Baby Mia (born 12 Nov 2018)
My niece has given birth to her third child: a baby girl, called Mia, weighing in at a healthy 6lb 11oz. So far, so sweet.
But mayn't it be the case that her charm lies not in her chubby little cheeks, tiny limbs, or tufts of hair, but in her prehuman status? For like all newborns, Mia is essentially not-quite, or not-yet-human. Which isn't to say she's inhuman, so much as humanus in potentia.
Thus, to be a little sentimental about her being in the world isn't to fall back into a hopeless humanism resting upon notions of moral agency and innate rights. Babies delight, rather, because they are little monsters of energy, striving towards ever-greater complexity.
In other words, they are tiny bundles of will to power - and nothing else besides!
In other words, they are tiny bundles of will to power - and nothing else besides!
In a different, but perhaps not so different, philosophical vein, Wordsworth's 'Intimations of Immortality' ode famously conceived:
ReplyDelete'Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And cometh from afar;
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!'
For Wordsworth, it's clear the child is also a kind of alien for whom, following the Platonic account of anamnesis, all of living is a remembering (or, in a quintessentially Wordsworthian term, a 'recollecting') of earthly life out of her estranged condition. (We don't, strictly speaking, 'learn' anything - we relearn or rediscover it.) Is this also why an ancient Japanese tradition teaches that we are born many times into life in our lives, because it's such a shock, such a momentous process?
One can of course read Wordsworth in the usual manner, as a high flush of Romantic neo-Platonism. However, such a view also resonates with a pre-Christian Gnostic view of 'dying to death', in which our 'fallenness' is not the expression of a preliminary state of sin, but rather a 'descent' into matter from the pleroma: that energy field or luminous plentitude that is our home. A baby is not merely naked, a Humean tabula rasa, but a daemon-drawn nexus - Wordsworth's soul-star - of psychic potentiality, a unique code from the beginning. Which is no 'beginning', but a kind of eruption from elsewhere.
Welcome, Mia, to your temporary terrestrial residence of terror and beauty! But don't forget, as the Jewish mystics understood, that you may be in the world, but you're not of it!