Adult Life

John Russon

Description

What does it mean to be an adult? In this original and compelling work, John Russon answers that question by leading us through a series of rich reflections on the psychological and social dimensions of adulthood and by exploring some of the deepest ethical and existential issues that confront human life: intimacy, responsibility, aging, and death. Using his knowledge of the history of philosophy along with the combined resources of psychology, sociology, and anthropology, he explores the behavioral challenges of becoming an adult and examines the intimate relationships that are integral to healthy development. He also studies our experiences of time and space, which address both aging and the crucial role that our material environments play in the formation of our personalities. Of special note is Russon's provocative assessment of the economic and political contexts of contemporary adult life and the distinctive problems they pose. Engaging and accessible, Adult Life is for anyone seeking the profound lessons our human culture has learned about living well.
Acknowledgments

Introduction
Vignette #1: The Generation Gap
Vignette #2: Worldly Engagement
Vignette #3: Mortality and Character
The Plan of the Book

Part I: Human Experience and the Meaning of Adulthood

1. Perception and Its Norms
Perception and Possibility
Reality and Maturity
Character and Aging

Part II: The Form of Adult Life: Maturity and Aging

2. Character and Reality
Exposure: Outer and Inner
Healthy Developments of Character
Responsibility and Happiness

3. Aging
Time: Indifferent and Personal
On Aging
The Spatiality of Adulthood

Part III: The Content of Adult Life: Adult Occupations

4. Domains of Settlement and Engagement
Intimacy: The Family
Economics: The Market
Politics: The State

5. Bearing Witness: Honesty and Wisdom
Art
Religion
Philosophy: Wonder, Science, and Wisdom

Appendix: Notes for Further Study
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Child
• Humanistic psychology
• Philosophy

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 3
• EAN13: 9781438479521
• Langue: English

