When Do We Become Adults, Really?(newyorker.com) |
When Do We Become Adults, Really?(newyorker.com) |
Because unlike the lesser animals, for a human adulthood is not a biological, societal or a chronological question but an epistemological question. The answer is that you become an adult when you learn to think for and by your self. Most people are not adults by that standard.
How can anyone ever say anything original, personal, unique to him, when by definition language obliges us to draw from a well of pre-existing words?
When we are influenced by so many external forces—our times, the books we read, our sociocultural determinisms, our linguistic tics so deeply ingrained that they form our identity?
The speeches we are constantly bombarded with, in every possible and imaginable form…
Who has never caught a friend, a colleague, a parent, a father-in-law, repeating an argument they have read in a newspaper or heard on television, almost word for word?
As if he were speaking for himself. As if he had appropriated that speech. As if he were the source of those thoughts—
rather than a sponge, rehashing the same formulas, the same rhetoric, the same presuppositions, the same indignant inflections, the same knowing tone—
as if he were not simply the medium.
Binet, on Barthes and Foucault, and himself I suppose.
You need to learn the distinction between a word (the symbol) and the concept (the meaning) of language. By your standard a Frenchman could never communicate with an Englishman but we know that is not the case.
Your earlier comment on adulthood reminded me of 7th function, and I didn’t want it to be too obvious I was quoting the book, because I thought it would ruin the joke. I’m not actually arguing that meaning can’t travel across language, and I certainly doubt that Binet would make that argument in earnest.
If your reply is a riff on Simon’s signifier/signified distinction, then I may have missed the joke and ended up reenacting the book.