Growing up enlightened

LISTEN. Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity... Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!”--that is the motto of enlightenment. Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment?

Growing up means realizing that no time of one's life is the best one, and resolving to savor every second of joy within reach. You know each will pass, and you no longer experience that as betrayal...

Can philosophy help us to find a model of maturity that is not a matter of resignation?...I believe that it can, and the best place to begin is Immanuel Kant's description of the process of reason's coming of age...

Real freedom involves control over your life as a whole, learning to make plans and promises and decisions, to take responsibility for your actions' consequences.

Susan Neiman, Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

“If the right to happiness is not an idle piece of wishful thinking but a demand of reason, the consequences can be revolutionary.”

“Freedom cannot simply mean doing whatever strikes you at the moment: that way you're a slave to any whim or passing fancy. Real freedom involves control over your life as a whole, learning to make plans and promises and decisions, to take responsibility for your actions' consequences.”

“A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you’re committed to Enlightenment, you’re committed to understanding the world in order to improve it.”

“Reason drives your search to make sense of the world by pushing you to ask why things are as they are. For theoretical reason, the outcome of that search becomes science; for practical reason, the outcome is a more just world.”

“When consuming goods rather than satisfying work becomes the focus of our culture, we have created (or acquieced in) a society of permanent adolescents.”

“Rousseau introduced the idea of false needs, and showed how the systems we live in work against our growing up: they dazzle us with toys and bewilder us with so many trivial products that we are too busy making silly choices to remember that the adult ones are made by others.”

“Given all the forces arrayed against it, no wonder Kant thought growing up to be more a matter of courage than knowledge: all the information in the world is no substitute for the guts to use your own judgement. And judgement can be learned — principally through the experience of watching others use it well —but it cannot be taught.”

“Doing what you can to move your part of the world closer to the way it should be, while never losing sight of the way it is, is what being a grown-up comes to.”

“Keeping an eye on the way the world ought to be, while never losing sight of the way it is, requires permanent, precarious balance. It requires facing squarely the fact that you never get the world you want, while refusing to talk yourself out of wanting it.” 

g'r