetic and social
laws. ",3~ In this countermodem, post-adult
utopia, as in early childhood, the disti.nction
between public and private self is abolished,
we "live and feel in the present," and live a
"unitary, undivided existence." The polari-
ties which make for the "dividedness, aliena-
tion, and inner deadness of modernity"- ~.
between spirit and maller, mind and nature,
desire and necessity-are broken. This new,
high Romantic mediation between thought
and feeling takes the child and the artist as its
exemplary symbols.
Significantly enough. this moment of ide-
alization of childhood as a boundary condi-
HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD
49
tion corresponds with the rise of the "Child- has not lost---{)r has regained--childhood. heavenlt
hood" in autobiography, which began to As Kuhn says of Wordsworth's vision: 'The pure des
crystalize as a literary genre around 1835. 39 childhood paradise is no longer a transient a theme
The writer of the Childhood may be charac- phase through which one passes on the way subjecti\
terized as the "citizen" in search of the to the miseries or to the joys of adulthood. It physics
"man," of an originaJ, lost identity. He or she is an omnipresent reality that can shape our
hood be'
looks to the founding, sacramental cosmos of whole existence and that makes possible the
a marke.
the child in a "quest for patterns and mean- poetic act''''s There is clearly a connection
differam
ings of existence. ,,40 between this project and the phenomenologi-
neutics I
As a historical marker the Childhood sig- cal project as expressed in Merleau-Ponty
phenoffil
nals the complete separation of adult and and Marcel, who are in search of an "ex-
hood, fa
child, for as Coe, in his study of the genre, panded reason," as well as in the postrnodern
than des'
has pointed out, "to write about himself as a project, which though its primary metaphor
narrative
child the author must have ceased to be a is transgression rather than dialecticaJ return,
In the
child. ,,41 It is an artifact of the moment of yet aspires equally to "that freshness of sen-
speaks c
greatest distanciation from childhood, which sation" identified by Coleridge as the ear-
mark of appropriation. 46 In fact, postrnod- moves te
is also the moment of the initiation of dia- ticipatiol
logue with the knowledge ofchildhood. Thus ernism may be seen as a sort of libertine
gnostic Romanticism,47 an approach to the breaking
Coe can say, "The Child began to be treated so
origins represented by childhood through a perses.
seriously when the Man was forced to stop takes a
"disordering of all the senses," which,
fmding the same kind of delight in the world which is
though it renders the origins a boundary and
as he had done when a child; that is, when all fundame
an abyss, yet still aspires to dance above the
men save tile poets were forbidden to shape thought.
abyss like a child. So Nietzsche, speaking of
any save the most marginal fragments of relative ..
the three "metamorphoses" of the spirit of
their adult lives around the 'other-dimen- to it its r
man: "The Spirit becomes a camel; and the
sionality' of childhood.,,42 flection (
camel, a lion; and the lion, fmally, a cbild. ,,48
The increasingly manneristic treatment of tive ass
childhood in later bourgeois Victorian senti- Through
The Well of Being
mentaJism about the innocence of children tology 01
should not blind us to the seriousness of this Por an archeology of lived experience, sort of pI
theme for the teleology of modem adulthood. child,hood intentionality is at least analogous Theul
The hermeneutics of childhood in Schiller, to the concrete, pre-reflective unity, or "phe- adult sel
Wordsworth and Coleridge, Blake, Holderin, nomenal body" which undergirds reflection. doubling
Novalis and others, who bring what is incho- Affectively, it is often spoken of as a kind of you knov
ate in Rousseau to new clarity, are concerned joy, a sense of what Coleridge called "Life reflect OJ
with the fusion of horizons with childhood in Unconditioned,''''9 a basic trust of the uni- hood, he
the interests of a developmental (and there- verse, and a sense of personal integrity which child, an
fore educational) ideaL The goal of success- transcends any rational explanation. This is fonn of~
ful development is to "carry on the feelings at least one aspect of the "enlarged self," and diate Cal
of childhood into the powers of manhood. ,,43 "the attempt to explore the irrational and exists for
In fact the drive to integrate the "physical and integrate it into an expanded reason." But as leau-Pon
psychological density of the childhood expe- we have seen, and perhaps best represented to restore
rience',44 into the mature psyche represents in Freud, it is aLso affect-laden with terror- itself the
the modem version of the fulfillment of the the terror associated with the loss of self's through,
Gospel command: the Saved is he or she who boundaries, and the contrastive pair will then
PHILOSOPHY TODAY
50
hood. heaven/hell which characterizes the life of process of reflexivity is irreversible. The
'The pure desire, or primary process. The latter is child, like the human life-cycle itself, is fate-
nsient a theme in the postmodern deconstruction of fully ordered toward reflection, and the sub-
eway subjectivity, and in the postmodern meta- ject-object separation implicit in adult
00. It physics of transgression, for which child- "knowledge."
Je our Thus for the not-child, the adult, there are
hood becomes, with bestiality and divinity,
lie the a marker for pure presence, or "life without no longer any words which refer directly to
ection the child's form of knowledge. Bernanos
differance." Thus, the postmodem herme-
ologi- says, "The deadest of the dead is the little boy
neutics of childhood is a "tum" from the
Ponty I used to be." But the hermeneutical relation
phenomenological hermeneutics of child-
1 "ex.-
hood, for which childhood grounds rather of the adult with childhood and the child
ladem places, through a dialectical process of reap-
than destroys self. ] will take each of these
taphor
narratives in turn. propriation, that lost form of knowledge in
:etum,
In tihe phenomenological tradition, Marcel the adult's future. Thus Bemanos can add,
lfsen-
speaks of a "secondary reflection," which "but when the time comes it is he who will
e ear-
moves to recover the unity, the level of"par- resume his place at the head of my life." And
tmod-
ticipation" which "primary reflection," in Htilderin states plai nly, 'The intimations of
~rtine
breaking the link with body and world, dis- childhood must be resurrected as truth in the
to the
perses.~o Similarly, Merleau-Ponty under- spirit of man. ,,54 The "more fundamental Lo-
)Ugh a
takes a "radical" or "hyper-reflection," gos" of which Merleau-Ponty speaks may be
vhich,
which is concerned to search out "a more characterized as, rather than a synthetic ac-
ryand
fundamental Logos than that of objective tivity of the subject, a perpetual ekstasis,
fve the
jngof thought, one which endows the latter with its wherein subject and object are "two abstract
relative validity, and at the same time assigns 'moments' of a unique structure which is
lirit of
nd the to it its place. ,,~I Radical reflection is a "re- presence.'.55 He has described it as the expe-
li Id.'>'l8 flection open to the unreflective, the reflec- rience of"that oneness of man and the world,
ti ve assumption of the unreflective.',s2 which is not indeed abolished, but repressed
Through it Merleau-Ponty uncovers an on- by everyday perception or by objective
tology of the body for which the child is a thought...~6 This form of subjectivity is time-
rience, sort of proof tex.t. less, because it is the time of body and world.
logous The unreflective cannot be "known" in the Insofar as the body lives in time, it lives self
r "phe- adult sense of the term, which implies a as present, for it is always co-original with
ection. doubling of consciousness-knowing that the world which it also is, with which it is in
tind of you know. Once a person is in a position to a state of mutual generation.~7 Merleau-
1 "Life reflect on the forms of knowledge of child- Ponty says:
le uni- hood, he or she is by defmition no longer a We are forced to recognize the existence of
I which child, and therefore no longer lives in that a consciousness having behind it no con- ~.~

