LITERARY SCENES OF INTERACTION WITH BABIES

In Book 5 of Herodotus’ Histories, the story is told of how the baby Cypselus, who would become the tyrant of Corinth, survived the Bacchiadae’s first attempt to murder him.Footnote ³ Two prophecies revealed to the Bacchiadae that Eetion’s son would overthrow their rule. A group of men is sent to kill the baby; one of them takes the baby in his arms with the intention of killing him. At that point, something happens that makes all of them, one after the other, unable to carry out the murder (92γ3):

According to Herodotus, Cypselus owes his life to the fact that he providentially happened to smile just at the right time: it is his smile that somehow prevents the men who had the task of killing him from doing so. Herodotus explains this effect in terms of pity, oiktos. As Aristotle says, pity arises in cases of undeserved (anaxios) suffering; the close connection between axia and timê suggests that this passage might be relevant to the theme of babies’ honour.Footnote ⁵ Konstan interprets Aristotle’s association of pity and axia strictly in terms of moral desert—if this was the case, we could pity someone only when they are suffering for something despite their innocence.Footnote ⁶ However, moral desert is too narrow a lens for a case like this: the men already knew that the baby was not guilty of anything, and the smile would not change their perception of this. The question is what Cypselus’ smile changed in the men’s perception of the situation, and how and why it did so. The notion of pity as moral desert does not suffice to answer these questions; more satisfactory answers are offered instead by philosophical and experimental accounts of intersubjectivity.

In the twentieth century, but building on nineteenth-century foundations, first philosophy and subsequently the social sciences were revolutionized by the intersubjectivist turn.Footnote ⁷ The notion of intersubjectivity rejects merely objectivist and subjectivist approaches to reality, stressing the co-created nature of reality and of our understanding of it.Footnote ⁸ In philosophy, intersubjectivity was already at the core of the thought of Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). Of particular interest for our purposes is his notion of Aufforderung, an invitation or summons to recognition that an agent addresses to another.Footnote ⁹ More recently, Axel Honneth has expanded the account of intersubjectivity, linking it to recognition theory; in his view, interpersonal and social conflict should be seen as a form of our constant struggle for recognition, driven by our fundamentally intersubjective nature.Footnote ¹⁰ This understanding of recognition as a bidirectional dynamic is the one best suited to explain the multi-faceted and complex dynamics encompassed by the Greek notion of timê.

Thanks in particular to Trevarthen, intersubjectivity is now also at the core of modern developmental psychology. Generally speaking, interaction with other human beings is seen as the dimension where babies (and adults alike) co-create their reality and their understanding of the world. In particular, the most recent theories identify three main stages of babies’ psychological development, corresponding to three different forms of intersubjectivity, starting with primary intersubjectivity.Footnote ¹¹ The current investigation is primarily concerned with the first phase, that of primary intersubjectivity. Also referred to as the phase of emotion sharing, primary intersubjectivity expresses children’s capacity to interact dyadically with adults in their first nine months, in the form of embodied emotional alignment.Footnote ¹² The experiments on primary intersubjectivity have tremendous implications for the question of infants’ honour. As several studies have shown, infants are attuned to the adult’s facial expressions and movements from birth.Footnote ¹³ Various experiments demonstrate that, when adults do not respond adequately to infants’ emotion sharing, babies become upset, manifesting this by interrupting the interaction through visual cut-off.Footnote ¹⁴ Already at this stage, therefore, babies have expectations about how interactions with adults should go—namely, they should respect emotional alignment. This is the first form of the sense of fairness and of the expectations of mutuality that represent important and often unacknowledged characteristics of infants’ and babies’ psychology.Footnote ¹⁵ Moreover, this shows that babies’ behaviour and reactions are dictated by a need for recognition, or a ‘struggle’ for recognition, in Honneth’s terms. In fact, as Gallagher stresses, ‘Honneth’s account of recognition starts too late in the developmental story’, in so much as it ignores embodied primary intersubjectivity and the fact that infants too are involved in recognition dynamics, expecting and offering emotional alignment in their interactions with adults.Footnote ¹⁶

