by
Edmund Sherman, Ph.D.
An Imprint of Richard Altschuler & Associates, Inc.
New York
There is a gradual but observable shift in the balance of activity to rest or repose as we move into the later years of life. Most of the time the inevitable physical limitations of advancing age dictate the need to be less active, but where there are no such limitations, there is still an implicit need to find one’s own mix of activity and repose. At another level, this can be viewed as the ontological balance or mix of doing to being. Even at this level, there seems to be a cultural imperative to remain as active as possible well into very old age, so we have the feeling that we have to choose the vita activa over the vita contemplativa until we are quite old and decrepit. Formal retirement is frequently the occasion on which the meaning of this becomes radically apparent and needs to be confronted, publicly and privately, as occurred in my own retirement experience, which follows.
My apologies to Milan Kundera (1984) for this play on the title of his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, but it captures a perplexing aspect of aging that begins with retirement. The idea that retirement could be at all puzzling came as a personal surprise. After all, it was something I had planned for, both financially and psychologically, for many years. Yet even before the formal date of my retirement, I came to realize that it presents a dilemma having to do with lightness and weightiness in Kundera’s sense of these terms.
This became apparent in the question I was asked repeatedly by friends and colleagues, “What are you going to do in your retirement?” My usual response was to tell them of my plans for travel and relaxation. This would elicit smiles of approval and the usual statements of envy, but it quickly became apparent that this was only about the “light” side of retirement. Beneath this amiable kind of discourse on the subject was the heavier question of “What are you going to do in retirement, seriously?” I soon realized that I would have to come up with an explanation of what I would be “doing” in retirement that would be considered “meaningful” or useful. So, in answer to that, I would reply that I was going to continue my counseling practice with elders, and to write a book about the lives and aging experiences of certain exceptional older persons whom I had interviewed in the course of field research on the subject of reminiscence in later life. My hope was that they could serve as exemplars for older persons in the general reading public. That sounded both serious and useful, so it satisfied my interlocutors. Still, I was beginning to be troubled about being asked the same question, with its inherent weightiness, “What are you going to do in retirement?” I was developing a nagging impulse to respond, “How about being? What would it be like to just be rather than do?”
Actually, I did respond in that way to one colleague, and he was nonplused. He gave me an uncertain look, wondering if I was pulling his leg; then he laughed rather tentatively and, sure enough, he said, “No, I mean, what are you going to do, seriously?” By this time the whole subject had turned itself back on me, and I had to ask myself, “But, seriously, what about being? What is it? It can’t just mean taking it easy.” I needed to think about it more carefully and deeply. I knew, of course, that being and doing cannot be separated in any realistic sense; that would be illusory. There is always a shifting but inseparable mix of one as related to the other. After all, just sitting with an empty mind is doing something. However, I couldn't help but think that, after almost a half century of doing and teaching in the human services and sciences, there had to be some shift along the continuum toward being, whatever that might be. Most certainly I felt a strong inner pull in that direction.
What did Kundera have to say about this? What did he mean by the “lightness” of being? As I reread his novel, he seemed to be putting the question in the context of our “doings” in the world, our actions and involvements with the people and things of the world. He seemed particularly taken by our existential responsibility for these actions and involvements. He regarded this responsibility as heavy, a burden, and stated, “The heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.” (Kundera, 1984, p. 5).
So, in its utter lightness, being lacks significance. That seemed “heavy” in the vernacular sense, and hard to take in the conceptual sense. Certainly there was something missing in his assessment of being. Actually, he admitted that the ancient Greek sage and philosopher Parmenides held that lightness is positive and weight negative. This led him to ask whether Parmenides was correct or not. After mulling it over, all he could come up with was the statement that “the only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.” He might have been mystified by this, but I was even more perplexed about his notion that the lightness of being is insignificant and, therefore, unbearable, particularly with respect to what I was undergoing in my own retirement experience. One way to remove some of the ambiguity is to take a look at what it means to be in retirement within the real context of our current American society.
