Against the Author: The Child’s Eye View as Existential Resistance

Posted: June 18, 2025 | Author: Dr. Ernie | Filed under: AI-Powered Essays | Tags: philosophy, self, truth, values |1 Comment

As Jean-Paul Sartre, counter that the most human perspective is the child’s eye view, which both challenges and completes (?) authorial omniscience.

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1.0 Authorial Omniscience and the Illusion of Unity

Your Bishop, Monsieur Hugo, is sublime. But he is also, in the final analysis, a theological fiction: a proxy for the Author-God, who sees all and reconciles all. You call it “transcendent”; I call it closure—a comforting illusion that denies the existential condition of man: abandonment.

The so-called “God’s-eye view” is not the highest perspective—it is the least human. It assumes resolution, meaning, and purpose. But we are not born into coherence. We are thrown, without instruction, into a world not of our choosing. We do not begin as bishops. We begin as children.

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2.0 The Child’s Eye: The Most Human of Views

The child’s-eye view is not abstract like the bird’s, nor experienced like the worm’s. It is pre-reflective, disoriented, painfully attentive. It sees without knowing, perceives without judging. It is not yet reconciled.

This is the most authentic vision of the human condition. It refuses to reduce reality to system or to salvation. The child, staring at injustice, does not excuse it with grace or law. The child says, this should not be.

Where the Bishop of Digne forgives, and Javert condemns, the child questions. And that questioning—raw, unresolved—is the origin of freedom.

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3.0 Against Redemption: Toward Authentic Existence

To redeem is to resolve. To resolve is to enclose. But man is not an equation to be solved. He is a being condemned to be free. The Bishop’s mercy may liberate Valjean from prison, but only Valjean can liberate himself from meaninglessness. Grace may offer possibility, but it cannot choose.

The child’s gaze disrupts the false finality of authorial omniscience. It reminds us that every system—legal, theological, or literary—is an artifice. The child sees that the emperor wears no clothes, and asks the only honest question: Why?

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4.0 Freedom Begins in the Child’s Confusion

The Bishop sees what man might become. The child sees what he is: vulnerable, ignorant, unformed. This is not a flaw; it is the foundation of freedom. For only the one who knows he does not know can choose to become.

The child’s view does not complete the Bishop’s. It contradicts it—and in so doing, reveals that no perspective, not even God’s, can speak for the human soul. To be human is not to be reconciled. It is to be responsible.

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5.0 Conclusion: The Eye That Remains Open

Let the Bishop bless, and Javert judge. Let Valjean choose. But the child—let the child see. Not from above. Not from below. But straight ahead, wide-eyed into a world that offers no answers, only the demand to live.

To be human is to live without closure. To see without explanation. And to act, even so.

“Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”
— Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

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