ON FREEDOM AND AGING: An Interpretation LEOPOLD ROSENMAYR* Univefsit# Wien ABSTRACT: This article explores stages of historical development of age status and relates thti to the present. Old people, already in the transition from tribal society to literate high culture lost their Luiing social posit& Moral and economic support was granted to them, yet the old as a social and cultural group never came back to power again in Western history. In technologically highly developed societies of the present countertrends of a new valorization of older people have set in This is no return of gerontocracy. However the main increase in social and ctdtuml prestige of old people as individuals can be observed lhis “readmt&ion” is connected with the general sociological phenomenon of irulividualization in postmoa?rn value orientations and lifestyles and will continue to expand

I propose a discourse about freedom while hoping that this will help us better under stand the potential for purposeful activity of the individual and the chances of people it midlife and later to broaden and take advantage of such freedom as social groups. The social discourse on freedom is oriented here toward both individual and social models. The search for a set of theses concerning freedom cannot derive from the usual determinism-often dominant without reflection in a social exegesis-or from socalled critical theory. The latter tends to exclude, by its negative definition, any constructive or “positive” alternative that can lean toward a new course of action, social recognition, and “activation.*’ In his early theoretical formulations, G.W.F. Hegel distinguished between the positive in a narrow sense (as mere detailed description of the observable present) and the positive in the sense of transformation. I shall speak in terms of the positive of transformation, thus in a nonpositivistic positive way. This position of “positive in transformation” today requires a vision of scenarios of the future that by definition are alternatives to existing observable reality. Our discourse will attempt to explore models of the future by a conceptual analysis of the potential for freedom. This potential is the result of improved life expectancies and qualitative life chances. This potential is shaken, however, by the anxieties caused by nuclear threat and by the increasing destruction and abuse of nature. No sociological *Direct all comnuuu? ations to: Leopold Rosenmayr,Institutfir Soziologie,Universitdt Wien, A- 1080 Wipn, A33, Amnia JOURNAL OF AGING STUDIES, Volume 1, Number 4, pages 299-316. Copyright @ 1987 by JAI Press, Inc. Au rights of reproduction hl any form reserved. l!ssN: 0890-4065.

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reasoning concerning human lives, which are the topic of aging studies, can legitimately avoid the discussion of the new, often global, and anonymous risks. As recent youth studies show, these anxieties have become important factors influencing expectations of youth (Rosenmayr 1985a). I shall focus here on older groups of society, on a population that is marginal to, or outside of, the workforce, a population-or populations-who are by and large in relatively good health. I am focusing on the “young old”-in the qualikzive sense of this definition (Neugarten and Neugarten 1986)-and, to some extent, on the more active “old old.” We seek to learn how these populations can grasp their potential for selfdetermined activity and use their chances to interact with this world instead of just allowing themselves to be influenced by dominating social and political forces.

FREEDOM AND OLD AGE IN PREHISTORY AND EARLY HUMAN CULTURE A Point of Departure for a Basic Consideration In order to properly appreciate human freedom, one must go back to an interpretation of prehistory, to the development of homo sapiens. The protection of the species within a difficult environment and the “plasticity” that is typical of man and his evolutionary jumps have made moratorium-phases in life (Mead 1970) a necessity. Youth and old age are such phases of moratorium. They are much longer in man than among any animal, including the primates who are closest to man. Roth these phases (youth and old age) offer chances for development. They permit the dynamic cultural process of the species. They were strictly complementary in the early phases of mankind, when information and life-supporting knowledge of all kinds passed from the old to the young. The old taught and the young learned. The postprocreative phase of man (his surplus longevity) is at the origin of his chances for flexible adjustment and gradual self-determination. The human species, by the foundation of its culture and by its transmission from old to young through a system of seniority, has created the dynamics of survival in prehistory and in early human history. Human longevity, the basis of the “simultaneous coexistence” of several generations, has markedly contributed to establishing and institutionalizing cultural apprenticeship. The content of culture was transmitted vertically by successive generations as different from the present dominantly horizontal cultural flow. The latter is typical for the age of the mass media and computer-based dissemination of information. It marginalizes the old from an information point of view and severely limits their degree of freedom (Rosenmayr 1983a, b). Chances for survival and expansion in early human history were won, lost, and won again in a process of renewed efforts for protection against a hostile environment. Chances for survival also depended on internal regulations and self-control. firer& protection called for an internal one. Man had to acquire this control through his struggle with his own violent and, to some extent, vicious infrastructure. The first steps toward purposeful and planned action made it necessary for man to defend himself against himself, his own devouring and self-devouring passions (Foucault 1984a, b). As we may infer from both comparative primatological studies (Vogel 1977) and from

