A Mother's Smile - proof we are not organisms.

Are humans organisms ? Or ONLY organisms ? No - they are persons. The Mother-child relationship proves it.

John Macmurray goes into it HERE , and one can extend his insights onto epistemic reflection on the mother’s smile as first apprehended by the infant. For that gaze, to which the infant freely responds with an answering smile, shapes the infant, her reality, and her knowing. Knowing, from the get-go, is encounter and communion. Our whole lives may reasonably be seen as seeking the face of the other.

The mother’s smile isn’t just epistemically formative; it forms us ontologically—in our very being.

Here are a few excerpts from Macmurray’s essay :

“….human behaviour individual and social became saturated with biological metaphors and moulded itself to the requirements of an organic analogy. It became the common idiom to talk of ourselves as organisms and of our societies as organic structures; to refer to the history of society as an evolutionary process and to account for all human action as an adaptation to environment.

It was assumed and still is assumed in many quarters that this way of conceiving human life is scientific and empirical and therefore the truth about us. It is in fact not empirical; it is a priori and analogical. Consequently it is not in the strict sense even scientific. For this concept and the categories of understanding which go with it were not discovered by a patient unbiased examination of the facts of human activity. They were discovered at best through an empirical and scientific study of the facts of plant and animal life. They were applied by analogy to the human field on the a priori assumption that human life must exhibit the same structure.

We are not organisms but persons. The nexus of relations which unites us in a human society is not organic but personal. Human behaviour cannot be understood but only caricatured if it is represented as an adaptation to environment; and there is no such process as social evolution but instead a history which reveals a precarious development and possibilities both of progress and of retrogression. It is true as we have argued already that the personal necessarily includes an organic aspect.

But it cannot be defined in terms of its own negative; and this organic aspect is continuously qualified by its inclusion so that it cannot even be properly abstracted except through a prior understanding of the personal structure in which it is an essential though subordinate component. A descent from the personal is possible in theory and indeed in practice; but there is no way for thought to ascend from the organic to the personal. The organic conception of man excludes by its very nature all the characteristics in virtue of which we are human beings.

We start then where all human life starts with infancy; at the stage of human existence where if at all we might expect to find a biological conception adequate. If it is not adequate to explain the behaviour of a new-born child than a fortiori it must be completely inadequate as an account of human life in its maturity.

The human infant is his total helplessness.

In this total helplessness and equally in the prolonged period of time which must elapse before he can fend for himself at all the baby differs from the young of all animals. Even the birds are not helpless in this sense. The chicks of those species which nest at a distance from their food supply must be fed by their parents till they are able to fly. But they peck their way out of the egg and a lapwing chick engaged in breaking out of the shell will respond to its mother's danger call by stopping its activity and remaining quite still.

We may best express this negative difference with reference to biological conceptions by saying that the infant has no instincts.

All purposive human behaviour has to be learned. To begin with our responses to stimulus are without exception biologically random.

The baby must be fitted by nature at birth to the conditions into which he is born; for otherwise he could not survive. He is in fact ‘adapted’ to speak paradoxically to being unadapted ‘adapted’ to a complete dependence upon an adult human being. He is made to be cared for. He is born into a love-relationship which is inherently personal. Not merely his personal development but his very survival depends upon the maintaining of this relation; he depends for his existence that is to say upon intelligent understanding upon rational foresight.

His expression of satisfaction is closely associated with being cared for with being nursed with the physical presence of the mother and particularly with physical contact. It would seem to be from a biological point of view unnecessary. There is no obvious utilitarian purpose in it; for the cessation of his cries would be enough to tell the mother that her efforts had succeeded in removing his distress. It seems impossible to account for it except as an expression of satisfaction in the relation itself; in being touched caressingly attended to and cared for by the mother.

This is evidence that the infant has a need which is not simply biological but personal a need to be in touch with the mother and in conscious perceptual relation with her. And it is astonishing at what an early age a baby cries not because of any physiological distress but because he has noticed that he is alone and is upset by his mother's absence. Then the mere appearance of the mother or the sound of her voice is enough to remove the distress and turn his cries into smiles of satisfaction.

Now if we attend to these everyday facts without any theoretical prejudice it is obvious that the relation of mother and child is quite inadequately expressed in biological terms and that the attempt to give an organic account of it must lead to a caricature. For to talk of the infant's behaviour as an adaptation to environment ought to mean that it responds to external stimuli in a way that is biologically effective. Yet it is precisely his inability to do this that is the governing factor.

Further when we speak of ‘environment’ in a biological context we mean nature as the source of stimuli and of material for the supply of the organism's needs as well as of dangers to its survival. But the human infant is not in direct relation to nature. His environment is a home which is not a natural habitat but a human creation an institution providing in advance for human needs biological and personal through human foresight and artifice.

