Written by StephenB

Maturity IV

As one’s physical umbilical cord is cut to leave the womb behind, so one must cut one’s mental/emotional umbilical cord to leave the matrix of childhood behind.

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Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!”–that is the motto of Enlightenment.

Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment?

5 thoughts on “Maturity IV”

      1. Mmm…wouldn’t that simply give us what we started with then? Or are you saying that both the question and the answer are within us and we need to discover them?

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      2. Just as practice doesn’t make perfect, only perfect practice makes perfect, so too a question will only yield the right answer when it is rightly worded. Yes, there are indeed stupid questions.
        When I was in library school, my classmates and I were trained in conducting a reference interview. This is a fancy term for a conversation directed by the librarian for the purpose of discovering the real question the patron or student is asking. For a patron or student will often first present to the librarian a question that they’ve formulated after going through several steps in their fruitless attempt to answer their original question. It is the job of the reference librarian to retrace those steps to get to the root query the patron/student has.
        Thus, when we begin to ask a question, let us first interview ourselves to discover what is at the root of our questioning. Indeed, at the core of our asking is this simple and all-encompassing question, viz., “What life do I really want?” I submit that the majority of humans never ask themselves this central and germinal question.

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      3. I’ve never thought of it in those terms, but I can immediately see what you mean. I was schooled as a Catholic but my Dad, who wasn’t a Catholic, taught me to think, to ask hard questions, and to be honest with /myself/. That lead to an interesting end to my secondary schooling as I outed myself as an atheist. 🙂 To their credit, the school didn’t kick me out, not once they were satisfied that I was genuine in my beliefs.
        I think I was extraordinarily lucky that my first big question received such a just hearing. Not all questions end so…’well’ but I still believe that we’d be better off if we asked them.

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