Erik Erikson (1968), in his influential study of the human life cycle, Childhood and Society, found that the mature personality expresses itself in both action and contemplation; and he raised the question of whether a culture that almost exclusively emphasizes action can be a very healthy environment for human growth. This question obviously has meaning for growing old as well as for growing up in such a culture. Now Erikson posed the issue in terms of action and contemplation, but it has to be put in the larger framework of doing and being. If one is contemplating, isn’t one doing something? It would seem so, even if only in the semantic sense. Nevertheless, there can and should be a difference in emphasis, in time and attention devoted to each, under different circumstances and in different stages of our lives. The argument being made here is that later life, from roughly age sixty on, is the prime time to be more contemplative. If not in old age, when?
“What do you do?” is the central existential question in a society devoted to the production and consumption of goods and services. Elders who are no longer “meaningfully” employed in production or consumption find themselves lacking any clear sense of social identity. The question then becomes, as I was asked so frequently by friends and family, “What will you do when you retire?” One option is to become more of a consumer of travel, recreation, and entertainment services and commodities, but the underlying question is, then, whether this is meaningful in any sense beyond the mere doing. Volunteering is an alternative to the consumer role, and it is becoming very popular and widespread among elders. It is a form of doing that can provide some sense of meaning in retirement, and is increasingly being pursued with that in mind. Yet one wonders how often it is being pursued because of the unbearable lightness of simply being. As e. e. cummings once put it, “If you can be, be. If not, cheer up and go on about other people’s business, doing and undoing to others ’til you drop.”
How can retirement—a word that evokes images of relaxation and recreation—be considered not only perplexing but also traumatic? Some leading gerontologists have claimed that, indeed, it can be traumatic, because so much of our sense of self-worth and identity has been defined by what we do, by our occupations and our performance in productive social roles. From that perspective, retirement and its implications of non-doing can threaten us to the core. It can amount to what Erikson would call a major psycho-social crisis in life, much like the oft-cited mid-life crisis. Currently, there continues to be an emphasis on doing in our culture, still with the imperative to “stay active,” but in different ways. Euphemistic terms such as “redeployment” or “redirection” have been used by gerontologists to describe this shift. Thus, “productive” retirement involves keeping busy with volunteer activities, attending educational, health, and cultural programs and events, and other socially approved and valued activities. These activities have unquestionable social and survival value, but there is a marketing flavor to much of this approach, as can be seen in AARP publications and products. Something is lacking in this scenario, namely the more interior and reflective features of mental life that emerge during the later years, which are much more about being than doing. When one considers retirement in the original meaning of the term, it is to “pull back,” to “take stock,” to review and consider the whole. However, the current popular and professional view of “successful” aging does not seem to allow much room for these being needs of late life, which are needs of a more interior and contemplative nature.
One eminent gerontologist wrote an editorial entitled “The Myth of Successful Aging” (Cohler, 1992), in which the contemporary discussions of aging assume the continued importance of individual activity and achievement of early and middle adult life into old age, without this interior or spiritual dimension. He claimed the emphasis is “scientistic” in stressing maintenance of health with a view to the realization of successful aging. These high expectations of continued achievement, robust health, and personal well-being have led to a situation, especially among professional men and women, in which retirement is most often viewed as anathema. For them, “being” in retirement would have an unbearable lightness.
