Old Age and Other Essays

Norberto Bobbio, Allan Cameron

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781509526116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book by one of Italy's oldest and wisest intellectuals is a philosophical and personal meditation on ageing. The question of old age has preoccupied writers from Cicero to Améry, but in this volume Norberto Bobbio produces an account that is specific to our times. Born in 1909, Bobbio has lived through the major events of the past century, and his experiences of Fascism, Communism and the Cold War lend his reflections a melancholy that distinguishes them from earlier eulogies on old age and death. Bobbio's conclusions are often sobering, yet his investigation into memory and mortality is written with both humour and emotion.

In the opening chapter, Bobbio reassesses the notion of progress from the perspective of an old man. Arguing for an understanding of historical change as the transfer between generations, Bobbio explains how the elderly are increasingly marginalized in contemporary society. Referring to the traditional idea of old age as the 'age of wisdom', Bobbio argues that our ever-accelerating technological progress has dramatically shifted the power of knowledge from old to young. This discussion of old age as a social problem is accompanied by a reflection on old age as a personal predicament. In his elegant and lucid prose, Bobbio confronts the facts of decrepitude and death. In taking stock of his life, he argues once again for the importance of democracy and human rights.

This is a beautifully written book that will be of great interest to the academic and general reader alike. Its intellectual content renders it of particular value to students in the fields of philosophy, politics and the social sciences.

Other Essays

To myself

In the entry for 28 December 1840 of his Italian Diary 1840–41, John Ruskin claims that It is tiresome keeping a diary, but it is a great source of pleasure to have kept one.’ During my life, I have always avoided this tiresome task, but now as an old man I cannot enjoy the great pleasure of using one. I have to make do with a great mass of notes scribbled on different occasions, which are often undated and stuffed into folders in no particular order. They contain quotations from books and ideas that sprang into my mind while reading, walking or dreaming. Often they are imaginary conversations with real people – writers, journalists and occasional visitors. In such scribblings, I express not only feelings, resentments, likes, dislikes, impatience, minor irritations and fierce disapproval, but also comments on contemporary events, brief discussions of some doubt, arguments for and against a theory under debate, and outlines for future writings. Often these notes contain autobiographical comments, thrown in not so much for posterity as to give vent to a state of anxiety, to reflect on an error I made in order not to repeat it, to describe a defect in order to free myself of it through self-awareness and self-confession.

I have written and continue to write very many letters, in spite of the advent of the telephone. In these letters, of which only a small part have been kept, I am occasionally obliged to speak of myself in order to reply to my readers’ questions. I have to thank Guido Ceronetti for the following recent comment, which I immediately noted down: ‘When I have the opportunity, I passionately sing the praises of letter-writing amongst those thinking beings who have not yet been brought down to the level of the beasts by communicating solely by telephones, mobile phones and faxes. It is not enough to say homo cogitat. A person who really thinks, writes letters to his friends.’¹⁸ And my friends know very well that I do not like being phoned. The all-too-frequent request for an interview over the phone is something that puts me in a state of agitation. Before having me disturbed, some regular callers ask my wife what my mood is, while others get their excuses in first: ‘Sorry to bother you, but you’ll have noticed that I haven’t called you for a month.’

My portrait could start with the fragility and vulnerability of my nerves. I would like to adopt, albeit in the form of parody, the self-definition provided by a Japanese poet that I recently read: ‘I don’t have any philosophy, only nerves.’¹⁹ When I was a boy and prepared myself for confession, grown-ups helped me in the task by suggesting that I should give particular emphasis to the sin that, in their opinion, I most frequently committed: that of anger. I then started to use a word solely for those occasions, and I cannot remember whether it was ‘irascible’ or the even more obscure term ‘iracund’, which I preferred who knows why to the more banal ‘bad-tempered’. In school, when we were a bit bigger, I was known and gently teased for my sudden outbursts of bad temper, called ‘holy rages’. These occurred when I happened to hear vulgar remarks, saw the weak as victims of jokes in bad taste, suffered an unfair rebuke myself or felt myself the butt of loutish behaviour. As an adult my interest in politics, which never became an exclusive passion and still less a pathological obsession, has been a continual source of furious rages. It still is, but in recent years I have become, if not more indulgent, then at least less intolerant and less fiery, although there are still three or four personalities around that I really cannot stand. I can see their comic side, and I vent my spleen with a few appropriate expressions and then calm down.