This is form of knowledge. 'DIe unreflective imme- sciousness to be conscious of it which,

If," and diate can only be assumed, and therefore consequently, is not arrayed out in time,
lal and exists for adults as a limit condition. As Mec- and in which being coincides with being for
. But as leau-Ponty says, "A lost immediate, arduous itself. We may say that ultimate conscious-
~sented to restore, will, if we do restore it, bear within ness is "timeless" (zeitlose) in the sense
~rrOT­ itself the sediment of the critical procedures that it is not intratemporal ... to be now is
f self's through which we will have found it anew; it to be from always and for ever. Subjectiv-
e pair will therefore not be the immediate."53 The ity is not in time, because it takes up or lives
HERMENEUTICS OF CHlLDHOOD
51
 time, and merges with the cohesion of a d'Ie. 62
life.
58 toward \
The adult sees and remembers and imag- The adl
Ekstasis as a characteristic form ofknowl- ines the child as living at the "ultimate bar- within, '
edge in early childhood is in fact the testi- rier" between self and not-self. 63 It is that he neve)
mony of many authors of childhood mem- barrier that the modem adult is drawn to as zon ofd
oirs, who characterize (he "fear and the to a distant freedom. Infancy is a marker for age, whi
glory" of childhood as a relationship with the a form of subjectivity wruch, in distinction sees hirr.
inanimate world which is qualjtatively dif- from the transcendental synthetic activity of The a
ferent from the typical adult's. In his study the Kantian subject. is always already there with chi
of the experience of childhood, eoe found in the world. The Kantian adult, who has Iytical e
that "In a significantly large number of cases, retreated into the categories, from wruch he characte:
the supreme ecstasies of childhood arise out constructs the world, feels this form of sub- ofa "weI
ofcontact with the inanimate-not with doUs jectivity as a threat; he is powerfully drawn ship beh
or other toys which are simulations of out of himself, whether toward anni.hilation both a rl
known,living beings, not even (although this or a "hidden noumenal reaJity,,64 is never
life," ane
is encountered more frequently) with natural clear. In David Malou f's novel An Imaginary
whkh is
Life the adult character, out wandering to-
phenomena such as trees or sunsets-but tanceof,
ward his own death on the vast Caucasian
with bricks or snowflakes or pebbles." They as the "a
plains, accompanied by a "wild child," fmds
are often described as "magical, not in the principle
himself at the barrier:
sense of wands or wizardry, but in the sense mony wi
that pure existence in itself is magical and f try to preCIpItate myself into his con- rung ... <
miraculous.,,59 Although the child, as Tra- sciousness of the world ... but fail. My ... archa
heme says, is "dumb," and lives before hu- mind cannot contain him. I try to imagine "with ch
man language, perception itself is interlocu- the sky with all its constellations, the Dog, "astonish
60
tive. In fact the child knows no distinction the Bear, the Dragon and so on, as an of wondel
between speech and silence, for the world extension of myself, as pan of my further andabov(
speaks to childhood intentionality in its own being. But my knowing that it is sky, that being," ar
tongues. Nor has this interlocutive world al- the stars have names and a history, prevents responde
ways been limited to children; it is in fact the my being the sky. It rains and I say, it rains. where "ili
same preliterate, oral cosmos which pre- It thunders and I say, it thunders. The world," ~
ceded that reification of childhood in chil- Chi Id is otherwise. J try to think as he must: me," and
dren which accompanied the West's coming I am raining, I am thundering, and am life.',66 TI
61
of age. It is the world of mysterious corre- immediately struck with panic, as if, in MerJeau-
spondences, of pars pro toto, and of the losing hold of my separate and individual world, th~
concrete universal. As Traheme sings it: soul, in shaking the last of it off my little ~cit cogil
finger, I might find myself lost out there in leveL of ill
. . . evry Stone, and Evry Star a Tongue, the multiplicity of things, and never get perceptior
And evry Gale of Wind a Curious Song. back.
65
expressior
The Heavens were an Orakle, and spake
thought an
Divinity: The Earth did undenake As Malouf's adult implies, the irony of the
ondary" ql
The office of a Priest; and I being Dum adult-chiLd economy is that the form of life
mension 0
(Nothing besides was dum;) All things did of the child can never be experienced by one
