A tree or a flower contain a wordless wisdom that can pass directly from them to a child. It is not only such wisdom that is conveyed in Luce Irigarayâs To Be Born. The bookâs themes range from a perspective for a collaborative construction of a new way of living for the coming generations, to bridging the spiritual and cultural divide between men and women. But a major theme of the book concerns the way in which we, as human beings, may not only bring to fruition our potentialities as adults living and developing together, but also may be able to think about children and childhood, about what it means to grow as a child and throughout oneâs life, as well as how to be a carer for children. There are many original lessons to be learned in such a domain, made all the more dramatically urgent because such a thinking of the beginnings of human life, of the growth of children and adults, and especially of the relations between adults and children, has rarely been taken up by philosophers. And when it has been, it was usually for demonstrating a universal principle, teaching a moral, or illustrating another point. In the case of To Be Born, Irigaray has in mind something at once more distinct and more comprehensive than, to take an example, that which Rousseau aims at in his Emile. Whereas Rousseau seeks to demonstrate the conflict the (boy) child endures to emerge from nature into the social world, Irigarayâs To Be Born traces the childâs growth and the significance of its interactions with the other(s) as well as the peculiar qualities of its relation with itself.
The being of the child, which is one of the focuses of To Be Born, does not amount to some general and fixed model. Irigaray is as much concerned with the child him or herself as she is with the adult that he or she will become, and thus also with the material and spiritual situations that the child encounters or brings about. This situates her book in a really special place amongst other discussions on childhood occurring in philosophy. Another feature which differentiates To Be Born is the attention that Irigaray pays to the internal growth and feeling of the child, contrasting with the usual focus on the external growth and the manifestations of child as a mere organism.
In addition to an extensive meditation on what it is to be a child and what it means for a child to be growing, To Be Born imparts some universal lessons. One of them tackles what growing means for a human beyond the merely physical aspect. Indeed, while there are elements of growth that pertain particularly to a child, others relate to the special way of growing that corresponds to humanity as such. Similarly, while we can learn in To Be Born some specific lessons about the relations between adults and children, that is, between persons belonging to different generational stages, we can draw from it, too, specific lessons about relations between and among the sexes, and within and across generations.
The book is at once a demonstration of what sorts of radical insights can be gained when we turn our attention to a topic so familiar, and yet so philosophically unexplored to date, as children and childhood. But it is also an acknowledgement of how truly new in certain ways our thinking about the generations is, and consequently, how we ought to open ourselves to novelty in such a domain. To Be Born particularly invites us to pay attention to the singularity of each human being and their own creativity, and to the necessity of a generative quality of thinking about creativity, since to be creative corresponds to being living, particularly a living human. We learn, moreover, that a child is responsible for its own growth, and that this growth amounts to a sort of transcending itselfâa process in which it must continuously engage itself during its entire life. And finally what it is to relate between generation is, in fact, to actualize someone and something new. Thus we cannot really anticipate what the next epoch or the future phase of human development will be, either for the single child or for the whole generation. Yet this ought not to prevent us from thinking about what sorts of conditions might foster or stifle such a generative process. There are ways of thinking and ways of being in relation that can lead children to their flowering, but there are practices and habits of thought that end in leading astray their growth and being a drag on creativity. A major point in To Be Born is Irigarayâs emphasis on the many self-giving births and rebirths that are undertaken by the childâand by all of us. Not only does the child initiate their birth-giving, but they must continue to be the initiator of their own re-birth and regeneration throughout their life. The child, not anyone else, is the one whose will to live allows it to be born: to pass from water to air, from weightlessness to gravity, from receiving sustenance from the motherâs blood to feeding by itself. As Irigaray writes, âEven if it has been conceived by two and it began its human existence in the body of an other, [the child] is the one who, alone, decided to come into the universe of the living. [âŠ] We were also the ones who gave birth to ourselves through our first breathingâ (To Be Born, p. 1). The moment of birth presents a great danger for the child: it might not succeed in breathing by itself, and thus it might die. But coming into the world is also a way for the child to transcend itself by passing from a mode of beingâbeing in the wombâto something altogether new. It is this act of self-transcendenceâtranscending by oneself oneâs present condition, oneâs present being, into something radically newâwhich truly characterizes the way of growing of a child, but more generally of the whole human life. In order to be a human being, we must be always creative; that is, we must not only live but also continuously pass from a stage or state of being to another, towards achieving our being.
