Middle Age

Christopher Hamilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317488446
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Middle age, for many, marks a key period for a radical reappraisal of one's life and way of living. The sense of time running out, both from the perspective that one's life has ground to a halt, and from the point of view of the greater closeness of death, and the sense of loneliness engendered by the compromised and wasteful nature of life, become ever clearer in mid-life, and can lead to a period of dramatic self doubt.In this book, the philosopher Christopher Hamilton (early 40s) explores the moods, emotions and experiences of middle age in the contemporary world, seeking to describe and analyze that period of life philosophically. Hamilton draws on his own personal experiences of turning 40 as well as a wide range of sources - from the philosophical writings of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Hegel, Heidegger to the literature of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Conrad and the films of Woody Allen - to offer us a philosophy of middle age.Some of the many fascinating themes explored include the strong sense of nostalgia experienced in mid-life, of loss for one's youth, and of regret, the sense that life has become boring, the recognition that one can never fully escape feelings of guilt, and - central to the experience of middle age - the question of what is the point of going on at all. In the light of the 'melancholy wisdom' of mid-life Hamilton suggests that pleasure becomes much more important than at previous stages of life and he shows that the enjoyment of pleasure can be something noble.Insightful, entertaining, and thought-provoking, "Middle Age" is fascinating reading and for anyone heading for a 'mid-life crisis' it is much cheaper than buying a sports car.

The only thing that should surprise us is that there are still some things that can surprise us

La Rochefoucauld (Maximes, 384)

Most people enter into middle age gradually; I was thrown into it in a moment.

About six years ago, when I was thirty-eight, one of my brothers told me that the man I had taken to be my father all my life, and who died when I was eighteen, was not my father. My real father was not K, but H. H is still alive. He is eighty-five, and almost blind and deaf.

I have four older siblings and one younger. What I was told when I was thirty-eight was that my four older siblings had known most of my life that my real father was H, as, indeed, had K. K never wanted me to know, and my older siblings acquiesced in this, believing it to be for the best. H was a teacher in a local Catholic primary school, and my mother came to know him because two of my older brothers went to that school. She met him at a parents’ evening. He was already married, and had three children with his wife, with whom he still lived; that family played a large role in the local Catholic community. He also lived close to my mother and the two families knew each other: H’s children and my older Hamilton siblings were on friendly terms. My mother and H began an affair that lasted two to three years: she says three, he says two. Their meetings were mainly furtive assignations. I was deliberately conceived when K found out about the affair and confronted first my mother and then H. My mother claimed to K that she was already pregnant when he found out what was going on, but this was untrue: she decided to conceive a child precisely because the affair was now exposed and at an end.

My mother and K divorced when I was nine. Their marriage had been in a state of collapse for years. K moved away; I saw him about once a month. He always treated me as his own son.

When I was old enough, I was sent to the school where H taught. I was thus partly educated in the classroom, with thirty-odd other children, by the man who was my real father, although neither he nor I knew this fact. He made a strong impression on me as a teacher, and on three or four occasions during my teaching career, and before I found out about his relation to me, I thought of him and was aware that my teaching style was rather similar to his. I took this to be a coincidence and nothing else. I even once told some students of mine an anecdote about him, having no idea that I was speaking about my father.

I was profoundly disturbed by what I was told. A problematic period typical of middle age, which had in any case been preparing itself in me for a year or two, was brought in a moment to the surface, and I was precipitated into a deep re-evaluation and reassessment of all that I am – for I am no longer who I was. In one sense, my life has been broken in two by my new knowledge: it has at one and the same time changed everything and yet left everything as it was; it has also distanced me from my childhood and early years, yet brought them back to me with the full force of a living reality. If I made a transition into middle age that for others takes longer, then this casts an especially bright light on it.

Among the many purposes the family has, explicitly or otherwise, is to conceal from us the radical contingency of our lives. It is simply a matter of chance that we are born to the parents we have, into a given family, community, socioeconomic group or class, speaking a particular mother tongue, with a certain history and cultural inheritance. It is also a matter of luck that we are born male or female, good-looking or otherwise, physically strong or weak, and with certain (latent) talents, abilities, aptitudes and so on. None of this is chosen, and we know this to be true. But the thought is in some ways unbearable, especially, perhaps, in an age in which we place so much value on choice. The philosopher Herbert Fingarette describes it thus:

There is a certain eerie feeling when I think about the amazing accident that I was born into life. It’s much the same eerie feeling I have when thinking of the trivial changes of circumstance that could have meant my wife might never have been, or that my daughter, the daughter I actually have and love, might never have come to be. I reflect on the utterly accidental nature of our existence, on the unplannable, uncontrollable, unpredictable character of the fact that there happen to exist these particular individuals and not others, that in the course of our life we have run into these particular life situations rather than any of the infinitely many variations on them that might have come to be. Appreciating this, I appreciate how little that is fundamental in my life and my world has been in my power.

