âFew peopleâ, remarked the Duke de La Rochefoucauld, âknow how to be oldâ (1975 [1678]: Maxime 423: âPeu de gens savent ĂȘtre vieuxâ). Most, he thought, who live to be old make a mess of old age, wasting their time or letting time waste them. Given La Rochefoucauldâs famously low opinion of human virtues and capacities, this judgement should not be read as singling out the elderly for special scorn; in his view, people were generally rather bad at living, irrespective of their age. Yet, the idea that one needs to âknow howâ to be old arrests attention. What particular qualifications or qualities might provide the requisite expertise? Whether or not we reach old age depends to a large extent on luck in the biological and social lotteries, though choosing a safe and healthy lifestyle obviously helps. But La Rochefoucauld was plainly gesturing towards something more than this: living well in old age requires certain skills or virtues, and most people, he considered, lack these. If this is true, it is disconcerting. How dreadful to be old and ill-prepared! What, if we are already old or anticipating that state, should we do about it? Should we rush to the nearest bookshop and buy a self-help book on successful aging? Or would we do better to pick up the current volume, The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Aging?
Here is the place to say what this book is and is not. To take the latter first, it is not a handbook of gerontology (i.e. the theoretical study of aging in its psychological, biological and social aspects), although many of the chapters draw on recent empirical research into old age and aging. Neither is it a manual on âgood livingâ in old age, and none of the chapters advises on such matters as aging gracefully, fulfilling oneself in oneâs âsenior yearsâ or reaching oneâs centenary. How useful such self-help manuals are is debatable and debated. In part this is because they generally assume, in a way that can only be described as question-begging, that old age is an unfortunate condition, much inferior to youth, that must be met by constant efforts to âstay youngâ. This approach amounts to a not-so-subtle denigration of old age that is in danger of missing what may be its distinctively valuable features. Furthermore, as Mary Mothersill has noted of the practical recommendations offered by the manuals, â[w]hat counts as good advice in one context, in another emerges as callous bullyingâ (Mothersill 1999, p. 17). Not everyone in their later years has the money or the inclination to pay daily visits to the gym, take up a new hobby or travel to exotic places. Instead, the present volume is a work of philosophical reflection on what it means and feels like to be old, and its chapters employ philosophical methods to throw light on the prospects, the problems, the social context and the moral responsibilities associated with old age. All authors represented in this wide-ranging collection have previous experience of writing in this field, and their chapters are informed by the latest scholarship and empirical research. In one significant respect, this handbook differs from many other handbooks and companions in that its subject area has received surprisingly little notice from the philosophical community in modern times, although topics of philosophical interest are occasionally addressed in general journals of gerontology, such as The Gerontologist and Ageing and Society. Consequently, there is relatively little current research and writing by philosophers to be surveyed by the authors of this book, and several of the essays have more the character of original research papers than is normally the case with handbook chapters. âOld age is a topic that philosophers by and large have ignoredâ, said Mothersill in 1999; and a decade and a half later the situation remains largely unchanged, excepting the work of writers featured here (though special mention should be made of the journal Philosophical Papers, which dedicated an issue to the subject in 2012). The need to blaze trails through largely untouched territory has been the challenge faced by the authors of the present essays, and it is hoped that their writing will prompt others to take these important discussions further.
