Your Whole Life

Beyond Childhood and Adulthood

James Bernard Murphy

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780812297096
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A holistic view of human development that rejects the conventional stages of childhood, adulthood, and old age When we talk about human development, we tend to characterize it as proceeding through a series of stages in which we are first children, then adolescents, and finally, adults. But as James Bernard Murphy observes, growth is not limited to the young nor is decline limited to the aged. We are never trapped within the horizon of a particular life stage: children anticipate adulthood and adults recapture childhood. According to Murphy, the very idea of stages of life undermines our ability to see our lives as a whole.In Your Whole Life, Murphy asks: what accounts for the unity of a human life over time? He advocates for an unconventional, developmental story of human nature based on a nested hierarchy of three powers—first, each person's unique human genome insures biological identity over time; second, each person's powers of imagination and memory insure psychological identity over time; and, third, each person's ability to tell his or her own life story insures narrative identity over time. Just as imagination and memory rely upon our biological identity, so our autobiographical stories rest upon our psychological identity. Narrative is not the foundation of personal identity, as many argue, but its capstone.Engaging with the work of Aristotle, Augustine, Jesus, and Rousseau, as well as with the contributions of contemporary evolutionary biologists and psychologists, Murphy challenges the widely shared assumptions in Western thinking about personhood and its development through discrete stages of childhood, adulthood, and old age. He offers, instead, a holistic view in which we are always growing and declining, always learning and forgetting, and always living and dying, and finds that only in relation to one's whole life does the passing of time obtain meaning.

PART I
STORIES OF DEVELOPMENT

CHAPTER 1
Human Nature from a Developmental Perspective

What does it mean to be human? Before we attempt to answer that question, perhaps we should first ask: Where do we look if we want to see human nature? Do we look at the spontaneity of children or at the acquired skills of adults? If we believe that our inherent nature is very different from our acquired culture, then we might well study children. We often say that children act more naturally and spontaneously than do adults. Since ancient times, philosophers have hoped to discover children who somehow grew up untainted by any particular set of social customs. If we could only find a purely natural child, would we then have a true picture of what it means to be human? A few “wild children” have been discovered who somehow managed to survive largely outside of any human community. Nothing is more natural to human beings than language, yet the few children known to have grown up outside of any human community not only lacked the ability to use language, they were also unable to learn any language. Purely “natural” children turn out to be very unnatural. Still, there is something right about this “argument from the cradle.”¹ In small children, we see natural hunger, thirst, fear, anger, frustration, and joy in all their raw vitality, relatively unmediated by particular social customs and rules. Small children are much less concerned with appearing to conform to social expectations than are most adults. Adults often praise the impulsive honesty of small children who have not yet learned to censor themselves. And many parents look with horror to see their own children corrupted by the particular vices of adult society. In many respects, babies and small children around the globe are more like each other than they are like their own parents. Observing children, especially young children, is one invaluable way to see what it means to be human.

Perhaps we should reject the assumption that human nature and human culture are opposed to each other. What if it is our nature to be nurtured by a particular set of social customs? What is more characteristic of human nature, after all, than acquiring culture? It takes decades of education to actualize our natural capacities for literary language, mathematics, and the creative arts. If we want to see what it means to be human, we should look at Einstein, Beethoven, and St. Francis—or, more precisely, look at them in the midlife prime of their adult lives. Perhaps we are most fully human when we realize our innate human potential for intellectual, artistic, and moral excellence in skilled activities. Beginning with Aristotle, biologists have always defined the nature of any species by studying specimens in their reproductive maturity. The implicit assumption here is that an organism either too young or too old to reproduce is just not a good example of that species. How can we know what an organism is until we can see what it can do? The prime of life is precisely when we are most capable of actualizing the range of human potential—when we are, in short, most fully human. Children are full of unrealized potential, and the elderly have lost many of their human abilities. Only in the apex of adulthood are we fully human. The great glories as well as the great crimes of history are almost always the achievement of those in their prime. Observing adults in the prime of their lives gives us a unique perspective on what it means to be human.

