It is a supreme privilege and joy to help initiate a baby into human society.

It is intrinsically good on every level — spiritually and emotionally, of course, and even somehow physically — but it is also intellectually fascinating. “Early childhood development” stops being a remote body of knowledge, and becomes experience-near insights, rooted in prolonged firsthand experience. A passage like this makes immediate sense, because the experiences to which it refers are so fresh:

Pointing is not a solitary act by which one actor or thinker confronts the world, identifying objects by means of this act. Rather, the act of pointing implies not only that there is something else to be pointed to, but also that there is someone else to perceive the pointing. Pointing is a fundamental social process. Pointing only makes sense within a social relationship: if a subject is pointing at something to another subject.

Although Kamlah and Lorenzen mention this fundamental sociality of pointing, the impact of this insight is accounted for in sociology, in the sociology of knowledge and in science studies rather than in philosophy. The communicative act of pointing makes it clear, in fact, to what extent knowledge and thinking are social: pointing is founded on a relationship between at least two subjects, who refer to a third element in a way that makes sense to them. If we consider pointing to be a basic act, we must also consider its basic sociality. It is the most general thesis of this book that communicative actions, such as pointing, are the fundamental social process by which society and its reality is constructed.

But now I am thinking about the full range of nonverbal communication that occurs between a baby and adults. Deictic communication (pointing, referring), including indicating actions to imitate, are part of it. But equally important is expression of physical and emotional states — most importantly to indicate needs.

All the talking we eventually learn to do is rooted in a primordial unity of physicality, of feeling, of perceiving, of relating — a world we inhabit a few painful, precious years before language develops to mediate it, tame it — and unfortunately, all too often, to eclipse and replace it.

The key to living in reality (versus our conceptualizations of reality) is maintaining connection with the primordial chaos, and keeping language in this role of mediator, and not as something that dominates or eclipses our participation in this strange, very physical, very intuitive participatory relationship we have with what William James famously called “one great blooming, buzzing confusion”.

The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion; and to the very end of life, our location of all things in one space is due to the fact that the original extents or bignesses of all the sensations which came to our notice at once, coalesced together into one and the same space.

Craft brings us back to materials, so we can hear the buzzing, blooming chaos to which we and all things belong, long before we slice thing up into subjects and objects and qualities — light and dark, upper and lower, dry and wet, animal and mineral — each labeled with a name and therefores — all stacked up and ready to be inventoried, quantified, utilized and managed.