(Death, 35–6)

But parents’ love for their children and the cultural inheritance they seek to pass on to them – if they do – work to conceal what we know, and to reassure each of us that I am the one that was wanted when this man and this woman sought to have a child. Those people who know that they are “an accident” feel in a small way, perhaps, a certain mild discomfort at that thought, but if they are loved by their parents it is usually no more than that. Yet they are vaguely sensing something that is a truth most of us find disagreeable.

This sense of the arbitrariness of our coming to be comes out wonderfully in the figure of Levin and his reactions to the birth of his son in Anna Karenina. Just after the birth, he hears the baby crying. Tolstoy writes:

It was a bold, insolent voice that had no consideration for anything, it was the cry of the new human being who had so incomprehensibly appeared from some unknown realm … Whence and why had he come? Who was he? … He [Levin] could not at all accustom himself to the idea. It seemed something superfluous, something overflowing, and for a long time he was unable to get used to it.

(Anna Karenina, 710)

Evidently we are dealing with a mystery that is not at all cleared up by recounting the facts of human reproduction. It is a mystery that attends our very sense of what human life is, gives something of the form to that life as we are familiar with it. And it is striking that Levin’s sense of the mystery here is only heightened by his incapacity to feel any love for his son: he feels, Tolstoy writes, merely repulsion before, and pity towards, the baby. Later Kitty, Levin’s wife, and the baby are caught in a thunderstorm, during which Levin fears for their safety. At this moment, love for the baby begins to arise in him, and he is relieved to find that this is so.

Levin’s sense of the baby is contained by his growing love for him. This does not mean that he no longer sees a mystery in the birth of his son. The thought is rather that the mystery is something that he can take pleasure and joy in – Tolstoy makes this clear – and, in doing so, it means that his answer to the question about his baby “Who is he?” is given by the love he now feels. In a sense one might say that the answer simply is that he loves him. But this is, so to speak, less an answer than a way of living with there being no answer. For, in loving his son, Levin finds himself loving this human being, and in loving this human being he places the question about who he, the baby, is; he makes clear why it cannot be answered except by pointing to his love for him. The love strips the contingency from the fact that it is sheer chance that this baby is born to him by allowing him to think and feel that it is this baby that is born to him, and no other. There is now, for Levin, in his love, no other baby he could have had, and that is his answer, which is a non-answer, to the question “Who is he?”

Levin’s love is connected with the intense physical presence of the baby: it is profoundly focused on the baby’s body. It is in tenderness for his fragile physical being that such love finds its true spiritual home. Accordingly, Levin’s love for his baby begins to grow when he fears for his physical safety. A friend of mine with two young children remarked to me once, when the older child, a boy, was about three years old, that she had seen since his birth how affectionate people are, and there certainly is something about the physical being of a child that naturally calls forth this response in people: the desire to touch and caress. Another friend of mine, sitting with her baby on her lap, turned to her husband and exclaimed, “I could eat him!” I sometimes wonder if adult human beings would ever be genuinely tender to one another if we did not have the natural life cycle of birth, growth and death that we do have: if, that is, we and those around us never had been children. Creatures otherwise like us but born as adults might simply not evoke in one another the tenderness that two adults can inspire in each other.

There is, I am suggesting, something redemptive in a parent’s love for a child: redemptive of the contingency of the child’s being, and redemptive of his or her body. In this love the child is redeemed from being just some child or other, some chance creature, as it were, and becomes this unique, irreplaceable human being. Human life would probably be unliveable – and it would certainly be a great deal bleaker – without this love. Love, from this point of view, does not reveal who the child really is in his or her contingency. Rather, it creates something – a sense of who and what we are – that makes life bearable. This is one of those places where we see the necessity of a certain kind of illusion to find a purpose and meaning in our lives. But it is a completely natural illusion, because the love parents have for their children is a natural feature of human beings’ psychology and spiritual condition.

A child grows into his parents’ love, taking it not merely for granted, but as his right. As he does so, his character develops and he gradually becomes aware of the kinds of personality traits he has, if only implicitly and inchoately aware. But, in being loved, those character traits are accepted by those around him – that is part of what it means for parents to love their child – and the contingency of his being thus and so does not strike him. At any rate, for most that is something of an ideal of the relations between parent and child.

For most people, this sense of things fractures when the question “Who am I?” first arises with an insistent voice in that period of life we call adolescence, and it is significant that it is then that parents’ love comes to seem insufficient to a young person and a need is felt for other kinds of love: the love of friends and the excitement of erotic love, newly sensed. The second period when this question is likely to arise is in middle age, when the issue of one’s identity becomes pressing once again.

