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...