The Socrates Express

Philosophy, as I said, has mostly ignored the subject of old age, but with one notable exception: Cicero. He was sixty-two years old and in terrible pain when he wrote his taut and optimistic essay “On Old Age.”

“Everyone hopes to reach old age, but when it comes, most of us complain about it,” he says. Why? Old age isn’t so bad. Advancing years makes our voice more melodious, our conversations more pleasurable. “There is no greater satisfaction to be had in life than a leisurely old age devoted to knowledge and learning,” he concludes.

Bollocks, says Beauvoir. She had no patience for Cicero’s cheery assessment. She was determined to stare down old age, and not blink. The result: The Coming of Age, a 585-page tome that is tough slogging. Here is a sample:

A limited future and a frozen past: such is the situation that the elderly have to face up to. In many instances, it paralyzes them. All their plans have been carried out or abandoned, and their life has closed about itself; nothing requires their presence; they no longer have anything whatsoever to do.

It gets worse. The elderly, she says, are “walking corpses… condemned to poverty, decrepitude, wretchedness, and despair.” Beauvoir enlists anthropology in her bleak cause, noting that the Nambikwara people have a single word for “young and beautiful” and another for “old and ugly.” She’s got history on her side, too. Old people have been mocked for as long as there have been old people and younger ones to mock them.

A thought experiment: Imagine a woman growing up on a desert island entirely alone. Does she age? She will develop wrinkles, and inevitably health problems. She will slow down. But is this aging? Beauvoir didn’t think so. For her, aging was cultural, a social verdict rendered by others. If there is no jury, there is no verdict. The girl on the island will experience senescence, biological deterioration, but she will not age.

Beauvoir’s grim treatise on aging was surely influenced by her own circumstances. She wrote the book at age sixty, when her health, until then “embarrassingly excellent,” began to flag. Her step slowed. She was often out of breath. She sneered when anyone mentioned “life’s golden years.” She was determined to write about old age “without glossing it over.”

Beauvoir fell into a cognitive trap, I think, a version of Hume’s Guillotine. Not an “is-ought” problem, but what I call a might-must problem. Just because I might expose my rear end in public like Rousseau doesn’t mean I must. Just because older people might slip into despair doesn’t mean they must. They have choices, something you’d think an existentialist like Beauvoir would recognize.

No wonder people like contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum reject Beauvoir’s grim fatalism. “I don’t recognize my own experience at all, nor that of my friends of similar age,” Nussbaum writes in her own book on aging.

Beauvoir, I think, overcompensated for Cicero’s sunniness. She traded the Roman’s rose-colored lenses for dark sunglasses. They protected her from harmful rays but also blocked the light. And there is light. Old age need not be the dismal slow-motion death Beauvoir makes it out to be. It can be a time of great joy and creative output. And the best person to make this case? Simone de Beauvoir.