Abstract
This new volume in Lexington’s Philosophy of Childhood series aims at a philosophical, political and educational exploration of childhood. The editors write in the introduction that ‘childhood is not seen as a developmental stage that needs to be overcome, but rather [as] an existential state of being human and a possibility for other beings’ (p. 1). 1 Childhood is therefore, paradoxically, not limited to children. The aim of this approach is to foster a responsiveness to the otherness of the child and of childhood as such. This book thus provides a great overview of the current discussions in philosophy of childhood and education, including issues concerning decolonialization and the Antropocene. 2
The book is divided in two parts: phenomenological approaches and poststructuralist approaches (including posthumanism and postcolonialism). Phenomenologically, ‘there are many possibilities to make sense of what we experience, and childhood stands as an experience that is no less meaningful than adulthood’ (p. 2). For the poststructuralists, childhood is ‘conceptualized beyond the limits of an individual human experience’ (p. 2). I will not discuss each contribution in its own right, since the editors already do this in their introduction. Rather, I will discuss the three main topics of the book: thinking, childhood, and time. The notions of time play a major role in many contributions to articulate a novel concept of childhood. This novel understanding of childhood allows for a re-evaluation of what thinking is and should do. I will therefore begin with what this volume teaches about time, before continuing on to childhood and thinking.
Time
The first two contributions by James Mensch and Barbara Weber focus on time. Mensch describes the genesis of clock-time by means of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology. This approach learns that the development of subjectivity is not a passage through different stages that are left behind when accomplished. Rather, ‘the chain of developments that exhibits its [subjectivity’s] development is also a chain of different levels of functioning, all of which are active simultaneously’ (p. 12). In other words, once we learn how to tell the time by means of clocks, the other senses of time are not simply gone.
Both Mensch and Weber note that time presupposes the ability to retain what has happened and to anticipate what is to come. The immediate ‘now’ is therefore never simply present, but contains in itself reference to the past and future (pp. 32, 34). A famous example to illustrate this is hearing a melody. To be able to hear it, you must be able to still have previous notes ‘present’ while already anticipating on notes that are coming (p. 17). Mensch and Weber both seek to understand how our experience of time comes about, from infancy (Weber) and childhood (Mensch) up to ‘adult’ clock time.
According to Weber, infants are not yet capable of fully differentiating between themselves and others. Rather, the infant has a way of being wholly in a situation, without taking a specific perspective on this situation. This ‘being wholly in a situation’ has a specific sense of time, which Weber terms ‘at onceness’ (p. 41).
She later asserts that this time is ‘represented by the fact that children bring a new beginning and have a future’ (p. 45). However, it is not fully clear how ‘at onceness’ is related to this representation of time, which she also connects to the notion of natality. Not only is natality not an aspect of childhood but rather of adulthood, as Toby Rollo shows in his contribution (p. 151), but it also names a different sense of time than at onceness.
Mensch points to a next layer of time in childhood: ‘event-time’ (p. 18). A sequence of events allows the child to ‘measure’ time, for example that play time is after breakfast. Now what happens to the child’s sense of time when it starts attending school? Mensch and Weber both note that the sense of time is reversed. The school measures time by means of clocks, which reveal a new objective sense of time. Although Mensch regards this as simply another sense of time, not fundamental but not necessarily ‘bad’, Weber (p. 37) and Murris (p. 161) both criticize clock time for its inherent hegemonizing aspects. It is noteworthy that Weber and Murris arrive at very similar insights about childhood and time, even though they work with different frameworks: phenomenology and posthumanism respectively.
The existence of different senses of time raises the ethical question of their possible co-existence. Although a ‘traditional’ understanding has privileged chronological time and repressed other temporalities, many contributors in this volume call for co-existence and dialogue (Mensch, Weber, Kohan and Murris). In the words of Mensch: ‘The point of education should not be the replacement of one stage by another, but rather the integration of the person as composed by both’ (p. 27). This is a clear consequence of the main idea of the volume: childhood is not a stage of life to be surpassed, but an integral part of what it means to be a human being, regardless of age.
Although Part I emphasizes the overlapping of the child’s time and ours, the otherness of childhood is asserted more in Part II of the volume. In a number of contributions (Weber, Kennedy, Kohan) this other time of childhood is denoted as ‘aion’. Aion differs from chronological time (chronos) and what Kohan refers to as kairos: ‘the time of opportunity . . . a precise instant or moment’ (p. 135). Aion is then the time of childhood, time in the now as not yet differentiated in past-present-future, for example the time of play (pp. 44, 120).