My teaching also played its part: especially the exams that lasted for hours often with third-rate students who tried to get away with the familiar old tricks. I remember one, who left all the talking to me and then at the end of my explanations said with reverence to flatter me: ‘Precisely.’ But I wouldn’t like to give the impression of being one of those professors who gets pleasure from telling stories about the idiocies of their students, which are a mirror image of the stories told by students about the idiocies of their professors. I believe I was among the ranks of easygoing professors, but there were moments in which, due to tiredness or the increasing conviction of the pointlessness of that encounter with the student being examined, I lost my temper and gave him a thorough dressing down. Who knows if one of them might happen to read these pages and finally vent his feelings by writing to me and telling me how much he detested me. I sometimes bump into old students who talk of my lessons with excessive praise due to the memory’s involuntary embellishments of the past or an innocent and unconscious reverence for an old teacher. They are mistaken, however, because I don’t think that I was ever a good speaker, and this being the case, I drew some comfort from Croce’s confession, which I have never forgotten since I first read it: ‘It’s easier for me to write than to speak, and I am not well-practised in the orator’s skills.’²⁰ So far it has never happened that someone has said or written any unpleasant words on my arguable and for him insufficient skills as a teacher. If it did happen, I would not be surprised, nor would I be offended. If anything, it would be long overdue and would give me a feeling of release.

I have always regretted my outbursts of anger, but only rarely have I been able to control them. Precisely because I can’t always control them, I am ashamed and suffer as soon as I become myself again, something that nearly always happens straight away, as unexpectedly as the original outburst itself. I lament the fact that I allowed one of the two war-horses of the irrational soul, the irascible one (here the learned expression is more fitting), to have prevailed over the nobility of the rational soul.

I have a tendency to be hard on myself and to be self-destructive. I have never attempted to examine this trait very deeply and I am only aware of turning in on myself and of suffering (very frequent) bad moods at times when everything seems to be going wrong. Fortunately these moments are counterbalanced during periods of calm by the opposing and salutary tendency to self-pity. My doubts about myself and my unhappiness with what I have achieved, much of which was unexpected and unhoped-for, have always arisen from the conviction, or at least the suspicion, that the ease with which I have followed my own path, which proved inaccessible to many of my contemporaries, was due more to good luck and the indulgence of others than to my virtues. Indeed I may have been assisted by some of my defects that proved crucially beneficial, such as my ability to withdraw in time – before taking the final and most risky step (I could write a treatise on this argument and call it Concerning My Moderatism).

Not having ever been at peace with myself, I have always desperately tried to be at peace with others. I don’t know whether there is a similar connection between internal peace and external peace in relations between states. I am tempted to think so. Once again, without wishing to find erudite explanations which I happily leave to the experts, I believe that fundamentally my insecurity, which generates anxiety and favours my irresistible inclination to extreme pessimism, results from the difficulty I have had since adolescence in learning the business of living. This difficulty has been aggravated by my conviction that I still haven’t been able to learn it, in spite of my exceptionally long apprenticeship. As a child, I was well known for my shyness. As a result, people felt sorry for me or occasionally ignored me. Relations who knew me at the time, have always reminded me of the speed and frequency with which I blushed if a stranger spoke to me, and immediately afterwards I blushed for having blushed. I might admire the arrogant, the bold and the overly self-assured, but they also get on my nerves. I do not envy them, because, apart from the fact that envy is not one of the sins of which I feel guilty, this would mean being pained by the success of others. I can only be completely indifferent to the success of the bold, the arrogant and the overly self-assured.

At peace with others. In the many years of my active participation in public life and in the public view, I have of course had my adversaries. But I do not believe that I ever looked for them or cultivated them. I haven’t always replied to my critics, because often their objections hit the nail right on the head, and it was much wiser to profit from this, instead of coldly searching around for counter-arguments solely out of wilfulness. One of my favourite mottoes is: ‘It is never too late to learn.’ On the other hand, a real slating destroys me and paralyses me. It deprives me of the lucidity necessary to respond. If my severe critic is right – and why shouldn’t he be? – then I would do well to change profession. Even now I am shaken and disturbed by the first slating I received immediately after the war in the most authoritative philosophical magazine in Britain.²¹ How could I reply? I was in a state of shock, as though hit by lightning. When I give in to the temptation of pride over the success of a book that has sold a lot of copies and has been translated – the ultimate vindication – into English, or in response to prolonged applause at a conference, I think to myself: ‘Remember what that critic wrote about you, remember what that other one said.’

