⩩ 48
To Aristotle the human being was the ζώον λόγον έχον. This means, in English, that the human being is the living being that speaks, the being that lives in and through speeches.
By nature, we are called to speak up, to speak out. We become more human as we become more outspoken. Our growth requires that we become enlarged and amplified by articulating our experiences and understanding in language. To use the phrase Nas does in “N.Y. State of Mind,” we are “born to use mics.”
But not as users but as creators do we relate to language authentically. When we are healthy, spiritually healthy, we have our own take on the things we encounter. I picture this as continually retreating from experience, retiring from the world, going home, and forming our own judgment.
As I explore in the image of Halloween, what happens at home is that we dig through our experience and sort it out and figure out what it all means. We ask ourselves what we actually have experienced. We want to understand it. But since the world is prejudiced, dogmatic, and superficial as we inherit it, the first attempts we make are not adequate. They cannot be. The first opinions we express are inadequate. The first language we use is inadequate, its words clumsy, blunt, hollow. Understanding experience requires changing the assumptions, experimenting with the terms, expanding some, retiring others, introducing others, in general using them in our own way.
This is a creative process. Underlying it is a grasp that is wordless, a non-linguistic feeling for reality. At the center there is a reverent silence. A humble silence. A surrender to things as they are. On this basis we make our way toward terms for experience.
This means putting things our own words. Coming to terms with experience means remaking the terms we use to talk about the world, and not just a word or term but a bunch of words and terms, a terminology. Looking over our experience means finding our words, creating our own web of meaning. And one thing to be clear about is that this terminology is not a term, not an end, but a middle and indeed a beginning.
I said that we are called “by nature” to speak up, but what does this mean? The word “nature” came into English from Latin, and it translates the Greek word φύσις, which is a form of the verb φύω, meaning “to grow.” An old aphorism from Heraclitus says “nature loves to hide,” and apparently nature hides even in its own word. It’s as if when the mud and dirt of centuries is washed away from “nature,” when finally it stands there naked and as seen by the naked eye, what we see is: “growing!”
This fits my taste. I took as a first principle the special priority of what I can see with my own eyes, or rather I made my starting point the attempt to find out what I have seen with my own eyes. It is a trial, a daring attempt, an experiment. I want to keep in mind firsthand experience, to test everything against it, to bring anything and everything within an arm’s length and see how it looks: opinions, norms, ideals, words.
When we do this, we see how many of our words become dark, resistant, unintelligible. We want our words to be as near to us, as easy and as familiar as possible. We want our words to be seethrough. And if you spend time running your hands and fingers through the grass around “nature,” digging around in the etymological garden, what you eventually find is surprising: something beautiful, familiar, very living and very green.
Growth is a variety of change, but a kind of change without change. When a stack of lumber becomes a building, what it is changes. When a sapling becomes a tree, it is only becoming more itself. Similarly, for the lumber the cause of the change comes from outside: the builder and their team. For the sapling, the cause comes from inside, from itself. To grow is for a thing to unfold its inner nature, to get bigger, fuller, to become more itself. The opposite is being cramped, stunted, getting weaker, getting smaller, shrinking and withering away.
Now consider the words “adult” and “grownup.” This is a fascinating pair of words to examine, not only because it is such a central concept in human life, but because, though on first glance the words appear to be synonyms and interchangeable, reflecting on it you quickly see that they play different roles in the language, according to their heritage. One comes to us, borrowed, from Latin through French, while the other comes to us from Old English.
In ordinary usage, “adult” means fully-developed and mature. It often means more specifically to be mature in the eyes of the law, to be a legal adult. In this sense, to be an adult is to be legally responsible, and the opposite of an adult is a minor. This sense of responsibility permeates the word generally.
But let us compare it with “grownup.” In ordinary usage, “grownup” also means fully-developed and mature, but when we look at the word in its own right, we see “grownup” breaks down into “grown” and “up.”
Grow, grew, grown, growth makes a family. Growing is something we understand immediately and easily, even if we can’t put it into words. We know it means to get bigger, to change, for a thing to become not something else but more itself. If we think about it a while, we see that growth belongs to all living things. The seed grows into a sapling, and into a tree. The caterpillar grows into a butterfly. In growing we participate in the logic of all of nature.
In the “up” there is body, spatiality, direction. So while on its surface “adult” suggests nothing to us, “grownup” turns into a picture. Because what has grown up and become taller was shorter and smaller before it grew, it is not a static image but a moving one, an image of a movement. Since the opposite of a grownup is a child, it perhaps suggests that being a grownup is itself not a state, but a moment in a cycle. What lives is born, grows up, breaks down and dies. It wilts and withers and falls away.
When you perceive that “grownup” is a metaphor, it is easier to see it is not by necessity that we call grownups “grownups” when we do. It is a convention, and there is some arbitrariness, imagination, and resourcefulness in the act. It is creative. And yet it seems about the most natural word possible, and it is easy to imagine a child using it spontaneously in describing big people.
So, while they mean the same in a sense, there is a big difference between “grownup” and “adult,” at least on the surface. In fact, “adult” is an image too, also from a word from growing, with many of the same associations. The root is alere, meaning “to grow,” plus a prefix, “ad,” meaning toward. It is just that it is borrowed from Latin, so that its metaphorical nature is hidden from us.
It is remarkable that in the last decade “adulting” has become a thing, i.e. we have given the noun “adult” verbal flavor. So far it is still consciously playful slang, and yet the fact that we are applying our own rules of grammatical transformation to it shows how familiar the word is to us.
Today “grownup” and “adult” are equally a part of our language, but they play different roles. “Grownup” is not only an opposite of “child,” but is used mostly by children, and always with something childlike about it. With its image and spatiality the word seems childish, playful, imprecise. Often it is funny for an adult to call herself a “grownup,” because in doing so she is speaking like a child. The really correct, official name for a grownup is an “adult,” and when you become an adult you stop thinking about and speaking of people as “grownups.” At least, that’s how the conventions of our language have it.
But each of us makes up a language around ourselves and decides for ourselves which word we will think of ourselves through. By thinking of ourselves as adults, we can place ourselves in the legal world, a world of correctness and responsibility, with a word that is static and flat. Or we can place ourselves in the natural world, a world more directly connected to childhood, with a word that is moving and playful and alive.
To me, it is no longer a choice. I think I used to implicitly imagine adulthood as static, a plateau. I saw adults as having arrived as knowledgeable agents—finished products, perfected, complete. But my own experience of young adulthood has dissolved the excesses of conception. With wonder and astonishment I find myself passing through a series of revolutions in self-understanding. I am changing—growing—more now than ever before. I see no reason to expect it to end.
I realize that, if an adult is a knowledgable agent, a finished product, there are none. No adults, no actions. The concept may be to some extent an inevitable byproduct of the facts of childhood, though this is something I would like to explore; in any case, it says nothing about its validity. I recognize the concept “adult” has a legal use, but philosophically I have outgrown it, retired it as a fantasy, a projection of childhood. I am grownup, and I’m not done growing yet.
You are reading Footnotes, by Garrett Allen, a series of philosophical-ish short essays. You just read ⩩ 48.