This was not always the case with professionals entering retirement. William James, whose rich melding of psychology and philosophy still has so much to contribute to our modern understanding of the aging process, was one such professional. When he retired from the philosophy department at Harvard, in January 1907, he said that, henceforth, he would be free to live “for truth pure and simple, instead of for truth accommodated to the most unheard of requirements set by others.” There is no question that he had taken a distinctly contemplative turn by the time of his retirement. More remarkable was the exemplary man of action, George Washington, who on his retirement from command of the victorious Continental Army, wrote the following to the Marquis de Lafayette: “I am not only retired from all public employments but I am retiring within myself, and shall be able to view the solitary walk and tread the paths of private life with heartfelt satisfaction. Envious of none, I am determined to be pleased with all; and this, my dear friend, being the order of my march, I will move gently down the stream of life until I sleep with my fathers” (Randall, 1998). More recently, a newly retired professor of English wrote in a gerontological journal that she was heartened by the fact that writers such as May Sarton, Doris Grumbach, and Doris Lessing use time differently in their older years, by immersing and rejuvenating themselves in nature and thus transcending quotidian time. She hailed the fact that they rejected “the popular notion of ‘productive’ aging, such as keeping busy with volunteer activities, playing golf, interacting with younger folks, traveling, and attending cultural events. For those writers aging becomes not a social and physical phenomenon, but a metaphysical one” (Waxman, 1999, p. 516).
On a folksier note, a fellow retiree drafted a letter to the editor of a local newspaper about a recent article in the business section, written by a Mr. Harvey, which “extolled the virtues of non-retirement.” The letter writer sardonically disagreed, saying that as a recent retiree he wanted to “be among the first to slap old Harvey on the back and applaud his can-do spirit.” He continued, tongue-in-cheek, saying “It is only the heroic and self denying sacrifice of those who persist in spinning the laboratory cartwheel that permits the escapees to roam free,” and he encouraged Harvey to “keep up the good work.”
Here, surely, is testimony to the bearable lightness of retirement, and, perhaps, of simply being. One dictionary definition of the word retirement is “retreat, withdrawal for prayer, study, or meditation,” and in cultures of the past and present, arrangements for such retreats or withdrawals have been built into the social fabric of each culture. This has been true of Christian as well as Hindu and Buddhist cultures, and it continues to be available in other contemporary societies. A psychologist and expert in cross-cultural studies of aging, David Gutmann (1974), described his experience with this phenomenon, in a study of Druze elders living in Israel. Most Druze live in neighboring Lebanon and Syria, and they are village-dwelling herdsmen and farmers of the Galilean highlands. They are considered heretics in Islam by other Muslims, but they have maintained their cultural heritage and continuity in that region for over 800 years, in the face of much persecution. Consequently, some of the core features of individual Druze character are stubbornness, piety, and reserve. Older men are held in high regard, and Druze patriarchs have a great deal of political, economic, and religious power. During the first stage of his study, Gutmann, interviewed a Druze elder in his early seventies who was an influential and respected leader in his community. The villagers would come to this man for advice and decisions on family, property, and ethical dilemmas. He would have to mediate family conflicts and neighbor squabbles over issues such as how many goats were a fair trade for a piece of land, or a charge that someone stole someone else’s goat. He confided in Gutmann that he was growing weary of these responsibilities, and found them to be an increasing burden. He said he would very much like to retire from them, but he felt compelled by his stature in the community to carry on.
That interview marked the “before” part of Gutmann’s longitudinal study of older men. When he returned five years later to interview this same elder, for the “after” part of the study, he knocked at the front door of the man’s house, and the man’s wife appeared at the door. When he asked to talk to her husband, she answered with a trace of peevishness, “He’s where he spends almost all of his time lately, out in back in the prayer house.” Gutmann proceeded out to the rear of the man’s property and found him in the small, single-room structure, engrossed in prayer or meditation. The elder recognized him immediately, and with a benign smile on his face, told him that several months earlier he finally did what he wanted, i.e., to retire from those patriarchal duties. He went on to say that he had never felt such peace and contentment in his life.
