This paper is concerned with the relationship between selves as subject positions and the experience of aging. The existing psychological literature on “subjective” and “objective” age, it argues, ...has failed fully to engage with the idea of subjectivity, focusing instead upon what are ascribed and attributed identities. In contrast to treating age and ageing as some object-like characteristic potentially applicable to both things and persons, this inquiry explores the internal experience of ageing and whether such experience can realise an authentic subject position. In begins with an outline of De Beauvoir’s views of the “unrealisability” of such a subject position and proceeds to consider whether her views are the necessary consequence of the phenomenological existentialism of Sartre and Heidegger that frames her thesis. Such foreclosure on De Beauvoir’s part, I conclude, is not inevitable, and, ultimately, there is a choice between what may be termed a Sartrean or a De Beauvoir position on the possibility of realising an authentic subjectivity of age.
Wild animals were once thought not to age, as their deaths were viewed as the consequences of constant exposure to the perennial risks of nature. Studies of non-human aging were largely confined to ...biological investigations, focusing upon short-lived species such as fruit flies, mice and nematodes. Over recent decades, this has changed, and studies of non-human aging have begun to investigate aging taking place in social contexts. The present paper reviews such work on social aging in non-human primate societies. Four themes were evident in seeking potential parallels between human and non-human social aging. These were social disengagement, social bonds or social capital, status rank and dominance, and kinship ties. No studies were found that had explored parent caregiving. The lack of clear evidence that agedness is perceived and recognised within non-human primate groups suggests that most age-associated behavioral changes are at best demi-regularities that map quite imprecisely upon social aging in human societies. However as non-human primate societies are becoming gradually confined to areas and environments established through human agency and human institutions, it is possible to speculate that non-human primate old age will become more common if less natural and as a result, perhaps more akin to social aging in human societies.
This paper considers the significance for ageing studies of Erikson’s theory of adult development, particularly his last stage the crisis of ‘integrity’ versus ‘despair’. Because his model assumes a ...clear pattern of lifelong upward development, culminating with the ‘achievement’ of integrity and wisdom, it can be seen as helping underpin gerontology’s moral imperative to confer meaning and value upon old age. Despite the difficulties in empirically demonstrating the stage-like nature of adult development, and the dubious evidence that integrity is an essential feature of a successful old age, the inherent directionality of Erikson’s model supplies ageing with a purposive quality in contradistinction to alternative ‘decline’ narratives. Rather than continue a potentially fruitless search for proof , it might be better to conceptualise his adult ‘stages’ of identity, intimacy, generativity and integrity as key narrative themes running through the development of adult character, articulated, expressed and struggled over in various ways throughout adulthood including late life.
Once exceptional, a long life is now an everyday expectation for many citizens of the prosperous nations. The consequence of this transformation in life expectancy however has led to a set of ...contradictory responses, representing threats as much as opportunities. Old age is no longer a stable coherent part of the life course; its future is fragmented by the competing narratives of the third age (opportunity) and the fourth age (threat). While there is a tendency to frame this distinction primarily through the lens of socio-demography and/or 'stages of life,' this paper proposes an alternative model. This model argues that later life is now represented through two different, though not unrelated, paradigms. The first frames the third age as a network of cultural fields dominated by rising consumerism and changing social relationships, while the second frames the fourth age as a negatively developed social imaginary of 'real old age. ' The central features of this imaginary, we suggest, are frailty, abjection and the 'othering of the self. This paper elaborates this theorising of the fourth age, briefly outlining each of these three features before considering in more detail the nature of othering and its consequences for those affected by this particular imaginary.
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Dostopno za:
DOBA, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VSZLJ
This paper is concerned with the issue of ageism and its salience in current debates about the COVID-19 pandemic. In it, we address the question of how best to interpret the impact that the pandemic ...has had on the older population. While many feel angry at what they see as discriminatory lock-down practices confining older people to their homes, others are equally concerned by the failure of state responses to protect and preserve the health of older people, especially those receiving long-term care. This contrast in framing ageist responses to the pandemic, we suggest, arises from differing social representations of later life, reflecting the selective foregrounding of third versus fourth age imaginaries. Recognising the tension between social and biological parameters of ageing and its social categorisations, we suggest, may offer a more measured, as well as a less discriminatory, approach to addressing the selective use of chronological age as a line of demarcation within society.
Old age featured in Samuel Beckett’s plays and novels throughout his literary career. This paper explores the question of how—or indeed if—Beckett’s own experience of aging and old age affected the ...representation of age in his late works. Focusing upon his last two trilogies, the plays Not I, Footfalls, and Rockaby and the novellas Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, and Worstward Ho, I argue that Beckett’s late-life literary preoccupations were little affected by the corporeality of his own aging. Even in the last year of his life, he still sought to put down through dramatic images and words the ontological issues that had always concerned him. Hopes that his own old age might lead him closer to the edge—closer to what has been termed “the event horizon of the fourth age,” where subjectivity implodes—were not fulfilled, although arguably he did feel, at times, that he was getting closer to it, stylistically perhaps, if not in substance. To what extent Beckett’s later works serve as examples of a “late style” and to what extent they represent the continuing elaboration of a cultural imaginary of “old age” that he first deployed in his original trilogy, Molloy,Malone Dies, and The Unnameable, are difficult to ascertain. What is clear is that Beckett’s literary old age remained a symbolic imaginary, realized differ- ently than in his earlier work but scarcely more connected with his own later life.
Abstract
Aging has been given short shrift as a topic in philosophy. The aim of this article is to redress this neglect by revisiting some of the key philosophical issues in Simone de Beauvoir’s ...book, Old Age. In her notion of old age’s unrealizability, its impossibility of fully embodying a subject position, and the role played by the other in denying such subjectivity, she draws upon the work of both Heidegger and Sartre. The dilemma she repeatedly draws attention to, of always seeming to age in ways other than as one’s self, raises the question of whether any view of aging as an authentic subjectivity may be no more than, in Heidegger’s words, a “chimerical undertaking.” In examining how the concepts of bad faith and inauthenticity are used by Heidegger and Sartre, the article concludes that for both these writers, an authentic subject position can be maintained in later life, without ending up as the otherwise inauthentic subject of others’ collective imaginary of “a good age.”
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