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ethnographic evidence, old male individuals had mediating and pacifying influence. This means that they were free enough to exert this influence. Self-affirmation and self-preservation required limits, rules, and prohibitions. Incest taboo, which developed step by step and often permitted partial endogamy, was one central instrument to control as well as to expand cultural exchange (Levi-Strauss 1947). This instrument was-and in some societies still is-in the hands of the old, or more precisely was and is part of the gerontocratic system. The old were the hubs of early human development. They had to follow traditional rules themselves but certainly acted within degrees of freedom: they could preselect marriage partners and direct clan and group activities. They also directed initiation and decided or at least influenced who had to learn what at which point. Particularly sacred and magical knowledge was imparted by the aged leaders of the gerontocratic system. The younger individuals always remained in the position of having chances to become accepted one day. Mobility was stepwise and depended upon admission (Rosenmayr 1986a, b). Culture was upheld and developed by precisely organized old-young relations; these relations regulated the life course and secured expectations in societies and tribal groups with imprevisible life and death chances. I have tried to sketch chances for freedom in prehistorical and tribal social systems. I shall now turn to early high culture in order to study the changes in the social distribution of freedom. What happened to the relative freedom that the old benefited from in prehistorical mythical societies? To understand this process, I am selecting the genesis of classical Greek culture in early European history to point out significant changes in the history of freedom and its relation to age. Other transitions to high culture could be studied in Babylon, Egypt, or China. The “Western” example shows the most dramatic and quickest transformation. It surely is the best documented one, and it has clearly become part of our cultural and emotional heritage. I shall use some notions of Solon, the philosopher, poet, and statesman who was elected to highest leadership in Athens in 594 B.C., to illustrate the implicit redefinition of freedom and age with the onset of the Greek city-state. “Eunomia,” harmony in the state based on law, was Solon’s key notion. To unfold eunomia required the equalization of socioeconomic chances. The low strata, the poor peasants, had to be given more freedom in order to improve general social justice. Only increased life chances would enhance the poor classes participation in eunomia. Social harmony according to Solon had to be based on the (relative) liberty of different groups within the social system. However, the self-liberating process of the individual through learning had to supplement political measures of equalization. Harmony according to Solon required the permanent work of “nus” (mind and reason), not only the social but also the individual one. Thus the development and training of the mind was recommended over the life course by Solon. Life-long learning became crucial in the struggle of the Greek city-state for the appreciation of internal justice and for the defense of external independence. Creativity and self-education became important programs for the self-defense of the small, trade-oriented, and independent political units, particularly in view of the aggressive Persian Empire. Traditionalistic gerontocracy could no longer guarantee a new socioeconomic order or take advantage of the economic and cultural changes in the Mediterranean universe.

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We can observe three different forms of transformation society to the beginnings of high culture:

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from early prehistoric

1. Instead of rules guaranteed by the power of the old, norms are elaborated and guaranteed by the law and by the courts. The rules are upheld by the whole “body politic.” Political freedom is generalized. 2. Instead of a strict hierarchy that attributes higher degrees of freedom to the gerontocratic top, a generalized moralfreedom attempts to equalize rights to all. 3. Instead of a learning under the auspices of the old (controlled information and initiation), self-induced and self-organized learning until you are old and continuing when you are old develops. Individual freedom, based on self-activation, is generalized. Old age is no longer a value in itself. Already at the beginning of European high culture, yet also in post-Vedic Hinduism, where the ascetic saint, regardless of his age, became the social ideal, we observe a reduction of social influence, status, and power of the old. Access to the chances of freedom are no longer biased in favor of higher age. The youth cult gets in already with the social expansion of the fundamental Greek idea of paiakia (Jaeger 1954). The institutionalization of the intensive corporate training of the young for war, gymnastics, politics, rhetoric, and philosophy underlines the education orientation of a dynamic culture. This basic paradigm did not change in the West until the middle of the twentieth century. European culture and Western civilization, wherever they developed, remained deeply influenced by the youth cult stemming from Greek antiquity. Youth cult was renewed particularly by the Italian Renaissance. It must be noted that the expansion of the idea of individual freedom, the right to oneself and the expression of one’s preferences and delights, was closely connected with the Renaissance cult of the young individual: The youthful Romeo and Juliet figure as tragic heroes of and for a new freedom of love; the young and powerful David sculpted by Michelangelo to stand in the center of the city of Florence came to symbolize the new era and may be understood as the hero to overcome all difficulties by his youthful strength and intelligence. Enlightenment in philosophy and politics in Europe and in the United States gave preference to the young and flexible individual who was capable of self-management and courageous enough to reject traditionalism. Youth remained a heroic force in European culture through the wars of liberation in the early nineteenth century. Youth again assumed importance in the Youth Movements at the beginning of the twentieth century and in the “Student Revolts” in the 1960s. It is our thesis that reevaluation of age and some trends of age-related restructuring of a fundamental character are underway now in the “postindustrial” society of the last decades of the twentieth century. Our exploration of chances for freedom for older people should serve as a preparation for the responses to present and future changes. The greying of society gives chances to the breaking away from the youth cult. However, the youth cult will not be replaced by a cult of old age. Trends point toward a general relativization of age or at least toward a potential of redefining life phases in view of this relativization. We are now entering a new society where age as a proxy can no longer be used for measuring a wide range of characteristics. Our is an era of the “fluid life cycle”

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(Neugarten and Neugarten 1986). We witness the replacement of the primordial homo sapiens by the new phenotype of horn0 sapiens longaevus, of a type of man who can now more fully profit from his genetically predetermined considerable longevity. A reevaluation of chances of, and for, freedom during the later phases of life seems therefore appropriate. It is not the research of a scenario “for the elderly,” but an attempt to understand and preview chances for a new profile of an extended and more potent second half of life.

