“All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall.”Footnote 1

1 Introduction

Every living thing goes through a continuous process of aging, starting the moment the organism in question comes into existence and ending the moment it dies (arguably a carcass may also age, but it does so in the manner of a non-living thing). To be conscious and experience the flow of time—as humans and many other animals do—means to experience this—from the organism’s point of view—never-ending aging. As Robert Pogue Harrison notes in his study Juvenescence: A Cultural History of Our Age:

The most sophisticated philosophers think of age as a function of time, yet a careful phenomenological analysis reveals that we should instead think of time as a function of age.Footnote 2

In other words, from the first-person perspective, every experience of time is had by a creature who is aging in the process of having it. Despite this rather elementary insight, phenomenological studies of the aging process are astonishingly rare in contrast to the books and articles that have been devoted to the subject of temporality and human finitude, including studies of dying and giving birth. The only major work on aging in the phenomenological tradition, to my knowledge, is Simone de Beauvoir’s La Vieillesse (The Coming of Age) from 1970.Footnote 3 In this paper, I will reflect on Beauvoir’s philosophy of aging and attempt to bring her analysis a few steps further by way of making use of thoughts found in the works by, mainly, Martin Heidegger, and, also, to some extent, in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Charles Taylor, Helmuth Plessner and Hannah Arendt.

My strategy will be to make visible a phenomenology of suffering in Beauvoir which calls for some complementary moves regarding its sources and contrasting possibilities. I am aware that neither suffering nor flourishing are concepts focused upon by Beauvoir but since my way of articulating suffering and its opposite, flourishing, will be phenomenological in nature, it should not be mistaken for an attempt to put in place a welfare theory of happiness in contrast to an existentialist theory of authenticity. Beauvoir and Sartre claim that the thing that matters in a human life is not happiness but freedom to choose one’s own way in contrast to being dominated by the demands and views of others. As we will see, this is perfectly in tune with my phenomenological attempt to characterize human suffering and flourishing; the difference between Beauvoir’s analysis and mine will rather be found in different views on embodiment, affectivity, temporality and intersubjectivity.

2 The nature and culture of aging

Even though aging is a process that takes place continuously since birth—or arguably since fertilization—the concept is standardly reserved for the coming of old age (which is the meaning of the French title of Beauvoir’s book). This is also what we normally think about when we talk about aging: getting old. The exact age at which a human person is considered to become old has obviously varied a great deal throughout human history and between cultures. The general tendency is that old age has been gradually postponed because of improved nutrition, sanitation, medical treatments and quality of health care. The changes that have taken place in the developed parts of the world over the last 150 years or so are particularly impressive in this regard. The expected age of a person has increased from less than 50 years to more than 80 years in countries like Sweden (the most important reason for this is radically decreased infant mortality).Footnote 4 If you had reached the age of 50 in the Swedish 1870s you would probably have been considered old, whereas in the 2020s the corresponding age is rather 70 or perhaps even 75. Beauvoir, writing in the late French 1960s, sets the limit to 65 years of age, which, she claims, is the normal retiring age of workers.Footnote 5

A common motive in folk art since at least the seventeenth century is the so called “age ladder” [Lebenstreppe] dividing human life into five steps upstairs, achieved by the ages of 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50, followed by five steps downstairs, completed by the ages of 60, 70, 80, 90 and 100 (the last step often identified with death).Footnote 6 In this model, the pinnacle of human life is reached on the 50th birthday followed by a maximum of 10 years at the top, after that it is all downhill. It is important to remember that although old age illustrated by way of the age ladder begins at 60, very few persons actually reached such a high age in the seventeenth century. Today it is considered normal to live not only to be 60 years old, but also 70 or 80 years old, because of public health and health care measures taken in developed countries. This development is not only a success story but also a big worry for politicians and national economists planning for the future and arguing for changes in the retirement system, but this will only concern me indirectly in this article.

Apart from scrutinizing the phenomenology of aging in Beauvoir my main subject will instead be to investigate if it is possible to age well in the sense of not only moving downhill towards death after 60, 70 or 80 (the “age ladder”), but also to find some meaning and ability to flourish in this aging process. Is it possible to wither well, to paraphrase my opening quote from Peter? Or is there only pain and loss to be found in withering for humans? There is certainly beauty in withering as poets and artists have pointed out in their representations of nature. Could this also be true in the cases of human bodies and persons?