the world.
com who knows he is experiencing it. The child
qua embo
With Voices and Instructions; but when I who knows he is a child already has the point
commune'
Had gaind a Tongue, their Power began to of view of the adult: adulthood is a horizon
precisely a
PHILOSOPHY TODAY
52
 toward which he travels, and thus already is.
imag- The adult carries this Child as a horizon
e bar- within, toward which he travels, but which
s that he never reaches. The child carries the hori-
I to as zon of the adult within himself from an early
~er for age, which he does reach, passes beyond, and
n.ction sees himself again in the distance.
lily of The adult's movement through dialogue
I there with childhood beyond the separative, ana-
10 has lytical ego-ideal of primary reflection is
ich he characterized by Bachelard as an uncovering
If sub- of a "well of being"-a transformed relation-
drawn ship between knower and known, which is
ilation both a return to an original, "monumental
never life," and a move forward into that integrity
ginary which is connected in adults with the accep-
ng to- tance of death. Bachelard refers to childhood
.casian as the "archetype of simple happiness ... a
" finds principle of deep life, of life always in har-
mony with the possibilities of a new begin-
(;on- ning ... a pure threshold of life, original life
My ... archaic being." We love things, he says,
gine "with childhood." Childhood is itself the
Jog, "astonishment of being"; it is "under the sign
:; an of wonder." Ontologically, it is "below being
rther and above nothingness," "the antecedence of
that being," an "anonymous" place of"secret cor-
'ents respondences" between self and world,
rJins. where "the I no longer opposes itself to the
The world," where "everything I look at looks at
nust: me," and "everything lives with a secret
I am life.'>66 The well of being is equivalent to
If, in Merleau-Ponty's logos of the aesthetic
idual world, the lived chiasm of the anonymous,
little tacit cogito, or phenomenal body. At this
:re in level of intentionality, the world is still one;
r gel perception is always also the spontaneous
expression of meaning. Any separation of
thought and being, or of "primary" and "sec-
Iy of the ondary" qualities is unthinkable. In this di-
1 of life
mension of subjectivity, I am an "openjng to
I by one the world." As Zaner says: "Not only am 1,
Ile child qua embodied, with things, but also they
~e point
commune with me, are with me-for they are
horizon
precisely at once inexhaustible, having their
own propet ecceity, and they are significa-
tions for me endowed by means of my em-
1
bodied acti'lity on and with th.,em.'t6 Here,
indeed, the human subject does not bestow
or construct meaning, nor is meaning "hid-
den behind" anything, but is an essential
element of the structure of existence. In this
dimension of subjectivity, there is no distinc-
tion between knowing and being.
Bachelard's ontology of what he calls the
"permanent child" is confinned in lung's
psychological analysis of the child arche-
type. He calls the child archetype an "ele-
ment of our psychic structure" which, in its
emergence in dream, fantasy, art, and reflec-
tion, signals a process of integration of con-
scious and unconscious elements of person-
aJjty, the onset of the "shifting of the centre
of the personaJjty from the ego to the self."
"Self," in Jung's terminology, is the "goal of
the individuation process," a synthesis, in
fact a unity of opposites in the personality,
whereby there is experienced "a wholeness
that transcends consciousness." The child
archetype is thus a "unifying symbol," a
"link with that original condition," in lung's
terms, a bringing of unconscious elements of
personality into harmony with the relatively
narrow forms of reflective consciousness.
Thus, for psychoanalysis, "child" symbol-
izes "the all-embracing ni\ture of psychic
wholeness," or "pre-conscious" and "post-
conscious" state, "both begmnmg and end."
"It is a personification of vital forces quite
outside the limited range of our conscious
mind; of ways and possibilities of which our
one-sided conscious mind knows nothing; a
wholeness which embraces the very depths
of nature.',68 On this account, childhood is
then "an anticipation by analogy of life after
death," a limit condition representing im-
mortality in that it stands for the return to the
unconscious, which is eternity, the realm of
the timeless, the sacred, or pure presence, the
unity of knower and known which is prom-
HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD
53
(
r