FREEDOM THROUGH REJUVENATION: A PRE- AND POST-MODERN CONCEPT? The human search for freedom resulted from both the need for defense against external enemies and a hostile environment and the need to respond to the unknown within the depth of one’s soul. In order to be free one must accept this unknown. Freedom derives from the response to the uncertain, from handling the obscure root of our conscience and also of our very existence. This unknown propels us to seek a liberating security. Winnicott (1965) speaks of the silent control point in the organization of the ego and of the profound noncommunication at the core of the personality. This organization of the ego must be sought and e&&red; it never occurs on its own. Any organization and communication must be created from the “unknown point.” Freedom is creation in relationship to the uncertain. It comes from courage and leads to confidence. Yet support is also sought. Only together with fhe other can the individual feel and accept himself as himself and herself as herself. The confidence that secures freedom is anchored within man, yet it may be reinforced from without the labyrinth of the contradictions of his psyche. The hope in a god of love reinforces confidence. It strengthens human love. Love is the sign of the impossibility of an exclusive confidence in oneself. The stoic philosophers of the Roman Empire, however, fostered this self-confidence and it served as the basis of their own gerontology, drafted in Cicero’s treatise on Old Age (De senectute). In the seventeenth century Montaigne revived this stoic philosophy that propagated, at the same time, a grim and relaxed attitude toward finitude and death. Aging and dying were seen by him as “natural” processes that should be expected by the individual. Man’s chronic instability, his perception of being unknown to himself and of being divided in himself, pushed him toward expecting a source of stabilization emanating from a powerful divinity. Jewish monotheism internalized faith as a source of freedom. It cultivated the idea and the rituals of a powerful Other who guides His people and comforts the faithful individual. Freedom in Judaism comes about as a result of the absolute belief in a messianic God, who acts historically and throughout the lifetime of the believer and will redeem the entire creation at the end of times. From hence comes an important, at least partial, valorization of old age. The good life of the just is best testified by the old person. If this moral independence is not lost through naughtiness and sin, he will become as spectacular as the mature old cedar tree in the mountains of Lebanon (Schabert 1979). Monotheistic faith and later, in Christianity, the Trinity link faith to freedom. The believer can only be a true believer if deciding his faith freely. God has a presence per se, external to and independent of the believer, as well as a presence within the believer. This internal presence is a loving, a free union (“unio mystica”).

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The notion of religious freedom in Christianity is a concept of ultrastabilization that comes from regeneration and re-creation. Real freedom cannot be created, it has to be re-created, born in an act of internal change. Freedom occurs in a process of reaflirmation. Similarly, love as different from moral self-assertion is also discontinuous. It is interrupted by crisis and needs to be reestablished. Christianity as a love-oriented religion emphasizes dynamic attitudes of renewal, of searching for new beginnings. Therefore, Christianity drew close to affuming the value of youthfulness, different from the Greek youth-centeredness on educational ideas such as pakieiu. But Christianity was definitely oriented toward change, transformation, and growth. The message of the young man Jesus is a message of a new eschatological era: “Verily I say unto you that you which have followed me, in the regeneration, when the son of Man shall sit in the throne of his glory you also shall sit upon twelve thrones.. .” (Mt. 19,28; emphasis added). Not only the individual, also world history, is expected to be renewed in a redemptive divine act. “Rebirth” in the gospel of Matthew, as we have seen, has sociopolitical dimensions. The desire for redemption leads to overthrowing the existing order of the world. God himself as the supreme master of history designs this “revolution,” and the Messiah operates the change for a qualitatively different new era. In the gospel of John, however, rebirth is also conceived as interna change, set into motion by the consent of the individual in order to let the spirit become efficacious within the person as a rejuvenating force. Nicodemus, the leading aged Pharisee comes to Jesus by night. He is ashamed to be seen in public visiting the dangerous young charismatic Rabbi and he has no real question to ask. Yet it looks as if he was motivated by more than curiosity. Nicodemus as an old man is surprised and overrun by the (to him) enigmatic suggestion of Jesus to be bent again. Why does Nicodemus as a learned man knowing the scriptures not understand “rebirth”? Jesus is surprised. Did Nicodemus not know that God could operate everything through his Spirit? According to the Jewish faith, the individuals who are attained by the spirit will become free and “just” in a long life-the macrobiotic way. They turn away from idolatry and rely exclusively and continuously on the invisible Jahwe. The God in whom they trust will carry them through all misery and corruption of mortality. This is the macrobiotic biblical Jewish tradition. The teachings of Jesus take up the idea of liberation but connect this idea with age irrelevance. In which sense? The spirit of God, the wind (pneuma), to blow into the soul, does not need “wisdom,” “maturity,” “ experience” as preconditions within the individual. “Where there is the spirit of God there is freedom” (2 Cor. 3, 17; Jo 8,36). The spirit can operate anywhere to bear witness to the power of God. The Christian “innovation” in the encounter with the divine spirit is characterized by the idea of a new lif within the old one. Man is called, and in accepting this vocation he gives up, “dies to,” his old life. He suffers death of his former life and he permits the spirit of rebirth to operate within him. Freedom in Christian dwught and practice k rejuvenation This Christian message, rich in connotation and political consequences for European culture (and the West in general) has again and again underlined the value of a nap beginning and has thus indirectly supported the ideology of progress and the youth cult of Western philosophy of life up to the end of the nineteenth century (Nietzsche 1969).

