Philosophy and Childhood

Philosophy of childhood is an academic field born at least with Heraclitus and his connection between aion (time), pais (child), and basileie (kingdom). There are many ways of understanding the nature, scope, and interlocutors of a philosophy of childhood, depending basically on the way two questions are answered, explicitly or implicitly: “what is philosophy?” and “what is childhood?” Even more, a philosophy of childhood can begin by a consideration of the word “childhood.” In the ancient Greek language there were many words for “child” but no word for an abstract substantive (childhood). In Latin, infantia is a rather late word, meaning literally “lack of voice” but used in fact in court to refer to those who were not allowed to give testimony in their benefit. So, the lack designated by in-fantia is legal, political, and not linguistic. In romance languages all words designating childhood come from that one: enfance (French); infancia (Spanish); infanzia (Italian); infância (Português), etc. So that in English, infancy would be more literal but because of the common use, in this entry we’ll use childhood. Is childhood a stage of human life? Does childhood need to be associated with (aged) children? An affirmative answer to these questions is the “obvious” and normal response, but not the only one. When childhood is understood as a stage of life, the concept of childhood is intimately related to the concept of adulthood and child-adult is an intrinsic, contrastive pair, so that every conceptualization of childhood implies a conceptualization of adulthood as well. A concept of childhood, then, is closely associated to a concept of time. While the concept of childhood as a stage of life presupposes a chronological concept of time (numbered movements composed by the past and the future, being the present a limit between both), with alternative concepts of time, other concepts of childhood emerge. Examples of these hetero-chronological concepts of childhood in the so called Western tradition are: Nietzsche (In “The Three Metamorphoses,” the child is the last non-lineal but circular transformation of the Spirit; it is not at the beginning but at the end of life); G. Deleuze, who invented the concept of “becoming-child” which does not refer to any personal child but to an impersonal force, a space for the transformation of subjectivity; J.-F. Lyotard, according to whom childhood is a state that is present the whole life as a testimony of a debt taken by the being with the non-being before each human being is being born; G. Agamben, who proposed childhood as a condition for language, history, and experience; and Paulo Freire, who understood childhood as curiosity and as a possibility though the whole life of any human being regardless of her age. At the same time, philosophy of childhood in contemporary philosophy is closely connected to philosophical inquiry and practice with children, a field that received great support in the contemporary period from figures like Matthew Lipman, Ann Margaret Sharp, and Gareth Matthews.