Clemens Tesch-Romer - Successful Ageing: Ambition and Ambivalence

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We are deeply grateful to Jamie Hyland for the excellent language editing of this text. We would also like to thank Ulrich Prachtl for the picture of the front relief of the Temple of Friendship in the palace garden of Schloss Schnbusch, Aschaffenburg, in Bavaria, Germany.

Suresh I. S. Rattan

Liat Ayalon

The struggle against death and the striving to live a life without end is as old as humankind itself. Ancient burial rituals, even those carried on by Neanderthals more than 100,000 years ago, whose practices included pointing graves toward the east where the sun rises, suggest a desire to help the dead continue their lives in another realm. Ancient Egyptians helped their dead to continue their existence by mummifying their bodies so that their souls would continue to have a safe dwelling place. They also symbolically reopened their mouths and reactivated their senses by ritually touching the relevant body parts to enable them to eat, speak, see, and hear. Grave chambers were also stocked with fruit and wine to give the departeds soul the sustenance it needed to live on ().

Yet total immortality has always been looked upon as a highly ambivalent gift. The Greek legend of Tithonos illustrates both the allure and the dread of ever-lasting life. Tithonos, a prince of Troy, was the lover of Eos, the immortal goddess of the dawn. In fear of eventually losing Tithonos to death, Eos asked Zeus to make him immortal. However, she forgot to ask Zeus to grant him eternal youth as well. So Zeus fulfilled Eos ill-expressed wish and Tithonos did get to live forever but forever becoming older and increasingly frail. Eventually, Tithonos had shrunk down into the form of an immortal cicada, begging for death to take him, taking up an unenviable place between men and gods: ageing like men, deathless like gods (, p. 17). Thus, the idea of immortality without eternal youthof eternal ageing without deathis looked upon as an extremely negative prospect, inspiring the hope that there may be some secret way of rejuvenating people indefinitely, even if one must accept the inevitability of eventual death.

).

The Renaissance era also witnessed the emergence of more realistic ways of achieving a long and healthy life. Italian nobleman Alvise (Luigi) Cornaro argued in his book The Sure and Certain Method of Attaining a Long and Healthful Life (1550) that people could influence both the duration and quality of their lives as they grew older ( resumed in his in-depth analysis of the Venetian gerontocracy: Stability and harmony were virtues to be placed before the uncertain attractions of novelty and contention (... ). Venices governors enjoyed a justified reputation for being temperate, prudent, and unimaginative (p. 178).

With the emergence of modern medicine in the nineteenth century, the positive notion of a good and meaningful later life began to be displaced by another that saw ageing as a disease to be resented and fearedand to be cured through the use of new medical treatments ().

In summary, the idea of living a long (or even eternal) life without accumulating age-related infirmities along the way can be set among that small set of cultural ideas that have retained their power across the millennia of human existence (Wahl, in press). However, it was only in the twentieth century that the quest for successful ageing became a central, recurrent topic in scientific research.

After a number of early treatments, particularly those provided by Robert J. Havighurst (Havighurst, ), whose aim was to further develop and demarcate Rowe and Kahns conception, treating it mainly through the lens of the social and behavioural sciences.

In the wake of this early work, it is satisfying to see the large number of publications in more recent gerontology dedicated to publicizing and discussing the concept of successful ageing. Two important publications by Jack Rowe and Robert Kahn merit particular mention: an article in The Gerontologist (), addressed a broad range of issues from questioning the term successful to missing components (e.g. well-being, spirituality) to accusations of blaming groups of older adults for not ageing successfully and nurturing elite thinking in gerontology.

The notion of successful ageing has not only been one of the most successful, but also one of the most controversial concepts of ageing research over the last 60 years. Attempts to uncover the secret of successful ageing have often resembled something like a quest for the Golden Fleece. And that quest continues within contemporary gerontologyso far with no end in sight. And yet every treatment of the idea of successful ageing is faced with a challenge from the very term itself. On the one hand, the expression draws attention to the achievements of modern science, seeming to promise a disease-free later life and old age. Visions of how ageing in the future might further improve may be moved from unattainable longings to real scenarios. On the other hand, it might well be argued that using the term puts up a considerable barrier in itself; its very utterance can elicit immediate rejection, so hyperbolic do its implicit claims seem. Moreover, characterizing certain avenues into old age as successful implies the existence of other unsuccessful ones. Does it really make sense to think of frailty and dementia as a failure of ageing, for example? Such questions illustrate how the ambition of the concept successful ageing continues to be burdened with pronounced ambivalence.