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In the course of the centuries a Christian theory of aging, however, has never developed. Aspects not of freedom but of both moral and social &o~~o~and suede of the old played the central role in the teachings of the early church (1 Ti 5,1- 16; Tit 2,1-5). Old age remained both an object of care and a phase of moral preparation for dying (Rosenmayr 1985b, Sprandel 1981). Aging oscillated between control and care, between pity and veneration until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Cole 1986). Generally the emphasis on rebirth and rejuvenation in Western thought pushed aging as a topic into the theological and p~losophical back~ound. Western philosophy elaborated on the Judeo-Christian notion of a nonguaranteed and discontinuous, a hoped for, development. Also methodological doubt (Descartes 1960) leads us to an insight not so different from the pious distrust of the faithful toward their own weak and sinful egos. No socialization, not even the best, according to eighteenth century “modem” European philo~phy, can confer to us the security of cohesiveness and of continue of our ego. One of the great paradoxes of the history of European thought results in the insight that the affirmation of personal autonomy (the true philosophical foundation of political and educational freedom) is closely linked to the so-called paralogisms that lead to explaining the discontinuity of the ego (Kant 1977). These paralogisms demonstrate the im~ssibili~ of afIirming the cohesiveness and the continuity of the self in a scientific manner. The ever-changing ego being tied to the moment cannot affirm empirically about itself any (metaphysical) stability over time. For Kant identity is a thoroughly precarious notion and only morally establishable as a postulate, Kant’s formalism in his theory of knowledge and in his ethics is based upon this uncertainty vis-a-vis the ego in the flow of life and time. Any discourses about the capacity for change in the final analysis is based upon Kant’s ela~mtion of the paralogisms of the ego. Man can change because he is not standardized. He must change in order to arrive at the various stages of his multiple homeostases. Man’s plasticity is a result of his precarious, always tentative, homeostases. Attitudes, even values, are only slightly attached to self; the ego basically is a force of self-afflation. Freedom, according to this concept implies the mobilization of self-affl~ation coupled with a certain trust in oneself, not so much in one’s attitudes. The self is the “carrier” of freedom, insofar as the self grows and “believes” that personal freedom including his own can develop. In what is generally called the era of postmodernity, human self-confidence is very hazardous. The dissolution of many systems of institutionalized order, the changes in gratification at work and through work, and the rapid turnover of ideas all require a new kind of trust. In order to last, trust must be based upon some personal capacity, even without our being able to name the social and psychological structures upon which it rests. Ideological and institutional insecurity demand a new firmness to accept one’s freedom. True liberation is invariably and painfully directed toward an unknown and threatened future. This is one of the main lessons of the above-mentions ~s~~erni~, which is characterized by a loss of naivete with respect to any notion of rationality. It is in this era of postmodernity that one may form a new image of an aging, but not old, personality. Postmodernity gives rise to man leaving work at an early age. In postmodernity a redefinition of culture is based upon many activities other than work. If

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postmodernity rejects all primitive rationalism, it does not reject the task of learning. In spite of biological aging and as a result of the rapid rhythm of technological innovations, the cycle of freedom can advance through continuous learning, which generates options. Freedom defined as spiritual rebirth to become “sons of God” was the center of the Christian “philosophy of life.” Baptism and communion were the rituals to underline and “practice” this creed. Rejuvenation was viewed as a spiritual process. The Christian teaching of moral age-irrelevance prevailed. This was the basic orientation of Christianity vis-a-vis age as a life variable. To become faithful, to be reborn as a believer, meant to accept spiritual renewal at all points and at any moment and age in the life course. The dependent old (according to early church discipline) should be both controlled and supported. This severe narrowing down of freedom for the elderly was a theological sideline in the Christian teaching but became influential if not dominant in Church practices. A special idea for freedom in aging, an idea to be applied to the changes of nature over the life course, was not brought forth by Christian theologians. The aging and the old remained in a realm of pastoral interpretations with moral consequences. To be reborn meant to become a spiritually bener man. It said nothing on how to confront with the losses and irreversibilities of aging and how to live joyfully in the later phases of life. Moral rebirth became a spiritual and political key notion in the development of Western mentality. Rebirth was coined as a category of challenge-can it turn into one of fulfillment? Answers to this question will have to be multidimensional. They ought to come from psychology and sociology as well as from a spiritual theory of fulfillment and aging (Opera Pia International 1982; Rosenmayr 1979,198O).

ON UNDERSTANDING UTOPIA AS A LIFE POTENTIAL LATER IN LIFE Freedom may be pointed at from approximations furnished by science, but cannot be defined by the latter. Science, however, may mirror the traces of elements and actions that furnish points of departure for freedom. An example is learning theory. In its developed form, learning theory (based upon the model of operant conditioning) demonstrates that knowledge is enhanced by spontaneous and unplanned reinforcements. We prepare for freedom when we dare to take risks, when we have the curiosity and the courage to accept improvised reinforcements. This accord with the unexpected represents human nonmaturity (not immaturity). Freedom implies man’s chronic nonmaturity, and it reinforces the capacity to tolerate risk and uncertainty in the second half of life. Another aspect is subjective life history, biography. In the course of aging, one’s ability to put a distance between oneself and one’s various accumulated experiences results from a certain amount of rejection of one’s past. This distancing can lead an elderly person toward a renewal of curiosity and to a change at the level of perception and even of values. It can also herald a process of restructuration and prepare one for a choice between several scenarios for “the life that remains.” Again, such a renewal in the later years implies risk-taking, the courage to engage in new behaviors and to consider new or redefined values. Freedom is always connected with the future. We move ahead impelled by an ideal or utopia, a vision of the world that does not coincide with reality. Creative nonmatur-