The main reference for linking childhood to the ancient term aion is a fragment from Heraclitus: ‘time [aion] is a child playing (‘childing’) at draughts . . .’ (p. 121). Philosopher and classicist Cornelis Verhoeven (1993) argues on the basis of all of Heraclitus’s references to children or childhood that ‘aion’ does not translate to ‘an abstract time or far eternity, but to the human course of life and the change of generations’ (p. 97). Although the notion of a distinctly ‘childlike’ temporality is certainly interesting, I therefore doubt the value of explaining this by referring to a fragment of a philosopher who was literally nicknamed ‘the Obscure’.
The triad of chronos, kairos and aion also plays a major role in David Kennedy’s contribution. Unfortunately, he wants to do far too much in only nine pages. The following quote illustrates this well: ‘This elemental world of becoming that has been opened through Kronos’ cut is Nature, the world of Generation: sex, birth, eating and being eaten; Anaximander’s Opposites, Heraclitus’ Strife, Blake’s Contraries, Freud’s Eros and Thanatos, Nietzsche’s Apollo and Dionysius, and Deleuze’s desiring-production’ (p. 122). It is then left to the reader to find out how all these notions are somehow all names of the same. I was very impressed by Kennedy’s (2006) book The Well of Being, but unfortunately his contribution in the volume does not come near to the level of scholarship displayed there.
All in all, I believe the most important merit of Kennedy’s essay is his coinage of the term ‘infans-theory’ to gather the philosophies of infancy of Jean-François Lyotard, Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze (p. 125). He already pointed to the systematic analogy of these philosophies in an earlier paper (Kennedy and Kohan, 2016), but it is only with this new term that we can easily distinguish them from other theories of childhood.
Childhood
Caputo begins her contribution (which should be in Part II rather than Part I) with a warning which unfortunately not all contributors heed. She notes that the child has traditionally been interpreted according to a specific dual scheme. On the one hand, the child is the minor which lacks reason and needs to overcome this minority to become mature. On the other hand, the child is a lost ideal and origin and as such object of adult nostalgia. In the context of philosophy, both approaches prompt problems: ‘in the first scenario a philosophy for children becomes unthinkable; while in the second case we run the risk of thinking that the child is the only true philosopher’ (p. 106). Especially the second is problematically present in a few contributions. According to Costello for example, ‘children are in a position to be most philosophical’ (p. 66). Another example is Bonnett, who construes a dichotomy between a scientistic approach to the world and a more fundamental and truthful other approach. He then writes: ‘In some ways this mirrors the distinction between adulthood and childhood’ (p. 97). But if this romanticizing of childhood is problematic, what is the alternative? Both Caputo and Rollo defend dialogue rather than playing out the one against the other.
They write that it is not about taking childhood up in adult thinking, nor cancelling adult thinking in childhood, but rather about becoming aware of their differences and to allow for dialogue (p. 107). Caputo names the interplay between philosophy with children and philosophy of childhood as example. But especially Rollo does an impressive job at being sensitive to differences between childhood and adulthood, while also proposing constructive ways to bring them into dialogue. His argument gains even more importance, because he also shows that the denial of children’s agency is a major cause of racism and other discriminatory discourses and practices. A postcolonial philosophy should therefore also reflect on the status of childhood.
A prime example of the denial of children’s agency is the scientific discourse of development. As I noted above, this volume aims at constructing alternatives. Childhood is not understood as a stage of life, but rather as a mode of being (p. 145). As a mode of being, childhood does not simply pass away when we enter adulthood. This latter claim is affirmed in one way or another in almost all of the contributions and it is perhaps less strange than it appears at first sight. We know it for example from discourses such as inner child psychology or the critique of society’s supposed infantilization (which is supposedly self-evidently a bad thing). 3 Thinking, Childhood, and Time offers more systematic and critical alternatives to these discourses, while at the same time remaining faithful to the idea that childhood remains with(in) us.
I already noted that Mensch and Weber affirm the remainder of ‘childish’ senses of time in adult life. In a similar vein, Kennedy and Kohan call our attention to the slumber of aion in adulthood. Although perhaps repressed, aion remains there and can wake us up to new possibilities (p. 119). It is attested to in various practices, as Jean-François Lyotard writes: ‘literature, the arts, philosophy. There too, it is a matter of traces of an indetermination, a childhood [enfance], persisting up to the age of adulthood’ (Lyotard, 1993: 3).
