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Jan Baars , Aging and the Art of Living , Johns Hopkins University Press , Baltimore, Maryland , 2012, 304 pp., hbk US$60.00, ISBN 13: 978 1421 40646 6 .
Reviews
Jan Baars wants us to 'learn to contribute to a culture that stimulates and supports aging people to lead full lives': his book aims to convince us that 'Developing an art of aging can help create such a culture' (p. 1). This book thus aims to make an intervention into its readers' lives, but it is conscious that they cannot change all by themselves: this is a social project too. For Baars, both as individuals and as societies we need to see the world, and ourselves in it, differently. While 'lifecourse' approaches stress the development over time of interrelated lives, Baars augments this by reflecting on 'life' from the inside: how the human condition is experienced by those who live it. This tends to be touched on rather slightly in gerontology. Researchers may mention that interviewees feel 'young', or feel 'old', or feel curious and engaged with life, or feel the opposite; but such accounts tend not to be envisaged as casting radical forms of insight on to the experience of living. This Jan Baars sets out to do, exploring ideas about the 'potential richness and fulfilment of later life' (p. 4). He celebrates humans' capacity for constructing their own lives creatively, together, and does so from an existential point of view that concentrates on lives lived in time (pp. 5, 7). One of this book's most important contributions is to make clear why and how discussion of what it is to be living in time is crucial for gerontology.
First, Baars argues that it is not mortality so much as finitude that is crucial to understanding the human condition. Finitude means that all our projects are destined for incompleteness, transience and change: everything has an end. This need not entail doom and depression, as long as we understand that it implies the need to work together, to identify with people and projects and causes beyond our own immediate concerns. 'The interhuman condition' is inherently vulnerable: only by developing our collective 'humane responses' can we form any remotely...