ised in consciousness, but which is con- -expelled man from paradise,,,7. which is a "meaninj
stantly eluding the adult who is cut off from classic Romantic ideal. In Freud's Romantic ence ofc
his source. It also armounces that enJarged followers, the global, narcissistic eroticism ticipate il
subjectivity., the integration of the irrational of the infant organization of desire becomes therefore
into an expanded reason, represented by both the promise of this state and the proof- texte." 51
Jung's Self, which is the place of conscious text of its downfall in human family and
become;
and unconscious integration. As such, it also civilization, where the hope it represents for
into a us(
stands for the abolition of repression, that instinctual liberation is continually betrayed
ity-"he
possibility which always haunts adult con- Postmodernism is a radicalization of the how to ~
sciousness. terms of the EnlightenmentlRomantic para- acquired
dox, and a Promethean assumption of its like natu
The Hermeneutics of Childhood and Post- tragic conflict. On the Enlightenment side, it hood, is;
modernism
represents a fmal separation of reason from On tll
nature, initiated in Kant and carried to an represen
The paradoxes expressed in the two con-
extreme in Nietzsche and his followers. 72 For against 1
tradictory views of childhood described
postmodemism, "nature" is a production of maintain
above are part of a larger modernist narrative
about the epistemological conflict between supplementarity, which, analogous to of the at
EnJightenment and Romanticism. From the Hegel's Reason, creates such pretexts in the dialectic:
point of view of the henneneutics of child- interests of its own (goals). That supplemen- mental Ii
bood, the Romantic project of the recovery tarity is not Reason, but Reason decon- postrnod
of childhood is actually a dialectical move of structed makes it no less an all encompassing ogy or d
"overcoming" or sublation of Enlighten- rationalization, which replaces logos with the monl
ment, because it represents a new self-under- grarrunar, and foundation with inscriptions Theprirr
standing through the appropriation that fol- created by the play of differance. is only a
lows from the distanciation from lived expe- Accordingly"-as for Enlightenment so the patri.
rience, and the narrowing of the defmition of for deconstruction-childhood is not a posi- gin), ani
reason which characterized Enlightemnent. tive state, but merely a deficit. Like "nature" imaginal
The henneneutics of childhood in post- and "God," "childhood" is a concept which repressic
modernity offers a further turn in the plot of supplementarity uses to defme itself, but, like nificant
the narrative. This tum has one precursor in Kant's noumenal, it is a limit condition, and and the c
Freud, whose thought plays within the dia- has no truth value in itself. Thus postrnod- of the hI
lectical tensions and secret correspondences ernism tends to view children in the classical Bataille
between Enlighterunent and Romanticism. 69 rationalist tradition as not-yet human crea- gression
Freud's narrative of early childhood, which tures. Derrida's child, like Aristotle's, is for 'the (
hinges on the conflict between primary proc- "sometimes on the side of animality, some- murdero
ess and the reality principle, is also about the times on the side of humanity_ ,,13 For Derrida, h the mate