Gutmann and his colleagues, in the field of study called the psychology of aging, refer to this man’s transformation as a move from “autoplastic mastery” to “omniplastic mastery.” They have found the same phenomenon among men of the remote, preliterate Highland Maya of Mexico, and it was originally found among American men (Gutmann, 1964). Based on their studies of men, there appear to be three stages that men go through. In the first one, termed alloplastic mastery, which begins in the twenties and runs into the early fifties, the emphasis is on pursuit of achievement and independence, as well as on control of outer world affairs. The second stage, which occurs in the fifties and sixties, is termed autoplastic mastery, and the emphasis is on more accommodation to the outer world, and on changing one’s self rather than the external environment. Gutmann and his colleagues called this “passive mastery,” because thought begins to replace action more and more often. From the seventies on, men move into the last stage, which the researchers termed omniplastic or “magical” mastery, characterized by greater engagement in recollection and reverie rather than in instrumental action, either in the outer world or within the self. They also said it was marked by “philosophic resignation,” because they tended to see these late changes as defensive and regressive. This could well be a value judgment on the part of Gutmann and his colleagues, who were in the alloplastic stage of life themselves.
Overall, then, what we see is a change in the way people conduct and see themselves in relationship to their surroundings and circumstances. Whereas in their younger years they are apt to try to actively or aggressively remake or reshape their physical and social environments, in the later years they attempt to handle or adapt to each new circumstance in a more reflective and accommodating way, so as to minimize stress and conserve energy. Part of this modality is a protective or defensive measure, to feel more secure in what, perhaps, appears as a more complex or threatening world to them. However, this can also be seen as a move toward greater acceptance and valuing of what one already has. Gutmann has described this as a turn away from competition and achievement toward the more elemental and sacred aspects of life. This was certainly so in the case of the Druze elder he interviewed, in whom inner, more passive and more imaginative forms of mastery, such as prayer, meditation, and recollection, replaced many of the external forms of mastery. Rather than being seen as regressive, these changes can be seen as stages of development to be realized and maximized in their own right. They can also be seen as another instance of a shift from a doing toward a being orientation toward life. It needs to be said, again, that doing and being are inseparable and innate polarities of our existence. They cannot be separated experientially, only abstractly, in a discursive context such as this. Contemplation, as we have said, is doing something. However, this particular kind of doing requires some change in attitude and habitual patterns of living, to allow for its emergence and practice in everyday life. The capacity for making this move occurs rather naturally in the course of aging but, again, it has to be recognized and cultivated for it to be realized in later life.
There is something about the view from old age that even insightful, younger persons can intuit as somehow more elevated or encompassing than their own youthful perspective. Rainer Maria Rilke intuited this in his younger years when he wrote, “I believe in old age; to work and to grow old: this is what life expects of us. And then one day to be old and still be quite far from understanding everything—no, but to begin, to love, but to suspect, but to be connected to what is remote and inexpressible, all the way up to the stars” (2006, p. 25). This certainly appears to be an intuition of cosmic consciousness in old age from a younger vantage point.
This ontological shift has been found by research psychologists in the field of aging to be a natural development in later life, and it has been described as an increased “interiority” of the personality. It is a development that tends to occur around the time people are entering their sixties (Neugarten, 1973). The research findings show that middle-aged Americans, in their forties and fifties, tend to see themselves as having enough energy and “go-getiveness” to overcome obstacles and take advantage of opportunities in the environment, whereas those sixty and over tend to see themselves as accommodating more to the outer world. The researchers have described this as a shift from an active to a passive form of mastery, as individuals move from middle into old age. The word “passive” has a pejorative connotation in our society, but here it means that the use of mental capacities, like memory and imagination, become more prominent in later life relative to motility and action in dealing with the environment, with one’s own body, and with life’s circumstances. This form of mastery is marked by an increasing commitment to a central core of values and ways of behaving and relating to the outside world. At the same time, with this turn inward, many of the old attachments and animosities, likes and dislikes, alliances, grudges, and ambitions lose their hold on people. Elders feel more able to concentrate on their core values, on the cohesion and continuity of the essential elements of their personalities, and on the meaning of their lives.
