On the superficial level there are assets or debits to living in any period. On the more profound level, each individual must come to his own consciousness of himself, and he does this on a level which transcends the particular age he lives in. The same holds true for one’s chronological age. The important issue is not whether a person is twenty or forty or sixty: it rather is whether he fulfills his own capacity of self-conscious choice at his particular level of development. This is why a healthy child at eight—as everyone has observed—can be more of a person than a neurotic adult of thirty.
The child is not more mature in a chronological sense, nor can he do as much as the adult, nor take care of himself as well, but he is more mature when we judge maturity by honesty of emotion, originality, and capacity to make choices on matters adequate to his stage of development. The statement of the person of twenty who says, “I will begin to live when I am thirty-five” is as falsely based as the one who, at forty or fifty, laments, “I cannot live because I have lost my youth.” Interestingly enough, one generally finds on closer inspection that this is the same person, that the one who makes that lament at fifty was postponing living also at twenty—which demonstrates our point even more incisively.
To him who had climbed the tower beyond time, consciously….The task and possibility of the human being is to move from his original situation as an unthinking and unfree part of the mass, whether this mass is his actual early existence as a foetus or his being symbolically a part of the mass in a conformist, automaton society—to move from the womb, that is, through the incestuous circle, which is but one step removed from the womb, through the experience of the birth of self-awareness, the crises of growth, the struggles, choices and advances from the familiar to the unfamiliar, to ever-widening consciousness of himself and thus ever-widening freedom and responsibility, to higher levels of differentiation in which he progressively integrates himself with others in freely chosen love and creative work.
Each step in this journey means that he lives less as a servant of automatic time and more as one who transcends time, that is, one who lives by meaning which he chooses. Thus the person who can die courageously at thirty—who has attained a degree of freedom and differentiation that he can face courageously the necessity of giving up his life—is more mature than the person who on his deathbed at eighty cringes and begs still to be shielded from reality.
The practical implication is that one’s goal is to live each moment with freedom, honesty and responsibility. One is then in each moment fulfilling so far as he can his own nature and his evolutionary task. In this way one experiences the joy and gratification that accompany fulfilling one’s own nature. Whether the young instructor eventually completes his book or not is a secondary question: the primary issue is whether he, or anyone else, writes and thinks in the given sentence or paragraph what he believes will “gain the praise of another,” or what he himself believes is true and honest according to his lights at the moment.
The young husband, to be sure, cannot be certain of his relation with his wife five years hence: but in the best of historical periods, could one ever have been certain that he would live out the week or month? Does not the uncertainty of our time teach us the most important lesson of all—that the ultimate criteria are the honesty, integrity, courage and love of a given moment of relatedness? If we do not have that, we are not building for the future anyway; if we do have it, we can trust the future to itself.
The qualities of freedom, responsibility, courage, love and inner integrity are ideal qualities, never perfectly realized by anyone, but they are the psychological goals which give meaning to our movement toward integration. When Socrates was describing the ideal way of life and the ideal society, Glaucon countered: “Socrates, I do not believe that there is such a City of God anywhere on earth.” Socrates answered, “Whether such a city exists in heaven or ever will exist on earth, the wise man will live after the manner of that city, having nothing to do with any other, and in so looking upon it, will set his own house in order.”