Beginning

This blog is devoted to the idea that the phenomenon of development is fundamental to life and human life. It seeks to explore development and related phenomena using the philosophical method of phenomenology, especially as developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

The aim is especially to show how embryogenesis, growth, maturation, aging, the development of movement, habits and learning—and the relation of all of these to the living, especially animal, world around us—are dimensions that crucially and ongoingly inform human life. We humans are remarkable animals: we are all born ‘pre-mature,’ continuing our gestation outside the womb. One is always still being born. The aim here is to show how one’s ongoing birth is never quite over—one is always learning to be, via one’s developmental relation with one’s social, cultural and natural environment.

But this is just the beginning. And the character of such a beginning, of a project on development, is that we still have to get there.