This volume, then, is not the place to look for advice on the doâs and dontâs of how to be old. It is not a philosopherâs job to tell the elderly (or those who are anxiously nearing that state) how to maintain âhigh functioning across a range of domainsâ (to quote one typical definition of âsuccessful agingâ [Gatz and Zarit 1999, p. 396]). But it does not follow that the philosophical investigation of the place of old age in the human story provides no food for thought of a practical kind. Indeed, it would be seriously disappointing if philosophical speculation on old age yielded merely abstract theorising which had little bearing on the more existential questions about how to be old. The pluralist tendencies of modern philosophy are rightly resistant to procrustean efforts to produce one-size-fits-all accounts of the good life, and this applies as much to notions of âsuccessful agingâ as to those of flourishing at any age. Even so, certain structural generalisations may be ventured. So, for instance, thinking about oneâs own aging and old age in terms of the narrative organisation of oneâs life focuses attention on the interrelationship of the successive phases of oneâs existence, making it easier to see what kind of coda will bring oneâs story to a fitting and coherent close. Reflecting on the kind of skills, virtues and other qualities that are serviceable in maximising the opportunities and facing the challenges that are common in old age can also pay practical dividends. Old people may lack the physical robustness of young ones, but they should play on the strengths they have. Plutarch, who took a rather more positive view than La Rochefoucauld of the capacities of the elderly, held that the virtues of âjustice, temperance and prudenceâ come to their perfection âlate and slowlyâ, and that old people possessed of these âbeauties of soulâ have a special contribution to make to society (1694, p. 100). Whether or not Plutarch was right to think that the old were typically more just, prudent and temperate than the young, he correctly identified as a philosophical question that of their proper social role and relationship with their younger fellow citizens. Theirs, he thought, should be primarily an active existence, in which the experience gathered over years should be applied to the good of the public: âan old man, acting in the state, is a venerable spectacle; but he who wastes away his days in his bed, or sits discoursing of trivial matters, and blowing his nose in the corner of a gallery, renders himself an object of contemptâ (1694, p. 77).
It is trite, but true, to say that old age, like any phase of life beyond infancy, is to a large extent what we make of it. Many elderly people live a creative, satisfying and useful life, at least before physical or mental infirmities commence their spoiling work â and frequently even after that. Realism about oneâs situation in old age is all-important. To pretend that one is still young when one is not is, and appears, foolish; yet people should not be in too much of a hurry to write themselves off as being âpast their bestâ. Such judgement belittles the knowledge that has been gained over the years (knowledge how as well as knowledge that) and the role that their experience enables them to play in supporting members of younger generations, via formal and informal social structures. It would be false to claim that age always brings wisdom, and perhaps rash even to assert that it usually does. But having lived for many years does at least mean that one has had plentiful opportunities to learn the ways of the world and means of dealing with them. In the fast-changing contemporary world, the idea of âthe wisdom of the eldersâ can seem as outdated as the age of steam; only youth, it is often said (especially by the young), can keep up with the breakneck pace of social and technological changes, while to be old is inevitably to be out of date and left behind. Yet plus ça change, plus câest la mĂȘme chose: many of the problems of human life are perennial and the skills and virtues needed to deal with them equally so. Navigating personal relationships, finding oneâs place and work in the world, maintaining oneâs self-esteem and determining what one owes to oneself and what to others are challenges to be faced anew by every individual. No amount of technological expertise can make a person adept at tackling them or provide any substitute for learning by experience; older people may not have all the answers, but they have had more time to learn from their mistakes. People who have lived into middle age and beyond should have also acquired more realistic ideas on what they can and cannot change.
Old people are, of course, as various as those of any age in terms of their strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, successes and failures, and virtues and vices. Therefore, empirical generalisations about them are risky, as many of the contributors to this book acknowledge. Surprisingly, one philosopher who did not acknowledge this was Aristotle. (See Chap.â 8 for a fuller discussion of Aristotleâs view of old age.) In a curious chapter of the Rhetoric, Aristotle painted a highly unflattering picture of old men, whom he portrayed as patterns of the vices of deficiency: cowardice, over-caution, small-mindedness, stinginess, greed, distrustfulness, irritability and querulousness. Being âtoo fond of themselvesâŠthey guide their lives too much by considerations of what is useful and too little by what is noble â for the useful is what is good for oneself and the noble what is good absolutelyâ (Rhetoric, 1389b; 2001b, p. 1405). Aristotleâs denigration of the elderly anticipates T.S. Eliotâs (1940) lines from East Coker: âDo not let me hear/ Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly.â This is strikingly implausible on a double count: first, its representation of old men (note that Aristotle did not say anything explicitly about old women) as being all alike in character, and second, its unqualified denial to them of any virtues. Aristotle divided human life into three major phases, youth, prime and old age, and he claimed that virtue was likely to predominate over vice only in the central phase (Bk.II, Chaps.â 12â14). On his account, youth is chiefly characterised by the vices of excess: fierce sensuality, hot temper, rashness and insolence (Chap.â 12). While young men overdo things, elderly men underdo them; only men in their prime get the balance right. These are gross caricatures, impossible to take seriously. Conceivably, this section of the Rhetoric was written tongue-in-cheek, as an example of rhetorical technique for studentsâ benefit. Doubts about Aristotleâs seriousness may also be aroused by the fact that his analysis of moral virtue (ethike arete) as âa state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean (meson)â between a vice of excess and a vice of deficiency (Nicomachean Ethics, 1106bâ1107a; 2001a, p. 959) maps with suspicious neatness onto his division of the three ages of man. The Rhetoricâs take on old age also make nonsense of the view defended in the Nicomachean Ethics that virtue, laboriously acquired through the exercise of practical wisdom (phronesis), becomes a fixed and robust character disposition. For that view hardly sits well with the claim that the mere passage of the years is sufficient to whittle it away again, and to do so, seemingly, whether the subject wills it or no.
