Cory,
"lonely outsiders"
can't help but see themselves as outside of a center of more value.
This "need" you speak of in babies is similar to this. The baby feels "apart" from itself.
The need and satisfaction of need I refer to in the human infant amount to biological need and physiological reaction, right down to its cutest little smile (which is more usually wind in the first few months). A pre-linguistic human infant has no concept of “centre” and “value”, and therefore cannot “feel apart from itself”, since it has no conception of being apart from its environment. In its earliest stages, we conceive of the human infant as being totally merged with its environment and all the things within it, since it is completely reliant on others for its survival. Without a parent of some description caring for it, it will die for its lack of ability to distinguish things, including its own needs.
As it grows and its brain and consciousness uniformly develop a capacity to distinguish between self and other and things/objects/environment, its “babyness” (need and satisfaction of need) gradually too becomes an object of its consciousness and it is only here that a potential for some sense of being apart from oneself can develop as what was need and satisfaction of need becomes separation and desire.
In other words, the baby isn’t lying there thinking, “I’m hungry, feed me”. Both its hunger and its demand for satisfaction of it are only “conscious” in the sense that a biological function reacts to physiological stimulus. We make a distinction between the stages of development of human consciousness (human infant, adolescent and the human adult) since such stages can be observed. This is not something a human infant does, neither will it ever have a capacity so to do whilst remaining human.
So although the baby is not necessarily self aware, it rages against a sense of incompleteness and helplessness. This carries over into the teenager years through envy, inferiority and loneliness. The self doesn't feel as if it's acquired what it needs to be itself. Therefore, the fascination with another becomes acute.
I’m really not sure what value you see in drawing a parallel here, and I think it extremely pertinent. Unlike in the adolescent, and that which might carry through well into adulthood, the “rage” in the baby is purely biological and has nothing to do with the much more complex consciousness of desire and conception of selfhood. Of course, such stages of development are transient and not entirely mutually exclusive. So yes, realistically, there exists also the early developmental stage wherein both exist simultaneously as a sort of psycho-physiological equilibrium.
What is the reasoning and/or evidence that supports your assertion that a human baby “rages against
a sense of incompleteness and helplessness”, (i.e., if you hold to the view that there is more, in terms of
self consciousness, to the human baby than biological need and its satisfaction)?
However, the woman feels the same way.
Well, yes—you mean, women are human, too.
So you have a woman who is making a big fuss over something out in the horizon (oh the big city! how I wish I could be there!) and then you have a man who wants to court her in the same spirit.
I’m sorry; I seem to have missed how this proceeds logically from what you have stated. I would have to fill in a lot of blanks to arrive here!
Both human beings are constantly placing more value on something outside of them. If only I had that person. I would make them my center. Obviously this doesn't work very well because neither human being has a center, yet, each expects the other person to be stable.
Right. So early male and female have no centre (no “I”). I don’t know then how you could reasonably object to the notion that a creature who makes a centre out of a creature who has no centre is that creature...
Were you agreeing with me without wanting to be seen to agree with me?
Furthermore, what a woman wants is different from what her male suitor wants. She's focused on large groups of people, precisely because she puts more value on the crowd than she does on her own worth. On the other hand, he's focused on her. The farce begins!
Again, I don’t see how this proceeds from what you have stated so far; it’s like there’s no centre in your writing and thinking, except a something without a centre!
I'll try to tackle the latter part of your post before the earlier carries us away... (: