Ultra-things and Infra-things (Wallon)

Henri Wallon's term, adopted by Merleau-Ponty in chapters 3 and 7 of *Child Psychology and Pedagogy*: cosmological horizons toward which no objective attitude is available, but which the subject does not doubt. Earth, sky, parents-of-parents, the absolute "house" / "yard," death — beings present in the child's experience but outside the scope of bodily action. Crucially: ultra-things persist for the adult too (CPP ch. 3 §VIII, p. 209): "we are not able to think outside all points of view, we can push the frontiers of 'ultra-things' further (e.g., in learning the Copernican system), but we cannot eliminate them completely." The adult/child difference is not logical/prelogical but a difference in the ratio of ultra-things to determinate objects.

Key Points

• Ultra-things presuppose a preobjective time and space adhering to the subject. They are not "objects" in the world; they are horizons of reality.
• Wallon's developmental account (CPP ch. 3 §VIII): the child's world is dominated by ultra-things; the adult world is dominated by things. But the ratio, not the kind, is what changes.
• Ultra-things in the adult: death is the most obvious. Also the absolute "house" of one's childhood, "the country," "the family-as-such." Cosmological horizons: the universe-as-totality, deep time, unobservable ancestors.
• The dual horizon structure (CPP ch. 7 §XII, line 5406): "An interior horizon close to the structure of visible things (ultra-things and infra-things which dwell in a diffuse state…)" — infra-things are the inverse pole: micro-perceptual realities adhering to the subject's body without being objects of attention. The two horizons together structure the child's lived world.
• Why Piaget misreads "magical thinking": when Piaget asks the child about ultra-things ("how was the world made?"), the child gives ultra-thing answers — but Piaget records these as the child's thesis about reality, when in fact they are responses to questions about ultra-things, which adults could not answer either. "Children display their animistic and conjuring beliefs most forcefully when they are asked about these 'ultra-things,' but in regard to what they live and experience they are most reasonable" (CPP ch. 7 §VIII.A, line 5034).
• Time itself may have a different structure in the child (CPP ch. 7 §XII, p. 5418), not just a different content: cyclical eternity in the leaves of spring; ultra-time as the temporal correlate of ultra-things.

What the Concept Does

The ultra-things / infra-things distinction performs the philosophical work of:

• Defending Wallon's positive reading of child perception against Piaget's intellectualist translation. Piaget's "animism" diagnosis presupposes that the child holds theses about ultra-things; in fact ultra-things are horizons, not theses.
• Generalizing the child/adult difference to a ratio difference, not a logical-mentality difference. Adults still have ultra-things; children's ultra-things are simply more numerous and dominant.
• Anchoring the adultomorphism critique: when adults ask children about ultra-things, the questions are themselves ultra-thing questions; child responses cannot be evaluated against adult-thing standards.
• Prefiguring MP's late vocabulary of horizon, anonymous depth, world-as-not-totalized (CPP ch. 8: "the world is a totality that one cannot totalize"). Ultra-things are the developmental form of this structural-ontological insight.

What It Rejects

• Piaget's "magical thinking" as adultomorphic translation of child responses to ultra-thing questions.
• The logical/prelogical distinction (Lévy-Bruhl): the difference is structural-perceptual (ratio of horizons), not logical.
• The adult-as-fully-objective: adults still inhabit a world structured by ultra-things; complete objectification is impossible.
• The classical-physics treatment of horizons: ultra-things are not "limits of knowledge" but positively structuring horizons of experience.

Stakes

If accepted, ultra-things / infra-things:

• Rewrites the child/adult comparison: not logical/prelogical, not deficiency/maturity, but different ratios of horizon to thing.
• Anchors the late MP vocabulary: horizon, anonymous depth, world-as-not-totalizable.
• Connects to adherence-to-the-given-situation: the child's mode of adherence (rather than representation) is structured by the dominance of ultra-things.
• Connects to infantile-polymorphism: the child's not-yet-crystallized polymorphism is in part the dominance of horizon over thing.

Problem-Space

The problem this concept addresses: how to describe the dimension of experience that is real for the subject but is not an object of attention? Classical psychology has only objects (perceived) and not-yet-perceived (anticipations). Ultra-things are neither: they are present (the child does not doubt the existence of the sky, the absolute yard, the dead grandfather) but not objects. Same problem-space as the late MP's horizon, wild-being, anonymous-depth, and invisible-of-this-world.

Connections

• is Wallon's term — adopted positively by MP via Wallon's *Origines de la pensée*.
• contrasts with piaget-magical-thinking (foil; Piaget's translation artifact).
• prefigures horizon (late MP) — the structural form of ultra-things generalizes.
• prefigures anonymous-depth / invisible-of-this-world — the late ontology's positive horizon-vocabulary.
• underpins the adherence-to-the-given-situation reading of child experience.
• applies to death — the cardinal adult ultra-thing.
• contrasts with adultomorphism (cross-question: adultomorphism projects ultra-thing answers to ultra-thing questions onto the child as if they were thing-thinking).
• is the condition of intelligibility of realist-thought's diagnosis of "errors due to realist thought" in representation-of-the-world research.

Open Questions

• Does the ultra-thing concept survive into the late MP under different vocabulary (horizon, invisible)? The structural similarity is striking; lexical inheritance is unclear.
• What is the relation between ultra-things (horizon-of-reality) and infra-things (micro-perceptual realities adhering to the body)? CPP ch. 7 §XII gives both as paired in the "dual horizon"; the relation deserves more philosophical articulation than MP gives.
• Does the late ontology of *V&I* explicitly cite Wallon's ultra-things? (Probably not; Wallon largely drops out of late MP. Phase 8 candidate.)

Sources

• merleau-ponty-2010-child-psychology-pedagogy — ch. 3 §VIII.C (p. 209 cardinal Wallon citation, "ultra-things persist in the adult"); ch. 7 §XII (lines 5404-5418, the dual horizon); ch. 7 §VIII.A (line 5034, "magical thinking" diagnosis).