Forever Young? #054

The Hindu Stages of Life

Hello, welcome back. My name is Andy. I'm a philosophy lecturer, and today we want to talk about a meaningful structure of life. In the past few episodes, we have been talking about work, about what meaningful work is, and how our work affects other people in society. But another important aspect that Aristotle does not talk about is how our life changes over time.

When I look back at my life, it has these clear stages. I was a child, then I was in school, then I was at university. After I finished university, I was working, then I married, I had children, and now I'm almost at the end of my professional career. I'm 60; at some point, I will be retiring, and then I'm an old man. When you look back at your life, I don't know if everybody's life is structured so clearly, but mine was. Each one of these stages also happened in a different country. I was a child in Greece, a student in Germany, and I raised my children in Hong Kong. When I retire, I will probably go back to Greece.

In retrospect, my life has been structured this way. I found a very similar concept in Hindu tradition. Hinduism has a very similar idea, and I want to read you something about it. It's called Ashrama. It says that it's a system of stages of life discussed in Hindu texts of the ancient and medieval eras. The four ashramas, or stages of life, are the student, the householder, the forest dweller, and the renunciation stage.

Now, they sound like what they are; they sound like the stages of life perhaps in ancient India. Today, we would not call it a forest dweller stage, but otherwise, this makes a lot of sense to me. Each one of these stages is supposed to have its own goals and its own understanding of life. This is certainly something that we must consider when we plan our lives. Why we live our lives, we should see what the goal of a particular stage is.

As Aristotle says, we're supposed to fulfill the end, the purpose of our life, but the purpose changes throughout life. The purpose of a householder with children is not the same as the purpose of a student in school. When we think about how we develop our lives and how we strive for particular goals, these goals change. Being aware of the changes saves us from pursuing the wrong things at the wrong time.

I think we all have heard stories of someone very old, let's say 80, who is rich and then marries for the fifth time someone very young. You feel that somehow this is wrong. It's not morally wrong; good luck to them if this works out, but you feel that somehow it is not what life is supposed to be. When you are 80, you're not supposed to marry a 25-year-old and pretend that you are back being 25. It seems to negate the idea that there is a progression in life. This progression is natural, and it's a good progression because this is what life is.

What we also will talk about later is when the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca says that we have to prepare for the end of life. This is also an important point, and built into this Indian concept of the stages of life is the idea of the end of life. You have a stage where life starts, where you are a student and you learn what you need for your life. Then you have the productive working stage. After that, you start to say goodbye to worldly things: a collection of money, a bigger house, family, and children.

Then you start to use your accumulated knowledge and wisdom, what Aristotle called phronesis. You use this to improve the lives of others, to give this wisdom to your children or to give wisdom to others. You retreat more into the role of an advisor for others. At the end of that, you completely retreat into nothingness, into retirement, where the natural end of life catches up with you.

The wisdom in this is that when death comes, it is a natural progression of life. It is not the sudden cutting off of a life that is still full of promise, but it is what happens with everything in nature that has a natural cycle. When the leaves fall from the trees in autumn, the tree is not just in bloom, and then suddenly everything falls down. It's a natural cycle from spring, when the leaves come out, to autumn, when they fall down, and winter, when they are covered in snow and gone, eaten by microorganisms and other things to recycle them. The same thing happens to the human body.

I think it is important to realize that one's life follows these same cycles. There is little value in being 60, 70, or 80 and then painting your hair pink or blue. It is an expression of one's individuality, and as such, it is valuable. But if it is an attempt to stay young, then I think that this is unnatural and works against these natural cycles. I don't think it contributes to the happiness of someone trying to reclaim youth that is now gone.

By extending your productive stage of life, you miss the stage of advising others, which could benefit society. By missing the last stage, you miss the preparation for your death, which then seems like a tragedy when it should look like a natural progression.

I think this is a very interesting concept to keep in mind. I hope you found this as interesting as I did and that you think about your own life, about the stages in your life: the student stage, the working and family stage, the slow retirement and advising others stage, and finally the retreat stage, in which we give up material possessions and prepare to go to the next stage of whatever comes, which nobody knows.

Thank you, and see you again next time. If you are here for the first time and you could not make much sense of this discussion of Aristotle, feel free to read the previous posts here, which explain Aristotle's ideas about life.

Thank you and goodbye.