With some of our achievements behind us, disappointments nearby and limitations in mind, we begin to realize that we are halfway through life, say, and not getting any prettier, cleverer or happier. You’re not going to get that big promotion; you have a dauntingly large mortgage; you’re never going to go and live in California. Perhaps you opened that bar in Spain but it didn’t work out and the dream is gone. You start wearing glasses, visiting your doctor more often, discover you have high blood pressure. Some fight on in optimism, give up work, sell the house, downsize, go travelling, embrace an exercise programme and complementary medicine. But some of us instinctive Schopenhauerians see these intimations of mortality as the beginning of the end, be that end yet thirty or forty years away. Lifelong routine cosmetic attention, hair dye, botox, hormone replacement therapy, all these to some extent, and increasingly, stave off the reality of ageing and aesthetic failure, but only partly and imperfectly.
For some, life fails to pan out in a way that feels fair. You may work extremely hard in a voluntary organization or in the health sector but have “little to show for it” compared with peers who worked less hard but had better luck or who worked in better remunerated careers such as banking. If you believed what you were told about hard work and honesty, yet witness get-rich-quick chancers flourishing around you while you struggle to make ends meet, a sense of injustice and bitterness might get to you. You may pay great attention to a healthy lifestyle yet succumb to cancer when one or two peers who have led dissolute lives escape such illnesses. You may lead a “blameless life” and yet suffer from redundancy, bankruptcy, divorce, accidents or bereavement. Most us are led to believe in some sort of natural justice based on personal goodness or merit, yet life can prove random in its rewards and adversities. All are susceptible to good and bad moral luck.
In the Judaeo-Christian tradition Job is the exemplar of the stoical and faithful believer in God, refusing, until he finally cracks, to curse God for the great suffering inflicted on him. Anyone can try to follow Job, Epictetus, Boethius, or modern-day cognitive behaviour therapists in accepting their lot uncomplainingly, whether or not they detect any purpose or justice in suffering. But some of us just see random suffering and injustice as part of the fabric of existence: wild animals can’t escape it, so why should we? Perhaps we fool ourselves with linear narratives about merit and reward distributed fairly across the lifespan and general population when we should know better about genetic “unfairness”, accidents and chaos.
As I write these words I have recently turned sixty-one. I never thought I’d be this old and although in my psychological self-image I am still about twenty, in the mirror or shop window I am clearly, I think, a bit of an old codger. I have little hair left and a general demeanour of having seen far better days. No matter how vigorously I brush my teeth with whitening toothpaste they remain a little yellow. My recent appointment with the optician showed a need for a stronger prescription. A photograph of me at twenty-two shows a slim, tanned, not bad-looking young man on holiday in Spain, but it doesn’t show the inwardly angst-ridden person I was. It’s taken me a long time to become a bit more at peace with myself and in some ways it is true that life is good. But somehow simultaneously, ironically life has new problems. I can’t do as much as I used to without tiredness; my sexual desire seems as high as ever but my performance doesn’t match it; my memory for certain things isn’t so good; I would like to change certain behaviours but many of the habits of a lifetime don’t shift easily. I don’t know quite “how to be”: for example what to wear, or what to aim for in life. I am slightly afraid of becoming an eccentric Don Quixote character.
How long have I got? When people say “You’re only as old as you feel” and “Sixty is the new forty” I am torn between contempt for such clichés and a concealed hope that they are true. Occasionally I become quite hypochondriacal, noticing a bump or bruise or ugly veins and shuddering at my declining aesthetic state and less than optimal health. How long have I got? How long do I want? Deep inside, the cogs of biological roulette are turning regardless of what “I” want. Yet I feel vaguely guilty for growing old, as if I could and should have prevented it. I could die at any time. I have forty years left at the very outside, probably around twenty, and quite possibly less. I may or may not suffer from one or another of the diseases of old age and the ignominy of the wretched nursing home. After I die I’ll be remembered for a few years and then forgotten, as if I had never existed, or at best recede into fuzzy, distorted, scattered memories. I know we all face this but it feels personal, as if it’s only happening to me.
A long, healthy and happy life is the main goal for many, even if the goal is merely implicit. Death is to be postponed for as long as possible and when it comes it should be a peaceful, sanitized death in bed. Most people in liberal Western democracies now expect to live into their eighties or beyond, as if sheer quantitative survival must be a good thing. This was not how Epicurus understood matters. In his account it is unimportant how long one lives; narrative accumulation of wisdom, say, is secondary to the completeness that comes from engagement with one’s goals at any one time. Whereas for MacIntyre (2007) and champions of virtue, bringing the unity of life to completeness over time is what counts. Philosophers disagree about the values of lives that fluctuate from a good early life to an unhappier old age or vice versa. Clearly, an earlier failure can present as an “edifying misfortune” (Velleman 1991) leading to redemption, but late-life failures probably do not present the same opportunities for learning and change.