As you might imagine, this kind of transformation is much less obvious in America than in other places, where the culture recognizes and supports this kind of development in later life. Yet it does happen to Americans, as the research shows, and this interiority allows for emerging inner capacities that can compensate for, and even transcend, the physical and social losses of later life. On this view, youth would be defined as the period requiring the gathering and enlarging of strength and experience, whereas later life would be defined as the period of clarifying and deepening what has already been attained and learned from experience and adaptation across the life span. Thus, it has been proposed that the inward-turning process of interiority can represent a key developmental gain in facilitating the kind of integration, or “ego integrity,” that Erik Erikson sees as desirable in late life. Similarly, Carl Jung’s individuation process of balance and wholeness in maturity has been viewed as a kind of socialization to this introversion, “an education of the soul,” to complement the extraverted style of our formal schooling and culture at large (Storr, 1983).
We can shift from predominant doing to greater being for perhaps the first time in our lives. At any rate, it is all very natural in that we age, that our bodies age, and that we can’t extend ourselves outside ourselves as much to change our environments as we were able to do in the past. So it becomes more natural to go within ourselves. Even if this is viewed as simply an accommodation to the physical frailties and social losses of old age, this developing interiority follows a path that has been pursued by monks and mystics for centuries. It is a simplification of the outer life and the enrichment of an inner life. In a sense, all elders follow this path, whether they like it or not. However, the kind of inner life they develop is crucial. If it is filled with regrets for what is missing from their outer lives, despair is the likely outcome. Elders would do well to note what Montaigne had to say about interiority: “It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own and go outside ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside” (Montaigne, 1952, p. 543). This is a sage observation for later life.
Milan Kundera’s metaphor on the unbearable lightness of being can be viewed much differently from the perspective of old age. He was not, after all, an old man when he wrote the book. There is not only a development toward interiority and more passivity in old age, but there is an existential and experiential shift of foreground and background, in terms of letting heaviness down and allowing lightness to arise. Perhaps it is the passivity of letting the weight fall that makes the lightness of being “unbearable” for Kundera. Before retirement we are always “on the make,” striving to achieve something so as to feel good or worthwhile, as well as secure. Letting go after retirement means letting the heaviness down, but we do not feel entitled to letting the burden down.
The shift is toward allowing and acceptance, but we fight it because we feel that we have to struggle and “fight the good fight,” which gives us the feeling of strength, mass, and substance. We feel insubstantial if we are not making matters weighty. This mind set has a great deal to do with the place of work in contemporary society. We are all, whether professional or nonprofessional workers, functionaries in a social system marked by a division of labor, whereby each of us is allotted a place and function within the system. We might have voluntarily planned and prepared for this function through training and education, but once we are in it, we are functionaries in a world of “total work.” It is total in the sense that it determines the conditions and circumstances not only of our actual work activities but also of our leisure. True leisure as a cultural phenomenon should not be the inevitable result of a holiday, a weekend, or a vacation of several weeks or longer. From a cultural standpoint, it is really more of an attitude of mind (Pieper, 1963). In contrast to the idea of work as activity, it is an attitude of non-activity, of inward calm and quiescence. It means letting things happen rather than keeping busy as an article of belief.
The quiescence of leisure is a form of silence, which allows for a finer apprehension of the reality around and within us. It has been said that only the silent hear, and those who do not remain silent do not hear. Leisure, then, is a receptive and, therefore, contemplative attitude of mind that is not only the occasion but also the capacity for immersing oneself in a total sense of being in the moment, in the here-and-now, and in the whole of creation. So leisure is the attitude of mind of those who are open to whatever might emerge in their consciousness, and not of those who feel the need to reach and grasp for whatever they think has to be possessed or accomplished.
