“Diptych of Old Age”: An Outline of Reflection on the Duality of Perception and Imaging an Old Man Over the Centuries

Abstract

In each epoch, one can distinct a different attitude of man towards transience, ageing and death, manifested in different mindsets and ideas about what is inevitable. The purpose of this article is to justify the thesis that since the earliest times, the discourse on late adulthood oscillates between a specifically understood “crisis and the renaissance of old age”. The main thesis is based on the premise that the characteristic feature of old age is the ambivalence, due to which, from prehistoric to modern times, it eludes full cognition. To verify the hypotheses, conclusions of own research carried out for the doctoral dissertation and conclusions from the analysis of the literature of the subject were used. In this article, the author looks at the duality of attitudes towards ageing and old age from prehistoric to modern times. The most comprehensive part of the article refers to the position of the elderly in prehistoric and ancient times. On the one hand, this overview has highlighted the fact that many of the old attitudes and perceptions of old age built over the years have survived to the present day, but, on the other hand, to verify the common belief that in ancient times, in contrast to modern times, the older person was respected and appreciated. The hypotheses contained in this article are not in the nature of decisive judgments, some of them require further in-depth research, but they are a kind of encouragement and an invitation to think together about the phenomenon of old age.