The darkness between your eyes

In an article espousing ἔρως (eros) as the other of λόγος (logos), Garrison uses Levinas and Derrida to problematize the entirety of Western philosophy - or what comes down to it, to the entirety of thought itself (an arrogant statement, that). He starts with a fundamental implication of both their positions: culturally, infants are our others, and through enculturation they are rendered unto the same, that is, the sameness in hermeneutic humanity.

If that is correct, infants are our cultural, existential, and phenomenological others, because properly speaking, no one experiences being an infant. This is not to say that they are tabula rasa when they are born, neither is it to say that they are not born. What it says is more fundamental: that there is no rubric, language, frame, or anything that, phenomenologically speaking, an infant has to make rational sense of anything at all. The closest we get to experiencing infants is through other infants, and inferring what their worlds are like, if they have worlds other than the strictly ontological.

Arguably we do the same with our experiences of others - we infer what they must be like based on what we ourselves are like. But the infant is truly an other - while there is an element of linguistic being to an adult other which makes sense of sense, an infant has none. They have no sense of sense, and as such no sense of time, space, meaning, reality, anything that language itself makes real. They have no selves. They must be what Adam and Eve are like before eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

Knowledge, therefore, is the first sin, as several exegeses would argue, and more importantly, self-knowledge. Adam and Eve's own nakedness brought to their consciousness upon the first bite of the fruit is itself the first object of consciousness in the literary history of mankind. Not for nothing, after all, does the Socratic dictum ring true after all these millennia: γνῶθι σεαυτόν, know thyself - for it is the first true piece of knowledge there is in the philosophical history of mankind. Know your nakedness, your ignorance, first and foremost, for in knowing that you may find the path to knowledge of the universe.

That is, because it is self-knowledge, a chasm is then generated upon first bite: the chasm between a self newly and for the first time created, and the chasm between what is not it. As Sir Pratchett says, to have an I means to have a space between your eyes, and therefore to have a space outside this space - in short, the universe. We are, then, our first others; the universe, the secondary but not second other.

So when people wish to go back to the innocence of youth, they do not mean to go back to the innocence of infancy. Youth at least has some self already endowed, some rationality already formed, already informed, already contaminated linguistically. For otherwise it is a strange thing to long for - to go back to innocence as it is conceived purely from the standpoint of contamination, for there is no path to go there. The fruit has been bitten, the landscape cleaved with an infinite chasm. (All this makes an interesting beginning argument for the vast difference between innocence and ignorance also.)

What is it to go back to that state, purely an ontological state the emptiness of which Heidegger cannot even dream of and Derrida will no doubt bump a few years later unto toddlerhood and say that it is a child of the patriarchy? What is it to go back to the womb, and to the first few months outside of it, to be in the world but not be in it as a self? What is it to be innocent, and to be and have a terrain nothing like the world and reality you are born in?

It is to die.

(That is why one of the most pertinent questions regarding the afterlife is: when we do join god in heaven, do we join him as ourselves?)



Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_of_the_Fetus_in_the_Womb#/media/File:Leonardo_da_Vinci_-_Studies_of_the_foetus_in_the_womb.jpg