The stoic way

UNESCO Courier, Jan, 1999 by Enrique Lynch

In a world devoted to the cult of youth and the machine, classical Greek philosophy can help us to grow old gracefully

How much goodness and humour do you need to bear the horror of old age? The garden outside and the flowers in the bedroom are beautiful, but the spring is, as we say in Vienna, "a face". I have finally discovered what it means to feel cold.

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), Austria

The Greek philosopher Plato believed that philosophers are wise men who devote their lives to learning how to die and that philosophy, among other things, is a long and difficult learning process which teaches us to grow old and face up to the climactic moment of our lives. There is nothing melancholy about this process of "learning to die". On the contrary, it means that it is only towards the end of our days that we are really able to profit from life and confront the imminence of death with fortitude and determination and without despondency. In the minds of the ancients, living to a ripe old age offered not so much respect from society as a reassurance that they would pass on gently from the world of the living to the kingdom of the dead.

The culture of Antiquity suggested that two forms of existence were worthy of emulation: that of heroes like Achilles who enjoy a short and action-packed life, and that of venerable elders who learn to lead quiet and secret inner lives in accordance with the ideal of Stoicism. In a way, it was impossible to envisage these patterns of individual behaviour in isolation from each other, and the models for living they offered were highlighted when the two were contrasted. As a result, our cultural tradition has for centuries made an almost religious cult of the two archetypes personified by the hero and the elder. According to the former, the hero's bravery is a quality which makes it possible to confront the risks and vicissitudes of life and which steels the character. The second conjures up an image of the experience and peace of mind which, so the Roman philosopher Seneca believed, only comes with old age, in other words when the desires of the flesh forsake us and the mind becomes detached from sensuality and soars in flight. To cut a long story short, the ancients felt that it was best to die either very young or very old, since old age, in spite of its disadvantages, was the age of reason in which the mind finally triumphs.

However, we no longer live in the age of ancient Greece or the Renaissance or even of old-fashioned bourgeois society, which also fluctuated between the ideal of the hero and the culture of the patriarch. Ours is a society which has left traditional values behind and is dangerously inclined to offer an exclusively technological solution to all life's problems. It's not so much that we disregard the value of the experience or tradition which used to form a natural part of the knowledge of very old people as that we have learned that no wise person, however retentive or sharp their memory may be, can remember as much as a computer, as the champion chess-player Gary Kasparov discovered (although he, incidentally, is still regarded as being a young man).

Enduring suffering and solitude

Our collective ideal is machine-like, and we know that when machines grow old they are taken out of commission and dismantled and their parts recycled, or else they are sent to the scrapyard to be broken up. We do the same with our old people so that, although technology has succeeded in extending the limits of our useful lives as never before and in balancing our diet, and is gradually unravelling all the secrets of our bodies, it does not seem to have found a satisfactory answer to living in old age. The religion of modernity only worships youthful gods. Our world has come to be populated by splendid young people who are superficial and pampered and whose impulsive behaviour knows no bounds, and by growing numbers of old people who, as the French thinker Jean Baudrillard has observed, inhabit a kind of ThirdWorld of existence. People with no future and painful memories of a past in which nobody is interested, the denizens of this ThirdWorld are condemned to live in a mundane present dedicated to generating profits for the powerful cosmetics and mass tourism industries and for the pension and insurance system that manages workers' savings. No matter how much technology may have improved their lot, the status of old people bears no resemblance to the remedy for all ills preached by the ancient Stoics. The onset of old age not only brings the threat of sufferings that were not known in the past, such as Alzheimer's disease, but is also compounded by such misfortunes as solitude, to which there is no easy answer. Only by adopting a new Stoicism, a rule for living which teaches us how to grow old and die, as it did in the past, shall we be able to prevent the greater life expectancy due to technical progress from bringing new and painful experiences in its wake.