The short answer is: because it’s harder than you think, so hard that it can amount to resistance. The forces that shape our world are no more interested in real grown-ups than they were in Kant’s day, for children make more compliant subjects (and consumers). In pointing this out Kant was careful to point out the ways in which we collude in our own immaturity: thinking for yourself is less comfortable than letting someone do it for you. While the structure of the problem was already clear to Kant, the means by which we are kept in states of immaturity are more subtle and invasive than they once were. We’re besieged by mixed messages. Half of them urge us to get serious, stop dreaming and accept the world as it is, promoting the picture of adulthood as capitulation to the status quo. The other half blasts us with products and suggestions that are meant to keep us young. What we rarely receive is a picture of adulthood that represents it as the ideal it should be. If the dismal vision of maturity was never explicitly planned by those whose interests lie in the world remaining no better than it is now, it serves those interests well. What better way to keep people in self-incurred immaturity than presenting a vision of maturity to which no right-minded soul could aspire?
What do you think of when you hear the word ‘serious’? The dictionaries are double-edged. They list synonyms like stern, unsmiling, grim, dour and humourless, but also earnest, genuine, wholehearted, committed, resolute. ‘Meaning what one says or does’ is one definition; ‘concerned with grave, important or complex matters’ is another. The dominant picture of adulthood blends all these meanings into one sour brew. As a result, even very thoughtful people can take the resolution not to grow up as a sign of freedom and spirit – as I discovered in the reactions of two friends upon hearing I was writing this book. Each of them, differently, is among the most successful grown-ups I know, though only one has achieved anything resembling conventional success. Both are grandfathers now, still leading lives of passionate work as artists and authors, of open-hearted multilingual travel and activism. Both were dismayed, and one was disgusted, on hearing my choice of theme. The other said bluntly: ‘My hero was always Peter Pan.’ You’d never guess it if you met him.
Given the complexity of social forces arrayed against it, coming of age is a subversive ideal. Like any ideal, it can guide our actions, but it will never be fully realized by any of them. Rousseau’s problem remains with us: it’s impossible to create fully active and responsible citizens in a society that undermines adulthood, yet it’s impossible to create another society without a fairly large number of responsible adults. Kant knew his solution could only be partial: growing up will never be complete. It’s the work of generations, for each of us is limited by an education we could not choose, from which we can, at best, take something of value, and only free ourselves partly from the rest. In 1968 the philosopher Herbert Marcuse even wrote: ‘All education today is therapy: therapy in the sense of liberating man by all available means from a society in which, sooner or later, he is going to be transformed into a brute, even if he doesn’t notice it any more.’31
But even partial liberation will leave the next generation a better place to start. Acknowledging that your best efforts to think and act autonomously will never entirely reach fruition, without acknowledging this as defeat, is part of growing up. It may even be misleading to think of the process as growing up, a metaphor that begins from the physical growth of childhood but encourages us to think of life as a path leading steadily towards the top of a great peak till we disappear into the clouds or slide down the other side, depending on our religious affiliation, or lack thereof. But the path isn’t steady. You reach a peak that turns out to be a foothill, steel yourself quickly to go down for a spell to walk the plateau, until you can begin to ascend again to the top of what you’re sure is now the real peak at last. One kind of success or another. The older you get, the more you know that the plateaus are not endless, the plunges rarely fatal. If you prefer to think in other modes of travel – for the metaphor of life as a journey is a very old one – you may like to think of yourself in Neurath’s boat: ‘We are like sailors who have to rebuild their ship on the open sea, without ever being able to dismount it in dry dock and reconstruct it from its best components.’32
Every analytic philosopher has heard this quote in an introductory course in epistemology or philosophy of science, and they will have heard that it was written by the Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath, one of the men who founded the Vienna Circle, often considered the birthplace of analytic philosophy. It’s unlikely they were told that it was first noticed in a book he wrote in prison, or that it is part of a book called Anti-Spengler. Neurath dedicated the book to ‘the young and the future they shape’ against the best-selling Decline of the West, in which Oswald Spengler presented a two-volume argument for downfall and doom.
Neurath chose a different path. In addition to writing and teaching logic, political economy, philosophy of science and sociology, he was a leader in developing housing for low-income workers, as well as the founder of the Viennese Museum for Social and Economic Affairs. His most passionate projects involved education, and he invented a system of graphic design for use in adult education that’s still influential today. Those are just the highlights. A lifelong left-wing Social Democrat, Neurath found himself in prison when the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic, whose office for economic planning he directed, was overthrown. After travels that embraced New York as well as Moscow, he left Vienna when Austria was annexed by the Nazis, and lived in exile in Holland and England. The sheer variety and intensity of his activities reveal a man who refused to give in to Spenglerian or any other messages to resign himself to accepting the flailing world he was given. His life may be as good a model for grown-ups as was his famous metaphor.
Certain readers will baulk at this point, if they haven’t already baulked before. It’s all very well for some … energetic types, but if that’s the sort of life you call grown-up, most people do not want it. They may not think that growing up entails wearing a tie or a serious (as in ‘dour’) expression, but they sense the demands that real thinking for oneself would make on them, and they’d prefer to spend their time on the couch surfing, thank you very kindly. What can you say to them? Rousseau’s Social Contract contains the unfortunate sentence ‘men must be forced to be free’, but he knew as well as any that freedom and force are at odds. We do speak of people who are forced to grow up, when war or abandonment or family tragedy prematurely thrusts them into responsibilities they should not have to accept. But nobody recommends it, for it’s just as likely to produce people who are bitter and fearful as the self-determined courageous adults whom we need. Maturity cannot be commanded, it must be desired. What we can offer is not force but persuasion, presenting models that are more compelling than the ones we now know. What’s needed is not rage against the dying of the light, but pace Dylan Thomas, rage against the picture of ageing as one of dying light. For some lights glow even brighter.
