It is this unmediated sort of consciousness, which is so elemental in a child, that philosophers like Wittgenstein would have us, I think, retrieve (if the retrieving of it were possible), not so that we might plunge ourselves into an intellectual haze, where categorization fails, and a fluidity of value replaces the organizing principles by which we have learned to navigate reality (to survive, yes, but also to participate at a caliber that is befitting of such complex beings), but that we might integrate it with whatever functionality belongs to our mental apparatus now, so that the moral inertia and imaginative complacency that are the hazards of civilized life, once it becomes habitual, can be opposed, and brought to heel, by a naivety that is already in us, but that is no longer without the sophistication of experience.