Another fundamental aspect is the ‘like me’ model developed by Meltzoff.Footnote ¹⁷ This notion, which can also be described as ‘self-other equivalence’, further undermines the traditional views of children’s solipsistic and egotistical nature. As Meltzoff’s research shows, infants can map their own experiences onto the behaviour of others, and vice versa. At first, this applies to bodily movements, but it then expands, gradually encompassing cognitive aspects, thus providing the foundation for social cognition. With regard to honour, this notion can also be seen as the foundation for the mutuality of recognition and for the bidirectional aspects of honour dynamics. Finally, the points about infants’ sense of self and their intersubjectivity are also supported by findings on emotional development. With regard to anger and shame, the emotions most closely connected to honour, recent studies show that children start to experience them early on. Studies on anger confirm the points about infants’ sense of fairness and of their own claims to respect, while the findings on shame show that soon after their first birthday infants worry about the impression they make on others.Footnote ¹⁸ Overall, this overview of modern accounts of infants’ psychology and development shows that essential aspects of honour and recognition dynamics play a crucial role for infants too. The science of early human development tells us that we are predisposed from the beginning of our journeys in the world to engage in bidirectional recognition with other human beings.

Let us now examine a different passage. In Menander’s Samia, Moschion’s ex-nurse notices that his baby is lying on a couch, screaming and crying. She picks him up, comforting him and holding him until he stops crying (225–6, 238–44):

This passage might appear banal in its content: the baby cries, somebody pampers him, he stops crying. However, this passage contains extraordinarily precious evidence for our investigation of infants’ timê. The keyword here is ἠμϵλημένον, ‘ignored’, ‘neglected’ (239). Nobody was taking care of the baby, and the lexical choice implies that this was a shortcoming on the part of the adults involved, namely the female servants who were busy with the preparations for Moschion’s wedding. The only person who pays attention to the baby and understands his needs is, unsurprisingly, Moschion’s ex-nurse. She immediately notices that the baby needs some attention and fondles him until he stops crying (ἐπαύσατο κλᾶον, 244–5): thus, she comforts the baby by simply rocking and addressing him with tender words. The baby was not crying because of hunger or other merely physical needs, but out of a need for recognition, as Honneth would put it: the infant’s cries express a claim to emotional attention, which both the nurse and Menander acknowledge and validate.Footnote ²⁰ Employing Fichte’s terminology, we can say that the infant’s cries represent an Aufforderung, an invitation or summons that only an agent can be thought to make. The fact that the nurse recognizes and responds to this summoning demonstrates her recognition of the baby qua agent.Footnote ²¹

We can now reconsider the episode of baby Cypselus. As we saw, a crucial question is why the man changes his mind on seeing the baby smiling; the answer lies in primary intersubjectivity and in dynamics of emotional alignment. Cypselus’ smile paralyzes the would-be assassin precisely because of intersubjective dynamics. Thanks to primary intersubjectivity, infants are predisposed to respond to adults’ facial expressions. This dynamic goes both ways, however, as adults engage in imitation of infants too.Footnote ²² Not only do adults respond to infants’ facial expressions, but they also feel that they have some responsibility to respond adequately. And this is why timê is relevant here. Generally, the right way to respond to a smile is to reciprocate it. By looking at the baby and seeing him smile, the man has found himself, willingly or unwillingly, in a situation of interaction and proximity with the baby.Footnote ²³ Because of primary intersubjectivity, the baby’s smile creates expectations of mutuality and recognition. The importance of proximity and contact is illustrated well by the functioning of supplication.Footnote ²⁴ Contact, either physical or visual, makes the suppliants’ demands more difficult to dismiss. The man is in the same position of the person whose knees somebody is clutching: ignoring the other person’s pleas is now a serious infringement of the expectations that proximity and physical contact tend to create. The parallel with supplication is highlighted by the outcome of the man pitying Cypselus and not being able to kill him.