The Childâs Encounter with Living Beings
The child is not just passively delivered into a new state. He or she must actively will their being-living to happen even if they do not consciously know what they are doing. This is a first occasion to transcend themselves by themselves, but it also represents a paradigm of the series of self-transcending that must characterize the continuous growth of a human being. What is radical about this way of perceiving birth as a form of transcendence is the understanding that far from being a completely helpless little organism, the infant is already in charge of the most important and most necessary aspect of its existence: its life as a self-transcendence. Although these aspects may be foregrounded for the caregivers whose job it is to aid the little human in meeting its most basic needs, helplessness and dependence dramatically contrast with the act of courage the newborn achieves when passing from fetal life to autonomous life. Thus, parents and other carers find it easy to ignore the real struggle that the infant faces: not merely to survive but to transcend itself. âFew adults,â Irigaray writes, âperceive the struggle, in a way the ontological struggle, which goes on within this little beingâŠâ (op. cit., p. 8). Adults choose instead to focus on the childâs physical needs. They do this partly because it is simpler, and it is easier than contemplating the reality of the difficulties and joys that the infant experiences. But they do this also partly because our culture(s) and education systems do not emphasize, and certainly do not promote, the cultivation of such living forces, primarily and critically those related to breathingâbut also to moving, and relating to the other(s), notably with respect for sexuate difference. Carers see the infant as a collection of vital needs, and they almost entirely ignore the efforts made by the newborn in trying to solve the âenigmasâ that it faces: for instance, the oscillations between daylight and darkness, noise and silence, scent and scentlessness, a world which both changes and remains the same (idem), enigmas which the baby eventually solves for him or herself.
Parents and carers are inclined to see the infant primarily as dependent on them and needy. They tend to treat the infant as if the satisfaction of its needs by the adults were its sole concern; they mostly ignore or forget the understanding of the infant as a living being, and thereby they do not respect the âautonomyâ that he or she gained in breathing by themselves (op. cit., p. 2). What parents and carers across cultures are already taking up the true challenge that the child faces: to be subjected to its culture, on the one hand, and in charge of it, on the other? The child finds him or herself emerging in a culture which, in most cases, subjects it to religious ideals, which traditionally are âsupra sensible,â or to ideals that are merely abstract, and not appropriately suited for a natural growth and development. Irigaray writes, âbeing faithful to our own nature does not mean confining ourselves to that which our tradition calls our natural needs, but entails the cultivation of our natural belonging until its human achievement, including that of our relational attractions and our sublime aspirationsâ (op. cit., pp. 2â3). She is then speaking not only about the way contemporary Western cultures bring up children, but also about the philosophical approach to being a human. In part, the lack of focus on children is already symptomatic of a philosophical culture which favors metaphysical projects and abstract methodologies and languages. She writes about the traditional Western approach to subjectivity,
Instead of being really concerned with integrating the different stages of our becoming human, subjectivity has been constituted only from certain aspects: those capable of dominating natural growth through categories and principles which are imposed on it from the outside or from on high as modalities presumed suitable for human development. (op. cit., p. 15)
Irigaray already made clear to us that children as well as adults are subjected to forces that are more or less alien to, or at least are inconsistent with their development as natural living beings. But she takes a step further in her analysis, suggesting that a child âwill be asked to submit its natural growth to meta-physical requirements already defined, the origin of which is not in its body [...]â (idem). What is the significance of this beyond naming the apparently inescapable effects of undergoing subjection to virtually any cultural institution, one of which having perhaps turned out to be a crushing machine? Asking the child to turn the motions of its growth over to the external pre-defined metaphysical requirements will, Irigaray writes, âparalyze its growth and tear it between a motion of which it is the source as living being and other movements to which it is subjected and which transform it into a sort of fabricated product, the mechanical functioning of which is dependent on an energy external to it, at least in partâ (idem, emphasis mine).