Extrait

Adult Life
SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Dennis J. Schmidt, editor
Adult Life
Aging, Responsibility, and the Pursuit of Happiness
John Russon
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Russon, John.
Title: Adult life : aging, responsibility, and the pursuit of happiness / John Russon, author.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2020] | Series: SUNY series, Contemporary Continental Philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: ISBN 9781438479514 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438479521 (ebook)
Further information is available at the Library of Congress.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedicated to my son Theo, whose future I hope these ideas will enrich, and to the memory of my mother Eleanor and my father Gordon, from whom I learned many of the most important lessons.
’Tis impossible to be sure of any thing but death and taxes.
—Christopher Bullock, The Cobler of Preston
A man has nothing better under the sun than to eat, to drink and to be merry.
— Ecclesiastes 8:15
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Vignette #1: The Generation Gap
Vignette #2: Worldly Engagement
Vignette #3: Mortality and Character
The Plan of the Book
Part I. Human Experience and the Meaning of Adulthood
Chapter 1: Perception and Its Norms
Perception and Possibility
Reality and Maturity
Character and Aging
Part II. The Form of Adult Life: Maturity and Aging
Chapter 2: Character and Reality
Exposure: Outer and Inner
Healthy Developments of Character
Responsibility and Happiness
Chapter 3: Aging
Time: Indifferent and Personal
On Aging
The Spatiality of Adulthood
Part III. The Content of Adult Life: Adult Occupations
Chapter 4: Domains of Settlement and Engagement
Intimacy: The Family
Economics: The Market
Politics: The State
Chapter 5: Bearing Witness: Honesty and Wisdom
Art
Religion
Philosophy: Wonder, Science, and Wisdom
Appendix: Notes for Further Study
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
I completed the final work on the manuscript for Adult Life in June 2019, shortly after my son’s third birthday, whereas I wrote the initial draft of Human Experience over the summer months of 1996, just one year after starting my position as assistant professor at the Pennsylvania State University. In the twenty-three years between those two events, my life, predictably, underwent quite substantial changes. Because this work is largely an attempt to understand what happens in the context of an adult life, it is not surprising that the people who were involved with me in those personally transformative years have been most important for my efforts to understand the meaning of adulthood; consequently, my debts in this case are more personal than scholarly, though I have scholarly debts as well. I owe the greatest personal debts to my closest companions, friends and colleagues throughout those years: Patricia Fagan, Maria Talero, Kym Maclaren, David Ciavatta, Peter Simpson, David Morris, Bruce Gilbert, Caren Irr, Greg Recco, Peter Costello, Nate Andersen, Eric Sanday, Tara Gump Newhouse, Susan Bredlau, Ed Casey, John Stuhr, John Sallis, Vincent Colapietro, Rick Lee, Kirsten Swenson, Kirsten Jacobson, Ömer Aygün, Len Lawlor, Scott Marratto, John Lysaker, Ken Aldcroft, Mike Milligan, Nick Fraser, Chris Gale, Chris Banks, Tom Richards, Ethan Ardelli, Eve Rabinoff, Whitney Howell, Tristana Martin Rubio, Shannon Hoff, Greg Kirk, John Hacker-Wright, Laura McMahon, Siby George, and Pravesh Jung; and I am grateful for the companionship of my friends Joe Pernice, Andy Payne, and Kelly Gallagher-Mackay, who sat beside me almost every day at Ideal Coffee as I wrote these pages into existence. On the scholarly side, I am intimately aware with virtually every sentence that I write of my debts to Eugene F. Bertoldi, Kenneth L. Schmitz, Graeme Nicholson, H. S. Harris, Joseph J. Owens, Francis Sparshott, Eva-Maria Simms, Robert Stolorow, Matthew Ratcliffe, Will McNeill, and, of course, many of those I have listed as more personally influential; and I am also especially grateful to Kirsten Jacobson, Jeff Morrisey, Laura McMahon, and Shannon Hoff, each of whom took the time to read the entire manuscript in draft and offer helpful, critical comments. And, finally, I would like especially to acknowledge my gratitude to Dean Pickard, who read and taught my books, and, on the basis of his interest, established a company to fund students to study with me; I am grateful for his friendship and humbled by his amazingly generous support.
Introduction
This book is an attempt to grasp what human adulthood is. When we study anything, though, we need first to have a reasonable sense of what the phenomenon is that we are trying to make sense of, and so, similarly, before we can dive into our interpretation of adulthood we need to have a rough-and-ready sense of what the basic phenomenon of adulthood is. For that reason, I will begin with three vignettes—three little dramas about real human situations. The narration of the three vignettes will bring forth, I hope, some of the most salient features of adulthood and help us to conjure up in imagination what it is like to live an adult life.
Vignette #1: The Generation Gap
Sitting in a coffee shop on a Saturday (actually, in Coffee Matters , in St. John’s Newfoundland), I notice a striking difference. Some students, probably in their late teens, are talking animatedly with each other. Also, two women, probably in their forties, are sitting at another table, chatting with each other. The striking difference is between the content and style of the conversations in the two groups. I can overhear the students speculating excitedly—the table is virtually “bubbling over”—about which of their friends will be at some upcoming event, while the two older women are calmly discussing renovations to their houses and how much those renovations will cost. The dress of the members of each group is similarly different: the students are wearing a colorful mix of T-shirts, sleeveless blouses, ripped blue jeans, short skirts, and sweatpants, while the older women are wearing well-tailored, businesslike clothes. These two groups look, sound, and act like radically different kinds of people; and that, furthermore, is not just how they appear to others—on the contrary, that is, presumably, how these groups look to themselves and to each other. The reason these differences are interesting, though, is that not that many years ago the older women looked and acted like the young students and not that many years from now the young students will look and act like the older women; in other words, though they seem like radically different kinds of people, each is, in fact, simply a version of the other.
This familiar scene draws attention to the phenomenon of age, by which I mean not just the fact that the different people involved have lived for different numbers of years, but the fact that those different numbers of years bring with them social, cultural, and behavioral meanings, such that being “eighteen” implies a recognizable lifestyle, and one recognizably different from the lifestyle of a forty-year-old. Presumably, this is something we all recognize easily enough, but it is a dimension of our existence that, though we ourselves live through it, we typically do not really comprehend. Indeed, the very fact that the eighteen-year-olds have no real interest in the forty-year-olds and, reciprocally, that the forty-year-olds have no real interest in the teenagers underlines the relative insularity with which we typically inhabit our “ages,” for those in each group do not see themselves in the members of the other group.
Surely, we are all familiar with situations like this, and we can easily imagine that members of either group would attempt to explain their lack of interest in the other as a “difference in generations.” This expression is no doubt correct, but perhaps not quite in the sense in which it is intended: the younger people likely attribute the boring appearance of the older people to the fact that those older ones like the things people liked in the ’80s, and they imagine there is something objectively less interesting about the music, the dress, or the pastimes of the past, while the older ones reject the younger interests that they perceive to be rooted in the culture of the early twenty-first century, imagining there is something objectively less interesting about the music, the dress, and the pastimes of the present; the truth, however, is that each group likes what was popular in their own youth. In other words, while there may indeed be something that is more or less intrinsically interesting about those two historical periods, that is not really what explains the interest or lack of it that the members of each group experience.
It is not just