Given sufficient economic well-being and medical support, perhaps many older people will increasingly experience a preponderance of the good. But the remaining flies in the ointment of old age are all too clear to see. Schopenhauer’s lament for the common “infirm and often wretched old age” has not yet been shown to be nonsense. Until much more effective cures are found, the older we get, the more susceptible to bodily and cognitive failures we become. In the sensory domain, deterioration in sight and hearing are the most common; in the cognitive, progressive memory failure.
Aristotle acknowledged that children must be exempt from any expectation of nobility. He did not accord the same privilege to those in old age. Indeed, in the Rhetoric he is distinctly negative about the character of the old, pessimistically regarding it as unlikely that much thriving takes place beyond one’s prime. Happiness would be greater overall, he averred, if one did not outlive one’s prime. The young still have potential; the old do not. Old age isn’t necessarily bound to failure but it is commonly bound to fragility. If viability is characterized by health and robustness, then we may well suggest that the typical process of increasing fragility in later life is necessarily linked with increasing fallibility. (Indeed, quite literally, many older people fear falling since their bones are more brittle.) Summarizing the thinking of philosophers and writers on old age, Helen Small posits an inescapable double-think at work:
Many of us spend more and more time, as we grow older, thinking about the fact that we are growing older and what it implies, but we also spend a great deal of time trying, more or less strenuously, not to think about that fact and what it implies.
(2007: 272)
This dissonance between what we know and what we try not to know may be understood as a tragic failure to face reality, or simply as part of our natural fragility, or perhaps even as something like a design failure: consciousness gives us some prescience but this is outweighed by fear and avoidance.
Assumptions about the often unquestioned desirability of growing old are not without their critics. Take just one, the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima. Like some other young, warrior-oriented men, in contemporary and ancient societies, Mishima saw nothing good about getting old and dying a mundane death in bed; he regarded the old as ugly and far from wise, and ageing as inevitable decline. Death was not an inconvenient and unpalatable end point of the fading process of old age but the most important event, something to be regarded in heroic terms
. For Mishima these considerations led to his fatal decision and execution of ritual suicide (seppuku). Immediately after a failed coup détat, at the age of forty-five, he ritually disembowelled himself and, by prior arrangement, had his head cut off, the decapitation itself being botched at its first attempt. While not by any means the same as the deaths of Empedocles, Socrates and Jesus, Mishima’s was based on a philosophy of life and death founded not on depression but on vigorous self-control and martial arts training. I am not here advocating suicide to avoid growing old but illustrating the point that passive ageing is not necessarily an inevitable or good thing, and to think so is surely a failure of imagination. The current growing trend for some older people who are suffering from incurable disease and terrible pain to terminate their lives is related to Mishima’s case by the moral principle of personal sovereignty over one’s life and death.
We might, with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, see our lives in time as “the perpetual reiteration of the sequence of past, present and future … as it were, a constant disappointment and failure” (1962: 453). It is now a cliché to refer to past and future as illusions, or as mental states only: the past full of regret and nostalgia, the future full of hope and worry. The gloomiest among us may dwell on past and future failures or imagined failures. But the present, “the now”, even the “eternal now” has become a fashionable and much sought-after experience, particularly since the importation of Zen Buddhism to the West in the 1960s but also increasingly in the practices of meditation and mindfulness. Like many amateur meditators, I have occasionally relaxed into a state of presence that felt distinctly different from the typical everyday preoccupied mental state but I know I have altogether failed to maintain a sense of heightened presence in my everyday life. I cannot know if the Buddha actually attained a state of freedom from the illusions of time but I can’t escape knowing that applied Buddhist philosophy hasn’t worked for me. I turn to Craig Bourne’s (2006) philosophical analysis of “presentism” for enlightenment but quickly become depressed on realizing that I simply cannot follow the text (yet another failure on my part), give up, and resign myself to living in the usual fuzzy mixture of past, present and future. I had vaguely looked forward to finally reading all those heavyweight books in my retirement but most of them will probably defeat me. If only I had saved money I could instead be travelling the world.
For some, the prospect of death itself is a disappointment. Given that each of us seems so unique and most accumulate large stores of memory, experience, knowledge and skill, it makes no intuitive or rational sense that all this is eventually wiped out. Quite naturally, many also fear death; indeed, all human cultures appear to have feared it and created rituals and explanations for addressing it. Some ancient traditions have recommended stoical acceptance or even welcomed death. Existentialists stress the defining importance of death as final. For Heidegger, “authentic, existentially projected being-toward-death” means “to be itself in the passionate anxious freedom towards death, which is free of all illusions of the they, factical, and certain of itself” ([1926] 2010: 255).