Setting aside Aristotleâs implausible, pseudo-deterministic account of the miserable ethical condition of the old, and recognising the range of existential possibilities open to people of mature years, we can see old age as having as much potential for excellence as any earlier phases of life. This is true even for the âold oldâ (commonly characterised as those who are aged 85 or more) in whom the adjustment to waning powers and worsening health calls for courage, resilience, patience and (an underestimated virtue) adaptability to circumstances. Old age, and especially old old age, involves an existential negotiation with the reality of oneâs mortality and the knowledge that oneâs death is no longer a distant prospect; yet to think so much about the approach of the grim reaper that one forgets that one is still alive shows very questionable wisdom. St. Jerome was commonly depicted by artists with a human skull as an object of contemplation. The aging poet John Donne had a picture painted of himself in his shroud, which he kept by his bedside as a reminder of the transience of life. Such memento mori should perhaps be seen more as spiritual or poetical conceits than as expressions of a morbid outlook, but while (as Tolstoy points out in âThe death of Ivan Ilychâ), there is a difference between accepting the abstract proposition that all men are mortal and reaching the existential realisation that I myself am mortal, few elderly people are likely to forget that their time is running out.
The description of Donne as âagingâ may perhaps be resisted by readers who are unwilling to apply that epithet to a man who was around 60 at the time of his death in 1631 (the precise date of his birth is not known) â albeit this was a fairly high age by seventeenth-century standards. But in one sense, Donne was indisputably aging â this being the sense in which we are all aging, from the day we are born. As Jan Baars points out in Chap.â 5, the word âagingâ is customarily used in three different senses. In the first sense, âagingâ means attaining a high or advanced number of years relative to the species norm. While there are no sharp or generally agreed boundaries, a human being who has reached her mid-70s can be described both as âoldâ and as âagingâ (if not yet âagedâ, a term that, although uncommon today, may apply rather better to the âold oldâ). A dog, by contrast, is aging, in this sense, at 15, but a Galapagos giant tortoise has barely reached its prime by 70. In the second sense, âagingâ can be understood as biological or functional senescing or wearing out. People in their 70s are aging in this second sense as well as the first, but only the second refers to the processes of physical and mental changes that occur as advanced years are reached. The third sense of âagingâ, and the broadest in its temporal scope, refers to the gradual unfolding of a biological/functional narrative from birth to death; so a child aged 5, while plainly not old or senescent, has aged in so far as he has completed the first 5 years of the biological course.
This handbook is concerned with all the three senses of aging but mostly with the first two. That we are all aging from the day we are born â that the biological clock is ticking away within us, and time departing from us â is a significant and sobering thought, and it may bring to mind the Roman Stoic Senecaâs advice to make the most of whatever time we have. People complain, wrote Seneca, of the shortness of life, yet if they invest their time wisely, they should find it sufficient. It is not how long one lives, but what one does with oneâs life, that matters. A short but well-spent life (which is not to be confused with âa short life but a merry oneâ, if that life is unworthy) is better than a longer one that wastes time. Indeed, the latter may scarcely deserve to be called a âlifeâ: âyou must not think a man has lived long just because he has white hair and wrinkles,â for possibly âhe has not lived long, just existed longâ (Seneca 2005, pp. 71, 67). However, the chapters of the present book are primarily c...