This volume teaches that we can also add education to these practices. In education, the teacher should join with the child in exploration, by means of what Mensch termed ‘empathy’ or what other contributors call ‘dialogue’. The possibility of such empathy or dialogue presupposes that the adult life is not completely estranged from childhood. It is then one of the tasks of the educators to not let this inner childhood disappear. As Paolo Freire said: ‘I think that one of the best things that I have done in my life, better than the books I have written, was never allowing to die in myself the child who I could not be as well as the child who I was’ (quoted on p. 138).
In this regard, Bonnett makes an interesting link between creating space for childhood in education and the experience of wonder. Perhaps wonder is another of those testimonies to a childhood that remains (Jones, 2013). If we combine this link with the re-conceptualization of childhood undertaken in this volume, we must ask: how can we create time and space for childlike wonder in educational practice?
Thinking
The re-evaluations of childhood and time have consequences for what we understand by thinking. In general, philosophy as understood in this volume is more concerned with ways of thinking rather than acts of knowledge (see also Kennedy and Bahler, 2016: xvi). The danger is that thinking is understood as a kind of abstract timeless activity of an adult intellect, which is a one-sided view. Many contributors bring the child’s more embodied and enactive way of being into play.
Rollo connects a ‘childish’ thought to the recent paradigm of 4E (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended) cognition in philosophy of mind (p. 147). This is a very fruitful connection, as it clarifies that childlike thought remains in adult thought in a way analogous to Mensch’s genetic phenomenology. However, Rollo defends this by incorporating insights from the analytic tradition rather than phenomenology. The notion of a childhood that remains can thus be defended with the results from different theoretical approaches.
Rollo’s call for the inclusion of more embodied and enactive forms of thought resonates with a lot of the other contributions, for example Costello, Murris and Berger and Argent. Costello notes that for children, thoughts are not their own. Rather, ‘thoughts think themselves into children, and children extend themselves into thoughts as a response to the call of the situation, of the world’ (p. 68). This prompts the question if this agency of the thought itself is limited to childhood as a stage of life, or if – since childhood remains in adult life – it remains a component of adult thought as well. It would be interesting to learn more about the interplay of passivity and activity in the act of thinking and how childhood can shed new light on this.
Berger and Argent argue that thinking about childhood cannot suffice with remaining outside of the practices of children as if they could be described as happening there while the researcher as observer stands outside of it. They narrate the ways in which children relate to their surroundings and the objects therein, but from the perspective of participants rather than observers. The educational aspect of these encounters consists in the stretching of life towards new possibilities and connections. Berger and Argent write that ‘attention is a form of reciprocity with the living world’ and that ‘we may think of education as keeping that reciprocity in motion’ (p. 203). For example, their narrative of children playing with woodblocks clarifies that it is one-sided to ascribe agency solely to the children. Rather, what occurs is more like an encounter between child and woodblock that takes them both up in a new kind of assemblage (see Gallagher, 2019: 189–193). Thought becomes embedded, extended, enactive, embodied and affective.
Although this is an innovative and inspiring new theoretical framework, I am a bit worried about some of its implications. For example, it becomes hard to judge the veracity of this approach itself, since Berger and Argent write: ‘to create concepts is, at the very least, to make something, and the measure of success of such a venture is in its intensity, and not in truth finding’ (p. 206). Interestingly, they link this conception to a quote from Deleuze about literature. I, and I believe Deleuze would agree, do not think that philosophy and literature are the same (even though they cannot perhaps be neatly separated). Moreover, intensity as sole criterion makes it almost impossible to deal with the problem of justice (Bennington, 1988: 1). This does not necessarily mean that Berger and Argent’s approach has to be abandoned, but I do believe it requires a supplement to account for the difficulties of establishing truth and justice.
Conclusion
Thus far I have summarized how the contributors conceptualize a childhood that remains. This ‘remaining’ occurs in a different sense of time than chronological measurable time and requires another way of thinking. However, exactly in what sense childhood remains is not yet fully clear after reading this book. Is it in the immersion in play, the ‘forgetting of time’ which occurs there? Or does childhood remain as a subversive force (aion), most of the time repressed by the requirements of adult life? The lack of a clear answer to these questions shows the need for further research and synthesis.
However, this book already provides plenty of building blocks. It contains many more valuable insights than I have mentioned in this review. Due to the different approaches, concepts and insights on thinking, childhood and time, I recommend this book for every researcher interested in the philosophy, ethics and politics of childhood and education today.
