What is Maturity...Really?: A Philosophical Exploration into Ethics
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Book Overview
Age happens to you. Maturity has to be built.
We have no shared account of what a grown person is. Competence isn't it. Neither is age, success, or good behavior in public.
What is Maturity...Really? rebuilds the answer by tracing how the question itself was formed.
It begins with Odysseus. Ten years of war, ten more of wandering, and twelve trials the gods designed as a curriculum, each one teaching him to hate a vice he would later have to judge in the men occupying his house.
Plato follows, arguing that eternal life is not something that begins after death but a quality of experience available now, to anyone disciplined enough to chase beauty to its source. Then Aristotle, whose ethics are not about behaving well: the aim is not to become good at living, but to live in order to become good.
With Moses the book turns. Campbell's claim is that God worked through Greece to supply the right questions and through Israel to supply the right answers, and this ethics book is built in exactly that order.
Augustine reads time as eternity stretched out to give us room to become good. Dante makes this world providential training for the next. Shakespeare's King Lear shows character deciding conduct. Hegel names the engine: negation, contradiction working as an amplifier of the mind.
Then the critics get their turn, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche read against Aquinas and Dewey, before a closing chapter answers Kant head-on rather than conceding to him.
Campbell taught Philosophy, Religion, Greek and Mathematics at the university level while running a structural and forensic engineering firm. Twelve appendices carry you further into the Republic, the Nicomachean Ethics, Hume, Kant, Mill and Nietzsche.
Maturity is not what happens to you.
It is what you are being trained for.
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