3 Beauvoir on old age

To grow older in general and reach an old age in particular is arguably driven by by natural and cultural processes. The human body ages by way of biochemical and physiological processes involving the interrelated functions of molecules, cells, tissues, organs and organ systems. There is a general aging process of the body taking place by way of cell divisions and increased possibility of harmful mutations, in addition to the general wear and tear caused by injuries and diseases. Some genetic and biomedical researchers dream about a future in which we will be able to stop the aging of DNA and RNA molecules altogether, replacing our cells continuously without ever falling ill or experiencing any infirmities, but this remains a transhumanist dream, which, in my view, is unlikely to materialize in the near future.Footnote 7

We could certainly imagine a technologically transformed future in which human bodies are no longer gendered and babies are fertilized and grown in incubators, in parallel with a future in which (human) beings do no longer age or even die. Some transhumanists think about this as an age in which we have turned into machines (computers) and relieved ourselves of the biological, bodily way of existing altogether.Footnote 8 My phenomenological response to such science-fiction scenarios is that even though we may imagine such things to happen we have no experiences similar enough on which to carry out an intelligible analysis on what it would be like to live such lives.

Also, the natural aging process is not all there is to becoming old. As Beauvoir points out in The Coming of Age—extending a general model of intersubjectivity launched by Jean-Paul Sartre in Being and Nothingness and previously employed by herself to describe the situation of becoming a woman in The Second Sex—one becomes old by being exposed to and interiorizing gazes (and expressed views) of other persons.Footnote 9 According to Beauvoir, the experience of becoming old goes like this:

Old age is particularly difficult to assume because we have always regarded it as something alien, a foreign species: ‘Can I have become a different being while I still remain myself?’ … Within me it is the Other – that is to say the person I am for the outsider – who is old: and that Other is myself.Footnote 10

Beauvoir writes that this feeling of finding oneself old by way of the gazes of other persons is a sudden transformation, and that becoming old is different from the experience of illness, since aging can only be felt by way of the views of other persons, not by way of any “private, inward experience.”Footnote 11 Deserving praise for her (then) original and much needed stress on the cultural processes involved in aging, I nevertheless think this statement by Beauvoir represents a rather extreme view in light of the way most people describe their feelings and thoughts about becoming old. Bodily decay is felt and reflected upon in private, not only when facing others. The reason Beauvoir insists on the presence of an outsider in the becoming-old process is, in my view, that she has inherited an ontological model put in place by Sartre in Being and Nothingness whereby the lived body can only be experienced as such by way of the other person. According to Sartre, my experience of my body is always mediated by the gaze of the other; I only discover and get to know my bodily experiences by way of interacting with other persons, in the case of illness, chiefly with the doctor.Footnote 12 This view could be questioned for two main reasons, first, I appear to have experiences of my own body that are not mediated by way of the gaze of the other—when I for instance feel a sudden pain in my left little finger—and, second, the gaze of the other is not always negative in the sense of reducing me to a mere thing-like being, lacking freedom in the way Sartre describes it in Being and Nothingness, followed by Beauvoir in The Second Sex, making this case for the experience of being and becoming a woman.Footnote 13

To be fair, Beauvoir’s point in The Coming of Age is arguably not that diseases and illness experiences are irrelevant to the aging process, rather that we tend to adapt to the decreased capabilities of our bodies and get used to minor pains and ill functions as we grow old in a way that makes us deny our own old age before being suddenly summoned by the other.Footnote 14 When we face the disgust, ridicule or possibly even empathy displayed by other persons approaching us we are brought to identify with our old-age bodily self, and this is, indeed, an agonizing self-transformation.Footnote 15

Generally, most, or even all, things associated with growing old are bad according to Beauvoir. This includes the standard bodily withering of aging, and the author, although downplaying the constitutive role of bodily dysfunctions in her phenomenological model, describes the old-age pains of becoming ill, disabled and ugly in penetrating detail throughout the 585 pages of the book.Footnote 16 Her main goal, however, is to show how outrageously bad old people have been treated by younger persons in almost all cultures since prehistorical times, this still being the case as concerns the poor and uneducated classes in contemporary societies. Her book is an explicitly political child of its time involving, for instance, lengthy discussions and details about the contemporary retirement system in France compared to other countries.Footnote 17 In her view, the only way to change the situation of old people and make it possible for them to lead a decent life is by way of putting an end to capitalism, as she points out repeatedly in The Coming of Age.Footnote 18

This is in parallel to how Beauvoir, about 20 years earlier, described the situation and possibilities of (French) women in The Second Sex: Only by way of a change of political government and the entire social system could the situation of women in reality be changed. Intriguingly, in addition to this social-constructivist and revolutionary point of view, there is also a tendency in the two books to describe the embodied nature of old age and womanhood as inherently bad, in the latter case because of the burdens of reproduction. The circumstances of a woman make her authentic projects harder to realize, not only because of sexist repression but also because of her embodied existence as such, which, according to Beauvoir, is more under the control of forces from within—menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth—than in the case of men.Footnote 19 Interestingly, this is also, according to Beauvoir, what often makes aging with grace easier for women than for men, since they are relieved of bodily labors (after menopause) and also of the caring work that comes with it. Instead of taking care of children, who have now moved out, or husbands, who are now dead, or have left them for younger women, older women can devote time and energy to self-chosen pleasurable activities.Footnote 20 Women also suffer less from loss of status and influence after retiring from working life than men do, since their self-worth has not mainly been built through investing in such activities. That women lose their sexual appeal earlier than men in contemporary society is certainly a painful experience for them—since this is their main way of being appreciated and achieving influence—but it also appears to be a situation which brings new possibilities for women, according to Beauvoir.Footnote 21