The sheer passage of time brings with it experience, and with it perspective. This isn’t yet wisdom, but it’s usually the case that perspective brings pleasures the young do not know. The last ten years have seen a flood of studies in which psychologists and economists report a finding that’s surprising in light of the view that coming of age is a lesson in disappointment: most people become happier as they grow older. These studies range from the Grant study, which conducted in-depth interviews with Harvard men over fifty years, to less meticulous but broader investigations of people across seventy-two countries. Most of them report what’s been dubbed the U-Bend: people become increasingly unhappy until middle age – the average global low point occurs at forty-six, though there is wide variation among nations, with the Swiss hitting bottom at thirty-five and the Ukrainians at sixty-two – at which point they report becoming steadily happier. Researchers controlled for all the obvious factors – income, employment, children – and found they didn’t matter. Regardless of social or economic standing, people report that their lives are happier as they grow older. The empirical evidence is constant from the United States to Zimbabwe.
The findings have sent scientists scrambling for explanations. One study used brain scans to argue that older people have reduced memory for negative images, suggesting that the ageing hippocampus selects rosier experiences and suppresses the rest. Another study compared the reactions of thirty-year-olds and seventy-year-olds to recordings of people who were disparaging them. While both groups reported sadness, only the young were really angry about it, suggesting that older people learn to manage emotion more smoothly. Both these explanations may contain some truth. Cynics can read the results as a result of diminished expectations: we become happier because we become happier with less. Most psychologists admit that we simply do not know why, in a world that portrays growing up as a process of decline – of hopes and joys as well as the physical capacity to realize them – so many empirical studies report the opposite.
They also report a good deal of growth. The American philosopher and psychologist William James was simply wrong when he wrote in 1890 that, ‘In most of us, by the age of 30, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.’33 Gail Sheehy and George Vaillant, for example, began their different long-term studies of the life cycle with the assumption that people stopped growing up in their fifties. Their subjects taught them better. Vaillant reports a seventy-five-year-old who was almost indignant: he knew he’d only grown better – and happier, in part because he knew it – the older he’d grown. His bones may have come to ‘ache in the places where I used to play’, as Leonard Cohen so precisely put it. But he was still engaged in becoming the person he wanted to be, and his life was full of meaning that he hadn’t found before.34
Even in a culture that works against growing up, we grow older without trying, and in that process we can’t help but grow up part way. As we do, we discover the things that get better. Aesthetic pleasure becomes more intense. In childhood you hear that you’re meant to enjoy sunsets, but you’re too busy exploring to sit still and gaze. Later you reject emotions you are meant to feel, and learn to call them kitsch. As you grow up you no longer care if that sunset in that moment would seem kitschy if seen through other eyes. You see it with yours, and you’re simply grateful to witness. The same is true with great art or good music. The Roman philosopher Cicero found it in his garden:
I say nothing here of the natural force which all things propagated from the earth possess – the earth which from that tiny grain in a fig, or the grape-stone in a grape, or the most minute seeds of the other cereals and plants, produces such huge trunks and boughs. Mallet-shoots, slips, cuttings, quicksets, layers – are they not enough to fill anyone with delight and astonishment? (Old Age, pp. 64–5)
He continues at some length to describe the ordinary miracle we call a grapevine before concluding ‘Can anything be richer in product or more beautiful to contemplate?’ (Ibid) The intense simplicity of aesthetic pleasure increases as other forms of sensual pleasure change. You still feel lust, and fulfil it, but it no longer has the force of domination it had in your youth. Plato’s Republic begins with a story about the poet Sophocles who was asked: ‘How about your service of Aphrodite, Sophocles – is your natural force still unabated?’ And he replied, ‘Hush, man, most gladly have I escaped this thing you talk of, as if I had run away from a raging and savage beast of a master.’ You may incline to pity Sophocles, and remind yourself that he was, after all, a tragic poet. But did you never make a romantic decision – often the most important decisions we ever make – out of lust you were certain was love? Growing up means realizing that no time of one’s life is the best one, and resolving to savour every second of joy within reach. You know each will pass, and you no longer experience that as betrayal.
Do we grow more courageous as we grow up? Cicero says that old age is more confident and courageous than youth because the old have come to disregard death. Sometimes, perhaps, but it’s often rather because we recognize that everyone else is as terrified of being found wanting, and faking it, as we are. Those who looked braver than you felt were feeling what you did, they just whistled louder in the dark. The confidence that arises when you grasp that is itself a source of pleasure. You may begin to understand what Kant meant by saying you have duties to yourself, and the basis of these is dignity, preserving the idea of humanity in your own person (Lectures on Pedagogy, pp. 475–6). Life will still surprise you – if it doesn’t you are lost – but you learn to trust your own responses to it. You’ve begun to construct a story about how the pieces of your life fit together. The story will be revised more than once, and become increasingly coherent, if not always increasingly true, giving shape to your life as it goes on. Places and objects will make it resonate. (The street corner on which you couldn’t help crying heartbroken over a love affair you can now recount as an interesting anecdote. The basket you bought from a market woman who taught you something about her continent. The painted bird made by a friend who ended the friendship twenty years ago for reasons neither of you would remember if you met on the street today.)