In general to represent the process of human development even at its earliest stage as an organic process is to represent it in terms which are equally applicable to the development of animals and therefore to exclude reference to any form of behaviour which is exclusively human; to exclude reference to rationality in any of its expressions practical or theoretical; reference to action or to knowledge to deliberate purpose or reflective thought. If this were correct no infant could ever survive. For its existence and its development depend from the beginning on rational activities upon thought and action. The baby cannot yet think or act. Consequently he must depend for his life upon the thought and action of others.

The conclusion is not that the infant is still an animal which will become rational through some curious organic process of development. It is that he cannot even theoretically live an isolated existence; that he is not an independent individual. 

He lives a common life as one term in a personal relation. Only in the process of development does he learn to achieve a relative independence and that only by appropriating the techniques of a rational social tradition. All the infant's activities in maintaining his existence are shared and co-operative. He cannot even feed; he has to be fed. The sucking reflex is his sole contribution to his own nutrition the rest is the mother's.

If we insist on interpreting the facts through biological categories we shall be committed to talking puerilities about maternal instinct. There is no such thing of course; if there were it would have to include some very curious instinctive components such as a shopping instinct and a dressmaking instinct. Even the term ‘mother’ in this connection is not a biological term. It means simply the adult who cares for the baby. Usually it will be the woman who bore him but this is not necessarily so.

From all this it follows that the baby is not an animal organism but a person or in traditional terms a rational being. The reason is that his life and even his bodily survival depends upon intentional activity and therefore upon knowledge. If nobody intends his survival and acts with intention to secure it he cannot survive. That he cannot act intentionally that he cannot even think for himself and has no knowledge by which to live is true and is of the first importance. It does not signify however that he is merely an animal organism; if it did it would mean that he could live by the satisfaction of organic impulse by reaction to stimulus by instinctive adaptation to his natural environment. But this is totally untrue. He cannot live at all by any initiative whether personal or organic of his own. He can live only through other people and in dynamic relation with them. In virtue of this fact he is a person for the personal is constituted by the relation of persons. His rationality is already present though only germinally in the fact that he lives and can only live by communication. His essential natural endowment is the impulse to communicate with another human being. Perhaps his cry of distress when he wakens alone in the night in his cot in the nursery has no meaning for him but for the mother it has; and as she hurries to him she will respond to it by calling ‘It's all right darling mother's coming.’

We can now realize why it is that the activities of an infant taken as a whole have a personal and not an organic form. They are not merely motivated but their motivation is governed by intention. The intention is the mother's necessarily; the motives just as necessarily are the baby's own. The infant is active; if his activities were unmotivated he would be without any consciousness and could not even develop a capacity to see or hear. But if he is hungry he does not begin to feed or go in search of food. His feeding occurs at regular intervals as part of a planned routine just as an adult's does. The satisfaction of his motives is governed by the mother's intention. It is part of the routine of family life.

We can dismiss at once any notion that we are born with a set of ‘animal’ impulses which later take on a rational form. There is no empirical evidence for anything like this and it is inherently improbable. In the absence of intention and knowledge consciousness is motive as we have seen. This means primarily that a feeling is present which selects the movement which responds to a stimulus. In the absence of any behaviour on the part of an organism that is of any activity which is so directed that we can understand it as an adaptation to the environment we have no ground even for suspecting the existence of a motive or indeed of consciousness at all. A motive is an element in or aspect of a behavioural activity. A specific motive means a specific form of behaviour. To say that any living creature is endowed with a set of motives can only mean that it behaves in a set of distinguishable ways and that its behaviour is of a kind which requires us to postulate a conscious component.

Now so far as concerns behaviour which is adapted to a natural environment the human infant does not behave at all. Its movements are conspicuously random. 

The movements gradually lose their random character and acquire direction and form. But the character of this development is quite unlike that observable even in the highest animals. It does not rapidly produce a capacity to adapt itself to the environment. In the early stages at least it does not seem to tend in this direction at all. It is quite a long time before the baby learns to walk or to stand or even to crawl; and his early locomotion so far from making him more capable of looking after himself increases the dangers of his existence and the need for constant parental care and watchfulness. Nature leaves the provision for his physiological needs and his well-being to the mother for many years until indeed he has learned to form his own intentions and acquired the skill to execute them and the knowledge and foresight which will enable him to act responsibly as a member of a personal community.

The child's progress appears rather to consist in the acquirement of skills as it were for their own sake without any distinguishable objective to which they are a means; and the primary stage seems to be concerned with the use of the organs of sense.

…we see that in human behaviour habit takes the place of instinct in animals. It functions in human activity as an instinct does in animal activity. The essential difference is that a habit is consciously acquired. It is a learned response to stimulus while an instinct is a response to stimulus which does not have to be learned. But this difference carries an important corollary. What has been learned can in principle be unlearned and relearned. If this is not in fact the case particularly with the basic habits which are acquired very early it is because the changing of a habit is a deliberate and conscious process which requires a sufficient motive to sustain it; and also because to unlearn a basic habit involves a cessation of all those higher-level activities in which it is an automatic component. It is this functional correspondence of personal habit and animal instinct which lies at the root of the widespread tendency to describe certain kinds of human behaviour as instinctive. It would however be less misleading to reverse the tendency and to speak of animal instincts as innate habits.

