Tag: Spinoza's Ethics

The Good Life in Old Age

Unlike the obscure and nitpicking scholastics of our time, classical philosophers spent more of their efforts in trying to define what makes a good life. Eudaimonia is a Greek word, meaning well-being, or, perhaps, something akin to personal happiness.  These earlier philosophers were interested in discovering and sharing the best ways to live, and how to hold those standards up against the reality of our own existence.  What could be more important?  And they were not just talking to other academics; they knew everyone was facing this challenge.  I have been thinking about these guys (and unfortunately, they are all guys) lately in regard to old age.  What makes a good old age?

The modern answer would seem to be: enough money to live and travel, enough energy to party and play pickleball, and children who are self-sufficient but ready to take care of us when we need them.  Our independence is of the greatest importance – we don’t want to be alone but we don’t want anyone else telling us what to do. There is nothing wrong with any of these things, but having experienced the personal trauma of moving this year and the collective trauma of what is going on with the economy and the government, I am grasping for something a little less material, a little more stable than finances, climate or personal health.

And there is some agreement among the philosophers about the good life.  Aristotle says that the exercise of our rationality and virtue will lead us to a good life.  So does Spinoza.  What would this look like in old age?  What would it mean to live rationally and virtuously in old age?

The Stoics (and I am thinking mainly of Epictetus) say that in old age, or at any time, to be happy, to live a good life, is to free ourselves from expectations:

The only way to a happy life (keep this rule at hand morning, noon, and night) is to stand aloof from things that lie outside the sphere of choice, to regard nothing as your own, and to surrender everything to the deity and fortune… and to devote yourself to one thing only, that which is your own and free from all hindrances.  (from The Discourses of Epictetus)

This is akin to the Buddhist exhortation not to be attached to things: to be attentive but not reliant, to do the right thing without concern for the consequences.  This is advice that we could all use, but probably a lesson we all should have learned by now.  If you haven’t experienced the disappointments of the plans of mice and men by now, you are fortunate indeed.  Nevertheless, true detachment is hard to come by.  And in old age, things we are attached to fall away at an alarming rate, so we had better be good at renunciation.

Then there is the matter of remorse, regret and atonement in old age.  (I have written about this previously in “Old Karma, Instant Karma.”)  Cicero warns us that the mistakes of our youth will follow us into old age.  Yes, we all know that.  Spinoza gives the best advice in this regard (as in most regards): “Repentance is not a virtue, or does not arise from reason; instead, he who repents what he has done is twice wretched, or lacking in power.”  “Twice wretched” reminds me of Nietzsche’s caution that remorse was like “adding to the first act of stupidity a second.” The Buddha calls remorse “the second arrow.”  Something outside us wounds us the first time; our remorse keeps opening the wound.  Some religions have rites and rituals to help us to atone and erase. Again, if you have reached old age without remorse, you are blessed.

So, we should be rational, ethical, and at peace with our past.  What does this mean?  Cicero is very specific about a good old age: “the tranquil and serene evening of a life spent in peaceful, blameless, enlightened pursuits.”  I agree with the aim, but the methodology often eludes me.  Each of us can only define it for ourselves. We must try; we must work at it.  As Spinoza says at the end of the Ethics:

If the way I have shown to lead to these things [peace of mind] seems very hard, still, it can be found.  And of course, what is found so rarely must be hard.  For if salvation [the ethical and intellectual state of freedom] were at hand, and could be found without great effort, how could nearly everyone neglect it?  But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.

 I recently read Florida Scott-Maxwell’s memoir of old age (recommended), written when she was in her 80s and in a nursing home:

I want to tell people approaching and perhaps fearing age that it is a time of discovery.  If they say, “Of what?” I can only answer “We must find out for ourselves, otherwise it won’t be discovery.”

In these times when the stock market is being undermined, when mores are changing, and the known is disappearing into the maw of the suspect, what better time for an internal “excellent adventure.”  Spinoza pursued this question while he was ostracized from his community and dying of spoiled lungs.  Florida Scott-Maxwell did it in a nursing home.  Epictetus did it as a slave.  We should be able to do this. I can give you no more than encouragement and reading lists (more on that in another blog).

You won’t hear the answers from Cicero or Epictetus or Spinoza or Aristotle.  Or me. That would be too easy.  But you might hear some of the right questions to ask yourself.

On a lighter note, I long ago drafted a story (“It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”) on the use of music to improve our mood – one way to a good life, at least in the moment. It’s something I pay attention to, and I know exactly what old songs will temporarily soothe my beast.  But, as the story points out, it is a band-aid and not a remedy.  The remedy would seem to be much harder.

Auden, Narcissus, and the Duty of Happiness

I have gone back to reading Auden; this time I am reading his prose in The Dyer’s Hand.  He has much to say about life and old age, but I was particularly taken by this bit about Narcissus:

Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his.   If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading.

We love our image because it is ours; we even correct it in our minds to be closer to what we think it should be.  I always think I look better in the mirror than I do in the cell phone pictures people take – I guess it is harder to mentally photoshop pixels than it is a face in the mirror (or in the mind).

Auden’s love for his own old body extended to his old age, even though he himself described his face as “a wedding cake that had been left out in the rain.”  It was his.  This comes across in his poem “A Lullaby,” written a year before he died.  Here he hugs himself, calls himself “Big Baby,” and references Narcissus again:

The old Greeks got it all wrong:

Narcissus is an oldie,

tamed by time, released at last

from lust for other bodies,

rational and reconciled.

For many years you envied

the hirsute, the he-man type.

No longer: now you fondle

your almost feminine flesh

with mettled satisfaction….

Harold Bloom loved this poem: “Older than Auden was [when he wrote the poem], I chant this lullaby to myself during sleepless nights and wish I had more of his admirable temperament.”

Bloom is right; Auden did have an “admirable temperament,” even in his old age (although Auden only lived to age sixty-six).  Like Spinoza, Auden thought we all have a duty to be cheerful, to be happy (again, from The Dyer’s Hand):

It is incorrect to say, as the Declaration of Independence says, that all men have a right to the pursuit of happiness.  All men have a right to avoid unnecessary pain if they can, and no man has a right to pleasure at the cost of another’s pain.  But happiness is not a right; it is a duty.  To the degree that we are unhappy, we are in sin.  (And vice versa.)  A duty cannot be pursued because its imperative applies to the present instant, not to some future date.

My duty toward God is to be happy; my duty towards my neighbor is to try my best to give him pleasure and alleviate his pain.  No human being can make another one happy.

Spinoza did not put it in religious terms; in his Ethics, he tried to reason his way through to a formula for the good life and says this: “Cheerfulness cannot be excessive, but is always good; melancholy, on the other hand, is always evil.”  And Spinoza has no use for regrets, the one thing that often heads off happiness in old age: “Repentance is not a virtue… instead, he who repents what he has done is twice wretched.”

Auden quotes Caesare Paves on the definition of maturity: One ceases to be a child when one realizes that telling one’s trouble does not make it any better.  Auden does not think that it even does any good to tell ourselves about our trouble.  Love the old body, love the life you have had and have now, and do your duty to be happy.  So says Auden, but it is not easy.

However, there are moments, like the one my character has in “Snickerdoodles.”