The ability to see your life as the whole it has become allows you to see the strengths with which you’ve lived it, and develop a sense of your own character. For integrity is never static; it’s too easy to lose for that. It’s rather a matter of determination: you’ve begun to figure out what sort of person you want to be, and you resolve to work harder to become it. In doing this you care far less about what people think of you, though you may be more useful to them. Every psychologist who talks about life cycles talks about what Erikson called generativity: the satisfaction that comes from giving back to the world the better things it gave to you, and especially of nurturing the young. You may discover the pleasure of generosity. You can give a gift or an honest compliment without fearing it will be viewed as flattery, you no longer view constant criticism as a sign of intelligence.
For your intelligence has likely improved. Kant divided the workings of our mind into several different functions. This wasn’t a new sort of project, nor is it an old-fashioned one, as the flurry of neurosciences makes clear, but little yet discovered by neuroscience makes Kant’s study of mind obsolete. Showing which part of your brain lights up when you think this or that does not show you how conscious thinking functions. Plato tried out models that reflect how we think, and modern philosophers since Descartes spent considerable energy trying to understand how the mind works. They described differences between reasoning, imagining, intuiting, understanding, judging, common sense and a host of other intellectual activities in taxonomies that were as diverse as they were fluid. A number of those taxonomies were explicitly written as textbooks guided by a simple assumption: understanding how we think will make us think better, and who could be opposed to that? Kant’s goals were similar, if more ambitious, though his explanation of how the mind works was more careful and systematic than that of his predecessors – if never quite as systematic as he or his critics believed.
His most important work, the Critique of Pure Reason, divides the mind into three basic functions. Through sensibility we receive raw data in space and time; through understanding we process that data into objects with mass and substance and other qualities; only by using reason do we actually think about them. As we saw in chapter 2, it is reason’s removal from simple knowledge of reality that allows it to step back and ask why reality is this way rather than that – the condition on creative activity and social change alike. Whether or not you actually get them, it is reasonable to expect justice and joy. What makes you condemn parts of reality is not a childish inclination to daydream, but the first law of reason itself. The principle of sufficient reason is simply the demand that the world should make sense. Injustice does not.
All this is clear enough in the Critique of Pure Reason, if you actually read the whole book. Long before those like Bertrand Russell begin to nod off, however, Kant introduces another faculty of mind. In contrast to his careful, and sometimes longwinded discussion of sensibility, understanding and reason, his discussion of judgement is remarkably short. He tells us that it’s the capacity to apply principles to particular cases, and calls it a peculiar talent that can be practised but not taught, ‘and its lack no school can make good’ (A133/B172). To teach a principle for applying principles would begin an infinite regress, for how do you know when and where to apply that one? Our experience is particular. I don’t experience a tree in general, but the linden losing its browning leaves before my window. Nor will principles of morality do much good if I cannot determine whether this act is honourable or that one despicable. Without judgement, you may understand a universal principle without ever being able to determine whether a particular case falls under it or not. About such people Kant adds the only (faintly) funny footnote in the entire first Critique:
Deficiency in judgment is just what is ordinarily called stupidity, and for such a failing there is no remedy. An obtuse or narrow-minded person to whom nothing is wanting save a proper degree of understanding and the concepts appropriate thereto, may indeed be trained through study, even to the extent of becoming learned. But as such people are commonly still lacking in judgment, it is not unusual to meet learned men who in the application of their scientific knowledge betray that original want, which can never be made good. (A135/B173)
There’s a reason Kant’s work is studded with legal metaphors. A good judge has studied the law and knows all its general principles. Her job is to listen to a series of reasonable arguments, then withdraw, reflect and make a decision: it wasn’t murder, it was manslaughter. Without judgement reason is paralysed, unable to apply its ideas to the world. Kant is often ridiculed as rule-bound, particularly with regard to his moral philosophy. His categorical imperative – the moral law that tells us to treat other people not as means to our ends but as ends in themselves – is often caricatured as a sort of machine that grinds out rules that tell us just how to act. But while treating people as ends and not means is a fine general principle, deciding whether you are doing so in a particular situation is enormously complex. That Kant understood this as well as anyone is clear in this example from his Metaphysics of Morals:
An author asks one of his readers, ‘How do you like my work?’ One could merely seem to give an answer by joking about the impropriety of the question. But who has his wit always ready? The author will take the slightest hesitation in answering as an insult. May one, then, say what is expected of one?
His more often read (yes, it’s shorter) Foundation of the Metaphysics of Morals leads readers to conclude he thought lying was always immoral. Here he shows how any ordinary social dilemma can be an occasion to think for yourself. Kant never tells us what we should say to the author, though the example does suggest that authors ought to spare their readers such situations, even with such an innocuous question as ‘Have you had a chance to read it yet?’ The example is meant for the reader to figure out.
