“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.” – Aristotle (the reviewer’s favourite Aristotle quote)

“John Russon is one of the best phenomenologists in contemporary philosophy. He uses the phenomenological method to cast light on some of the most important issues in our lives. In this book, Russon offers a sensitive description of what it is like to navigate the world as an adult, displaying the ways in which adulthood involves a development of our relations with the world, one another, and ourselves. In doing so, he allows us to see afresh the ways in which our lives unfold over time.” – Todd May 

In the appendix of the book, Russon writes: “This book, Adult Life, completes the Human Life trilogy, begun in Human Experience (2003) and continued in Bearing Witness to Epiphany (2009). Like those works, it is not intended as a work of academic scholarship but as a traditional form of philosophical reflection. As such, it relies not on specialized knowledge but on insight, reasoning, and the evidence of experience, all of which are resources that any reasonably well-informed and reasonably self-reflective reader can in principle bring to it.”

In other words, the book is one that non-philosophers will benefit from reading – it requires no special philosophical training to understand the journey – much like life itself. The book is informed by Merleau-Ponty, Henri Bergson, and Martin Heidegger, but is not heavily footnoted as are most texts by phenomenologist philosophers. John Russon is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Guelph and the Director of the Toronto Summer Seminar in Philosophy. 

This reviewer’s first confession: I have not read the first two books in the trilogy.

Russon’s introduction is useful. He explains that the book is not an ’empirical study in psychology or sociology … but is a work of philosophy’. He is to articulate “first principles” –

“The fundamental insight that orients our study is primarily that we experience: we are not just natural beings to whom something happens, but we are subjective beings for whom something happens: we find ourselves situated in the midst of a happening and our experience is our ongoing process of coming to terms with this condition.”

Phenomenology is, as Wikipedia tells us, “Phenomenology (from Greek phainómenon “that which appears” and lógos “study”) is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness. As a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl and was later expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany.” The study of that which appears – we are beings, situated in time and space, existing in a real world but also the recipients of belief systems that help or hinder us in understanding the world we inhabit. The phenomenologist insists that an approach as free as possible from conceptual presuppositions—and the attempt to describe them as faithfully as possible. Moreover, most adherents to phenomenology hold that it is possible to obtain insights into the essential structures and the essential relationships of these phenomena on the basis of a careful study of concrete examples supplied by experience or imagination and by a systematic variation of these examples in the imagination.

The reader however does not need to know the intricacies and battles of the phenomenologists to read and understand Russon’s book, which is written, as mentioned above, for the non-philosophic audience. Or, as the author puts it, “my writing is not an exercise in “knowing for the sake of knowing,” but is an attempt to communicate what seems to me to be the deepest lessons our human culture has learned about living well. My belief is that anyone will benefit from taking the time to learn these lessons.”

Adult Life is presented in three parts:

Part I – Human Experience and the Meaning of Adulthood – with a discussion of perception and possibility, reality and maturity, and character and aging.

Part II – The Form of Adult Life: Maturity and Aging – with a discussion of character and reality, outer and inner content, time, responsibility and happiness.

Part III – The Content of Adult Life: Adult Occupation – with discussions of the family, the market, and politics. And a discussion of art, religion and philosophy, wonder and science and wisdom.

The introduction presents three vignettes for discussion: the generation gap, worldly engagement, morality and character, and outlines the plan of the book. Read them carefully; they help to understand the rest of the book. The book is readable, interesting, and at times enlightening.

The “message” of the book? 

Be honest, be engaged, “find what it is you can do and do it to the best of your ability,” live to the fullest and enjoy the trip!

Bob Lane is a Philosophy Professor Emeritus at Vancouver Island University on Vancouver Island.

Categories: Philosophical

Keywords: aging, philosophy