Statistics of average age at death and for increasing longevity can imply that a normal good life will now end at about eighty or ninety. There is now a sense that it is a success in itself to live to a ripe old age. Conversely, there is perhaps a superstition, suspicion or sadness about those who die in their sixties, fifties or younger, as if sheer dogged longevity trumps shorter lives. We may say “the good die young” but I doubt we really believe this. I suspect that often beneath the ritual outward sadness at shorter lives lurk ancient prejudices about biological inferiority, divine punishment or dark psychosomatic forces for which we are cryptically held responsible: a kind of counter-Mishima view.
Most religions contain theologies of death survival, and some frankly spurious spiritualism practices hold out hope of a life after death. For many in the Abrahamic traditions there is the prospect of a rewarding heaven or perfect paradise beyond flaws or suffering. For Hindus and some Buddhists there is the prospect of upward reincarnation. There being no evidence for such claims, one can choose to embrace them, dismiss them entirely or consign them to the category of harmless comfort-giving, or one can remain agnostic.
Refusing to accept the unacceptable flaw of mortality, some sign up and pay up for cryonic freezing and hope for potent future technologies to resurrect them. Increasingly, we witness a group of biogerontologists locked in a “war on ageing”, who do not accept the inevitability of ageing, and death by about a hundred. Rather, they are serious about researching the causes of senescence and finding due therapies, and predict large advances within decades so that the lifespan may extend to hundreds of years and the quality of life and health for most of that time will be excellent. Here we may choose to admire the indomitable human spirit that stubbornly refuses to accept the inevitability of ultimate failure. Conversely we might interpret this attitude as a failure to face the ultimate reality, however frightening and disappointing, and furthermore as an act of unethical folly; if by any chance such research ever leads to a vastly increased lifespan, imagine the knock-on effects on world population, on intergenerational dynamics and other social and economic phenomena.
One might presume that after whatever ignominy and failure we face in this life, we can fairly “rest in peace” when we die. Hell (the latter-day destiny for all doomed souls) aside, it seems that a few of us who were deemed successful in life may succumb to posthumous failure in death. I refer to those celebrated persons who are exposed to revisionist biographies or slurs demonstrating by means of new evidence that the acclaimed deceased beat his wife, indulged in sexual perversions or was a racist, fascist, bigamist or plagiarist. It does not matter to the deceased but could be hurtful to family and fans. Think about the process of decanonization of saints: to become posthumously a failed saint. It is interesting that our posthumous reputation can matter so much to us, many driven and famous men especially being keen to promote their “legacy” as if anything less than immortality and standing out from the run of average human beings might constitute a failed life.
3.
Collective human folly, sin and error
Collectively, we humans have long tried to understand ourselves and to envisage and create better societies. We have recognized deep fault lines in our collective behaviour, frequently leading to tragic outcomes, and analysed these tirelessly. Arguably, in spite of much social science, we are no closer to truly satisfactory analyses or solutions than we ever were, since chronic social and international problems dog us perpetually. We might usefully go back to the question of where all this began.
“Without the notion of a failed universe, the spectacle of injustice in every system would put even an abulic into a straitjacket” (Cioran 1998: 125). In other words, way beyond us, aeons before our personal, agentic responsibility developed, the foundations of the universe were laid. Not a perfect universe designed by a perfect God, it is a random universe creating within itself the forms that must follow from the ingredients and actions given. “Cosmogonic discomfort” is a term suggested by Cioran for these foundations. The universe is a mass of expanding and entropic forces and we human beings exist within this with all our apparently elevated consciousness and complex civilizations. We think we are a successful end point of millions of years of evolution, we glory in our cleverness, yet simultaneously lament our inability to remedy the tragedies independent of us and those of our making. Of course, it is true that we are in a sense the universe itself, composed of the same materials and reflecting back on itself. Human consciousness, containing not only self-preserving instincts but also what we might call “higher” emotions and reason, perceives and feels many dysfunctional and unjust phenomena to exist for which no clear and enduring corrective is available.
Somehow we reflect the expanding and entropic forces of our universe: we cannot help but develop and go forwards, yet we make a mess too. We feel that we are responsible and capable of necessary actions but
often our actions are counterproductive. We claim to want justice but we perpetuate absurd injustices. Something beneath the level of our intellectual analysis, intentionality and will undermines us. “What I do is not the good I want to do” (Romans 7:19): this Pauline observation of our human obduracy is utterly central to the human predicament at both individual and collective levels and is essentially the same problem of akrasia.
Often our questions about life are unhelpfully grouped together and confused. Questions about the meaning of life proliferate: is it pointless and absurd, as Camus suggested? Theoretical battles over human nature torment us: are we essentially good, bad, neither or both? Deliberations over the best way to understand and meet social challenges continue unabated: what shall we do about crime, health, population, climate change? Many revel in the optimistic view that our progress is significant and continuing. But perhaps at best we imperfectly understand ourselves and “do our best” pragmatically to solve or reduce social problems.
Failure (The Art of Living) Page 6