It is judgement, in short, that plays the most important role in thinking, for it is judgement that decides which thought (which idea, which concept, which principle) applies to which piece of the world. Judgement makes the leap between theory and practice. Kant decided his first great taxonomy gave it too short a shrift, for almost twenty years after the Critique of Pure Reason he published the Critique of Judgement (1790). In it he tells us that good judgement is so important and necessary that it usually goes by the name of common sense. The book has provided occupation for scholars ever since, for though full of important ideas about teleology, taste and aesthetics, it’s hard to see how it’s meant to answer the question the first Critique left open. It distinguishes between determinant judgements, which subsume particular things under general rules, and reflective judgements, which derive general rules from particulars, but Kant tells us little about how to make them. Is there anything more to be said about judgement other than it can’t be taught but only practised, and that people who lack it are those we call stupid?
Among her other achievements, Arendt was one of the great neo-Kantians; few people understood his work better, especially his conviction that our concepts of reason and judgement have political consequences. She too was raised in Königsberg, though she left the city early and travelled far. Perhaps it helped give her the nerve to do what nobody else ever ventured: to write last works planned to mirror all three of Kant’s great Critiques. She finished Thinking and Willing, which paralleled Kant’s critiques of pure and practical reason. When she died of a heart attack in 1975, the first page of Judging was in her typewriter. Those who hoped Arendt might explicate what Kant did not can only groan, but it’s hard to imagine that she would have been able to fill out much more than Kant did – because of the peculiar nature of judgement itself. Her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy do provide some useful thoughts about it while expounding her basic concepts of natality and plurality: the fact that we are born and the fact that there is more than one of us. She stresses the political nature of Kant’s theory of mind, for he holds sociability to be the origin of our humanity:
This is a radical departure from all those theories that stress human interdependence as dependence on our fellow men for our needs and wants. Kant stresses that at least one of our mental faculties, the faculty of judgment, presupposes the presence of others. (Lectures on Kant, p. 74)
In radical opposition to every philosopher who came before him, Kant believed that philosophy was not an exercise for the privileged few, but an activity prescribed by the very nature of reason itself – hence something that’s natural to all of us. For all philosophy is an attempt to wrestle with three questions that concern us all: what can I know? What should I do? What may I hope? Later Kant wrote that all these questions could be reduced to another: what is the human being? The Critique of Pure Reason makes the astonishingly radical claim that its conclusions are confirmed by the fact that they are just as available to the common understanding as to the philosophers:
For we have thereby revealed to us, what could not at the start have been foreseen, namely, that in matters which concern all men without distinction nature is not guilty of any partial distribution of her gifts, and that in regard to the essential ends of human nature the highest philosophy cannot advance further than is possible under the guidance which nature has bestowed even upon the most ordinary understanding. (A831/B859)
Some common understanding, you may be inclined to snort, all the more upon learning that the passage just quoted occurs on page 831 of the Critique’s first edition. It’s preceded by many that are far more impenetrable. Kant’s own judgement of the book’s style was unswerving. He called it ‘dry, obscure, opposed to all usual concepts and moreover longwinded’ (Prolegomena, p. 3). I began by quoting Kant’s wistful comment that it isn’t given to everyone to write as well as the writers he admired. It’s doubtless easier to write well if you grow up in a home filled with good books and articulate people. Still Rousseau’s father was also a craftsman, and he taught himself to write gorgeous prose. There is no way around it: apart from an occasional stunning sentence, Kant’s work is hard to read. But like learning an instrument or another language, the effort to do so is worth it, for the lesson that remains after cutting through the tangle of words is meant for all of us. You can enlarge your mind.
What does all of this have to do with persuading people to grow up? Judgement is the ability that normally requires age to improve. Writers from Cicero to contemporary psychologists are in agreement: your memory will acquire blank spots, your performance on cognitive tests depending solely on speed will decline. But in everything related to judgement, your thinking is likely to improve. Kant’s understanding of judgement explains it. For how can it be learned if it cannot be taught? ‘By comparing our judgement with the possible rather than the actual judgements of others, and by putting ourselves in the place of any other man’ (Critique of Judgement, §40). You enlarge your mind by continually thinking from others’ perspectives, stepping into as many pairs of shoes as you can find. Let Neurath’s boat be your guide. As your judgement improves, so will your ability to learn, travel and work in ways that minimize the pitfalls we saw. And the more you learn where you can, travel freely, find work that you cherish, the better your judgement will be. Call it a virtuous circle: there is no straight path that will take you there.
Ideally, you develop good judgement by watching other people who have it, but you can learn from bad examples as well. Since judgement is about particulars, examples are crucial, though deciding which ones are truly exemplary of something important, and which ones are simply oddballs, is a matter of judgement itself. All this takes time (and preferably space: the right kind of travel does give you access to more people’s judgement, thus improving your own). As de Beauvoir explains in The Coming of Age:
In many fields, such as philosophy, ideology and politics, the elderly man is capable of a synthetic vision forbidden to the young. In order to be able to appreciate the importance or unimportance of some particular exception to the rule or allot it its place, to subordinate details to the whole, and to set anecdote aside in order to isolate the general idea, one must have observed an enormous number of facts in all their aspects of likeness and difference. And there is one form of experience that belongs only to the old – that of old age itself. The young have only vague and erroneous notions of it. (p. 381)
Growing older, of course, is not a sufficient condition for having good judgement: we’ve all met old fools. Nor is it absolutely necessary: occasionally, Australian Aborigine peoples will appoint young men to be elders – not because they know so many of the old stories that serve to orient the community, but because they know which stories to tell when. In general, however, growing up leads to better judgement, as good judgement is generally a sign of being grown-up. For more than you may fear – if less than you may hope – is in your hands. Even Cicero, who knows his praise of old age is unusual, reminds us that: ‘Throughout my discourse remember that my panegyric applies to old age that has been established on foundations laid by youth’ (Old Age, p. 68). This is not a reference to stopping smoking or starting to exercise, though Cicero, presumably, would advise you to do both. More important: you can lose judgement, like any other capacity, if you fail to use it.
