Oldal 126 [126]
Birth is the creation of the one, who can then become an individ¬
uum. It is the creation of possibility: the possibility to be human,
and the possibility to lose their humanity. Either-or.
1. The baby is the same cast into the world. Let us consider:
the baby knows nothing of the other. Its concerns, struggles, and
sufferings are all exclusively within its own inner world. The baby
cries if it is hungry, cries if something hurts. Ina panic, the parent
searches for the reason. They feed it, but it keeps crying. They
comfort it, but it keeps crying. They try to find something that
might be causing it pain, they rush the baby to the doctor, but the
baby keeps crying. They rock the baby to distract it, but they are
not successful, because it keeps crying. Just because.”
Later, if the parent gives the child a rattle, the baby seems to forget
all about everything and everyone else, because nothing else exists
for it, just the same. Its hand moves, the rattle makes noise, and it
searches for where the sound is coming from. It looks at the rattle
in the hand, but not at a rattle in its hand (nota bene: it has no
hands, no feed, no head—this is complete sameness). It does not
understand, nor could it understand. It lives in pure perception.
Later, when it is older, the baby discovers the rattle, which turns
out not to be alien from it after all. It realizes that the rattle is in its
hand, because by then it has hands, feet, and a head. And it shakes
it harder and harder. This is its own. Here, the complete sameness
has ended. The other has appeared, which will later become its
other, its other-existence. The consciousness discovers perception,
or to put it more precisely perception brings the consciousness into
being. (“His criterion of truth is thus self-equality.”) (PoS. p.71. italics
mine) The consciousness knows of itself, and so the possibility of
the self comes into being, which will then become real through
52 This brings to mind Bergman’s genius film, The Serpent's Egg (1977). They
conduct an experiment to see how long a mother can stand to hear her baby
cry. They give the child a chemical injection so that no matter what the
mother tries, it will not stop crying. What starts as empathy turns over time
to panic, until in the end the mother murders her own child.