>Scientists define the stages of life in biological, societal, and chronological terms—but none of them quite capture what it’s like to grow up.
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.
nemosaltat•39m ago
And besides, when I make phrases, is it really me who is speaking?
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.
rman666•1h ago
It’s not when you start to tell fart jokes, apparently.
dmfdmf•1h ago
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.
nemosaltat•39m ago
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.