But how to use it well when none of the distinguished old philosophers will offer any guidelines? There’s no question about it: think for yourself, Kant’s motto for maturity, is undeniably vague. But how could it be made more specific without violating the message itself? By telling someone how to do it in any situation she might encounter? Exactly. To tell someone how to think for herself is to undermine the possibility of her doing it at all. The Critique of Judgement does make suggestions that are slightly more determinate. ‘Think for oneself (the maxim of enlightenment); Put oneself in thought in the place of everyone else (the maxim of the enlarged mentality); and the maxim of consistency, Be in agreement with oneself’ (§40). This may not seem like much to go on, but Kant’s maxim of consistency does point towards some guidance. What would it mean to be in agreement with yourself?
Would you live your life over if given the chance? Like most interesting questions, this one has haunted the West for almost 2,500 years, but Enlightenment thinkers took it up with special relish. No wonder: they were living in the first time in memory when individual human lives became the subject of change. Had you lived before the Enlightenment, your life would have been largely determined by your father’s father’s father’s, and his place as a slave or free man in a social structure that seemed as set in stone as the great cathedrals it produced. Once life was no longer viewed as given by God and fixed in place by social and political forces that claimed to have His blessing, the question of whether you’d choose yours began to make sense.
Few Enlightenment thinkers were entirely clear about the kind of question they were asking. Was it an empirical enquiry about how many people would in fact choose to live their lives over, with the same end as the sorts of happiness studies that social scientists undertake today? Or was it rather a philosophical question of whether life, on balance, is justified? All the answers they left us hover between the two. On the cusp of the Enlightenment, the notoriously optimistic Leibniz held a surprising position. He thought most people at the point of death (if they had no knowledge of heaven) would take up their lives again, but only on the condition that their lives, if no better, would be different next time round. We would insist on variety before agreeing to go through this again. Voltaire was as usual more caustic. He agreed that most of us on our deathbeds would choose to take our lives back, but this is just about fear of dying. Even then, we’d insist on variety too: better to die of anything else than to die of boredom. Voltaire wrote poems in praise of pleasure and luxury throughout his long life, and clearly enjoyed a great deal of both. He also had more than an ordinary share of life’s deeper joys: more than one real love story, plenty of friends and admirers and the knowledge that his voluminous work had an impact on the wider world. Yet in the same book – Zadig – that insists the world is a much better place than its detractors complain, he gleefully recounts a myth that describes the earth as a toilet where the slops of the universe are dumped. The fact that we cling on our deathbeds to lives we’ve done little but complain of is, he believes, just one more proof that humankind is mad.
Hume agreed that this is folly, but his view was even more cheerless than Voltaire’s. (Hume’s unique ability to promote a bleak view of humankind with a sort of jovial elegance allows his admirers to overlook the fact that only Schopenhauer’s view is bleaker.) Ever playing the part of empiricist, Hume claimed to be merely reporting:
Ask yourself, ask any of your acquaintances, whether they would live over again the last ten or twenty years of their life. No! But the next twenty, they say, will be better … Thus at last they find (such is the greatness of human misery; it reconciles even contradictions!) that they complain, at once, of the shortness of life, and of its vanity and sorrow. (Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, pp. 99–100)
Rousseau thought such statements were their problem, not his. He was convinced that well-fed, well-bred men like Voltaire and Hume create their own misery. How can anyone blessed with Voltaire’s many fortunes find the world wretched, while Rousseau ‘in obscurity, poor, alone, tormented by a suffering without remedy, I meditate with pleasure on my retreat and find that all is well’ (Letter to Voltaire, 18 August 1756). Yet though he insists that, unlike the overstuffed Parisians, every mountaineer in Valais would choose to repeat his life endlessly, Rousseau’s own choice is not entirely clear. Few people wrote more poignant descriptions of happiness, or more enthusiastically, on occasion, of their own. But he often repeated that life always holds more suffering than happiness – even in the book he considered his brightest, Emile.
Kant’s discussion of the question also veers between reporting what we would choose, and considering what we should. In ‘The End of All Things’ he mentions Voltaire’s Persian legend of the earth as a toilet, and adds a couple of others: earth as prison, as madhouse, as cheap highway inn. He claims to be merely repeating metaphors others have used. But other texts suggest he found a desire to repeat one’s life over to be positively irrational:
The value of life for us, if it is estimated by that which we enjoy (that is, by happiness), is easy to decide. It sinks below zero; for who would be willing to enter upon life anew under the same conditions? Who would do so even under a new, self-chosen plan (yet in conformity with the course of nature) if it were merely directed to enjoyment? (Critique of Judgement, §83)
He goes on to dismiss the argument that, after all, most people prefer living to dying:
one can leave an answer to this sophistry to the good sense of each man who has lived long enough and reflected on the value of life; you have only to ask him whether he would be willing to play the game of life once more, not under the same conditions, but under any conditions of our earthly world and not those of some fairy-land.35
That’s life seen as an object of pleasure; thank heaven we have duty! Without it, Kant is certain that not only would few of us live our lives over; most of us would be tempted to suicide.
