What’s the Point of Aging? Does Philosophy Make a Difference?

Jan Baars is the premier philosopher of aging, working in Europe and the United States today. Actually, to call him a philosopher of aging is to diminish the range of his thought and his accomplishments. Baars, who writes in Dutch and in English and whose work has been translated into several languages, recently “retired” as Professor of Interpretive Gerontology at the University of Humanistic Studies in Utrecht, where he retains a part-time appointment and continues to extend and publish his remarkable body of work. It is difficult for American readers and gerontologists to appreciate the breadth of Baars’s work—partly because of its density and also because it emerges from his dual training, both in the social sciences and in the European tradition of Continental philosophy. We rarely encounter a scholar whose thought ranges across conceptual analysis, historical interpretation of texts, social theory, critical gerontology, and existential issues. Baars, however, began his career far from the concerns of aging. In 1975, he organized a major conference at the Free University of Amsterdam on “Theory and Praxis in Sociological Theory,” where he brought critical theorists and phenomenological sociologists into philosophical conversation with Dutch sociology, which he found too limited in its uncritical integration into the social life of the country. In 1987, Baars’s philosophy dissertation on the Frankfurt School theorists Horkheimer and Adorno led him to embrace Habermas’s view of communicative discourse as a means of analyzing problems of social justice, interpreting the meaning of human existence, and understanding the disparate spheres of politics, science, and everyday life. Baars then turned his attention to gerontology, just at the time when the author organized the first conference on Critical Gerontology at the University of Texas Medical Branch (1991), leading to the volume Voices and Visions of Aging: Toward a Critical Gerontology (Cole, Achenbaum, Jakobi, & Kastenbaum, 1993), in which Harry (Rick) Moody first articulated the concept of critical gerontology. In Moody’s formulation, critical gerontology unsettled mainstream gerontology by introducing interpretive and emancipatory philosophical questions, beginning with the realization that instrumental knowledge about aging carried the possibilities of social control of older people and undermined the possibilities of emancipatory social change. Baars, too, had come to the view that science did not produce “objective” knowledge but functioned as a means of legitimating and regulating social processes and forms of domination. This view was first fully exemplified in gerontology by Steven Katz’s Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge (1996). Since then, Baars, in collaboration with European and American colleagues, has turned out a significant body of work that links his interests in the social, the existential, and the political. His most recent publication along these lines is the coedited collection Ageing, Meaning and Social Structure: Connecting Critical and Humanistic Gerontology (Baars, Dohmen, Grenier, & Phillipson, 2013). The book under review, Aging and the Art of Living, flows from Baars’s more purely philosophical meditations though critical gerontology and social theory are deftly woven into the arguments put forward. With this landmark book, Baars takes his place among the very few serious