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ity is formed and is forming us. Truth attainedis (finally) death. “Not truth is true; it is the relationship to illusion which becomes true.” For being in truth “it is sufficient to stubbornly take pain to arrive there” (Barthes 1977). In the second half of life, the renewal of a utopian vision of one’s existence determines the horizon; the intensity and the fullness of the utopia are potentially greater, as there is more “material” for this utopia. Processes of development and achievement are manifested as projects. They result from life goals and are realized through life plans, which implement goals. Life plans permit expectations and anticipation of behavior in everyday action. They owe their realizations to decisions taken. Actions and sequences of actions are nevertheless limited by social deprivation, which has a tendency to cumulate in old age among the economically, politically, and socially underprivileged classes and groups. Financial hardship, illness, emotional difficulties, dependencies, and so forth, have a tendency to create a vicious cycle called cumulative &su&untage (Rosenmayr and Majce 1978). The potential for freedom may thus be reduced to a minimum if the shackles of disadvantage predominate. The strengthening of hope by an open life horizon implies the safeguarding of certain social supports for man in the later years. This safeguarding is based on an equalization of economic opportunity, of life preservation, of preventive and restorative care insofar as it is possible. It is based on a fair distribution of services, care, and assistance-all these factors must be considered as underlying freedom. The welfare state, however, has a tendency to create a large number of new dependencies. Freedom needs support, and it can be smothered. Freedom is not just choice. Political and social decisions create a basis that fosters, limits, or destroys freedom. Liberation is a task related to the self. This task is not accomplished at a given moment, or with reference to an established identity. Identity to me appears to be legitimate only in a the sense of a flow, of a tension. We should rather speak of identities-in the plural-that alternate during the life course. The various identities an individual “lives through” during his/her life result from the structuring of “projects” (Sartre 1960) and the sufferings to which the individual is exposed. Phases of an artist’s creativity mirror the various identities of the artist. The later “periods” of Picasso’s creativity are a good example of a variety of identities that coexist in a latent form but unfold and become manifest consecutively. Processes of individuation (Jung 1928; Wehr 1977) take place during events, crises, and decisions. Such processes form phases that “incarnate” various identities of one individual. We may thus understand the cycle or spiral of freedom, the stages in the development of the self that result from growth. This “growth toward freedom” is a process of incorporating subconscious forces into a responsive whole of the personality. This growth develops in several homeostatic stages. The older human individual has the speciul task of not only incorporating and selectively “living out” vital pressures of the subconscious, but in addition is forced to take a position vis-a-vis his/her own and the &&&past he/she has lived through. Complexity for integration is thus increased. For the younger individual, his/her own life story can more easily be integrated; it does not become vested in a mass of memory-contained conditions. Therefore we hold that “late freedom” is structurally different from freedom earlier in the life cycle. It implies dealing with higher degrees of complexity.

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The interconnection of phases is shown by a life review. Such a review can be carried out in a critical manner and with conscious disillusion concerning all the goals that one has not been able to reach (Brim 1976). But this review is relative to the image that the individual carries with him/her regarding his/her future hopes. Thus, liberation does require a change in the emphasis of self-understanding, a change in the sense of a more realistic appraisal of future possibilities and at the same time of more courage to admit to develop what has not been tested before. The estimate of what one can expect of one’s future life is to a certain extent based upon what one has experienced, but is never limited to experience. Therefore redefinitions and reevaluations of this estimate are possible. Freedom, insofar as it is reached, contributes to redefinition, and the latter enhances freedom. It is in the spirit of a freedom that a courageous and inventive relation of the past to the future and of future to the past is designed and established. Neglect of the past does not permit planning in later life. To try to remember everything suffocates the energy directed toward “unfinished business’ in the realm of life goals. A conscious and selective attitude vis-a-vis the past widens the scope of freedom for options for the future. Late in life, it is feasible to overcome constraints if one is able to perceive the limits of the finite in a more tangible and conscious manner. The full awareness that there definitely is an end to our life may bring about new forces of liberation. “Late freedom” is precisely the kind of freedom that grasps the existence under the condition of certain clearly visualized limits. These limits cannot be defined precisely as nobody knows the hour of his/her death. But the awareness that the limits exist may grow. Certain cognitive and emotional supports contribute to accepting these limits, and thus to allowing for a certain capacity for change. The latter is an indispensable element of late freedom. Anxieties may grow with increasing age and constraints as well. The awareness of finitude, if not flooded by depression, may, because of its urge in late life, stimulate the courage to change. Becoming aware of the relative closeness of death may have encouraging effects vis-a-vis life. The experience lived and the sufferings and disillusions encountered in the flow of life tend to discourage. The awareness of the end, of one’s death, the conscious appraisal of finitude, may have a tendency to encourage. To assimilate behavioral innovations into one’s psychological attitudes as well as embracing and applying new technologies and social mores is more difficult in later years than in youth. Novelty exposes an older person more easily to uncertainties and coping problems. In the case of uncertainty, it is sometimes fruitful to refer oneself to the utopias that one embraced in youth. As we graft ourselves onto our dreams in later life, we may do better-especially if the realism of one’s life experience eliminates false hopes-to return to unlived youth ideals. Youth, different from childhood, partakes of conscious life planning. Youth may serve as a reference phase for attempts at liberation in the second half of life. Youth is life’s utopia. The task of recuperating one’s youth is quite different from that of assimilating one’s childhood. Modem economy and productivity permit a drawing closer of youth and old age. The nearness of youth to old age is enhanced by the extension of education (e.g., protracted university education up to an age of 30) and by the shortening of the phase of occupational life, down to 55 and below. The bridge between the two phases (youth

