The Philosophical Baby (1998) Alison Gopnik

Of the unpardonable violence that science has levied against humankind, perhaps none is more grievous than that of the old and pernicious belief that babies are less conscious than adults; It was only 1987 that, after recognizing that infants do suffer pain, doctors began to administer anesthesia to babies undergoing surgery. Prior to this moment it was presumed by the medical establishment that the baby possessed a dumb half-awareness and could not feel pain, or if felt, the pain would not be remembered. The baby, of course, remembers everything and unconsciously archives such memory in more visceral detail than science is yet able to acknowledge. While Alison Gopnik makes no pact with the unconscious, or psychoanalysis in general, she uses what blunt tools she has to map out the magic cartography that is the child’s psyche (and that psychoanalysis had been aware of for the last 120 years). The thesis here is that a baby is rather far more conscious than any adult. Such consciousness possesses a mystical capacity; it is fecund, super-adaptable and amphibious; residing at once within the impossible real and submerged within the fantastical currents of dream (contained by the mother); in a word: the child’s consciousness is psychedelic. It is the entanglement between the limits of real and dream that powers the dynamo that is the child’s mystical psyche and makes the volcanic production of language itself. The child learns to navigate an environment that is far beyond what most adults can know or imagine and as such the child gains a knowledge (savoir) that is foreclosed to the adult; the world is born anew with every infant. But the book’s bias towards philosophy betrays its more sci-fi implications; Alison Gopnik imagines a baby as if he were a little Bertrand Russell systematically invalidating metaphysics while becoming super-literate of any given environment. And yet it is more likely the case that the child’s profound genius exists precisely because they think outside of and prior to the giant structures of philosophy ordering the symbolic. A better name for the book then would have been The Mystical Baby, for clearly, as the book unknowingly argues, the child is the world’s true and original mystic, residing as they do at the sensory limit of human experience.