The Enlightenment, in short, was never as sanguine or sunny as its critics suppose. These men wrote reams of pages about evil, and their conclusions about a world that contains so much of it were often sombre. It’s hard to know whether their reflections on reliving one’s life were meant to be surveys, soliloquies or parlour games. A century later, however, Nietzsche turned the question into a cornerstone of his philosophy. His Twilight of the Idols states: ‘In every age the wisest have passed the identical judgment on life: it is Worthless … Everywhere and always their mouths have uttered the same sound – a sound full of doubt, full of melancholy, full of weariness with life, full of opposition to life’ (p. 29). Nietzsche believed this was a form of revenge. The sages themselves were weak and decadent. Unequal to the challenges that living presents, they sought to spoil it for the rest of us by inventing another life that makes this one look like a tale of woe. ‘Why a Beyond if not as a means of befouling the Here-and-Now?’ (Ibid). Christianity is the clearest case of this inversion, but Nietzsche called Christianity the Platonism of the masses; he thought every philosophy before his leads us to despise life itself.
So he proposed a test. Don’t think of time, or your own life within it, as something linear, leading upwards or forwards to a point of redemption. Imagine instead something circular: moments that recur eternally, ever again. Face the particulars: think of pain and heartbreak and all the things that make you wonder on occasion if you’d be better off dead. Could you live that life, with all its contents and contingencies, over and over for all eternity? If you say yes you are stronger than the Stoics, who merely urged us to accept our fate. Nietzsche challenges us to love it. Your answer to the question is the key to your soul. Forceful, noble spirits can affirm the eternal return of the life they are living; slavish, resentful ones will shrink from the idea in horror.
Nietzsche sometimes presents the eternal return as a piece of cosmology. I have argued elsewhere that it is instead a very powerful counter-theology, though it is infected by both the Stoicism and the Christianity Nietzsche claims to despise.36 But Nietzsche’s test can serve us as a tool. Supposing you asked yourself regularly: would I live this life over? (Not over and over, as Nietzsche demanded. Once would be enough.) If the answer looks like Hume’s did – not the last ten years, but the next will surely be better – then you’d better get to work. How many of the choices you’ve made are truly fixed? What parts of your life are changeable, and what do you want to keep? This is not a matter of glorified New Year’s resolutions, but of asking of yourself the same questions you must ask of your parents and your culture if you’re in earnest about growing up. Which parts are really mine? If you are carrying around inheritances of which you never truly took possession, you do not even know how little you are thinking for yourself.
I get the idea. Being in agreement with oneself, Kant’s maxim of consistency, can be furthered if we consistently ask if this life is the one we want to be living, and doing something about it if the answer is no. But isn’t the problem less with the life we’ve lived so far than the one that is certainly before us? Don’t people refuse to grow up because growing up means growing old?
It does, if you’re lucky. The alternative is dying young.
The men who sang ‘Hope I die before I get old’ were not in fact talking about their generation; it’s a very old sentiment. De Beauvoir’s The Coming of Age dates its written expression back to the philosopher and poet Ptah-hotep who lived in Egypt in 2500 B.C.E.
How hard and painful are the last days of an aged man! He grows weaker every day; his eyes become dim, his ears deaf; his strength fades; his heart knows peace no longer; his mouth falls silent and he speaks no word. The power of his mind lessens and today he cannot remember what yesterday was like. All his bones hurt. Those things which not long ago were done with pleasure are painful now; and taste vanishes. Old age is the worst of misfortunes that can afflict a man. (The Coming of Age, p. 92)
De Beauvoir’s ambitious study explores ageing from inside and out, examining both social practices and attitudes towards the aged as well as differing individuals’ own perceptions of ageing from prehistoric times through to the mid-twentieth century. It can make for disconcerting reading, for in almost every generation there’s a written consensus: growing old is worse than death. There are some exceptions. The Coming of Age spans cultures in which the old are ceremonially killed or abandoned and those in which being called old is a sign of respect and honour. On the whole, de Beauvoir shows that the better the place of children in a culture, the better the place of the elderly, for the bonds formed between well-treated children and their parents are strong enough to resist the temptation to discard the less productive elderly – even in nomadic societies where ageing bodies are not only a drain on scarce resources but an impediment to the movement of the group as a whole. Still, she argues, the problem of ageing is that the status of the old is never won, but granted by the young, as her book The Second Sex argued that women’s standing is granted by men. De Beauvoir emphasizes the great variety in ageing among people of different classes. While well-educated, well-off creative people may indeed lead creative, expanding lives well into their eighties, the old worker’s world shrinks. This is not merely a matter of poverty, though she steers our attention to those in whom activity is thwarted for lack of money to buy a bus ticket or a beer at the local pub. Even worse:
The tragedy of old age is tantamount to a fundamental condemnation of a whole mutilating system of life that provides the immense majority of those who make part of it with no reason for living. Labor and weariness hide this void; it becomes apparent as soon as they have retired. It is far more serious than boredom. Once the worker has grown old he no longer has any place on earth because in fact he was never given one. No place; but he had no time to realize it. When he does discover the truth he falls into a kind of bewildered despair. (The Coming of Age, p. 274)
De Beauvoir’s account of the tragedy of old age is remarkably similar to Goodman’s account of the tragedy of adolescence. We have not created a world in which reasonable people should want to grow up, or grow old. Unsurprisingly, her conclusion is similar to his:
Old age exposes the failure of our entire civilization. It is the whole man that must be remade, it is the whole relationship between man and man that must be recast if we wish the old person’s state to be acceptable … It is the whole system that is at issue and our claim cannot be otherwise than radical – change life itself. (Ibid, p. 543)
De Beauvoir is right to insist that the problems of ageing are at least as social in origin as they are biological. Her own comparison of the status of the aged to the status of women leaves real space for hope. It’s easy to point to sexist structures that remain in the twenty-first century, and in parts of the world they can still be fatal. Yet it’s undeniable that the relationships between men and women have changed more in the last fifty years than in all the centuries before them, put together. We are now exploring possibilities between genders that de Beauvoir could hardly imagine, even as The Second Sex was one of the books that contributed to expanding possibility’s scope. As life expectancies and economic structures change we may find ourselves echoing Rousseau’s ‘We do not know what our nature permits us to be’ and follow him in testing its limits.