Since ancient times, philosophers have not been able to agree about whether human nature is revealed best in childhood or in adulthood. Both young children and prime-of-life adults reveal something essential about what it means to be human. We ought to resist the urge to choose.² A human life is essentially a work in progress. To be human means that there is always a gulf between what we are now and what we might become.³ Every young organism grows and develops; only human beings retain a robust capacity for growth and development throughout their lives. Being human means never fully growing up. Moreover, only human beings have the capacity to lead their own lives and to guide their own development. Each of us has aspirations in the present which guide our development into the future. “Become what you already are!” captures the paradoxical nature of human development.

Every society possesses a folklore that distinguishes several “ages of man,” or stages of human life. William Shakespeare codified much ancient lore in his “seven ages of man”: infancy, childhood, adolescence, youth, maturity, old age, and senescence.⁴ In addition to these traditions of folk wisdom, comparative embryologists since Aristotle have distinguished several distinct stages of embryonic development. The development of embryos proceeds through an invariant sequence of stages: each stage is the necessary precondition for subsequent stages, and development is marked by discontinuities between stages. During the nineteenth century, biologists began to ask whether all human development also proceeds through such an invariant sequence of stages. Developmental biologists and psychologists, including Sigmund Freud, Stanley Hall, Carl Jung, Jean Piaget, and Erik Erikson, extended stage theories of embryonic development first to childhood and then to the whole of human life.

Does a human life proceed through an invariant sequence of discontinuous stages? Must the oral stage precede the genital stage? Is adolescence a necessary precondition for adulthood? Most empirical studies of human development during the twentieth century have failed to confirm these theories of stages. By the late twentieth century, studies of human lives have taken a more holistic approach to the entire life span, life course, or life cycle. Put simply, the empirical study of human physical, psychological, moral, and spiritual development has decisively undermined the view that there are sharp discontinuities or radical qualitative changes in human development. Human life is of a piece.⁵ At every “stage” we are learning and forgetting, growing and deteriorating, gaining and losing. The balance of learning and forgetting, for example, does usually vary from childhood to old age, but the idea that children merely learn while the elderly merely forget is demonstrably false. Because of what is called habit interference, everything we learn makes it harder in some ways to learn something new (think of languages): in short, every gain in development leads to a loss and every loss to some potential gain.⁶

It is puzzling that we associate physical and intellectual decline with old age. After all, every athlete and dancer knows only too well that our strength, agility, and speed begin their irreversible and inexorable decline in our late twenties. Male sexual potency also notoriously begins to decline in the twenties and female fertility in the late thirties. Our sensory acuteness already begins to decline in late adolescence: teenagers see, hear, and taste better than do adults. In short, as soon as we start growing we also begin to decline. “Birth,” wrote Samuel Beckett of one of his characters, “was the death of him.”

Intellectual decline is also not limited to old age, just as intellectual growth is not limited to youth. To live is to learn, and we never cease learning—or forgetting. Cognitive psychologists distinguish the “fluid” intelligence (that is, our problem-solving heuristics) we use in chess or in math from the “crystallized” intelligence (that is, our total stock of information) we use to understand a work of literature or history. Our fluid intelligence begins to decline in our thirties while our crystallized intelligence does not normally begin to decline until our seventies. Studies of various kinds of creativity show even earlier patterns of decline: creative reasoning about physical causation may begin to decline in late childhood while creative reasoning about the causes of actions may begin to decline in late adolescence.⁷ At every age, we are gaining and losing, growing and declining, learning and forgetting.

