In What Does It Mean to Grow Old? essayists come to grips as best they can with the phenomenon of an America that is about to become the Old Country. They have been drawn from every relevant discipline—gerontology, social medicine, politics, health, anthropology, ethics, law—and asked to speak their mind. Most of them write extremely well [and their] sharply individual voices are heard. What Does It Mean to Grow Old? Reflections from the Humanities By Thomas R. Cole, Sally A. Gadow Duke University Press Copyright © 1986 Duke University Press All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-0817-1 Contents Acknowledgments, Foreword, Part One: The tattered web of cultural meanings, The Meaning of Life and the Meaning of Old Age, The Virtues and Vices of the Elderly, The Meaning of Risk, Rights, and Responsibility in Aging America, Legal Reform and Aging: Current Issues, Troubling Trends, The "Enlightened" View of Aging: Victorian Morality in a New Key, Part Two: Subjectivity: Literature, Imagination, and Frailty, Reminiscence and the Life Review: Prospects and Retrospects, The Wizard of Pilgrimage, or What Color Is Our Brick Road?, The Meaning of Health Care in Old Age, Growing Old Together: Communality in a Sarasota Neighborhood, Frailty and Strength: The Dialectic of Aging, Appendix: A Select Bibliography of Aging and Meaning, Aging and Meaning: A Bibliographical Essay, A Select Bibliography, I. History and Public Policy, II. Philosophy, III. Religion, IV. Medicine, Nursing, and Health Care, V. Psychology, VI. Sociology and Anthropology, VII. Gerontology, VIII. Art and Literature, Contributors, Notes, Index, CHAPTER 1 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