But even for those who do their best to think for themselves, possibilities will be affected by others’ expectations. De Beauvoir’s account of the urge to ridicule old age, bolstered with quotations that span every historical period since ancient Greece and Rome, is as chilling as it’s puzzling. It’s easier to understand some men’s continuing contempt for women and some societies’ continuing disrespect for their minorities than it is to understand the mixture of disdain, derision and revulsion which marks so many discussions of the aged. For unlike being a woman or having different coloured skin, old age is a fate that awaits us all. If we’re lucky.
Fine examples can be found in the outpouring of mocking that, today, greets the information that a major rock star has reached a round-numbered birthday or opened a concert tour. Here is a quote from a recent New York Times:
Just look at them: the graybeards and grannies smoking pot, the bodies tugged by gravity and wretched excess, all that late-age libido and feeble jump-stepping enabled by Viagra and Lipitor. Baby boomers – a stadium full of them. Is there anything worse?… Where is the off-ramp marked grace, dignity or class for the 76 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964?37
European media can, if possible, be even nastier in asking: isn’t it time for these people to accept their obsolescence and leave the stage to others? I have often wondered why the fact that some of the greatest talents of our time refuse to get off stage should fill people with rage – particularly since, as anyone who has actually seen recent concerts of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen or Bruce Springsteen will know, they are anything but laughable. On the contrary, each of these artists has shown how far human and creative development can continue, surviving flops and falls and excess and error – and thus provides a model of how to grow up. Can it be that these men produce resentment because we are too lazy, or frightened, to grow up ourselves? Or are we complicit in sending a message to the young (and internalizing it ourselves) about what life can hold? Those between eighteen and thirty are continuously told that they are living the best years of their lives, though it’s the decade that is often the hardest – and it has only got harder as structuring norms and economic stability dissolve. But rather than being encouraged to react to the complex doubt and struggle of those years by determining to grow out of them, the young only hear that no grown-up state will be better. ‘Enjoy the best years of your lives’ sounds cheery, but it contains an ominous message: everything else will be worse.
Take a look at most any discussion of coming of age and you’ll find a reference to something called ‘Shakespeare’s seven ages of man’; google it, as of this writing, and you will get 196 million entries. In fact, dividing the life cycle into seven ages began well before Shakespeare, but most people will recognize the very famous line with which the speech begins: ‘All the world’s a stage’. The line that follows is grim enough: all the men and women are merely players, suggesting that the script of our lives has been written and the parts are all fixed. Worse than that: every possible role we might play is both miserable and ridiculous. The baby’s part is to mewl and puke, the schoolboy whines on his way to school, the lover can but sigh, writing foolheaded verse, the soldier seeks the glory that will kill him, and so it goes through to the last pathetic sequence that leaves the player with nothing at all. Here is the speech in full:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel,
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin’d,
With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose, and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav’d, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion, –
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.
(As You Like It, Act II, scene 7)
A more formidable gloss on the modern slogan life sucks and then you die would be hard to find.
Now some of the texts that quote it try to soften Shakespeare’s blows. Psychology Today points out that people live longer than they did in his day; we can go to the gym and take advantage of modern dentistry. Others latch on to the gloom with something like glee. Shakespeare being rightly considered a source of general wisdom – including the insight that there are more things in heaven and earth than philosophy can ever dream of – the view that human life is both futile and absurd gains authority through his bitter and brilliant expression. To be sure, as Kant taught us, reason has the right, and even the obligation to question authority; this view of coming of age might indeed be Shakespeare’s and nevertheless be wrong. Still I blanched on reading the speech, for crossing swords with Shakespeare is daunting. I reached for my copy of As You Like It, for it had been decades since I’d seen it, and I no longer remembered the context.
It was a revelation. For the speech is spoken by the courtier Jacques, who says of himself ‘I can suck melancholy out of a song, as a weasel sucks eggs’. His description of his own melancholy is so melancholic that it turns out to be funny, which is why none of the other characters in the play take him seriously. His melancholy, finally, is a comic device. The fact that Jacques’ melancholy is so extreme as to be ludicrous does not make him dispensable. Without him, the play’s second half would be sappy. His voice counts, for this is the real world, not just Arcadia, or the forest of Ardennes. Shakespeare’s wisdom consists in the fact that he can express such voices perfectly – as we’ve seen, such views of life are all too common – and still end the play with a double wedding. It’s a comedy, after all.
