Harry R. Moody

The Meaning of Life and the Meaning of Old Age

Editor's Introduction. In his wide-ranging philosophical essay, Harry R. Moody reminds us that timeless questions ("The Meaning of Life and the Meaning of Old Age") do not have timeless answers. All thought is historically conditioned—that is, related to changing structures of power and patterns of culture. This insight encourages Moody to analyze contemporary philosophical discussions of meaning in light of our modern "therapeutic" culture, the triumph of scientific professionalism, and the bureaucratized life-cycle of late capitalism. In doing so, he uncovers the ideological nature of life span developmental psychology's assumption that apolitical, value-free science benevolently improves society and enhances individual autonomy.

But this deconstruction does not leave Moody wringing his hands, either with glee or despair. Rather, it clears the way to pursue more philosophically sound, politically and existentially honest, and socially just answers to the questions of "The Meaning of Life and the Meaning of Old Age." Combining traditional values of contemplation, myth, and spirituality with a radical critique of trivialized leisure in old age, Moody points us toward the intersection of life review and autobiographical consciousness. Here perhaps, transcendent meanings meet the existential and social experience of individuals; here we may renew our understanding of the "gifts reserved for age."

T.C.

At first we want life to be romantic; later, to be bearable; finally, to be understandable. —Louise Bogan

I approach the question of meaning in old age as a philosopher, yet not exclusively from a philosophical point of view. Alasdair MacIntyre has suggested that every philosophy presupposes a sociology, so it is just as well to be explicit about how social structure is related to ideas. If MacIntyre is right, then the examination of a seemingly remote or metaphysical question—"What is the meaning of life?"—may have extraordinary implications for how we think about the social system, about ethics and politics, even about the daily activities of our lives. It may prove to be the key to how we can think about the problem of meaning in the last stage of life.

I begin my inquiry by trying to make clear how we can succeed in thinking about the meaning of life and I conclude that we inevitably invoke some image of life as a whole, of the unity of a human life. Contemporary psychological systems appeal to some such idea but it is rarely made explicit. We live in a culture dominated by the therapeutic outlook, a world that looks to psychology rather than to traditional disciplines of religion or philosophy to find meaning in life. In practice, the perspective of psychological man tends to reinforce a separation between the public and private worlds, a separation that is a dominant feature of our society.

As we trace the origins of these psychological ideas, their ancestry reaches back eventually to Greek and Roman thought. We know that in time a suppressed dimension of ancient philosophy—the appeal to a principle of divine transcendence—eventually triumphed in the form of religion. Yet both ancient and medieval civilizations took for granted that the contemplative mode of life represented the highest possibility for human existence. By contrast, the modern world, since the seventeenth century, has favored a life of activity over a life of contemplation. This fact is fundamental to understanding the modern horror of old age, which is a horror of the vacuum—the "limbo state" of inactivity.

In twentieth-century philosophy the older problem of the meaning of life for a time disappeared, but when it resurfaced it was assumed that the solution must lie in some form of privatism: the meaning of may life. Modern philosophy has rejected any appeal to transcendent sources of meaning. Further, the modernist wish is to maintain that life in old age can have meaning even if life as a whole does not. The traditional answer was quite different. The traditional answer amounted to what Philibert called a "scale of ages" or a hierarchy of life stages in which late life was a time for unfolding wisdom and spiritual understanding. But any such positive image of old age depends on a cultural framework wider than the individual.

That cultural framework is what is missing today. The modernization of consciousness coincides with the modernized life cycle, with its sharp separation among the "three boxes of life" (education, work, retirement). This segmented life course undercuts any sense or meaning that belongs to the whole of life. The search for meaning is displaced from otherworldly to this-worldly concerns, then finally compressed into late life and brought under the domination of professions and bureaucracy. The result has been a covert ideology of life span development which lacks any rational foundation for shared public values whereby the idea of development might make sense. In the end, the empirical science of life span development must turn to the humanities and to cultural traditions if we seek to reconstruct a narrative unity to the human life course.

As soon as we begin to explore the question of meaning in old age, we come up against an obstacle presented by the forms of thought that prevail in our time. How are we to understand "meaning" in life? It is characteristic of modern thought to separate three levels of meaning: the individual, the collective, and the cosmic. That separation is what defines the present situation and throws up an obstacle to the inquiry.

