The philosophical Figure of the Child. Descartes, Spinoza.
Julie Henry
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Abstract
• The question of transformation When we try to think rationally about the status of the child, the first difficulty we meet is due to the gulf which separates the infant he starts out as and the adult he will become: how can we understand what he is without assigning two distinct natures to beings so different from one another? And how, then, can we think out an unbroken link (and not a qualitative leap) between these two states of human nature? These questions are extremely problematic in Spinoza's philosophy, which understands changes by degrees (and not by natures) and which refuses to envisage the succession in time of two different natures in one and the same individual. Now, Spinoza doesn't avoid this problem; on the contrary, he explicitly picks it out in the scholium of proposition 39 of the fourth part of Ethics, when he writes about babies that "a man of advanced years believes their nature to be so different of his own that he could not be persuaded that he had ever been a baby if he did not draw a parallel from other cases". In other words, neither our memory nor our reason are able to convince us that we've ever been in that state (which, because of the great difference between it and our actual "state", does rather appear to us as a different "nature"); the observation of others and "knowledge from casual experience" which can be drawn from it are only able to make us believe it.
Key takeaways
- On the one hand, thinking about entering into adulthood as continuous (there is no clear demarcation which is able to distinguish in an absolute way childhood and maturity) and natural (every child will, by nature, become an adult one day) seems logical.
- All this can explain the negative viewpoint Descartes develops about childhood: the fact that we have been a child before being an adult will always mark our search for truth, and getting out of childhood will require unceasingly repeated efforts.
- In order to think about what becoming ethical is, it's required to know what adulthood is, as well as to think about what becoming an adult is, it's required to know what childhood is.
- In that way, there is, according to Spinoza, a real passage from childhood to adulthood: the difference between the infant and the man of advanced years is even so significant that we could think they are of two different natures.
- Indeed, in our early childhood, the soul is, according to Descartes, "so closely tied to the body that it ha [s]
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Baruch Spinoza, the 17th century philosopher best known for his metaphysical rigor and the radical heterodoxy of his conception of God as Nature, did not say much about children or childhood. Nevertheless, his few mentions of children in his masterpiece, the Ethics, raise fascinating questions of autarky, rationality and mind-body relations as they are perceived in the contrast between children and adults. Generally, philosophical theories of childhood benefit greatly from a strong metaphysical foundation. Spinoza's philosophy, which has recently been gaining considerable attention by contemporary neuroscientists and psychologists, can serve as stable and fertile ground for developing a strong philosophy of childhood. In this paper I address the Spinozistic conception of a flourishing, happy human and the way this understanding of human excellence reflects on his understanding of children and childhood. I argue that the use of Spinozistic concepts can be valuable in the analysis of children and childhood-especially essence, striving to persevere in being, and the nature of the imagination. Spinoza's epistemology can explain the unique rationality of children, and provide a metaphysical basis for normative behavior. Moreover, it can help us as caregivers better understand and empathize with children, by explaining the similarities and differences between children and adults.
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