But there is a great difference between children's play and that of animals. The child is learning the life of a personal maturity; the animal a life of biological maturity. The difference is a difference in form not merely in degree of complexity. We need call attention only to a few of the differences. First animals in play are in general practising and so perfecting skills which are in some sense already present from the beginning. The child has to start from scratch and has to learn everything. All his skills are acquired. Secondly the child's acquiring of skills is a cumulative process. Simple skills are used in acquiring more complex skills and the process goes on indefinitely. For in learning them he learns how to learn. Thirdly at an early stage of the process we begin to suspect the presence of deliberate intention and soon we are sure of it. The form of the child's behaviour convinces us that he knows what he is doing. Opinions will differ as to the point at which a mere reaction to stimulus gives place to deliberate action; at which the child can form an intention and so foresee the end which is his goal and select a means of attaining it. We can be sure however that it does not come as a sudden miraculous intrusion; and that it has been present for some time before we can verify its presence as observers. 

We selected this negative aspect of the infant's life by the simple device of thinking of him as an isolate and seeking the origin of his behaviour wholly within himself; by treating him as a self-contained individual. In particular we referred the form of his behaviour wholly to him. But we have already noted that this is not correct. The form of his behaviour is governed by the intention of the mother in terms of a personal mode of corporate life into which it must be fitted. Because of this even the negative aspect of the child's development has a rational form although the intention which rationalizes it has to be for a considerable time wholly the mother's. The consequence is that the skills a child acquires and the form in which he acquires them fit him to take his place as a member of a personal community and not to fend for himself in natural surroundings.

A child’s play is not merely an exercise but a display of skill. The reference to the mother is pervasive in all the child's activities. He does not merely learn as animals do by instinct helped out by trial and error; he is taught. His acquirement of skills is an education. It is a cooperative process which requires from the start the foresight judgment and action of a mature person to give it an intentional form. Because of this the child's development has a continuous reference to the distinction between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. He learns to await the right time for the satisfaction of his desires; that some activities are permitted and others suppressed; that some things may be played with and others not. He learns in general to submit his impulses to an order imposed by another will than his; and to subordinate his own desires to those of another person. He learns in a word to submit to reason.

In the human infant—and this is the heart of the matter—the impulse to communication is his sole adaptation to the world into which he is born. Implicit and unconscious it may be yet it is sufficient to constitute the mother-child relation as the basic form of human existence as a personal mutuality as a ‘You and I’ with a common life. For this reason the infant is born a person and not an animal. All his subsequent experience all the habits he forms and the skills he acquires fall within this framework and are fitted to it. Thus human experience is in principle shared experience; human life even in its most individual elements is a common life; and human behaviour carries always in its inherent structure a reference to the personal Other. All this may be summed up by saying that the unit of personal existence is not the individual but two persons in personal relation; and that we are persons not by individual right but in virtue of our relation to one another. The personal is constituted by personal relatedness. The unit of the personal is not the ‘I’ but the ‘You and I’.

We can now define the original motivation-pattern of personal behaviour. We have recognized as the minimum of our original motive consciousness the capacity to feel comfort and discomfort. But the behaviour which is motived by this distinction is we now see an activity which communicates the experience to the mother. The motivation of the infant's behaviour is still bipolar; it has a positive and a negative phase; the negative phase being genetically prior since it expresses a need for the mother's aid while the positive expresses satisfaction in the supply of its needs. But both the negative and positive poles have an original and implicit reference to the other person with whom the infant shares a common life.

This original reference to the other is of a definitive importance. It is the germ of rationality. For the character that distinguishes rational from non-rational experience in all the expressions of reason is its reference to the Other-than-myself. What we call ‘objectivity’ is one expression of this—the conscious reference of an idea to an object. But it is to be noted that this is not the primary expression of reason. What is primary even in respect of reflective thought—is the reference to the other person. A true judgment is one which is made by one individual—as every judgment must be—but is valid for all others. Objective thought presupposes this by the assumption that there is a common object about which a communication may be made.

The human infant then being born into and adapted to a common life with the mother is a person from birth. His survival depends upon reason that is to say upon action and not upon reaction to stimulus.


There is from the beginning an element of symbolic activity involved which has no organic or utilitarian purpose and which makes the relationship as it were an end in itself. The relationship is enjoyed both by mother and child for its own sake. The mother not only does what is needful for the child: she fondles him caresses him rocks him in her arms and croons to him; and the baby responds with expressions of delight in his mother's care which have no biological significance.

 These gestures symbolize a mutual delight in the relation which unites them in a common life: they are expressions of affection through which each communicates to the other their delight in the relationship and they represent for its own sake a consciousness of communicating. It is not long before the baby's cries convey not some organic distress but simply the need for the mother's presence to banish the sense of loneliness and to reassure him of her care for him. As soon as she appears as soon as the baby is in touch with her again the crying ceases and is replaced by a smile of welcome.