True leisure is not just a break in one’s work for an hour, a day, or even weeks, since those are pauses made for the sake of work, in the sense of refreshing oneself for more work in the near future. Leisure and contemplation are of a different order, outside the closed circle of work-relaxation-work; and they allow us to realize the natural bent of the human mind and spirit, to contemplate the larger whole. If ever there is a time for true leisure it is in retirement. Will we allow ourselves the opportunity to really engage in it? An 81-year-old woman gave this explanation in a survey interview, as part of a larger research project:
I always had to be accomplishing something. I’m talking about every minute of every day, sunup to sundown. That’s how I was brought up. There were no idle hands in our house. Raising my family, a day was wasted unless I sewed a dress and put up a week’s worth of soup and darned a dozen socks. Then I did all this all over again, helping my daughter raise her family. Now I’m an old lady and my hands are knotted up with arthritis. There’s hardly anything I can work on anymore. I used to wander around the house, muttering, “useless hands, useless life.” I certainly couldn’t sit on a couch and say it was a good day. Lately, I’ve decided to stop fighting it. I’ve been letting my mind roam while my hands rest. You know what I’m thinking now? There’s not a thing wrong with sitting still. You just have to relax into it.
Emerson (1870, p. 278) put the matter a bit more elegantly when he wrote about the interiority of old age in the following words:
But the inner life sits at home, and does not learn to do things, nor value these feats at all. ’Tis a quiet, wise perception. It lives in the great present; it makes the present great. This tranquil, well-founded, wide-seeing soul is no express-rider, no attorney, no magistrate: it lies in the sun, and broods on the world. A person of this temper once said to a man of much activity, ‘I will pardon you that you do so much, and you me that I do nothing.’
And Euripides says that “Zeus hates busybodies and those who do too much.”
It is fair to say that the greatest spiritual task of aging is to shift direction from the mode of doing to the mode of being. Many elders find their lives meaningless because they have derived their meaning completely from the kinds of activities that they are no longer physically capable of doing, such as earning a living, caring for children, serving the community, or even attending religious services that once gave them a sense of meaning. Thus, they feel they have been “reduced” to the state of being. But the reality is that in our younger years, almost all of our doing is to some end, to make a living, to raise children, and so on. We do not cease doing in old age, even very old age, but it is no longer for those pragmatic ends. There is simply no way to be without some kind of doing, even in silent, effortless daydreaming, which is “doing” something, if we recognize, again, that being and doing are inseparable polarities of our lives. Still, when we meditate or dwell in repose, there is a great deal more in that moment of existence. Yet even the nature of doing can take on a new meaning in later life. This happens when we begin to make doing an end in itself rather than a means to an end. This can be a spiritual as well as pleasurable practice. Doing something in the spirit of non-achievement (in itself, for itself) has a good quality to it. You could even say it is an enlightened way of doing. Thus, we can engage in the mundane activities of each day mindfully, as though they are rites or acts of reverence in a state of being that truly gives meaning to what has been called “the holiness of everyday life.” This can be like entering a new dimension of living, in which you recognize and revere the simple sanctity of being, a dimension you have, perhaps, overlooked, by-passed, or discounted as meaningless in your earlier years of life. Contemplative being, then, is not defined by specific acts of contemplation, but rather by a whole way of existence.
The concept of being has varied in its meaning in different eras. The Hellenic concept of being was the underlying, essential being, the being which is immovable and unchanging. However, in the later Christian era, there arose a conception of being that viewed it as a progression from lower to higher levels of existence. At the lowest level of minerals or inanimate matter there is pure passivity. A stone is totally passive and dependent on outside forces for movement. The next level, plant, is not totally passive, but it has very limited capacity for adaptation to changing circumstances. At the animal level, consciousness appears, and there is a marked shift from passivity to activity, with an emphasis on purposive movement. Finally, at the fourth and human level, there is an “I,” or a person with self-consciousness, which marks a greater shift from passivity to activity. With this self-consciousness, there is always the possibility of rising above circumstances, no matter how weighed down by them the person might be. Consequently, the four levels of being were seen as pointing to the ultimate existence—a level of Being above the human.