Sometimes I have replied sharply, I have to admit. There are some subjects on which I am not willing to compromise. The tongue ever turns to the aching tooth. Even though I have never acted the part of the veteran Action Party campaigner, given that I only had a very small walk-on part in it, I have never tolerated the two opposing rebukes that are most often and most persistently made against the members of the Action Party: those of being too feeble in their anti-communism and too severe in their anti-fascism – in other words, of not being equidistant. I do not deny the truth of this observation, but I believe there were good reasons for not being equidistant. I have spoken of this many times, and I will not persist. Because of the historical revisionism of recent years, I have noted with bitterness that the rejection of anti-fascism in the name of anti-communism has often ended with another form of equidistance that I consider abominable: the equidistance between fascism and anti-fascism. This equidistance goes back to those who, right at the beginning of the process of re-establishing Italian democracy, pontificated about the need to go beyond fascism and anti-fascism, but the problem is that this makes it more difficult for later generations to perceive the difference between a police state and a state based on the rule of law, and between a dictatorship, albeit a less cruel one than in Nazi Germany, and the First [Italian] Republic, albeit something of a lame-duck democracy but one that still manages to limp along. This equidistance also fails to recognize that fascism, the first dictatorship in the heart of Europe following the First World War, was responsible, in its subsidiary role to its more powerful ally, for unleashing the Second World War that, ending in a tragic defeat, was a stain on the history of a country that for a long time had been counted amongst the civilized nations. We will only free ourselves from this shame if we fully realize the price the country had to pay for the unpunished arrogance and bullying of the few and the obedience of the many, even though that obedience was coerced and often barely tolerated.

I do not insist on having the last word. I do not like this and it gives me no satisfaction. I detest arguments that never end, simply to defend reputations, and not because of the need for continuing dialogue. Following an exchange of opinions, I try to do everything to avoid a breakdown in relations and I pursue the path of reconciliation. When it comes down to it, I prefer to hold out my hand than to turn my back on someone. The purpose of dialogue is not to demonstrate that you are cleverer, but to reach an agreement or at least mutually clarify your ideas.

I do not like having enemies, as I have said. Given the great difficulties I already have in resolving my inner conflicts, in taking the necessary steps to manage even the smallest everyday tasks (without my wife there would be real trouble) and in stopping myself from losing my head over nothing, I could hardly afford the luxury of cultivating active and energetic enemies to block my path or, even worse, to work behind my back. I haven’t always succeeded. But I take failure to convert my enemy to friendship or at least to a loyal and lasting agreement between gentlemen to be a personal defeat.

I have always been someone more interested in dialogue than conflict, or so I like to think. The ability to enter into dialogue and exchange views – in place of mutual accusations accompanied by insults – is the foundation of peaceful democratic coexistence. I have sung the praises of dialogue on I don’t know how many occasions, without however turning it into a totem. Talking to each other is not enough to constitute a dialogue. Those who talk to each other are not always actually talking to each other: each person may be talking for himself or for the audience that is listening to them. Two monologues do not make a dialogue. You can use words to hide your intentions rather than to manifest them, and to deceive your adversary rather than to convince him. Not only have I praised dialogue, but I have also practised it. I have experienced the dialogue of the deaf, the dialogue in bad faith, and the false dialogue in which one of the speakers, if not both, knows exactly where he wants to get to, right from the beginning, being firmly convinced that he mustn’t concede an inch of ground from his initial position. I have experienced the inconclusive dialogue, the most common type of dialogue in which each speaker ends up with his own views unchanged, but comforts himself that the dialogue has been particularly useful because he has been able to clarify his ideas (which is not always the case, indeed it often is not). I have engaged in dialo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Publisher’s Note
• Old Age
• Other Essays
• Appendix: Notes on the Text
• Notes
• Index
• End User License Agreement