Philosophy Meets the Infant

You attend, therefore I am.

This book finds the origin of self-awareness in reciprocal attention between infant and caregiver. To use mutual gaze as example: As with several animal species, a baby’s eyes follow a person’s shifting gaze. Evidently, she takes the person to be looking at something. When a caregiver gazes into her eyes, the baby likewise takes her to be looking at something. The baby does not see the “something” but feels it. This is the self in its awakening. You attend, therefore I am.

That addresses the philosophical problem of self-awareness: how what is aware can be what it is aware of. The two whats are mediated by the caregiver. When face-to-face, the infant’s awareness of the caregiver-attending is a condition for awareness of herself.

This looplike emergence of self is termed a “You-I Event.” The first chapters show how these Events generate basic features of self-awareness: that I exist, am aware, am embodied, can act on the world, have feelings distinct from others’ feelings, and continue to exist when alone.

Now comes a major turn in human life: Because the infant’s existence as a self depends on You-I Events, she dreads separation from her caregivers. On acquiring language, she quells the dread by playing them toward herself in speech. Such “self-talk” internalizes the You-I Event; she feels as if attended to by the internalized others. From now on she will use inner speech to secure the sense of her own existence. Thus arises the kind of self who, alone by the fire, can talk to itself and realize, “I think, therefore I am.” The original Event has gone into eclipse (which is why the You-I account is initially counterintuitive), but a longing for it persists beneath life’s surface, finding indirect expression in love, work, art, conversation, religion, and ethics (each of which gets a chapter).