conflict between reason and nature. Their childhood, far from exemplifying a funda- where ttl
conflict is tragic, in that becoming an adult mental human nature, is "the first manifesta- liberated
means "overcoming the residues of child- tion of the deficiency which, in Nature, calls imposed
hood,,70 through the "educatio~" of psycho- for substitution,,74 in the form of education The chi
analysis, i.e. reason overcoming nature. But and training in order to become an adult. Freud's.
the adult is never free of a nostalgia for and Childhood is the weakness, the fault, which bivalent
an involuntary belief in the possibility of life demonstrates that nature is not "pure pres: consciOl
before (or after) repression, of nature uncon- ence," but just one among the play of signi- Thus
strained, without "that sense of shame which fiers of (adult) supplementarity. Far from the postmod
PHILOSOPHY TODAY
54
vhich is a "meaningless [sic] ofthe supposed full pres- ment side or the Romantic side, it disappears
Romantic ence of childhood ,,,75 the child does not par- into a limit condition. Indeed, to the degree
eroticism ticipate in the "order of the supplement," and that postmodemism represents the death of
~ becomes therefore is not a human being-she is "hors the subject, it is also the death of childhood,
the proof- texte." She will only be human when she has because the child's su~jectivity is found be-
unily and become an adult, i.e. when she has entered fore language, in nature and the body, in the
'esentS for into a use of language which shows retlexiv- "logos of the aesthetic world." The state of
, betrayed. ity-"he will no longer weep, he will know immediacy ("pure presence") represented by
ion of the how to say 'I hurt,,'76-i.e., when she has childhood, in that it is a state outside the play
Intic para- acquired the adult horizon. The prereflective, of supplementarity, an "excluded other," a
ion of its like nature, like pure presence, like child- limit condition, is also a nihilation, a not-hu-
ent side, it hood, is a construct, without truth value. man. So Marchak can say, " ... in that place
ason from On the Romantic side, postmodemism beyond, 'man' disappears.,,78 The Romantic
ned to an represents a radicalization of the revolt seeks to reappropriate a lost immediate
72
vers. For against repression, and the reason which through dialogue with those other forms of
:luction of maintains it. Whereas the Romantic notion knowledge represented by chil~hood, mad-
ogous to of the abolition of repression involves the ness, the primitive, etc., and integrate it into
~xts in the dialectical recovery of an originary, "monu- an "enlarged" subjectivity. Postmodernism
lpplemen- mental life," leading to an "enlarged" reason, cannot allow for the moment of appropria-
In decon- postrnodemism has done away with teleol- tion, because both the self and the "structure
Impassing ogy or dialectic, and thus can only recover of presence" are merely inscriptions pro-
)gos with the monumental life through transgression. duced by the play of differance. Having
79

