Susan Neiman's 'Why Grow Up?': Wisdom and balance

Why Grow Up?

By Susan Neiman

Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

240 pp. $24 nolead ends

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Reviewed by Katie Haegele

nolead ends One morning a few days before I started reading philosopher Susan Neiman's new book, I found in my daily calendar of New Yorker cartoons this gem by Joe Dator.

Two children are sitting together, and one says to the other, "What do you want to be when you give up?"

It's funny because it's true.

At least it can seem that way - to the very young and hopeful, or to anyone who has internalized the tenets of our culture, which fetishizes their innocence and selectively forgets how hard it often is to be young.

According to Neiman, the essence of maturity is not resignation, but wisdom and balance: the ability to accept life's difficulties as inevitable while never abandoning the struggle to make things better. To persuade us, she takes us on a tour of the world and the history of thought, how childhood, adolescence, and adulthood have been seen in different times and cultures.

"Coming of age is an Enlightenment problem," she tells us. Many of our ideas about choosing the "right" path to adulthood come from this time, when traditional social structures began to loosen, and individuals had more autonomy, and choosing the "right path" to personhood first became a philosophical problem.

Neiman's book is easy to understand, a solid introduction to some of the major themes of the Enlightenment, with a special focus on Immanuel Kant and his ideas about reason and experience and the importance of both.

Neiman argues that all of us, beginning in earliest childhood, learn that there is a difference between the way the world is and the way it ought to be. The difference between is and ought, of course, is a central concern of most schools of philosophy. The Epicureans were a little too frivolous, with their whole "If it feels good, do it" ethos, and the Stoics were just kidding themselves, trying to desensitize themselves to the swift kick life would give them (as it gives us all).

Hume and others tried to pass off the Stoic line of thought as maturity, but Neiman aligns her thinking with Kant's, who accepted an even more difficult truth: Happiness and virtue aren't always one and the same.

Neiman then explores three categories of experience that are essential parts of "growing up": education, travel, and work (this last one essential to our very humanity, according to Kant, Hegel, and Hannah Arendt, so be sure to finish those chores you promised to do today). She bolsters her discussion with writings from psychologists, primatologists, and thinkers from other fields. She calls on us to be vigilant against threats to freedom and by "extending social justice," asserting that "growing up depends on both."

Stirring stuff. Neiman also makes brief forays into lesser sorts of advice: make friends with smart people, take breaks from the Internet, and so on.

She's impassioned and thorough, alive with curiosity, devilishly well-read, fair-minded, and funny. Her writing is strongest when she employs her good humor and graciousness, as when she takes issue with the claim that elder rockers should get off the stage. Far from embarrassing, Leonard Cohen and Bruce Springsteen make fine role models for us all, proving that creative development can - and should continue - for longer than we've been told. (The only regrettable thing about this argument is that Neiman forgets to mention Patti Smith.)

The philosophers' calls to grow up, and grow up well, are frequent, and in Nieman's hands surprising and moving. She asks: "Can it be that these men produce resentment because we are too lazy, or frightened, to grow up ourselves?"

Katie Haegele's latest book is "Slip of the Tongue."