Русское зазеркалье (двуязычная версия)

To dare ask general questions one must have something of a child, indeed. Once again, I want to remind you of Agnes Heller, a living Hungarian philosopher who clearly states that philosophy has always raised precisely the childish questions. Why do children ask childish questions at all? My answer is: because they, unlike us, are not fully aware of overt and covert mechanisms of this life of ours, the life that in all its particularities, including their own toys, games, and school activities, is shaped by adults, not by them. In other words, they do not feel at home here on earth, not as yet. They still have to learn how to grapple with both routine and not-so-routine procedures of our everyday and social life, from buying groceries to dating a girl, and from having a job interview to running a company. These procedures clearly differ in different cultures—even today when the world has become so monotonously standardised—and this is why tourists, expats, or refugees sometimes produce a very helpless impression, a very ‘childish’ impression, I might say: they, too, still have to learn how dating a girl in Rwanda differs from dating a girl in North-Atlantic countries. (One of the great errors of today, to note in parenthesis, lies in mistaking helplessness of a refugee for his or her innocence: the two characteristics are not synonymous, and never have been.)

(Another quick note: I also wonder why philosophers ask childish questions and will welcome your guesses about that.)

All this was an attempt to answer the first question of this lecture, namely, what are children. They are human beings very unlike ourselves, beings who do not know as yet how very mundane things, indispensable to exist here on earth as a grown-up person, are to be done. We, too, can learn from them how to behave in the spiritual realms that have been, so to speak, the country of their departure before they happened to arrive here. To be certain, my last remark is true for you only if you admit that these ‘spiritual realms’ exist at all. If, on the other hand, you firmly believe that our consciousness is just a result of material causes and conditions, such as the chemistry of our brain, my last remark immediately becomes full nonsense—and so does any sacred book of any religion that an atheist normally regards as a piece of a good—or bad—fiction. Bud this is quite another story.

Children still are to learn a big deal, and they do so by imitating what we adults do. This is exactly how words of one’s native language, among many other things, are learned by a three- or a five-year-old. No imitation is perfect, not at its beginning, and so children must be allowed to err; must be given a ‘safe space’ where they won’t have to answer for their mistakes. Each culture provides, or used to provide, children with such. Games in particular, childhood in general were seen as ‘the green zone,’ as a safe area with no (real) answerability for its inhabitants.