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and higher age) allows for a crossing over of utopia from youth to late life. Intensive and fundamental cultural change contribute to the “disappearance” of adulthood. Chronic nonmaturity becomes a characteristic of postmodem man. If, in the second half of life, changes can be related to desires of youth that have not yet been satisfied, it is more likely that one will experience them as rewarding and will transform them into late freedom. Following in the footsteps of hopes that have arisen in youth, late freedom can then build upon fewer uncertainties, as enlightened hope reduces them. When man in his later years has grasped finitude, he may resign himself to the fact that achievements of his life will inevitably remain unfinished. All solutions appear as more temporary and preliminary. If solutions are to express inner freedom, they must be susceptible to revision. In order to build a late freedom, one’s projects must be both definite and open to reconsiderations. In this process of becoming aware of the limits of life a certain ambivalence may be observed. Finitude is accepted on a conscious level but it is doubtful whether it can be fully accepted on a subconscious one. Whereas it is necessary for an elderly person to critically assess remaining resources and to realistically plan for the future in the light of understood finitude, the enthusiastic utopia of a fill life (even in its later phases) has great value in challenging creativity. In a text reflecting on finitude, a 75year-old, highly intelligent, and intellectually active woman participating in my university courses writes: “We have our whole life ahead of us.” In the spirit of freedom, life’s horizons, the future opens up again with enlightened hope. AU of life, not just a portion of it, starts over. Thanks to this manner of perceiving oneself in the spirit of freedom, the future is regenerated. This manner of seeing oneself in a nonmetrical time frame, in the time of subjective fullness (Piaget 1936), allows for a redefinition of life’s goals. A time of subjective fullness fosters the transformations of daily chronology. Freedom based on subjective fullness gives us enough force to basically master chronological time and thus to obtain more freedom in everyday life.

THE FIGHT FOR HAPPINESS AS A MORAL AND MEDICAL TASK IN AGING Freedom means the fight against coercion. What is coercion? In his theory of coercion, Freud (1962) described how stagnation of a love-hate dialectic produces constraint. Hatred that has not seen the light of consciousness remains in captivity in the subconscious, where it plays a crucial role in the pathogenesis of coercion. The pangs of unreflected and repressed hatred may create a certain self-imposed coercion to help other people. Unconscious hatred necessitates a host of altruistic activities aimed at soothing one’s anguish on account of one’s own hatred, in order to free oneself from guilt. It is then through the effort of an altruistic task that one attempts to balance the elements of one’s repressed hatred. In the process of such an effort, one risks selfdestructive self-sacrifice (masochism). Coercion feeds one’s doubts about one’s capacity to achieve freedom. On a cognitive level, coercion blocks one’s ability to make decisions. It becomes very difficult to change and to escape from coercion, if the latter has set in at a cognitive level as well. Freedom is related to fullness and happiness and therefore necessitates facing or curbing of coercion.

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Modem philosophy was deeply influenced by eighteenth-century formalistic ethics. The ethics postulated mutuality; e.g., “Do not do unto your neighbor what you would not wish to be done to yourself.” In such an ethical system, however, no values were prescribed or arranged in a certain hierarchy. Postmodem societies have rediscovered the rank order and the ethics of eudaimonia. This is the theory according to which ethics ought to be based on the pursuit of happiness. Eudaimonia implies a search for psychophysical wellbeing and health, and the ability to impose limits on oneself in order to respect and permit the realm of freedom of the other. A morality based on the search for mental health would reject repetition of behavior only because it has once corresponded to certain established norms (Strotzka 1983). Such a repetitive morality is too close to coercion. Morality that is based upon mental health must seek a profound understanding of, and a respect for, oneself. Respecrof self is a force to overcome ego-centeredness. Such an effort toward conscious and critical self-respect transcends coercion. Even if, seen from the outside, a behavior corresponds to the norms of a legitimized standard, if it is not based upon an inner acceptance of oneself (which is an element of freedom) such a behavior does not qualify as fully ethical. With advancing age, freedom may be increasingly experienced as the process of liberation, as a road for decisions in view of developing one’s in~viduali~. If confo~i~, and the anxieties that lead to it, can be overcome, morality draws nearer to a profound inner agreement. In later life the chances for pursuing happiness in the direction of an inner agreement grow, if the individual permits himself or herself to develop. Individual and social consequences may result from a level of harmony, obtained by inner agreement. However, aging increases the experience with repeated failures that are due to difficulties in coping with bodily changes and reduction of functions and to problems of coping with technological innovations and their more efficient absorption and application by the younger generations. Therefore, harmony with oneself needs special efforts to be established and upheld. Reduced expectations of an older person, however, do not exclude significant growth, providing there is energy and trust. If certain conditions exist that are preliminary to the capacity to change onself, in the later years one can more easily call into question codes of confo~i~. In this manner, one is able to accept an inner sense of wellbeing and happiness as ~l~llment. Happiness implies that freedom has been acquired by a struggle. Happiness may be reached in the second half of life by creating a paradoxical relationship between restraint and openness. Late freedom is defined as a model of attitudes that bring about an expansion of the personality coming from courage and hope, while accepting the challenge of the finite. Such attitudes may define implant subjective goals in a positive manner, and translate them into plans to be implemented into the praxis of life. If the anticipatory perception of one’s limits and of life’s limits progresses hand in hand with a hope for broadening-resulting from opportunities for renewal-then the likelihood of freedom and for further development is greater. In most cases several models, several scenarios, for life plans are visible. Let us look into a few relations~ps between coercion, illness, elf-des~uction, and ethics. Does it not appear that overcoming coercion is a profoundly moral act? Is it likely that an ethics develops from the perspective of health including mental and psychical health?