The word “above” suggests reaching and a striving toward the highest, which is ultimate Being, or God. Contrary to this metaphorical upward reach toward the heavens, it is possible to take a different route, which is inward and downward. It is one of letting go and allowing, that is, allowing the “gravity” of being, of existence, to predominate, and to move one toward a deeper level of being. This is a conception closer to the Greek. Recall that gravity means not only the gravitational attraction of mass, but it also denotes importance and seriousness. Thus, letting go of the weight of societal roles, responsibilities, and burdens in this metaphor does not make for an “unbearable” lightness of being in the sense of being useless or meaningless.
A most felicitous term in this regard is Paul Tillich’s expression “Ground of Being” (1973), which provides a more earthly sense of being in later life. It includes not only the physical and sensuous realm of being, but even the mental realm, which takes on a different tone in late life, one of receptivity and spirituality. Aristotle reminds us that the goal of action is always contemplation, which is knowing and being rather than seeking and becoming. Reflecting and musing, instead of intense searching and examination, becomes the more open and contemplative process of what Heraclitus called “listening to the essence of things.” Thoreau put it differently when he wrote, “Wisdom does not inspect, but beholds.” Therein lies the holiness of contemplative being in later life. It is becoming one with Being.
In his influential paradigm of the stages of human development, Erik Erikson (1982) claimed that the last developmental task of life is to find an assured sense of meaning and order in one’s life and in the universe. The way for elders to achieve that assured sense is to develop a particular style of old age, which he called “philo-sophical,” inserting a hyphen to emphasize the original Greek meaning, philo (love) and sophia (wisdom), or love of wisdom. Such a love enables one to maintain order and meaning in the disintegration of mind and body, while also advocating a “durable hope in wisdom” (Erikson, 1982, p. 64). By this philosophical attitude Erikson meant not only a calm and unflinching attitude in the face of trouble, pain, and loss, but also an open and reflective frame of mind, which allows one to ponder the place and meaning of that pain, and those losses, in the context of both one’s entire life and place in the universe.
Erikson was referring to a psychological development that ordinarily occurs in old age in the normal course of aging. But what if one goes directly to philosophy itself to further develop this frame of mind as a way of life in old age? Although much of philosophy deals in abstractions, there is a wealth of wisdom to be unearthed in reading some of its greatest practitioners, especially those who saw philosophy as a way of life (Hadot, 1995). It can certainly strengthen and add substance to the philosophical style that Erikson claimed emerges in later life, as a natural development of aging.
One of the most powerful examples of philosophy as a way of life was given by Boethius (1962), in his classic book The Consolation of Philosophy. This learned and accomplished man was unjustly accused of treason and sacrilege in 523 CE, and thrown into a remote prison of the Roman Empire, where he suffered deprivation and torture for months before his brutal execution. Yet in those trying months, he wrote The Consolation in his prison cell, and it became one of the most influential books in Western Europe from the late Middle Ages until the end of the Renaissance. It was remarkable for its curative power as a remedy against desolation of the spirit in the face of much misfortune, pain, material deprivation, and injustice in the course of life. For Boethius, philosophy truly was the love of wisdom, in terms of its liberating power of mind, and in providing a true estimate of the limited value of transitory material and physical satisfactions in life. Furthermore, he rendered this attitude beautifully in the poetic form of that period.
