In the beginning, there is childhood. Life has already begun, and childhood is its most immediate, most material, liveliest and most exuberant expression. It is sometimes said that this is its most beautiful expression. Babies and children express life with a sort of crystalline purity. ‘Life is there, simple and serene,’ says the poet Paul Verlaine in his Sagesse. Childhood is innocence. That might be a universal truth, if we did not recall the words of St Augustine in the Confessions when he observes that even a baby at the breast feels jealousy and already bears the stigmata of sin that runs through the human condition from the very beginning. The innocence of being and of origins is therefore neither a fact nor a universal postulate. Childhood may even be, as in the Hindu or Buddhist tradition, the new beginning of ‘something’ or of a life that came before it. If that is the case, origins, purity and innocence are so many illusions that are fostered by our shortsightedness and/or ignorance. So, it is very complicated from the very beginning. Where do we begin? And how can we speak of ‘apparent’ origins, or of childhood as it is lived, and not as we observe it, from our viewpoint, with our reason, our judgements, our philosophies or our religions? If childhood is neither primal, pure nor even innocent . . . then is there such a thing as a truth that can express it or a quality that can describe it? That is a difficult question, and yet the extraordinary thing that attracts and fascinates us to the point of moving us to tears is palpable as we sit at the bedside of a child and of life: childhood is life, but it asks no questions about life. The ‘being of being’ immediately clings . . . to life. It asks no questions and is not mediated by either consciousness or the intellect.
Childhood is carefree in the literal sense: a child lives but has no worries about life. That does not mean that a child feels no pain, is never hurt and never suffers. It does not mean that a child experiences only pure joy and happiness. No. Children do experience pleasure and pain, laughter and tears, fullness and lack, but they do so unquestioningly. Childhood does not need answers or philosophies. It falls short of that, or perhaps it is beyond that. The painter Pablo Picasso used to say how difficult it was to ‘become young again’ because he was so eager to rediscover a carefree creativeness –and finally outgrow his precocious mastery of forms and colours. Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher who was so in love with art, had already described childhood as the final stage in three basic transformations: his prophet Zarathustra proclaimed that human beings had to become rebellious lions and no longer submissive camels if they wished to accede at last to the free and carefree liberty of a child. Nietzsche did believe in innocence, but what looked like the final completion of the philosophical quest was a combination of lack of concern and freedom: the freedom of the carefree, of those who are not worried about life, the freedom of the child. He thought that we have to get beyond useless questions about meaning if we are to experience the fullness of being in its immediacy. The philosopher’s only hope of success was to transform himself into a child-artist. He was not hoping for an answer to questions about life but trying to get beyond them, and that is a much more profound experience. Nietzsche’s insight was profound, and so true: in philosophy, the ideal of childhood is the end of philosophy.
Questions, a Question
Escaping consciousness is, however, difficult. And perhaps we can never really do so. The intellect gradually awakens as it discovers the realities of life and asks the first questions: why, or why not, are there things to eat? Why, or why not, are there toys, a swimming pool and rain, presence or absence? The first ‘whys’ are about immediate causalities that are obvious at an immediate level –at the heart of the life that is given us –and not about life itself. Time passes, and the questions become deeper and more focused as our consciousness has to deal with the real: our carefree existence, and part of childhood vanishes as we begin to ask the basic existential question: why life? Why me, here and there?
We reach the age of reason as we take the path that leads to maturity. We have to become adults whether we like it or not. This journey – these stages, the immediacy of the carefree existence that ceases as we approach the mediation of conscience is the most intimate and the most universal experience of all. It is a universal intimacy, or the universal nature of human intimacy. Ancestral traditions punctuated this journey with rites and/or initiations, rites of passage, symbolic ordeals and new responsibilities. They helped being, consciousness and the intellect to enter the world of meaning. Religions and prophecies, like traditions, spiritualities and philosophies, find their raison d’être at the very threshold of this question of meaning: they are so many of the answers that are given to human consciousness – either in advance (by a family or community) or in the course of the personal quest – when consciousness accede a the existential preoccupation (life’s worries about life) and asks the question ‘Why?’
The essence and the prospect remain the same, from the tribal religions of Asia to the Aztecs and the Mayas, from the religions of the Andes to the traditions of Africa: understanding, doing and giving meaning. Egyptian, Greek and Roman polytheisms, like Hinduism and Buddhism, and even the Jewish, Christian and Muslim monotheisms, offer frameworks and systems that allow us to answer the basic existential question, and then all the other related questions: what is the meaning of death, suffering, love, morality, and so on? Philosophers and philosophies try to reconstruct what religions have already grappled with by asking the initial question, by using their autonomous reason and exploring truths that have, to some extent, been established or verified (postulates). They try to arrive at a meaning by asking questions and in the process elaborate systems that strive for consistency and for answers. Socrates has often – and quite wrongly, as it happens – been described as the first systematic philosopher, but he is the first and emblematic representative of the philosophical project and the philosophical experience. The Socratic dialectic is a pedagogy based upon a series of leading questions. The thousands of questions he asks are designed to elicit from his interlocutor truths he did not know were in his possession. And those truths allow the interlocutor to apprehend, with the intellectual gentleness that is implicit in logical reasoning, the question of questions: the question of meaning, and the question of truth.
The geneticist Albert Jacquard observed, with a certain humour, that human beings are born too early, and quite incomplete. It is impossible for a baby to survive without help. Left to its own devices, it is physically doomed to die. It is therefore naturally in a state of need. The physical need to be cared for, fed and protected until it reaches physiological maturity is most obvious and most pressing at the very moment when it is most carefree. Total physical dependency in order to stay alive is associated with an absolute freedom and lightness: our being is part of life. And then time passes and perspectives are inverted: as we become physically independent, we gradually begin to ask existential questions, and those questions are so many needs.
At the very moment when the body realizes its potential and becomes autonomous, the mind becomes aware of its questions, limitations, needs because its dependency mirrors its incompleteness, doubts and truths. We spend our time coming to terms with our physical, emotional and intellectual dependency. We move perpetually from one state to the other: man is a being who is ‘in need’. That is why our relationship with peace –inner or collective – is always a question of autonomy and power. That is as true of individuals and couples as it is of social relations. ‘Why?’ expresses the quest for meaning, and an awareness of our needs, limitations and powers.
St Augustine did not have the benefit of Darwin’s discovery of our evolutionary past, which offers a more plausible explanation for our behaviour: it is not a question of the stigmata of sin but traits for survival, as seen in all other creatures.