Feral Children & Foundlings

A Thought Experiment:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaspar_Hauser

Gardens and such

Rousseau’s adjudication of the savage propels him to meditate a riddle that has puzzled humanity through out recorded history, from the Tower of Babel to the formulation of philological discourse. A central problematic yielding little in the way of positivism, the origin of language rather represents a chronic deliberation reflective of historical conditions ordaining the arbiter's vocabulary.

Weighing these matters upon the “scales of impartiality,” Rousseau refutes the ability to explain man’s natural state with the language of civil society; nonetheless, he situates the noble savage with characteristically modern capacities and affects (Rousseau 98). An animal imbued with a soul and a freewill that may guide his actions against the statutes of natural order, Rousseau nostalgically gazes upon a distinctly modern bower erected through apprehension of racial Others.

Temporal Dialectic

“The Egyptians before the reign of Psammetichus used to think that of all races in the world they were the most ancient; Psammetichus, however, when he came to the throne, took it into his head to settle this question of priority, and ever since his time the Egyptians have believed that the Phrygians surpass them in antiquity and that they themselves come second. Psammetichus, finding that mere inquiry failed to reveal which was the original race of mankind, devised an ingenious method of determining the matter. He took at random, from an ordinary family, two newly born infants and gave them to a shepherd to be brought up amongst his flocks, under strict orders that no one should utter a word in their presence. They were to be kept by themselves in a lonely cottage, and the shepherd was to bring in goats from time to time, to see that the babies had enough milk to drink, and to look after them in any other way that was necessary. All these arrangements were made by Psammetichus because he wished to find out what word the children would first utter, once they had grown out of their meaningless baby-talk. The plan succeeded; two years later the shepherd, who during that time had done everything he had been told to do, happened one day to open the door of the cottage and go in, when both children, running up to him with hands outstretched, pronounced the word ‘becos’…Psammetichus ordered the children to be brought to him, and when he himself heard them say ‘becos’ he determined to find out to what language the word belonged. His inquiries revealed that it was the Phrygian for ‘bread’ and in consideration of this the Egyptians yielded their claims and admitted the superior antiquity of the Phrygians.”

-Herotodus, Histories