The man is thus caught in a contradiction between his intention to kill the baby on the one hand and the intersubjective drive to respond to the infant’s claim to recognition on the other. In philosophical terms, on seeing Cypselus smiling at him, the man intuitively interprets the baby’s smile as a Fichtean Aufforderung, an invitation to recognize the baby as agent and respond appropriately in the interaction.Footnote ²⁵ The man’s change of attitude demonstrates that he now sees the baby as an agent: the man’s pity is based on a recognition of the baby’s status qua agent and of his claims to recognition and respect. Recognizing the strength of the principle of mutuality, the man feels unable to kill the baby, who appears axios, worthy, of being perceived as an agent and having his Aufforderung or claims acknowledged and respected.Footnote ²⁶ In this interpretation, this episode shows that the notion of axia that underpins pity is much wider than moral desert. It is not an appraisal of the baby’s moral desert that saves him, but the acknowledgement of the claims that others make of us, and the feeling that, in any given interaction with someone that we recognize as an agent, we are enmeshed in mutual obligations and expectations. Overall, this episode is thus a powerful illustration of the importance of intersubjectivity in the case of infants, and an acknowledgment of their status as agents capable of putting forth legitimate claims to recognition and respect.

Another perspective on similar problems is offered by a passage from another play by Menander, Epitrepontes. In the scene that gives the play its title, the slaves Syriscus and Davus are involved in a private arbitrage judged by the old citizen Smicrines. The slaves are arguing over the jewels found with an exposed baby (238–358): Davus was the one to find and take up the exposed baby, with the idea of rearing him; soon after that, however, he changed his mind and had second thoughts about raising the baby. Thus, when Syriscus begged him to give him the child, Davus agreed and gave the baby to him. We can read some of the lines with which Syriscus is claiming for the baby the objects that Davus had found with him (301–7, 316–18):

As the scene depicts a private arbitration, the perspective in the passage is mainly legal. The passage is therefore notable in so much as it shows that infants could be thought of as having rights in a legal sense. In his speech, Syriscus puts emphasis on the baby’s legal rights: the baby is not a thing, but a sôma, a person, and he is being wronged (σῶμ᾿ ἀδικούμϵνον, 318): the objects belong to him, and Davus is acting like a thief (τὸν λϵλωποδυτηκότ᾿, 312). sôma must here be interpreted as ‘person’, ‘human being’, and is thus the vaguest possible designation from a legal or social point of view.Footnote ²⁸ Syriscus’ point is therefore independent of the child’s legal status; according to him, the grounds for the respect owed to the baby consists in the fact that he is a human being, a person. Some lines later, Syriscus also makes the point that the tokens represent the only available clue to discover something about the legal status of the baby, who might be of free birth. The appalling eventuality that a baby of free birth, adopted by a couple of slaves, might lose the only possible evidence of his real status is a strong argument in Syriscus’ plea. However, the fact that the point about the baby’s legal status is only brought up in the second argument enhances the wider scope of the first point. Just on account of his being a person, the baby has the right to be respected and not to be deprived of what belongs rightfully to him.

In addition to these legal aspects, this passage is also significant because of the aspects connected to interaction and proximity. To stress his points, Syriscus takes the baby in his arms and declares that he is speaking on behalf of the baby himself. By addressing Davus as if it were the baby who was accusing him of theft, Syriscus powerfully stresses the baby’s status as an agent, capable of putting forth claims to respect. Additionally, holding the baby up so that Smicrines can see him better is a way to create a situation of proximity between the two, so that it will be easier for Smicrines to recognize the baby as an agent endowed with rights and claims, and to feel obligations towards him. With this twofold move, Syriscus is thus fostering Smicrines’ sense of involvement and responsibility towards the child. The interactive context that Syriscus creates resembles in crucial ways the scene of Cypselus’ attempted murder: physical proximity strengthens the obligations to respect and mutuality that a subject feels towards the other person. In other words, Syriscus is harnessing specific intersubjective means to reinforce Smicrines’ recognition of the baby’s claims to respect.Footnote ²⁹

PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS OF INFANTS’ PSYCHOLOGY

Let us now consider Plato and, more marginally, Aristotle. Both Plato and Aristotle are often taken to have narrow views of children, seeing them as passive, empty receptacles of any influence they are exposed to. Although these views are undeniably present in both authors, they actually draw a more complex picture.Footnote ³⁰ One first crucial hint as to this lies in the role played by thymos in their views of infants’ psychology. The meaning and function of thymos is highly debated, but what is certain is that it is strictly linked to timê.Footnote ³¹ Often translated as ‘spirit’, ‘spirited element’ or ‘anger’, we can describe it as the metaphoric locus of a desire for recognition and a sensitivity to one’s self-image and social image (which must not be seen as separate entities, but are actually intimately connected); one second related meaning, which underpins its meaning of anger, is the tendency to react when these images are threatened in some ways. Interestingly for us, both philosophers attribute it to newborns as well. In the fourth book of the Republic (441ab), Plato states that even new-borns are full of thymos:

This statement is echoed by Aristotle in a passage from the seventh book of the Politics (1334b23–5), in which he also affirms that all the three basic forms of desire, including thymos, are present in children from birth:

According to both Plato and Aristotle, then, children are equipped with thymos from the moment they are born. The question arises, then, of what the implications of this are, and whether we can take Plato’s and Aristotle’s statements about the thymos of infants as an acknowledgement of their desire for recognition. One might object that thymos simply refers here to the tantrums that babies throw to express their physical needs and has no implications beyond that. However, the passages that we have examined before authorize us to imagine that thymos has to do with timê in the case of infants too. Moreover, both Plato and Aristotle employ other elements to talk about merely physical needs; Plato’s passage is located in the section of the Republic devoted to the distinction between to epithymêtikon, thymos and to logistikon. Given that to epithymêtikon is specifically oriented towards physical needs, the point about infants possessing thymos must imply something about their struggle for recognition. Furthermore, one prominent meaning in both these two passages is thymos as anger. Together with aidôs and aischynê, anger is the emotion most closely connected to timê, as a response to some form of disrespect towards a legitimate claim. As supported by modern studies of babies’ psychology, behind this anger we are also allowed to see a sense of entitlement to recognition.

Plato seems to be quite concerned with children having an excessive sense of entitlement. In the seventh book of the Laws, the Athenian Stranger describes children as the most insolent among beasts, ὑβριστότατον θηρίων (808d):

Not surprisingly, then, he is strongly concerned with the upbringing of children. As he underlines in a different passage, the earliest stages of one’s upbringing have tremendous effects on one’s character, and it is of the utmost importance that babies be brought up in the right way to ensure they develop the proper character, êthos, thanks to good habit, ethos (792e).Footnote ³⁵ The negative outcomes of a bad education can have two possible extremes, as detailed in 791d:

tryphê, excessive indulgence, could lead to characters that are dyskoloi and akracholoi, ill-tempered and irascible, while its opposite, described as a form of doulôsis, literally enslavement, would make them tapeinoi and aneleutheroi, submissive and slavish (791d), as well as misanthrôpoi and thus unfit to live with others.Footnote ³⁷ Both these dispositions clearly have to do with timê, with an inflated sense of entitlement on the one hand and a deficient one on the other. As misanthrôpoi reveals, moreover, both deference and demeanour, in Goffman’s terms, are at stake here—that is both one’s attitude towards oneself and that towards others.Footnote ³⁸

This sentence refers to the characters of neoi, young men in their twenties, but the Athenian Stranger firmly believes that the roots of these dispositions lie in the early upbringing. In 791d–3e, he gives specific instructions for the upbringing of babies up to three years old and for children between three and six years old. For the former group, he recommends that they be exposed to a balanced mix of pleasures and pains. For the latter, he recommends punishing them so that they do not become spoilt, but they must not be punished in a degrading way, atimôs (793e), since, like slaves, children would become angry if they were punished with hybris. In the case of children between three and six, therefore, the relevance of timê and of intersubjective dynamics is made explicit. While for babies up to three years old the focus is on pleasures and pains, the other passages examined so far, and in particular Plato’s reference to infants’ thymos, support an interpretation that sees in this advice too a concern with babies’ sense of entitlement. If a baby is always pampered and never gets used to pain and lack of satisfaction, he will grow up with the assumption that he is entitled to be always satisfied in all his desires. As the Athenian Stranger says, it is in the earliest phase that the whole character is implanted in us; from the sentence on the possible outcomes in neoi’s characters, it is clear that our sense of entitlement, of our claims to dignity and respect, our deference and demeanour, our attitude towards ourselves and others—in a word our timê—are a huge part of our character, if not the most important.