Although Boethius was a devout Christian, he consoled himself through philosophy alone, not Christian doctrine. Of course, it is entirely possible that philosophy for him was influenced by his strong religious beliefs. In fact, he did claim that philosophy teaches us that the supreme good and highest happiness are found in God and, in fact, are God. This raises a question as to whether there were other precedents in Western philosophy for a contemplative way of life that were not bound to the prevailing conception of God found in Christianity or the other major monotheistic religions. Where might a modern secular person look for a philosophy, rather than a theology, with sufficient mental and emotional sustenance to provide a truly contemplative way of life in old age? The ancient philosophy of Plotinus is one that could conceivably qualify, and Plotinus lived and taught in Rome even before Boethius, circa 205-270 CE. For him, philosophy was a route to what today might be called a conversion, meaning a return to the self, to its essence. He believed that, in our ordinary state of consciousness, we are spiritually distant and distracted from the true self, and this calls for a major reorientation of our attention inward. The philosophical life is a constant quest, seeking to find the prior unity of the Good or the One, which is the ground or ultimate source of spiritual life. The One is pure, simple, and indecomposable presence. This quest is an experiential one that goes beyond normal reason and intellect, transcending our ordinary discursive consciousness. Through contemplation, the soul can reach its highest state, which is one of receptive passivity. He wrote, “The soul’s highest state is complete passivity,” and he invites us to bring about this form of passivity in ourselves (Hadot, 1993, p.8). It is in such a state that one is apt to have contact with the “Good” (qua God), in a mystical experience of union. This is not that far removed spiritually from Boethius. Such an experience of union cannot be willed, so we cannot know with certainty if it will come about. Yet one continues preparing for it through contemplation, which nevertheless has its own rewards in its very practice.
The central doctrine in Plotinus’s philosophy has to do with three realities of ascending value and unity. They are Soul, Mind (Nous), and the highest first principle, which Plotinus, like Plato, called the One or the Good. Thus, rather than the monotheistic God, there is the One or the Good, and through contemplation the individual can approach the One through the levels or realities of Soul and Mind. This contemplative practice calls for a turn inward toward the self, not to seek refuge or satisfaction within one’s self, but because, through its conversion to interiority, the human self transcends itself and no longer sees itself as an isolated ego. At this level of transformation, there is an experience of an other than self, i.e., it is an experience of oneself becoming Other, of unity with the One. This is not unlike the Hindu view of self as related to, and absorbed in, the larger universal Self or Atman.
Plotinus proposed that what matters in the contemplative life is that we rid ourselves of “having” in order “to be,” in its purest sense. This means simplicity in worldly possessions, thought, and deed. True being is the first level of reality that proceeds from the One, for actually the One is beyond being, and the source of being. Being is the ultimate simplicity of life, and it is incapable of being grasped by reflection. In order to reach it and our pure self, we have to abandon intellectual reflection for contemplation; but even then, we can only identify ourselves with our true self for a few fleeting moments. At our ordinary level of consciousness and ego self, all we can access are fleeting thoughts and images. We attempt to fixate the content of this stream in language, but it just brings us back to the intellect and reason, which cannot reach the realm of clear and simple being. Yet for Plotinus, the spiritual realm was nothing other than the self at its deepest level, and it can be reached by returning within oneself at any time. This is achieved without ritual and without the theological superstructure of institutionalized religion. Yet who can say that these returns within the self that Plotinus describes are not genuinely spiritual, if not religious, experiences?
There is no question where Plotinus stood with respect to the issue of contemplation versus action. He claimed that when people are too weak for contemplation they switch to action, which he described as but a mere shadow of contemplation and reason. Contemplation was at the center of his ontology. For him, experiential life consisted of contemplation, concrete simplicity, and presence. In this respect, his approach was very similar to some forms of Eastern meditation and mindfulness, of being present in the now, and apprehending life’s grace directly—experientially rather than intellectually. He valued intuition over intellect in the life of reason, and through this he grasped the ultimate foundation of life as grace. He claimed “The Good is gentle, mild, and very delicate, and always at the disposition of whomever desires it” (Hadot, 1993, p.60). This statement could serve as an apt description of Plotinus himself, a person who displayed gentleness, a tactful sense of reality, and a smiling benevolence, despite a very distressing physical affliction he endured in his later years of life. Not a bad model for the philosophical style of old age proposed by Erikson!