Psychological studies of maturation also undermine theories of development as an invariant sequence of stages. Yes, there are a few “critical periods” and invariant sequences in human development. One must have receptive language before expressive language. We must crawl before we can walk, and we must experience puberty before we can reproduce. Otherwise, psychological, emotional, social, and intellectual development vary hugely by culture and by individual. It is not precocious but normal for many children to be more mature than many adults. And although we must pass through puberty, we need not pass through adolescence. In the pure theory of stages there can be arrested development but no skipped stages or reversals. Yet children often do skip stages and adult emotional maturation often involves actual and measurable reversals. Human development is real, but it does not proceed through an invariant sequence of qualitatively distinct stages. Instead, the younger anticipate the achievements of the older: almost everything we can do well later, we were doing badly earlier. Human maturation is like a well-crafted story in which the early chapters foreshadow later developments.⁸

But if human development is not well described as a sequence of stages, then why does every human culture divide a normative life into age-graded stages?⁹ The answer must be practical rather than theoretical. There are sound moral and legal reasons for treating individuals differently at various ages of life. We do not want small children getting married or serving in the army. Even if development were perfectly continuous, practical reasoning about proper moral and legal responsibilities would still require us to divide a life into partially arbitrary age-graded stages. It is not feasible in practice to treat each individual according to her own unique developmental trajectory. The stages of human life serve invaluable practical purposes for assigning rights and duties, praise and blame—even if they are a poor guide to understanding actual human development. If we are to protect vulnerable children or senescent elders, law and morality must draw bright lines across human growth and decline, whether or not those lines reflect actual stages of development.

Indeed, as we shall see, every human child learns and can recite a life script defining all the important milestones and stages of a normative life in her society. To be a human being in a modern society means knowing at what age we are expected to start and finish school, get married, have children, start a career, and retire. Of course, not every individual life in a particular society follows the normative script, but everyone interprets his life in relation to that shared script. We all know when we are early or late in reaching these normative milestones. Moreover, every age-graded stage of life includes its own standards of conduct. The ages of man or the stages of life are the ubiquitous forensic categories in human life: they guide virtually all of our myriad practices of praise and blame. “Act your age” is the only universal moral imperative in human life.¹⁰ This life script teaches us not only what to expect at each stage of life but also how to treat people in other stages. We have compelling practical reasons, then, for assigning human beings into age-graded stages.

The objective shape, then, of a human life does not fit into a sequence of stages. Just as important, we do not subjectively experience our lives as a rigid series of stages. When a plant or animal is in a particular stage of development, it cannot see beyond the horizon of that stage. Do caterpillars dream of taking flight? Does a cat miss her carefree kittenhood? What makes human beings unique is our capacity to see our lives as a whole.¹¹ The language of stages is misleading when applied to how we think of our own lives.¹² Unlike kittens, children above the age of about two are aware of their future as adults. Children often wonder about adulthood—its freedoms, powers, and duties. Many of the games of make-believe enjoyed by children involve pretending to be adults. Living in a world designed for grown-ups, children are often reminded in very unpleasant ways that they are not yet adults. Most children are ambivalent about becoming grownups but accept its necessity. Are children stuck in childhood? By the power of imagination, children can escape childhood just as they can escape our galaxy. But children can do more than imagine their adult lives; children can focus their energies and conduct on the project of becoming successful adults. Children may dream of living with dinosaurs or space aliens, but they take action to become adults.

Children are not stuck in childhood. They already imagine their futures and attempt to live their lives as a whole. Similarly, adults are clearly not stuck in adulthood. Every adult reflects on his childhood—often with ambivalence. Adults commonly compare the full bloom of their mature achievements with the seedlings of their childhood hopes or fears. Adults even attempt, in ways ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime, to recapture their childhoods. Nothing is more common than for children to act with the gravity and speak with the insight of “adults” or for adults to act and think in ways called “childish.”¹³ Chronological age bears little relation to emotional, moral, or spiritual maturity.

We are often told that childhood is a time for playing and learning to trust others, that adolescence is a time for learning to separate from parents and establish one’s own identity, and that midlife is when we regret our past, realize that our present options are limited, and dread the future. It should be clear, however, that none of these challenges is remotely restricted to a particular stage of life. We should enjoy play throughout our lives; learning to trust others and to establish one’s own identity never ceases. From the moment we are born, our future options are bei...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction. The Story of Your Life
• Part I. Stories of Development
• Part II. Unifying the Whole
• Conclusion. A Practical Guide to Life Writing
• Notes
• Index
• Acknowledgments