That separation has a history of its own. After the Enlightenment, the cosmic sense of meaning began to atrophy. In its place came belief in a collective sense of meaning that absorbed into itself both the individual and the cosmic senses of meaning: the idea of progress through history. Then in the twentieth century, the collective sense of meaning in turn has weakened, leaving us with an exclusively individual preoccupation with the meaning of life. Religious and metaphysical systems have lost credibility, belief in social justice and human progress has become doubtful, and the best advice appears to be Voltaire's prescription: "Cultivate your garden." In other words, retreating to a private sphere of meaning is the best we can hope for in a disordered and meaningless world. We have gone the way of Candide: we can hope at best to cultivate our gardens, but those gardens have now shrunk to the size of windowboxes.

This retreat to privatism is an unsatisfactory solution to questions about the meaning of life and the meaning of old age. Privatism, what Christopher Lasch has called "the culture of Narcissism," is unsuited to provide any abiding sense of meaning that transcends the individual life course. That absence of enduring meaning creates a special peril for old age when the temptations of narcissistic absorption are greater. The psychology of narcissism—the self-reflexive center of psychological motivation—has emerged as a dominant problem for modern man. The heart of the problem is that in the modern age, at just the moment when the meaning of old age is in question, the cultural fabric itself unravels to the point where "the center cannot hold." Things fall apart and the search for meaning turns inward to escape from collapsing institutional norms. But in a therapeutic culture can late-life narcissism find satisfactory resolution apart from any binding institutional norms?

The bankruptcy of privatism becomes all too evident in old age. But by that point individuals alone cannot invent meanings to save themselves from despair. The exercise itself invites the humor of Samuel Beckett and others who have seen the problem for what it is. We have shrunk the question of meaning down to its lowest denominator, the psychological meaning of my life. But it turns out that any serious inquiry even in that direction brings us quickly to a wider collective and historical level: the survival and meaning of the human species.

Finally, we cannot consistently sustain a sense of meaning without situating our collective enterprise in a wider cosmic setting. The philosophical questions are all connected, regardless of how we come to answer them. The levels of meaning—individual, collective, and cosmic—must be connected. As we become increasingly an aging society, the collapse of a coherent framework for meaning in old age becomes a more pressing social and cultural problem. It cannot be resolved without clarification of the philosophical issues, and it is to these issues that I now turn.

I have suggested that we can distinguish between three levels of meaning in life: the meaning of my life, the meaning of human life, and the meaning of the cosmos. In each case we could add the phrase "as a whole." Ordinarily, human beings act as if they understand quite well the range of meanings that life can in fact possess. But when we add the qualifying phrase, "life as a whole," then we are clearly talking about something else, something out of the ordinary. It is this larger or global sense of meaning that comes to attention at times of crisis and particularly when the limits of a life come into view: for example, in the shock that surrounds death and bereavement. These moments, which Jaspers called "limit situations" (Grenzsituationen), are the familiar signposts of modern literature and existential philosophy. Characteristically, in literary expression or philosophical reflection, as soon as we begin to reflect on the meaning of life as a whole, we quickly reach the boundaries of language itself, as Wittgenstein noted: "The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. Is this not the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the meaning of life (Sinn des Lebens) became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that meaning?" But, contrary to Wittgenstein's contention, the problem of the meaning of life has not vanished. On the contrary, with the emergence of an aging society, it seems certain on demographic grounds alone that more and more people will be confronted with the "limit situation" of old age in which the whole of life itself may be put into question. My purpose here is to examine how that question is intelligible, in both cultural and philosophical terms.

At certain times in life, we tend to ask questions about the meaning of life as a whole. In mid-life crisis or in autobiographical reflection in old age, what is at stake is a sense of the meaning (or lack of meaning) of my life. This is the psychological version of the question of meaning that is most familiar today. But we must also distinguish a second sense of this problematic question about the meaning of life. This is the concern about the meaning of the entire human situation, the meaning of human existence or human history as a whole. This concern is alive today in fears about the threat of nuclear war and the future of the human species. Here obviously is something more than individual concern alone. For old age, that collective concern can be felt as disillusionment with the collective goals and efforts of earlier years. All earlier goals presupposed an image of the future. But in old age that imagined future has now become history. The results are likely to be different from what was anticipated, and effort often gives way to disillusionment. Struggles to create a more just world, for example, run up against a mood expressed in Ecclesiastes: "I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all." The pessimism of Ecclesiastes is not uncommon in old age. In our time, doubts about progress and the advance of social justice have become endemic. In old age, this questioning about the meaning of human life as a whole may be unavoidable.

Finally, we come to the widest possible question about meaning in life: the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, the meaning of life and death. These are the questions of traditional philosophy and religion. The questions may be greeted by the cry of Ecclesiastes, "All is vanity"; or by faith in an inscrutable reality beyond understanding, a faith expressed for example in the Book of Job; or again by belief, as we find in works by Aristotle and Spinoza, that human existence is part of an order of nature that makes our human life intelligible at a cosmic scale. Note that I have not stressed here the question of belief in immortality or life after death. This is of course a vital question, but I am concerned at the moment to bring out alternative responses to what is a more fundamental question about cosmic meaning: does our human existence have an ultimate significance in the universe as a whole? This is a level of meaning wider than either individual or collective concern. Nonetheless, we can presume that any answer to this wider question of the meaning of the cosmos or of human life as a whole will have implications for the psychological or personal question of the meaning of my life.

Any question about the meaning of life finally comes back to intuitions about wholeness: the unity or wholeness of an individual life, the unity of the human species, the unity of the universe as a whole. As we approach the completion of any task—building up a new business, writing a book, leaving one job for another—it is inevitable that we think of the task as a whole. We ask the question, "What did it mean?" It is as if we were on a ship or a plane leaving a city and then, at a certain distance, we look back and see the city as a whole for the first time.

But the analogy fails, as Kant noted in his Critique of Pure Reason. When I ask questions about the unity or totality of myself or my life, I am still within my life, not outside it, not able to see it as a whole. The same point holds true for the human species or human history, in which we live our lives, and again, at the widest possible scale, for the universe as a whole. Thus, argues Kant, it is a logical error to think that we can form intelligible concepts of the self or of the universe as a whole. But we cannot resist the impulse to seek such concepts, despite the fact that we can never grasp the metaphysical totality of things.

Kant's critical observation opens up a different kind of question about the search for meaning over the course of human life. The question is transformed into a phenomenological inquiry into the different forms of meaning. How are the three levels of meaning—individual, collective, and cosmic—bound up with one another? What is the shape of this question about the meaning of life in old age and how is the question related to the status and social meaning of old age itself? How have these relationships changed historically over time, and what are the possibilities for rediscoving old age as a period of life in which the search for meaning has a legitimacy and even a broader social importance?

The question of meaning in old age, after all, is not merely an academic inquiry; it has implications for the quality of life in old age in our world today. Old age is the period of life when the shape of life as a whole comes into view, or when it is natural, at any rate, to try to see things in a wider scale. Totality may be metaphysically unattainable but the drive toward totality, the search for meaning, appears at a point when the task of life is about to be completed. In Hegel's phrase, "The owl of Minerva takes flight as the shades of dusk are falling."

Is it permissible to use the word "task" in speaking of this search for meaning? Even life span development psychology cannot avoid the language of developmental "tasks" for different life stages. It is just here that old age is in a precarious position, for the task of the final stage of life is in some way bound up with the completion of life as a whole. Old age is not simply one more stage but the final stage, the stage that sums up all that went before. Here we cannot avoid thinking of life as a whole. But can we speak of a task for life as a whole without some larger philosophical concept of meaning? And without this larger intuition about life as a whole, what sustains the integrity of the last stage of life?

Inevitably, we find ourselves caught up in an image of the normative life cycle. But what the social sciences have lacked is a philosophical legitimation for such covert appeals to the idea of a normative life cycle. In the work of our most prominent exponent of such a theory—Erik Erikson—such covert ethical appeals command widespread public admiration. Erikson's ideals evoke in us a numinous image of something we desperately want to believe in: the unity of the life course, the integrity of the life cycle. In Erikson's work developmental psychology becomes a vehicle of hope.