OLD AGE AND DEATH

Abstract

This article is a reflection from the standpoint of the history of ideas on how the collective outlook on death shapes the concept of old age. In first place, the complexity of the idea of death and the difficulties of defining it as an experience are presented. There follows and explanation based on Spanish Renaissance and Baroque texts of how the idea of death as the essential horizon of the elderly determines the traditional view of old age. In our modern times, the silencing and loss of the ontological value of death have suppressed its role as the basic reference of old age. The process of dying, surrounded by fears associated with an uncertain hospital death, has replaced death and the scatological fears it used to entail. Old age has become more flexible because sanctions arising from moral and religious codes have become hazy, and the cast-iron distinctions between age groups have disappeared. This more elastic old age is infused with a generalised but not risk-free principle of youth.