Living - Participating - Growing Old: Assumptions and Certainties

198 Pages·2023·2.618 MB·English

by  Anton Amann

Anton Amann
Living -
Participating
- Growing
Old
Assumptions and Certainties
Living - Participating - Growing Old
Anton Amann
Living - Participating -
Growing Old
Assumptions and Certainties
Anton Amann
Universitat Wien
Wien, Austria
ISBN 978-3-658-39680-0 ISBN 978-3-658-39681-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-39681-7
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This book is a translation of the original German edition „Leben - Teilhaben - Altwerden“ by
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I had planned to do a lot of work, but nothing came
of it, and I had done a lot of things I hadn’t thought
of; so this is really living life.
(Johann W. v. Goethe to Friedrich A. Wolf
16.12.1808)
Günter Dux
dedicated
Preface
Assumptions (hypotheses) are of a scientific nature if they are methodologically
justified, certainties are of a practical nature if they stem from the experience of
success. All the considerations in this book are oriented towards these two perspec-
tives. Sociological opinion, i.e. knowledge that is pretended to be sociological but
lacks that sociological quality of its own that allows social things to emerge from
thought, action and speech, is irrelevant. This meaning seldom grasps the matter at
hand and usually misses the mark. Moreover, it is true that the social cannot be
reduced to psychological events, nor is it exhausted in anonymous structures; it is
the acting people who, with the help of the existing world, constructively produce
their own world in a new and changing way, even if they may sometimes miss what
the consequences of their actions will be.
To stand in the middle of life, to look into the future together with others with
confidence, and to participate in what is happening, that is what almost everyone
wishes for. The digital “openthesaurus.de” offers the following synonyms: “to par-
ticipate in life, to be in the midst of life, to shape one’s life, to take life in one’s
hands, to know how to master life, to know how to take life, to be fit for life”; the
common associations are: “(to understand) the art of living, to know how to take
life, to be active, not only to sit in front of the television, to undertake something”.
Truly a multifaceted task. But, what enables people to participate in life, what in-
dividual and structural moments make participation shape or fail, and according to
what ideas is it evaluated? These three questions hold the relevant landmarks for
the journey into an area of very heterogeneous research traditions, and the various
possible answers will show that participation is neither unquestionably given nor
does it come about on its own. From earliest childhood, even before birth, it pre-
pares itself, forms itself and shapes itself. It is essential to gain clarity about what
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x Preface
life means and what participation means. Its goals, contents and ways of shaping
are manifold and change in history and in the individual course of life for the most
diverse reasons, whereby participation in old age means its own specification of the
conditions contained in the three questions mentioned at the beginning.
These specification suggest that a discussion that wants to start without presup-
positions at what is simply in front of the eyes of observation as participation
would have to go astray. There are no facts that “speak for themselves”; they only
become findings through interpretation within the framework of binding concep-
tions. At least this is true from an epistemological point of view, as I pursue it here.
It rests, as will be shown later, on the thesis that the forms of social life are not
based in any way on idealistic presuppositions or innate forms of behaviour that
cannot be further explored but are constantly created and also changed by people
themselves in a constructive way. Concepts such as biological fate, a better race,
extra-human forces, anonymous powers, or what is supposedly always valid prove
to be of little use or even absurd in substance for sociological analysis from this
perspective. The book is an attempt to contribute essential elements to a holistic
view of participation.
Participation in life, in its infinite richness of facets, is nothing other than an
expression of the fullness of interaction of the forms of life intentionally construc-
tively created by human beings in their history. In view of this fact, I am attempting
to ground participation sociologically anthropologically, since the conceptualiza-
tions employed in the usual empirical surveys have so far seemed to me to be rather
unsatisfactory.
Wien, Austria Anton Amann
Contents
Part I Idea-Historical and Epistemological Approach 1
1 Life and the Acting Human Being . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
1.1 Reservoir of Ideas in Philosophical Anthropology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
1.1.1 Johann G. Herder: The Great Forerunner . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5
1.1.2 Max Scheler: “The Position of Man in the Cosmos” . . . . . . 8
1.1.3 Helmuth Plessner: “The Stages of the Organic and Man” . . 9
1.1.4 Arnold Gehlen: Deficiency Being and Institutional Theory . 13
1.2 Günter Dux: The Epistemological Turn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20
1.3 Relation of Participation to Evolution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
2 General Concept of Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
2.1 Participation and Integration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
2.2 Standard of Living. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 36
2.3 Social Policy/Senior Policy: Reconsideration? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
2.4 Individual-Environment Relationship . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Part II S ocial-Gerontological Centering 49
3 Participation in Growing Old . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
3.1 The Malaise of a Time-Honoured Dichotomy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
3.2 Age Specificity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.2.1 Age Structure Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
3.2.2 What Does “Ageing” Mean? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
3.2.3 Tasks of a Political-Practical Nature . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59
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3.2.4 Ageing Is Changing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
3.2.5 Sensible Pragmatism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64
3.2.6 Malfunctions and Restrictions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
3.2.7 Mental-Psychological Changes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
3.3 Generations Are Interdependent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
3.4 Family, Relationships and Generational Solidarity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74
3.5 Images of Old Age, Past and Present . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
3.5.1 Definition of Terms . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
3.5.2 Ancient Images of Old Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
3.5.3 A View of the Middle Ages . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
3.5.4 The Invention of Old Age as a Social Problem and
Economic Burden . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80
3.5.5 The Euphoria Discourse of Old Age as a
Counter- Im age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82
4 A Brief Overview of Historical Forms of Participation in Old Age . . . 85
4.1 Findings from Ethnology and Cultural History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
4.1.1 Knowledge and Seniority Principle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
4.1.2 Material Factors and Valuation System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
4.1.3 Where Life Is Meager . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88
4.2 Participation in the Age of Industrialisation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
4.2.1 Rural Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92
4.2.2 The Situation in the Craft Sector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
Part III Empirical Findings from Recent Research 97
5 Participation: Normative Guidelines and Empirical Findings
in Austria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
5.1 Self-Determined Life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
5.2 Societal Areas of Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .101
5.2.1 Economic Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .102
5.2.2 Political Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .108
5.2.3 Social Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .109
5.2.4 Cultural Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .113
5.2.5 Contextual Hypotheses on Participation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .121
5.3 Objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .125