Old Age and Other Essays E-Book

Norberto Bobbio

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Seitenzahl: 184

Beschreibung

This book by one of Italy's oldest and wisest intellectuals is a philosophical and personal meditation on ageing. The question of old age has preoccupied writers from Cicero to Améry, but in this volume Norberto Bobbio produces an account that is specific to our times. Born in 1909, Bobbio has lived through the major events of the past century, and his experiences of Fascism, Communism and the Cold War lend his reflections a melancholy that distinguishes them from earlier eulogies on old age and death. Bobbio's conclusions are often sobering, yet his investigation into memory and mortality is written with both humour and emotion. In the opening chapter, Bobbio reassesses the notion of progress from the perspective of an old man. Arguing for an understanding of historical change as the transfer between generations, Bobbio explains how the elderly are increasingly marginalized in contemporary society. Referring to the traditional idea of old age as the 'age of wisdom', Bobbio argues that our ever-accelerating technological progress has dramatically shifted the power of knowledge from old to young. This discussion of old age as a social problem is accompanied by a reflection on old age as a personal predicament. In his elegant and lucid prose, Bobbio confronts the facts of decrepitude and death. In taking stock of his life, he argues once again for the importance of democracy and human rights. This is a beautifully written book that will be of great interest to the academic and general reader alike. Its intellectual content renders it of particular value to students in the fields of philosophy, politics and the social sciences.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title

Copyright

Publisher’s Note

Old Age

Part I

Disgruntled old age

Where is all this supposed wisdom?

Rhetoric and anti-rhetoric

The world of memory

Part II

I am still here

After death

Slow motion

Lost opportunities

Other Essays

To myself

Intellectual autobiography

Reflections of an octogenarian

Reply to my critics

Power and the law

Taking stock

The politics of culture

Appendix: Notes on the Text

Notes

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

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e1

Old Age and Other Essays

NORBERTO BOBBIO

Translated and edited by Allan Cameron

Copyright © this translation Polity Press 2001

First published as De senectute e altri scritti autobiografici, © Giulio Einaudi, 1996 Turin.

First published in 2001 by Polity Press in association withBlackwell Publishers Ltd.

Published with the financial assistance of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Editorial office:Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Marketing and production:Blackwell Publishers Ltd108 Cowley RoadOxford OX4 1JF, UK

Published in the USA byBlackwell Publishers Inc.350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade of otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0–7456–2386–7ISBN 0–7456–2387–5 (pbk)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bobbio, Norberto, 1909–[De senectute e altri scritti autobiografici. English]Old age and other essays / Norberto Bobbio; translated and edited by Allan Cameron.p. cm.Translation of: De senectute e altri scritti autobiografici.Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0–7456–2386–7 (acid-free paper)—ISBN 0–7456–2387–5 (pbk: acid-free paper)1. Bobbio, Norberto, 1909–2. Aging—Philosophy. I. Cameron, Allan, 1952–11. Title.

JC265.B59313 2001305.26—dc21

2001021045

Publisher’s Note

This text is a selection of the essays which originally appeared in the Italian volume De senectute e altri scritti autobiografici (Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1996).

Old Age

Part I

Disgruntled old age

Old age is not an academic subject, but I am an old academic. So allow me to speak this time, not as an academic, but as an old man. I have spoken so often as an academic that I constantly run the risk of repeating myself, a risk that is all the greater because, as we all know, ageing academics are so in love with their own ideas that they bring them up again and again. I myself am beginning to realize that many of my writings in recent years have been variations on a single theme.

I have been observing myself for some time, but, apart from a few asides,1 I have never discussed my experience of old age in public. How long have I been observing my old age? Its threshold has shifted by about twenty years in recent times. Since Cicero, writers on old age have been aged around sixty. Today, sixty-year-olds are only old in the bureaucratic sense, in that they have reached the age in which they are generally entitled to a pension. An eighty-year-old was considered, with a few exceptions, to be so decrepit as to be unworthy of interest. Today, however, physiological rather than bureaucratic old age starts when you approach the age of eighty, which is our country’s average life expectancy, although slightly lower for men and slightly higher for women. The change has been so great that human life, traditionally divided into three ages, has been extended to the so-called ‘fourth age’, even in official documents and studies into the question of old age. The novelty of this situation is best proved by the lack of a word to express it – even official documents still only refer to three ages: minor, adult and ‘old age pensioner’ or ‘senior citizen’. I am loosely defined in the last category.

It is well known that, as well as biological age, bureaucratic age and chronological or birth-registry age, there is psychological or subjective age. Biologically, I started my old age from when I was approaching eighty years, but psychologically I have always considered myself to be a little old, even when I was young. While I felt older than my years when I was a youth, in later years I thought of myself as still young and continued to do so until a few years ago. Now I believe myself to be old in every sense of the word. These moods are critically affected by historical circumstance – events occurring around you both in your private life (such as the death of someone close to you) and in public life. I will make no secret of the fact that during the years of student revolt, when one generation rebelled against its fathers, I suddenly felt years older (I was about sixty). It is possible to recover from a crisis of psychological old age. It is more difficult to do so in the case of biological old age, although modern medicine and surgery do work miracles. The much more serious historical crisis resulting from the fall of the Berlin Wall affected the entire world, and recently has been the cause of momentous events in Italy too.2 This appears to confirm the idea that the course of history involves a continuous process of transition from one generation to the next. Like many of my contemporaries, I found this second crisis much more bewildering than the first, to the extent that I sometimes feel that I’ve lived beyond the generation I belonged to.

When I chose this subject, one that I had been mulling over in my mind for some time, I never thought that it would become topical, albeit only fleetingly. Following the elections of March 1994 and the renewal of our ruling elite largely on a generational basis, there was a sudden outbreak of those grievances of the young against the old, an ancient phenomenon that always has a freshness about it. I was personally implicated in these events, which occasionally bordered on the grotesque: it became apparent that the opposition candidate might get elected using the votes of a few senators-for-life, who were mostly in their eighties like myself, and were a negligible and often neglected minority. Those old fools’, as they were bluntly called, would once have been called ‘venerable old men’, admittedly an expression that today sounds pretty ridiculous. A great film director with a taste for vilification commented: ‘It was amusing to see the dismal parade of senators-for-life, each one more corpse-like than the other: a bygone Italy we no longer want – a bygone Italy that has dug its own grave.’ As increasingly occurs in times of inflation in printed matter, the whole question had a few days of glory, and one newspaper summed up the debate under the heading: ‘Giovinezza, giovinezza’ [a reference to the fascist hymn to youth – translator’s note].3

Where is all this supposed wisdom?

Let’s face it: it is impossible to ignore the fact that old people are increasingly marginalized in an age marked by the faster and faster pace of historical change. In static traditional societies that evolve slowly, an old person encapsulates a community’s cultural heritage more fully than any of its other members. The old person knows from experience what the others have yet to learn in terms of morals, customs and the techniques of survival. The fundamental rules that govern community life, the family, work, moments of play, the treatment of diseases, attitudes to the next world, and relations with other groups do not change, and the skills involved are passed on from father to son. In developed societies, the accelerating change in both custom and the arts has completely overturned the relationship between those who possess knowledge and those who don’t. Increasingly the old are not in the know, while youth is, mainly because of its greater ability to learn.

Centuries ago, Campanella had his traveller say at the end of Città del Sole: ‘Oh if only I knew what our prophets and those of the Jews and other peoples predicted by astrology for our century that has had more history in a hundred years than the world in four thousand, and more books have been produced in these hundred years than in five thousand.’ Today, it is more like ten years than a hundred. When Campanella mentioned books, he was referring to the invention of the printing press as a technological advance, just like the computer today, which has increased the number of books exponentially. Now we probably print as many in a year as were printed in the entire century to which Campanella refers.

Rapid technological progress, particularly in the production of instruments that proliferate man’s power over nature and over other men, is an objective fact that leaves behind anyone who pauses along the way, either because they cannot keep up or because they prefer to reflect upon themselves and turn in on themselves where, according to St Augustine, truth is to be found. But this is not the only thing that needs to be considered here. A phenomenon common to all times also contributes to the increasing marginalization of old people: the cultural ageing that accompanies biological and social ageing. As Jean Améry observes in his book on old age,4 older people tend to remain loyal to the principles and values acquired in their youth and mature years, or even just to their habits which, once formed, are painful to change. As the world changes around them, they are inclined to have a negative view of all that is new, solely because they no longer understand it and have no desire to make themselves understand. We all know how common it is to praise the past: ‘Florence, within her ancient circle from which she still takes tierce and nones, abode in peace, sober and chaste.’5 When an old man speaks of the past, he sighs: ‘Ah, in my day.’ When he speaks of the present, he curses: ‘What times are these!’

The more old people hold firm to their own cultural universe, the more they become estranged from the times in which they live. I can easily relate to this line of Améry’s: ‘An old man who now finds that Marxists, whom he not unreasonably considered champions of a rationalist army, now identify in some ways with Heidegger, must feel that the times are out of joint, indeed suffering from a split personality: the philosophical mathematics of his own era has been transformed into a kind of magical calculus.’6 We experience the way one philosophical system is continuously replaced by another as a series not of advances but of steps backward. The system that you believed to have eclipsed the previous one is then eclipsed by the one that follows. However, with the passing years you don’t realize that you have become the mould-breaker whose mould has been broken. You are paralysed by your estrangement from the system that preceded you and your estrangement to the one that followed. The more rapid this succession of cultural systems, the greater the sense of estrangement. There is barely enough time to acquaint yourself with a new current of thought, let alone assimilate it, before the next one comes along. It would not be entirely mistaken to speak of ‘fashions’. My head swims when I think of how many highs and lows, how many meteoric rises and sudden falls from grace, and how many sudden shifts from prominence to oblivion someone of my age has witnessed. You cannot possibly follow them all. There comes a time when you have to stop, your breath failing, and you console yourself by saying: ‘it’s hardly worth it.’ It is the time, as Améry observes, that marks ‘the end of any possibility to develop yourself further in the cultural sense’.7 He also implies that fifty years is the age when this occurs.

Although it is impossible to generalize, I am ready to admit that there are many philosophical, literary and artistic works that I am no longer capable of understanding and, because I do not understand them, I shun them. Our thought runs with the ‘spirit of the times’ in the Hegelian sense. Consider how classicism and romanticism contrasted each other for a long historical period, itself divided by an explosive event in the shape of the French Revolution. Such a contrast is no longer possible. There has been nothing similar in the last fifty years, a period in which we have witnessed a succession of trends and personalities rapidly appearing and equally rapidly disappearing under the following wave. You had a figure like Sartre, but after Sartre, came Lévi-Strauss, Foucault and Althusser, just to keep our examples to France. Many intellectual mentors, but no single one that dominates all others. The only division that we have come up with is the one between modern and postmodern, but it is slightly odd that as yet the only name for this innovation in our time involves the addition of a feeble ‘post’ to the preceding era. ‘Post’ merely means that it comes after.

Rhetoric and anti-rhetoric

I am fully aware that our literature has a long rhetorical tradition of treatises exalting the virtues and pleasures of old age, stretching from Cicero’s De senectute, written in 44 BC when the author was 62, to Elogio della vecchiaia by Paolo Mantegazza, which appeared at the end of the nineteenth century when he was 64. These works are nothing less than a literary genre that provides both an apologia for old age and a belittlement of death. Cicero discusses the subject in accordance with the classical model of contempt for death.8 Youth itself is no stranger to death. Besides, what is there to worry about when my soul will survive my body? ‘Nature has given us this dwelling-place in which to stop for shelter, not to live in forever. Magnificent will be the day when I will depart for that divine meeting-place and assembly of souls, leaving behind this disorderly throng.’ The positivist and Darwinian Mantegazza dispensed with troubled thoughts of death more briskly and prosaically: ‘There is simply no need to think about it.’9 Why torment yourself with thoughts of death? Besides, death is nothing more than a return to nature into which all things come together.

It goes without saying that I find this eulogistic genre nauseating. It is all the more tiresome now that old age has become a great social problem that remains unsolved and difficult to solve, not only because of the increased number of old people, but also because of the increased number of years that we live as old people. More old people and a longer old age: put these two factors together and you get an idea of the exceptional gravity of the situation. A doctor once told me that when he was discussing old age with a group of sick people, who were naturally complaining, one of them interjected: ‘It’s not that old age is so bad, the problem is that it doesn’t last long.’ Really, it doesn’t last long? For many sick old people who cannot look after themselves, it goes on for far too long! Anyone who lives amongst old people knows that for many old age has become a long wait for a longed-for death, partly thanks to medical progress, which often doesn’t so much keep you alive as prevent your death. You don’t continue to live, you just can’t die. Dario Bellezza has written: ‘Fleeting is youth / mid-life a murmured breath / old age draws out eternal / its slow and ghastly tread.’

Yet there is still a rhetorical presentation of old age, but not one that nobly defends the final age of man against the derision or even contempt of the first. No, it is found mainly on television and consists of a disguised and highly effective attempt to ingratiate potential new consumers. In these advertisements, the elderly rather than the old, to use the more neutral term, appear sprightly, smiling and happy to be in the world because they can finally enjoy some particularly fortifying tonic or exceptionally attractive holiday. Thus they too have become highly courted beneficiaries of the consumer society, depositories of new demands and welcome participants in the enlargement of the market. In a society where everything can be bought and sold, even old age can become a commodity like any other. If you look into rest homes and hospitals, or small apartments of the less well-off where an old person has to be continuously supervised and cared for, because he or she cannot be left alone even for a second, then you will realize the falseness of the supposedly disinterested but in reality self-serving and flattering expression, ‘old is beautiful.’ This banal formula, well suited to a society based on the market, has replaced the encomium of the virtuous and wise old man.10

Innumerable inquiries, using painful first-person accounts, have shown what it is like to be old and poor, and have revealed the no less painful and sometimes more pitiful circumstances of their close relations. I refer in particular, because I took part myself, to such collections of writings and accounts as Vecchi da morire (1987) and Eutanasia da abbandono (1988), published in the series Quaderni di promozione sociale edited by Mario Tortello.

I particularly recommend Sandra Petrignani’s short book, Vecchi,11 whose intense and effective examination of the life old people lead in a hospice makes a fascinating and disturbing read. It made me think about the question of life and death more than any philosophical work. The old people who confided in the author had nearly all given up hope. Even religion almost never provides succour. They were literally in despair. An 85-year-old widow whose son had died in a terrible accident: ‘Life is always a mistake. Nothing would induce me to live my life again … A good life does not exist anywhere for anyone.’ An architect of eighty-one whose wife had died: ‘You believe that you are fond of things, memories and your own property. You spend a life making a home with its little corners, its armchairs. Then one day you no longer care. Really, you don’t care about a thing.’ An old woman of eighty-five has ‘stopped living’ following the death of her husband: ‘I mustn’t start crying, it is all so awful … You cannot understand what it is like to wait for this void. You just can’t. I can’t explain it. I immediately want to cry … It is as though our life never existed, and I’m gradually forgetting everything. When I’ve forgotten absolutely everything, I’ll die and that will be that.’ An old embroideress who never married and lost her only friend when she committed suicide: ‘I sleep, and when I’m not asleep, I cry. I would like to smash my head against the wall. I am eighty-three years old. That’s too many. I should be dead by now: no one cares whether I’m alive or dead.’ An old mother remembers her little girl who died aged six many years ago, and still cannot resign herself to it: ‘It was terrible after her death. I never had another day’s happiness … I have always been frightened of the world, old age is just another misfortune. How can you be happy in such a terrible world? Things are indifferent to our fate, nature is indifferent, God is indifferent.’

The world of memory

Strangely, traditional attitudes to death based on fear and hope never appear in these personal accounts. Fear is challenged by the tedium of living (taedium vitae), which turns death into something to be hoped for rather than feared. Hope of getting better or moving on to a new life, which comes to the sufferer’s assistance even in situations that appear desperate, is opposed by the desire to dissolve and cease to exist (cupio dissolvi). However, taedium vitae and cupio dissolvi have nothing to do with the mystics’ contempt for the world (contemptus mundi). For them life was also miserable, but its misery was not the product of a cruel or indifferent God, but of sin, and contempt for the world was a ‘natural transition on the ascent towards God’. Now for those who are tired of life and long not to exist, death is the desired repose after the colossal and pointless burden of living. According to one writer: ‘My vital forces are so exhausted that I can no longer see beyond the grave, I cannot manage to fear or desire anything beyond death. I cannot believe in a God who would be so hard-hearted as to wake someone tired to death and sleeping at his feet.’12