Abstract

How might we fathom out what is maturity? Is it by opposing it to immaturity? Is it a polysemous word? Who or what is to be said mature? And what are the domains where maturity reveals itself? In this paper, I probe how Merleau-Ponty innovatively fields those questions. He establishes that maturity is conquered in the actual work of an artist. Maturity consists in an awareness that makes our reading of the world and of others reach a higher degree and pass a critical point. Such a movement in maturity is conceptually refined as a too lengthy maturation that inhabits a process of learning, historical, and perceptual, also as a maturing of thought that is slow and shows intrinsic limitations. In such a facticity that is also an anticipation, maturity essentially becomes a prematuration, which is by no means premature for psychoanalysis, politics, and philosophy.