The Children, They Know
Who is doing this work of acting-on-the-possible where the sidewalk ends? What makes them act on possibility at the edges of death? How are they attuned to the Possible? Are these the children that Silverstein identifies? The children who know and mark so that others might know? Silverstein is not alone in his description of the knower. Ernst Bloch begins The Principle of Hope stating that to think oneself into what is better first proceeds inwardly which “indicates how much youth there is in man” (Boyne, R., 1989). Steiner (1965), presented that human life holds the “germs of its own future” within itself, and the “future state [resides] within [the] hidden depths…of the child”, not just for the child’s sake alone, but for the larger body of humanity and its growth and evolution. Who are the children, and why children? How do they become knowers? Is it wonder, puzzlement, and pain that enable children to see, hear and leap into the unknown, into possibility?
The circumstances of childhood, particularly early childhood, seem to be the most philosophically provocative time in one’s existence. Being thrown into the world, children contend with philosophical quandaries from the get-go as they are becoming inducted into a kind of existence that others have either become accustomed to, have already negotiated amongst themselves or are trying to negotiate the terms of existence. Philosopher Gareth Matthews, who inaugurated the philosophy of childhood, explains that "in important part, philosophy is an adult attempt to deal with the genuinely baffling questions of childhood" (Matthews, 1994, 13). Young children’s questions emerge upon entering or as the existentialists prefer, being thrown into this world. Young children’s existence upon thrownness is not an event that is foreclosed. From the point of existence, children “are faced with rules and norms they have not internalised yet and want to understand the justification for them” (Goeing, 2008). This assumes that children are firstly, innately attuned to the physical and philosophical perplexities of everyday living. Secondly, children are actively engaged with these perplexities without being tethered to any ‘norms’ of living. In putting those assumptions together, children’s engagement with the perplexity and absurdness of life and living is meaning-making and a search for new horizons. For children, being thrown into existence in this world is not a deterministic life sentence that needs new imagining for one’s salvation, but one that is indeterministic where every encounter with entities in this world presents an engagement of imaginative ethical deliberation for that time, for that time’s projection of the future. Others, particularly adult counterparts, see children as foreclosed upon their entrance into this world. They impress the foreclosure of structural defects of social, cultural and political systems onto that child, accepting that because children are born into their unique set of subjectivity, their probable projection for life can be and has been calculated, therefore rendering a prognosis for their existence as being-toward-death which is dasein’s utmost possibility. Perhaps these individuals see their existence as one that is foreclosed by others in this world and hence they prognosticated the child’s utmost possibility even before the child works out his existence. Farthing this position, it is not only the child that they see as foreclosed, it is also the potential adult that is presented in this child as determined from birth. The person at any given point of existence then exists as an unfolding symmetry of the assemblage of both child and adult of the same person (Priya, 2023) against the horizon of time.
Hence in the space of philosophical perplexity, children are “knowledge holders” (Petryna, 2022) as they exercise experimental knowledge production pathways in their search for solutions, justifications, or balance in their experience of existing as they “stand in a space between the present and the future that is liminal and porous” (57), the place where the sidewalk ends. In what Petryna identifies as a data-scarce environment (46), children are already remediating knowledge through philosophical questioning. Children negotiate and disclose new boundaries in the ‘foreclosed’ world of others simply through the construction of meaning and reasoning of a world that is not pre-rationalised. Mathews (1994), deems children's observations and philosophical comments often "have a freshness and inventiveness that is hard for even the most imaginative adult to match…in philosophy, as in poetry, freshness and inventiveness are much to be prized". Petryna (2022) reveals this nuance in doing science, through new and experimental knowledge production of fire scientists and managers who threw away their mental slides – coherent scientific, reliable and stable knowing – as “they don’t match up with reality” (90) and face the rapidly switching fire that is in front of them. Entering into this experience connotes a similar entrance into an ethical deliberation much like the children as “we no longer know what fire is (112).
These processes that children engage with as dasein’s or beings-toward-death that are thrown into the world, trace the question of what makes dasein its utmost possibility and why several thinkers identify children as ‘knowers’. In taking ‘children’ in Silverstein’s poem out of a biological, ontical interpretation, one can argue that children are the “unusual person” (Petryna, 2022, 40) that conduct inquiries of meaning-making under conditions that are unintelligible, murky, and in constant change. It takes an unusual person to remain in this space, or to come back to this space, to throw out slides of prescription and admit oneself into dialogue with ‘fires’. We see with children that one is already oriented toward meaning-making upon being thrown to existence, but concurrently, in the face of the angst that Heidegger would say is an everpresent mood of existing, one is also at risk of becoming a fugitive from possibility. Possibility poses a hermeneutic demand for being in flux – to leave the known and move into the unknown, making a home where there is none. Rinaldi (2021) identifies this state of transition and flux, as the “basis of true education”, where one moves beyond the edges and fissures of knowledge and into the perplexities of existence. This leaves us with open questions such as: Is possibility truth-seeking? What are the ethical parameters after throwing the ‘slides in the face of unstable conditions of social, political and environmental living? Is possibility the immaterial real estate that is at risk of being taken? What happens when one’s possibility is unbalanced with systems of how life is organised in this world? How much further is one able to ‘horizon’? What is this unknown that we are supposed to be in?