IS criptions The primal paradise of the pleasure principle deconstructed the subject, the postrnodem
is only attained by a crime-the murder of individual can only find that monumental life
:oment so the patriarch, the self-severing from an (ori- through the violation of supplementarity it-
lot a posi- gin), and self-creation through art or the self. Hence what Marchak describes as the
e "nature" imagination. For this ideal of liberation from "joy of transgression," the "journey to the
ept which repression and sublimation, childhood is sig- end of the possible in man ... where ulti-
f, but, like nificant because, like madness, bestiality, mately subject and object become fused, in-
Lition, and and the divine, it represents a limit condition extricable, in ecstasy and anguish," which
postrnod- of the human. Marchak, in her analysis of involves the liberation of "outlawed (sponta-
e classical Bataille and Kristeva, describes the trans- neous) drives.',81J This theme is also present
man crea- gression of those limits as a "ceaseless search in Derrida's thought:
totle's, is for 'the desirable, terrifying, nourishing and
ity, some- "Man calls himself man only by drawing
murderous, fascinating and abject inside of
Ir Derrida, limits excluding his other from the play of
the maternal body, '" i.e., primary narcissism,
: a funda- supplementarity: the purity of nature, of
where the ego is all instinctual body, and is
nanifesta- animality. primitivism. childhood. mad-
Liberated from the super-ego of "paternally-
lture, calls ness, divinity. The approach to these limits
imposed prohibitions, taboos, and law."n I·
education is at once feared as a threat of death and
The child ceaselessly sought for here is
an adult. desired as access to a life without dif-
Freud's and Melanie Klein's cauldron of am-
jerance."SI
ult, which bivalent instinct, projected as the goal of
?ure pres- consciousness. The postmodem project, rather than one of
V of signi- Thus either way childhood is construed in expansion of the notion of reason through
,r from the postmodemism, whether on the EnJighten- incorporation of the irrational, requires a
HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD
55
break into the irrational, in order to eseape and accomplished "the Oedipal project of and a
the hegemony of supplementarity. Only becoming father of oneself,',s4 Lives apart of SOl

through violation is it possible "to rise above from becoming and contradiction, in a state ing a
politil
his [man's] subordination, to break out of the of pure play, of suspension from goal. This
mall.y
law of reason,..82 to go beyond language, state, like the archetype of the divine child,
durinl
beyond supplementarity, beyond the human. is both pre-human and posthuman, but, in
ups e
The postmodern project is thus an anti-hu- deconstruction, assumes the death of the sub- popuJ
manism, the project ofbecoming both divine jeet, rather than the enlargement of subjec- status
and bestial. As Harvey says: 'We have ex- tivity through dialogue. It is associated with they I

tended the field beyond the subject, beyond the primary narcissism of childhood, and the lord,
the object, beyond the sayable as such, be- heaven of instinctual Liberation, but only as them
yond the as such and therefore must ap- another mark of its otherness, of its location lIren"
proach animality on the one hand and divin- "beyond the boundaries." It also does away pcrsOi

ity on the other." This extension of the field with a hermeneutics of childhood. The gods, "child
Middl
beyond the human subject is associated with after all, although they are eternal children,
(New
the end of history:83 the animal/god, having have no childhood, nor do they have chiJ-
21. QUOle
done away with repression and sublimation, dren.
Child
ENDNOTES
Unive
I. F. Ashis Nandy. "Reconstructing Childhood: A Critique of 8. "For Descartes and Malebranche. the child was a failed 22. Nand
the Ideology of Adulthood," in Tradirions, Tyranny, and adult." Richard Cae, When rlie Grass Was Taller: Aurobi- 23. Freul
Uropias (Delhi: Oxford Universiry Press, 1981) p. 71. ography and rhe Experience of Childhood (New Haven: educa
2. Walter Misgeld, "Self-Reflection and Adult Maruriry: AduJt Yale University Press, 1984), p. 18. childh
and OtiJd in Hermeneutical and Critical Reflection," PIu!- 9. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-Sense (Evanston: chey, '
nomenology + Pedagogy 3:3 (1985): 93. Northwestern University Press, 1964), p. 92. logiet
3. For an account of the origins of the modem instinuionali- 10. Ibid., p. 63. HogllJ
zalion of childhood. see Philippe Aries, Cenruries of II. Mark Golden, Children and Childhood in C/as.,ical Arh- 24. "The
Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Robe.r1 ens (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1990), sion.'·
Baldick,lrans. (New York: Knopf. 1962). For an account pp. 10, 11.44. choa,.,
of the rise of civilite, and its relation to the "growing 12. Jung and Kerenyi, pp. 79 ff. Wesle
distance between adults and children," see Norben EI ias, 13. Psalm 8:2 (see also Matt. 21:14-16); Tan Te Ching. Verse has to
The Civilizing Process: The Hisrory of Manners (New 55. could
Yoric Urizen Books, 1978). 14. Mary M. Mclaughlin, "Survivors and Surrogates: Parents A PhI
4. See Tao Te Ching, trans. Stephen MilcheU (New York: and Children from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Centuries," Press.
Harpu& Row, 1988), verses 20, 28,52,55.68; C. G. Jung in Lloyd deMause. ed., The History of Childhood (New 25. The iJ
and e. Kerenyi. Essays on a Science of Mythology: The York: Harper & Row, 1974). p. 133. by the
Myrh of rhe Divine Child and rhe Mysreries of £lellSis 15. See David Kennedy. "Fools, Young Children. and Philoso- Freud
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969); Plato's phy," Thinking 8:4 (1990): 2-6. oofoun<
Politicus. cited in KathJeen Raine, Blake and Antiquity 16. M. H. Abrams, Narural Supernaruralism: Tradirion and ended
(Princeton: Princeton Universiry Press, BoUingen. 1977). Revolution in Romaneic Literarure (New Yorle: Norton, all soc
pp. 57~; Matt.18:2~. 197\), p. 239. 26. Wilfri
5. Paul RicoclU. Hermeneurics and rhe Human Sciences 17. Leo Stein.be.rg, TIu! Sexuality ofChrisr in Renaissance Arc ing WI

