Growing up

LISTEN. Maturity in the Kantian sense is going to be an anchoring theme in my CoPhi (Intro) classes this Fall, with Susan Neiman's Why Grow Up? one of our new texts. She's a Kantian, and while I'm generally not one in the ethical sphere (leaning pragmatic/utilitarian) I do also endorse the sentiment that accepting responsibility for one's own thought is central to philosophy's civilizing mission.

The Kantian point is another of those crucial remembrances our conformist natures, and culture, press us to forget.

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding! What is Enlightenment?

Growing up is letting go of the false security that comes when we defer to what "they" all say and know, and realizing our own voice -- but also realizing that our voice is finite, and part of a vast trans-temporal chorus. Self-possession of this sort goes hand-in-hand with a humanizing humility and species solidarity.

It's a late-dawning awareness for most of us, that at last brings real maturity and generosity. David Whyte, again, expresses this so well.

From his 2016 On Being conversation:

I often feel that one of the real signs of maturity is not only understanding that you’re a mortal human being and you are going to die, which usually happens in your mid-40s or 50s — “Oh, I am actually going to die. It’s not someone else I’m going to become.” But another step of maturity is actually realizing the rest of creation might be a little relieved to let you go [laughs] — that you can stop repeating yourself, stop taking all this oxygen up and make way for something else, which you’ve actually beaten a trail for. And it could be your son, your daughter, could be people you’ve taught or mentored; it could be — the more generous you are, the more that circle extends into our society and those who go after us.

More pithily, to repeat that marvelous line about the deepest source of unhappiness:

Why are you unhappy? -"Because 98.98% of everything you do is for yourself, but there isn't one."

So get over yourself, is the lesson. Grow up.

But that doesn't mean you shouldn't still have fun, which is why it delighted me to surprise Older Daughter with Ava Duvernay in her mailbox yesterday.