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xi Preface: A Philosopher Who Is Willing to Observe Flannery O’Connor wrote, “The fact is that anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days” (1969, 84). To begin a book asserting the relevance of childhood for our understanding of the human condition seems trite. Of course, childhood greatly shapes our adult experience of the world. One’s situation at birth—genetic make-up, family, class, cultural milieu—initiates a history that one is compelled to continue. Rebellions will always be rebellions against the past; even if we define ourselves by rejecting the past, rebellions are inescapable. In adult life, childhood is present not only because it constitutes, for better or for worse, who we are, but also because we bring it forth in our interpersonal life. Our relationships are permeated by discussions about our own childhoods. We bond with new friendships comparing past humorous and sad stories. We relive our past with our own children, wondering if we should raise them differently than we were raised, wondering how much influence our behavior will have on them. It is not just in our everyday life that we see a wealth of interest in childhood. The academic study of child psychology is so diverse and so specialized that no one person could hope to master the wealth of peerreviewed articles and texts which concern themselves with the child. Yet, although childhood is evidently critical to our self-understanding, can we really speak meaningfully about the child’s experience? I can only access my childhood self through memories of often questionable veracity. Since so much of how I view my childhood changes as my adult life transforms , it seems impossible to pronounce the truth of what my life was like when I was two, five, or ten years old. Any academic study of childhood would appear to be completely shut out from the child’s experience. How can we say what the child, especially the preverbal or minimally verbal child, feels, thinks, desires, and knows? This book approaches the child’s experience through Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s interdisciplinary work on child psychology. It acknowledges the difficulty of accessing the world of the child but encourages us to pursue a phenomenological approach to overcome these challenges xii P R E F A C E and to resist objectifying the child. In so doing it finds that an examination of childhood sheds illuminative light on the nature of adult embodied experience. Our embodied existence is not a limitation to a scientific account of the human condition; it is its ground. In a 1948 radio address, Merleau-Ponty explains, “We can no longer flatter ourselves with the idea that, in science, the exercise of a pure and unsituated intellect can allow us to gain access to an object free of all human traces, just as God would see it” (2004, 44–45). The fact that we must begin with something as ambiguous and hard to quantify as “experience” should not strike us as unscientific but instead should cause us to avoid unquestioned faith in scientific “objectivity.” Our embodied experience has never been so well researched. Neurology , genetics, psychology, and psychiatry criticize our philosophical forefathers who so erroneously thought that the questions of the intellect were independent from questions of the all-too-human concerns of the physical-psychical being.* We know that our psychological and physical development conditions our later adult responses. As research in genetics has made us revisit and question assumptions regarding our freedom, the examination of our development calls into question if we can examine solely the adult to know the nature of motivation, character , freedom, and intersubjectivity. A study of human development helps outline the manifold influences that shape human experience, from the importance of physiology and psychology to culture, language, and the environment. To avoid the challenges that arise in any investigation of the child’s experience, one could assume that the relevant aspects of it will reappear in the adult. Yet, while certainly the child lives on within the adult, the approach that addresses only adult experience fails to understand how the child lives on in the adult. A phenomenology—an exploration of the world of the child—is needed. Merleau-Ponty’s texts are rich with psychological, sociological, and anthropological references. His approach is strongly interdisciplinary and eclectic in his discussion of child experience, human development, social and cultural determination, and the role of scientific investigation . Such...

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