When I was told about H, my first overwhelming sense of myself was as if I were polluted by something foreign. I felt as if my flesh and blood were literally composed of something alien to me, something that I did not know but which was inside me and composed me. I felt as if I wanted to vomit it out and whenever I went running at that time – I run about five miles, three times a week – I felt as if I were purging or punishing my body. I have no idea how typical such a deeply corporeal response is to the kind of knowledge I had gained; it may be that others in a similar situation do not have that feeling about themselves much, or at all. I think it was fairly predictable for me, however, since a sense of the body and its powers to pollute and be polluted has been with me most of my life. My body has often seemed to me to be something that, as it were, lies in wait for me in order to entrap me or subvert me. I have, for example sometimes found it hard to escape from the sense that sexual desire and sexual activity are polluting; and for very long periods in my life I have not been able to sleep at night with a sense that my body and I are at peace with one another.

In an interesting essay, Virginia Woolf complained that:

with a few exceptions … literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent.

(On Being Ill, 4)

The situation has in many respects changed in literature since Woolf wrote, but it has not in philosophy, which still has, in general, a very poor understanding of the body. Be that as it may Woolf goes on:

On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature can only gaze through the pane – smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending process of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness …

(Ibid., 4–5)

In these terms, I could say that my sense of my body as polluted was a sense of its immense, heavy, compromising, opaque presence to me, as me: as Woolf indicates, like tallow or wax.

And this understanding of my body as polluted was, in part at least, an increased sense of my mortality: of my death, or just of death. In fact, for cultures in which issues of ritual pollution play a large role, such as ancient Greek culture, death itself is considered polluting: there were all kinds of prohibitions and injunctions surrounding the treatment of the corpse, contact with which was considered defiling and thus needed to be regulated in various ways. It is unclear why death was considered polluting, but it may have something to do with the idea that, in death, a human being is totally vanquished by his or her body: all the labour of culture, a large part of which goes into the effort to invest the corporeal side of our life with meaning – think here of the elaborations, prohibitions, directives and so on that surround such activities as eating, sleeping, defecating, having sex, washing and so on – is here rendered null and void. The corpse represents, as it were, the complete failure of this labour of culture: it lies there inert, a sign, so to speak, of the failure of human beings to be anything other than animals. Yet it is also uncanny: faced with a corpse one has the sense that this cannot be a dead person, that he or she must surely be able to get up and walk. Wittgenstein remarked that the human body is the best picture of the human soul (Philosophical Investigations II, iv, 178), and this point applies here: the dead body looks for all the world as if it must still be ensouled, still animate, and thus not really be a dead body at all – just sleeping, perhaps, or resting. This can be so even when the body is badly mutilated. In the film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novel Enduring Love, after John Logan has fallen from the balloon, Jed and Joe approach the body. It is horrifically injured, collapsed like a concertina, with Logan’s guts spilled out over the ground and with blood issuing from the mouth. Jed asks Joe, “Do you think he’s dead?” a question that must seem superfluous if any does, yet Joe later says, “In a funny way, I knew what he meant, because I kept on expecting him to get up, walk away…”. There is something unbelievable in the sight of a dead body: unbelievable in the thought that this really is death for that person.

So it is, perhaps, hardly surprising after all that death – the dead body – has been felt to be polluting. When I felt my body to be polluted, and when others in middle age become increasingly aware of their mortality as their body starts to age in a way that cannot be ignored, there is felt the cold presence of death. In a sense, when I wanted to vomit up the pollution I felt to be in me, I wanted to vomit up my own mortality, not least because I felt myself to be totally out of control of my own body and its functions, just as I shall be when I do die. I had a feeling that not merely was this man, H, my former teacher, literally inside me, but so was the whole line of his family: parents, grandparents and so on. I had – I still have – little idea what I was carrying around with me, in me.

It is, in fact, probably in an increased sense of death, of one’s own mortality, that one first grasps the significance of middle age. This has a corporeal side, but it is also connected with the idea that time is running out.

The corporeal side of this process manifests itself in profound changes in the body. My sense of being polluted when I found out about H may have been intense, but I think it was simply a heightened form of an experience of the body that attends middle age. For in mid-life one’s body suddenly makes its presence more and more felt. This can often be so in an unpleasant manner. Some people in middle age, for example, are acutely aware of becoming increasingly physically weaker. In this, the body shows itself to be profoundly vulnerable to natural processes over which it has little or no control, or, as one might put it, shows itself to be a natural process over which one has little or no control. Perhaps this touches women more than men, at least generally, in that they have to cope with the menopause. But for both men and women there is a sense, I think, that the body is being reclaimed by nature, that nature is asserting its rights over the body, and that the grave is already pulling one down. Of John Webster’s preoccupation with death, T. S. Eliot wrote that he “saw the skull beneath the skin” (“Whispers of Immortality”, in his Collected Poems). This is something that can be said of all of us...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• The Art of Living Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Frontmatter
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Contingency
• Afterword
• A final thought
• Bibliography
• Index