For Irigaray, the matter is not just one of institutional power relations as well as economic, technologic, or political forces appropriating the being of the child through their ordinary practical meansâfor instance, by subjecting children to advertising that transforms them into subjects of capitalism, or by habituating them to interacting mainly with little computers. There is no doubt that these sorts of subjectionsâto politics, to capitalism, to technologyâdo happen, and make living, growing, and relating to other human beings more difficult for children. However, it is not only the institutional structures that tend to distort childrenâs spiritual growth. It is also a lack of encountering living beings within their milieu. Irigaray writes, âOnly living beings come into presence by themselves and offer the little child, who opens up to them, their own opening to its worldâ (op. cit., p. 21). Thus we must also be concerned by the fact that the child may not, or probably will not predominately encounter living beings, especially in nature, but rather an environment filled with fabricated products. These can never fulfill the aspirations of the child, or spark in it the creative desire that living beings can spark. As Irigaray writes,
Different appearances of life will fertilize one another, and the opening up of the child to the world will contribute towards its own blossoming as livingâwhich cannot occur if the child is surrounded only by fabricated objects, the existence of which already amounts to human work and does not provide a living presence and energy in a will. (op. cit., p. 22)
The Childâs Own Longings
Instead of the childâs development corresponding with the cultivation of a natural belonging, it is subjected, at every level, to external purposes, be they institutional or metaphysical. The child finds itself subject to âcategories and principles which are imposed on it from the outside or from on high as modalities presumed suitable for human developmentâ (op. cit., p. 15). Not only is the child surrounded by fabricated products in the environment where it lives and is presupposed to develop, but he or she is also subjected to requirements concerning the way of growing imposed from the outside on what could otherwise be faithful to a natural growth. These sorts of âtechniques,â Irigaray writes,
by substituting themselves for the motion of a natural growth, will paralyze and distort it [âŠ]. Using techniquesâincluding those presupposed by our traditional logos [âŠ] to support our natural evolution, ends in the latterâs domination [âŠ] Then human being becomes a kind of manufactured product, whose accomplishment will be subjected to an ideaâan eidosâ of the human element which results from a culture instead of being a flowering of its natural belonging, notably into a fleshly face. (op. cit., p. 15â16)
As the child, being born into the world, is never allowed to grow by itself because it depends on others to meet its physical needs, it thus becomes confused between its own natural growth and the ways of being imposed on it, some of them coming from the ideological tradition of its culture, and others from the fact that it was born into an already-constructed world. Irigaray writes: âTo be, for a human, will never amount to blossoming in accordance with its life or being present in its real achievementâone could say that it will never bloom according to its own faceâ (op. cit., p. 16). Partly because of its dependence on other beings for satisfying its physical needs, and partly because of its being âbent to constructed imperatives that do not participate in the same energyâ (idem), the childâs quest for growing into a human being is diverted from its course, and, when it should have grown up to be a human, it has instead become a product of external forces without having grown in and as itself.
The remedy for the situation the child finds itself in, being thrown into an already-constructed world, would be for the child to return to itself by self-affecting so as to discover its own appropriate way of growing. The child, in various ways, ought to learn its limits. If we consider the paucity of thinking, philosophical or otherwise, that goes into the perception of limits as limitations, demarcations, and boundaries, both physical and ontological, of the human subject, we must conclude that the question of learning our limits has scarcely been explored. Children as well as adults are confronted with the fact that there is no teaching, no tradition which allows them to perceive a framework within which they can confidently explore. Indeed, limits are usually imposed on the child either by a set of artificial boundaries, which are designed to keep the child safe but at the same time prevent it from learning by itself. Lacking a suitable education regarding its own limits and manners of being, the child can easily cross the boundaries of its own safety. It is prone to exceed these limits by almost boundless movements and explorations which might give any satisfactionâunless, as Irigaray argues, the child finds itself in nature surrounded by living beings. Often, even when in nature, children are kept confined and allowed only to explore with their eyes and not with their whole bodies, notably through touch, taste, sound, and smell. Only if children are able to engage with the world through more of their senses will they get the nourishment and energy that their boundless explorations seek. And children need to return to themselves again and again to free themselves from the ex...