That Shakespeare is not identifying with but mocking Jacques is underscored by the fact that the famous seven ages speech is spoken just before the entrance of the play’s hero, Orlando, bearing the weary servant Adam. Adam’s view of ageing is a far cry from Jacques’:
Though I look old, yet I am strong and lusty;
For in my youth I never did apply
Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood
(Ibid, Act II, scene 3)
Having followed the sort of advice about moderation in drink and food that could be found in any contemporary manual on successful ageing, Adam concludes: ‘Therefore my age is as a lusty winter, / Frosty, but kindly’.
His actions proceed to put the lie to Jacques’ picture of the aged as silly and useless, and our lives as pathetic and predetermined journeys. That’s to say: Jacques’ view of the life cycle gives us no more insight into Shakespeare’s own than Lady Macbeth’s soliloquies give us insight into Shakespeare’s view of morality. Why have generations of readers rushed to identify Jacques’ standpoint with Shakespeare’s, burnishing the bleakest picture of human existence with the authority of the Bard?
* * *
While writing this book I read widely, disparately and so unsystematically that the books I read may have nothing in common but the fact that I learned something or other from each of them. For a year my desk was piled with works on the history of childhood under studies of successful ageing, psychological investigations of the life cycle next to political criticism and sociological treatises sprawled beside The Picture of Dorian Gray. Interspersed among them were a number of philosophical works that I knew well enough, but wanted to read again. The disparity suits my conviction that too much contemporary philosophy is marred by isolation from other fields in ways earlier philosophy would have found foreign. (Kant not only read in, but gave university lectures on fields as diverse as geography, anthropology, psychology, mathematics and military strategy – with particular attention to pyrotechnics.) But though no guiding thread tied all subjects together, one difference emerged between those books that were written by philosophers and those that were not. Most of the empirical works aimed to shed a helpful, hopeful light on some piece of the problem of coming of age. They discussed better forms of education or healthier attitudes towards ageing or new modes of political action. They demonstrated how the right sort of vision of the meaning of life could promote soldiers’ resistance to combat trauma, or lead to wealth and influence. You’re meant to close their pages with the feeling that the problems, if not solved, are certainly manageable. By contrast, the works of philosophy only seemed to make the problems harder. How could that make sense?
I began this book with the claim that philosophy may help us find ways of growing up that do not leave us resigned. It can only do so by way of showing that growing up will be more demanding than we ever imagined. Any philosophical solution of a real problem begins by revealing how far we have ignored it. The American philosopher Stanley Cavell has called philosophy education for grown-ups. His explication makes it clear how it can help us to get there – as well as why it’s help we’re inclined to reject. For what we need to learn is not a matter of information. ‘One could call this learning rethinking, except that this may suggest clarifying (say, giving explanations) which may pass by the essential idea that you already know what you keep from yourself’ (Stanley Cavell and the Education of Grownups, p. 209).
Philosophy seeks answers to questions children raise, and most adults assume have already been answered. Why should I grow up? Follow rules? Get an education? How do I know? Find meaning? Shape my own life? These are all questions that can be answered, or dismissed, in a sentence. Yet when you ask them with the attention they actually demand you may find yourself feeling, as Cavell writes, that
my foregone conclusions were never conclusions I arrived at, but were merely imbibed by me, merely conventional. I may blunt that realization through hypocrisy or cynicism or bullying. But I may take the occasion to throw myself back on my culture, and ask why we do what we do, judge as we judge, how we have arrived at these crossroads. What is the natural ground of our convention, to what are they in service?… In the face of the questions posed in Augustine, Luther, Rousseau, Thoreau, we are children; we do not know how to go on with them, what ground we may occupy. In this light, philosophy becomes the education of grownups … The anxiety in teaching, in serious communication, is that I myself require education. And for grownups this is not natural growth, but change. (The Claim of Reason, p. 125)
Philosophy begins by making things harder, and proceeds by showing them as wholes. Each of the questions raised above must be answered individually, but any answer that remains individual will fail. The political dimension is inescapable. It requires us to look beyond even the best-intentioned of interests. As Kant pointed out, it’s not just rulers but parents who want to educate children to cope with the world they live in; ideally, however, education would prepare them to help shape a better one. Philosophy, I’ve said, is inherently normative. Good philosophy recognizes this, while keeping a lookout for all it can learn from descriptions that will inevitably disappoint. Since any description will take place in history, its questions are not eternal, but they have very long lives. So Kant’s works can provoke you in ways most works of eighteenth-century science cannot. This is one thing philosophy and literature share in common.
I have argued that the picture of growing up as inevitable decline is supported by a web of interests that operate against our coming of age. The tragedy is the way that we constantly collude in it, seeking confirmation for that picture even where it cannot be found. We misread As You Like It to endorse a view that spells our own doom. That’s the sort of thing that made Kant call our immaturity self-incurred, and urge us to have the courage to grow out of it. Courage is needed to oppose all the forces that will continue to work against maturity, for real grown-ups are not long distracted by bread and circuses. No longer confused by baubles or shy with inexperience, we are better able to see what we see, and say it. We? All of us, including this author. It’s a process of permanent revolution. Who wants to encourage that?