Aging and Social Justice: A Phenomenological Investigation

Abstract

The rapidly aging populations of the post-industrial countries is forcing to what amounts to a type of paradigm shift in the concept of the welfare state. Not only must the distribution of goods and services be re-calibrated to adjust to an older population, but the entire dynamic of the social as well. Present and past conditions of the welfare state have not been favorable to the aged, particularly for older women, minorities, and the poor. (1) Social and institutional practices of age discrimination continue to serve as means to impoverish persons economically, politically and existentially. The type of shift the welfare state undergoes will determine the extent to which social injustice grows with its aging population. There is no concept more elemental to aging than the concept of time. It is how age is measured and as such functions as the fulcrum for social division, categorization, and, consequently, social injustice. How the welfare state adjusts to its aging populations is conditioned by its standard of time. In this paper, I show how a phenomenological investigation of the experience of aging disrupts the standardization of time. Rather than reduce all temporal experience to the same, a phenomenological description recognizes that every age has its own time and integrity. Part 1 of this study describes how time consciousness is transformed by the experience of aging, demonstrating the unique and heterogeneous quality of one's life time. Part 2 suggests how phenomenology can function as a type of critical gerontology in examining the management and production of discrimination in the time of aging. I. The Experience of Aging and the Structure of Time-Consciousness Aging may in fact be as natural to us as death, but it is certainly an experience of which we are much more familiar. Unlike death, getting older is not an alien or impossible experience, but something we experience directly in every moment of our lives. Despite the relative proximity between death and aging, aging has been an experience generally ignored in the philosophical and phenomenological traditions. (2) A central factor contributing to this prejudice is the presupposition that time has an essential and universal structure that remains identical throughout the course of one's life time. A critical description of the experience of aging calls this presupposition into question. Because aging is a process often attributed exclusively to the body, we often find ourselves describing the process of aging in biological terms such as the breakdown or steady exhaustion of the body. Yet, biological descriptions of this type are not the descriptions of aging, but rather descriptions of being aged. Children, for example, exhibit a keen sense of getting older, while at the same time enjoying an increase in biological capacity and power. The physical body may serve as an external sign or evidence of aging and as a consequence become a part of the experience of aging. It is however, not our originary and fundamental experience. An aging body can only serve as evidence for aging when we know already what it means to age. (3) Max Scheler was the first phenomenologist to address the experience of aging and understood the problem of aging to be a problem of time, not of the body. His analysis begins with the epistemological question, what accounts for our certainty of aging, the certainty that we are getting older? (4) As a means to answer this question, he asks us to imagine the case wherein we have never perceived or had any contact with the aging of another person or living being. Would we still be certain that we are getting older? And what if we were to imagine that we had never experienced perceptually or otherwise any decline in our own bodies? Would we still be certain of ourselves as aging? For Scheler, the answer to this series of questioning comes in the affirmative. The intent behind this experiment is to direct us to what Scheler calls the structure of the inner consciousness of the life process. …