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The pain of constraints, often self-imposed, blocks affective life and causes “operational thinking,” which is a way to dominate others (Nemiah and Sifneos 1970; SamiAli 1969). This amounts to reducing the other person, the partner, the collaborator, to a function. We see that coercion and blocking, added to the feeling that one cannot cope, play a major role in certain psychosomatic disorders. Numerous studies of myocardial infarction and cancer demonstrate the sick-making role of constraint. This is true particularly if constraint is coupled with a state of internal surrender. Then, these two major factors contribute decisively to myocardial infarction and cancer in our society, which are basically major psychosomatic disorders built on specific genetic predispositions. It is easier to avoid the dangers of so-called illnesses of civilization, which usually strike in the second half of life, if one is able to change the conditions and the style of life in the direction of a liberation of individuality. Given that one can thus arrive at internal serenity and at the rejection of an external determination, self-affirmation decreases pathogenic stress. Social anxieties are increasingly acknowledged as being pathogenic factors, i.e., as bringing about psychosomatic disorders. Aging man is more readily subjected to psychosomatic disorders if he is incapable of altering harmful life circumstances. Happiness as a moral task; as a goal to be fought for, appears to be legitimate also politically, in view of rising per capita health-care expenditure on the elderly (Rosenmayr 1983a), which in the United States is nearly four times that of the rest of the population (Pifer and Bronte 1986). The age-ratio of consumption of special psychopharmaca to treat nonspecific ill health is still more accentuated (Glaesge 1985). Medically prescribed consumption of tranquillizers of older people (sleeping pills or anxiety-reducing daily pills) is taking on the character of legitimized mass drug addiction. It is against this sociomedical background that I have underlined the approximation of moral values of eudaimonia-happiness on the one hand and psychosomatic health values on the other.

Summary I have tried to explore the special chances for freedom in later life. The first section of this article described the roots of freedom in early human ui$eme for survival and demonstrated that the old were needed to guide this survival. The system of gerontocracy operating through the seniority principle empowered the old to counsel external defense and to impose internal order. The development of high culture out of tribal society generalized freedom and transferred its distribution from the seniority rule to written law, the courts and mobility through life-long learning. The second section took up the relation between faith and freedom. Several important world religions and creeds like Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianity developed structurally different but central notions of spiritual rebirth. Except for certain trends in Judaism, old age was not considered by world religions as a special value in itself. Freedom was looked upon as a status that could be reached by internal revival through asceticism or love (or both) at all ages; no preference or special weight was given to late freedom. As the sciences started to penetrate the field of aging and the life course, the problem of special characteristics of a freedom in the later phases of life was discovered. The sciences emphasized the notion of chance in connection with freedom (Morel 1986).

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The third section reviewed freedom as the capacity to reduce constraints and to reach a certain amount of self-accord or agreement with oneself. We argued that forces grow in the second half of life that contribute to a potential for self-assessment. Freedom, subjectively, is furthered by a more detailed and experienced self-knowledge. If the socioeconomic infrastructures give enough support to the older person after work life, chances for self-determination are significantly increased. Late freedom, as any other, needs social support but individually may be more realisticaltyself-propeUed than freedom earlier in life. “Freedom increases as alternatives increase” (Hillary 1976). In spite some physical and psychological cutbacks, the net balance for older persons may be in favor of increased chances, particularly for the “young old.” I have shown that freedom as the capacity to re-creute (Gurvitch 1955), to develop and pursue new life goals of the future, may be learned and trained in the second half of life, even after people have left work and entered into pension age. It will have to be left to further exploration, speculative, introspective, and empiricalobservational, to estimate how far the spirit of self-control and self-limitation grows together with liberation processes in late life. Generally I hold that freedom at its fullest is a form of self-governance that respects or even furthers the chances for selfgovemings of others. “Man is not born free but born for freedom” (Schelsky 198 1). If this view is correct, it flows therefrom that freedom remains an ever-unfinished task or status in human and social life and that a developmen~l and life-course view of freedom is justified. I shall now turn to some aspects of the implementutionof freedom in the concreteness of sociopsychological insecurities and chances for fulfillment for older people.

TOWARD A SPECIAL SOCIOLOGY OF FREEDOM IN A POSTMODERN REDEFINITION OF LIFE PHASES According to Anne-Marie Guillemard (1985), the identity of the elderly population is becoming increasingly ill-defined. Is this regrettable? Is it not better to accept insecurity in order to acquire greater freedom? The more one’s abilities to achieve and to experience self-selected pleasure have been acquired, the more likely one can expect an internal integration of leisure. Such an integration is a path toward late freedom insofar as it allows for self-affirmation. Does happiness for the elderly come about as a result of society’s grasp of elders’ usefulness? Is it desirable to underline the “usefulness” of the elderly? I should like to argue for leisure as a potential for liberation (Attias 1986; Dumazedier 1985). In other writings I have underlined the dependence of the changing age status on the changing systems of the division of labor (Rosenmayr 1982). Social organization tends toward utilization and standardization of the biologically anchored yet ontogenetically and phylogenetically modifiable human ages. The division of labor specifies economic and social productivity and determines the distribution of the biological potential over the phases of the life cycle. The division of labor, as it establishes itself through technological development and the (economic} power connected with the control and exploitation of technological progress, designs the division of the life span into phases. Surely, ritual and symbolic interpretation (and the institutionalization thereof) name and sanction “youth,” “maturity,” “old age,” and so on. Yet the founda-

