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Birth is the creation of the one, who can then become an individuum. 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.