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Prc8s, 1981), p. 144. and in Modern Oblivion (New York: Pantheon, 1983). Befon
6. Ibid, p. 192. 18. E. H. Gombrich, Symbolic Images: Studies in rhe Arr of 4:3 (I'

7. Enunanuel Levinas, Torality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Ihe Renaissance (London: Phaidon, 1972), p. 168. 27. Nandl
Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Universiry Press, 1969), p. 19. Golden. p. 39. 28. From
277. 20. And Boswell. continues: "This is a philological subtlety L.e. ~

PHILOSOPHY TODA Y
56

of and a social one. In modem Western democracies everyone
Jart of sound mind achieves independent adult status on attain-
ing a prescribed age: the primary distinction in social and
late
political capacity is between children and adults. and nor·
bis
mally everyone occupies each position in succession. But
ild,
during most of Western history only a minority of grown·
,m ups ever achieved such independence: the rest of the
ub- population remained throughout their lives in a juridical
ec- status more comparable to "childhood." in the sense that
lith they remained under someone else's control-a father. a
the lord. a master. a husband, etc. . . . [these] social roles
, as themselves (slave. serf, servant, etc.) were those of "chil-
ion dren" in terms of power and juridical standing, whether the
vay person discharging them was young or old. Words for
"children" designate servile adults well into the High
Ids,
Middle Ages. John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers
en,
(New York: Pantheon. 1988). pp. 27-28.
:lil-
21. Quoted in Reinhard Kuhn. Corruption in Paradiu: The
Child in Western Literature (Hanover. NH: New England
University Press, 1982), p. 12.
liled 22. Nandy, pp. 57, 58.
'obi- 23. Freud described psychoanalysis as "a prolongation of
yen: education for the purposes of overcoming the residues of
childhood." Five Lectures 011 Psychoanalysis. In J. SITa-
:ton: chey, cd.. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psycho-
logical Works of Sigmund Freud, 24 vols. (London:
Hoganh Press. 1957), Vol. 11, p. 48.
Ath- 24. 'The question facing mankind is the abolition of repres-
'90), sion." Norman O. Brown. Life Against Death: The Psy-
choanalytical Meaning of History (Middletown, Cf:
Wesleyan University Press, 1959), p. 308. "Civilization
erse has to defend itself against the spectre of a world which
could be free." Herben Marcuse. Eros and Civilization:
'Cnts A Philosophical InqUiry Into Freud (Boston: Beacon
les.'· Press, 1955), p. 93.
\jew 25. The influence on late 20th century mores is complicated
by the fact that it is confused with the other stream of post-
oso- Freudian soteriology exemplified in Wilhelm Reich, who
"foundered on the theory of infantile sexualily ... and
and ended up in glorification of lIle orgasm as the solution to
10n. all social and bodily ailments" (Brown. p. 29).
26. Wilfried Lippitz, "Understanding Children, Communicat-
~ Art ing with Children: Approaches 10 the Child Within Us,
l. Before Us. and With Us," PhellOmenology + Pedagogy
rt of 4:3 (1986): 59.
27. Nandy. pp. n. 58.
28. From Henry Vaughan. "Childe-hood," in Works. 2d ed.,
uety L.C. Martin. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), p. 520.
.t
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 post modernism," And
he adds, "No doubt the future of poslmodemism is yet
HERMENEUTICS OF CHILDHOOD
57
 anOlher disguise of Enlightenmenl." Stanley Rosen, Her- Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 123,125,193,126,116,127,188,
meneuticsas Politics (New York: Oltford University Press. 108, III. 125, 135, 162, 193, 197,198, 167, 185, 188.
1987),p.181. 67. zaner, p. 188.
48. Friedrich Nie17.sche, Thu.s Spake Zorathustra. in The 68. Jung and Kcrenyi, pp. 100,83,97,89.
Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New Yorlr.: 69. Gadamer approaches this view when he speaks of Roman·
Viking Press, 1954), p. 137. ticism in its project of "retrieval of origins," as a "radicali·
49. Quoted in Plotz, p. 77.
}
zation of the enlighterunenl." Hans-Georg Gal1amer. Truth
50. For Gabriel Marcel on secondary renection, see his The and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1975). p. 244. See
I
Mystery of Being (Soulll Bend, [N: Gateway, 1951), vol. also David Kennedy, "[mages of the Young Child in His· {
I, pp. 77-102; and Homo Viator: Introduction to a Meta- tory: En[ightenment and Romance," Early Childlwod Re· I
physics of Hope, uans. Emma Craufurd (New York: Har- search Quarterly 3 (1988): 121-37. W
perTorchbook, 1962), p. 100. 70. See Note 23. above. po
,
(

51. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,

trans. Colin Smilll. (UJndon: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
71. Brown, p. 31.
72. For an argument for the continuity between Kant and
.
I
TI
1962) p. 365. "Ni~11.sche, see Rosen, pp. 4-5. been
52. Ibid, p. 359. 73. Jacques Derrida, OfGrammatology (BaJtimore: The Johns West
53. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the 'nvisible Hopkins Press, 1974). p. 248. aclitl
(Evanston: Norlllweslem University Press. 1964), p. 122. 74. Ibid. p. 146.
beSt t
54. Bemanos quoted in Kuhn, p. 62; Hlliderin quoted in 75. Irene Harvey. Derrida and the Economy of Differance
ism (
Kuhn, p. 169: Hegel quoted in Abrams, p. 380. (Bloominglon: Indiana University Press, (986), p. 223.
theor
55. Merteau·Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception. p. 430. 76. Derrida. p. 248.
this i:
56. Ibid, p. 291. 77. Catherine Marchak. "The Joy of Transgression: Bataille
profo
57. R. M. Zaner, The Problem of Embodimell/. 2d I'd. (The and Kristeva," Philosophy Today 34 (Winter 1990): 360.
the c(
Hague: Maninus Nijhoff, 1971). pp. 187-88. 78. [bid. p. 361.
58. Merleau-Ponty. Phenomenology of Perception, p. 422.
the fa
79. Gary Brenl Madison makes this point in The Hermeneutics
Compare Brown: "If ... we go beyond Freud, and specu- ofPostmodemiry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
Holo!
late seriously on llle possibility of a consciousness nOI 1988), p. 115. and tl
based on repression but conscious of what is now uncon- 80. Man:hak. p. 359. an er
scious. lllen it foUows a priori that such a consciousness 81. Harvey, p. 186. lacke
would be nOl in time bUI in eternity. And in fact eternity 82. Marchak, p. 357. word.
seems to be Ihe lime in which childhood lives" (p. 94). 83. "The unrepressed animal carries no instinctual project to is Em
59. Coc. p. 113. change his own nature; mankind must pass beyond repres- operu
60. For a discussion of "how linguistic structures mirror and sion if il is to lind a life not governed by the unconscious ing in
analogiz.e the structures of perceptions," see Maurice Mer· project of fmding another klnd of life .... After man's
leau·Ponty. ConsciOllsness and the Acquisition of Lan· unconscious search for his proper mode of being has Th.
guage.trans. Hugh J. Silverman (Evanston: Northwestern ended-after history has ended-particular members of
I
stated
University Press. 1973), p.uiv. the human species can lead a IiII' which. like the lives of
I lows:
61. See Waller Ong. The Presence of the Word (Minneapolis: lower organisms. individually embodies llle nature of the
University of Minnesota Press. 1981). species ...an individual life which enjoys full satisfaction I t- Tht
62. Traheme. p. 25 ("Dumnesse"). and concretcly embodies the full essence of the species. stru
1
63. Coc. p. 125. and in which fife and death are simultaneously affinned, eplJ
64. Brown, p. 94. because life and death together conSlitute individuality,
1
firs
65. David MaJour. An Imaginary Life (New York: George and ripeness is all," Brown. p. 106. And see Rosen's I teee
Bmjllcr. 1978), p. 96. description of Alexander Kojeve' s posthistorical Utopia,
1 Oth
66. Gaston Bachelard. The Poerics of Rever;e: Childhood.
Language. and the Cosmos. trans. Damel Russell (BaSIon:
pp. 91-107 and passim.
84. Brown, p. 127. I of (

I Howa
Northern Michigan University, Marquette, MI 49855 1 speet
l PHIL
PHILOSOPHY TODA Y
I
58 \