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tions of life-course phases lie in the division of labor. Societal production and work must always be considered for explaining any set of life course or age positions in a given society. In summary, the structural variation in the social division of labor creates objective chances for life-course subdivisions (life phases) that are subjectively perceived, evaluated, socially approachable, and seized as opportunities. With the increase of leisure in all phases of life, however, it is no longer only the division of labor that counts but also the division of leisure. Older people have significantly more time at their disposal. It is true that the slowing down of various functions and the psychophysical handicaps for at least certain subgroups and subtypes create difficulties of liberating time to the extent that it may turn into leisure. Also, leisure offered by commerce, organizations, and media may contribute to alienation instead of leading to individuation and selective self-satisfaction. The internal assimilation of leisure, if it occurs, opens new paths toward satisfaction. If such satisfaction is experienced, and leisure is adjusted to the self and not vice versa, this, in turn, strengthens late freedom. Late in life, self-respect as an integrative force becomes increasingly important. The ability to choose one’s experiences plays an ever-more critical role in the process of self-validation. If the choice is successful, it brings happiness in its wake. Happiness and freedom in the second half of life increasingly imply the art of protecting oneself against suggested or imposed forms of leisure. Selectivity is the result and the underpinning of late freedom. The beginnings of highly developed cultures in Europe, Asia, and America brought with them the writing down of myth and law and let political empires grow out of earlier tribal societies. During these processes we observe the descent of the power of old people as the leaders of the social system. Gerontocracy was reduced step by step. Freedom was no longer an age-specific value but became a general social and political one. The phenomenon of mass aging in the twentieth century and the increasing value of permanent innovation as a key characteristic of late industrial competitive society have significantly reduced the social prestige of higher age. It is my thesis that in many technologically, medically, and socially advanced societies, counter-trends of a nao valorization of olderpeople have set in. It is by no means the return of gerontocracy that we are experiencing but the valorization of a long life and of later phases in life. What we see is much less the increase of the status of the elderly as group-this valorization concerns older people mainly as consumers and target groups in marketing (e.g., in tourism, in the media, etc.). The main increase in social prestige may be observed in relation to older people us ind~~zuzls.There is no return of a general gerontocracy, although old people are accepted in top power positions. Yet in the process of a gene& &crease of the importance of calenaizricage as a life-structuring variable older people may reenter and in fact do reenter the foreground of socialprestige.This readmission is connected with the general sociological phenomenon of individualization in matters of value orientation and lifestyle. Although the term is debated, postmodemkm is the cultural climate within which the trend of the valorization of the old as individuals manifests itself. Postmodernism may be characterized by the lack of “clear culturally shared expectations” (Hagestad 1986), by the replacement of a rule-oriented moral

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system by perfecting strategies oriented toward an “esthetic of the existence’* (Foucault 1984). In postmodernism, irregularities become social reality. The social consensus on characteristics of what is young and what is old goes down rapidly. Retroactive socialization where the young teach the old becomes more and more socially acceptable (Rosenmayr 1985a) and a certain contemporaneity of the noncontemporaneous increases. This means that more generations than ever-up to three or four who represent &&-e~t times (noncontemporaneous elements)-experience togetherat the sume time (contemporaneously) events and changes. Let me point to another characteristic of postmodernism. In postmodem society, achievement orientation tends to be in part replaced by a mass search for meaning and self-interpretation. Attachments become more revocable, separations more frequent. That tendency results in special forms of suffering and coping that require individuation as “arriving at one’s owness through self-realization” (Jung 1928). Mass singularization (e.g., dramatic increase of one-person households, particularly in West European cities where the majority is composed of the population 60 and over) is the sociological phenomenon of a lifestyle typical for postmodem values and structural demographic conditions. Important divergences between individuals of the same calendaric age show that not only genetic differences but also individualized a#i&e.r and lifepractices contribute to their widely differing bodily status, fitness, educational interests, etc. We have “multiple images of persons of the same age: there is the seventy-year-old in a wheelchair and the seventy-year old on the tennis court” (Neugarten and Neugarten 1986). From all these premises we infer that the special increase in conditions for freedom in the postmodem era is based on the achievements of age-specific societal assistance such as pensions and other benefits. But the most recent dramatic increase of chances of freedom takes place on the individual level. A new understanding and appreciation ofparticularity is also contributing to the growth of the prestige and liberty of older people in society. Particularity appears in many forms, as ethnicity, local customs, dialects, etc. Particularity is a postmodem defense against overgeneralized life patterns of technology and the conformism resulting from bureaucratization and mass information. If particularity is valued, the concrete development of the person and his or her experiencesin Lifeassume special importance. The new liberty of the postmodem era and the valorization of individuation inflict “wounds” of isolation and singularization on many older people. This may contribute to increased efforts to develop better self-management and maybe even self-restriction as a new central element in “self-realization.” To the extent that the individual chances for freedom in higher age will be utilized and lived, the acceptance of an older woman or man on the grounds less of age than as fellow persons will grow. The late freedom that we have discussed is revealed as both an individual achievement and as the fruit of new historical developments and preferences. How broad the access to these increased chances will be will also depend on economic and political macro-trends.

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