4 Heinämaa’s interpretation of Beauvoir’s model

How should we deal with Beauvoir’s habit of jumping between claims that make the ailments of being a woman or an old person all due to a sexist or bourgeois society and statements that underline the inevitability of biological decay in the suffering process? Sara Heinämaa, in her book Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference, does a good job in attempting to save Beauvoir from both the Scylla of social constructivism and the Charybdis of biological naturalism.Footnote 22 The way to navigate in between these two monsters, according to Heinämaa, is to read Beauvoir as a phenomenologist analyzing two different ways for human beings—feminine and masculine—to find themselves embodied in the world and attempting to lead meaningful lives.

Heinämaa recognizes Beauvoir’s tendency to describe the feminine condition as being controlled by biological functions to a greater extent than is the case for men, but she claims that this, according to Beauvoir, is a gradual difference and that it could at least partly be changed by cultural revolutions. Sexual hierarchies (in which women are defined by men as “other,” as mere bodies in contrast to conscious and rational beings) are not caused by biological differences between the sexes (installed by the evolutionary forces of sexuality and reproduction) but are merely the result of the sedimented habits of human history in her interpretation of Beauvoir.Footnote 23

As a phenomenologist you are supposed to pause on the validity of biological explanations when performing what is referred to as “the epoché.” This also appears to be Heinämaa’s position when (not) answering the question of whether the physiological differences between women and men, established long before the dawn of human history, are not likely to have played a role in how women have always been controlled and repressed by men. According to Heinämaa:

Beauvoir acknowledges that both biological and economical studies of sex differences offer invaluable facts that must be taken into consideration in any philosophical attempt to understand the relation between men and women.Footnote 24

Perceptive readers of the Second Sex will certainly agree, but the question is, of course, how, more exactly, are we to take into account the biology of the sexes, if, as Heinämaa continues: “It is a fundamental mistake to assume that one can identify a causal chain that proceeds from some such facts to the present state of the sexual hierarchy.”Footnote 25

From the phenomenological perspective, the gender difference could be articulated as female versus male ways of being attracted to objects and subjects in the world by way of embodied feelings—including different combinations of male and female, or, hybrid transsexual, patterns—leading to actions, forming sedimented patterns of culture. The gender difference could also be articulated as different ways in which the independent (sometimes experienced as alien) drives of the body are felt to influence the desires and possibilities of a person (sexual attraction, intercourse, menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, as well as female versus male ways of experiencing illness). The tension between cultural and biological forces beyond the reach and control of the subject is not solved but rather upheld and made intelligible by such a phenomenology of gender difference.

To sum up, according to my phenomenological reading of The Second Sex—aided by Heinämaa—biology plays a vital role in understanding the situation of women, since female patterns of existence have certainly been embodied in different ways than male patterns of existence throughout human history, and the interactions between male and female forms of embodiments have been shaped not only by cultural but also by natural forces. Biology is not destiny, but it provides a starting point and offers the possibilities (and impossibilities) of historical happenings. This is not only true of gender identities but also regarding aging, to which I now explicitly turn.

5 Heidegger’s phenomenology and the importance of feelings

Many readers have pointed out that “Dasein”—roughly referring to human persons—in Martin Heidegger’s seminal work Being and Time lacks gender.Footnote 26 But only few have complained that Heidegger’s phenomenological analysis, despite the general focus on temporality and finitude, makes no mention of different stages in human life, and, even less, investigates the process of aging as such.Footnote 27 Since he explicitly focuses on what he calls “being-towards-death” one would assume Heidegger to spend some time on the differences between being young, middle aged and old. However, since Heidegger’s main idea is that death is the meaning of finitude haunting Dasein from the very beginning, all human beings are in the process of dying as soon as they have established what he refers to as a “being-in-the-world.”Footnote 28 Even though existential anxiety—offering the possibility of developing what Heidegger refers to as an “authentic” understanding of death—is more commonly experienced in the face of terminal illness and old-age decrepitude, its meaning in Heidegger’s set up is structurally neutral to matters of age and aging.Footnote 29

Despite this, I see no principal obstacle for making use of Heidegger’s conceptual set up in Being and Time to spell out the meaning structures of aging, analogously to how Beauvoir makes use of the conceptual set up in Being and Nothingness and The Second Sex to approach aging in The Coming of Age. The upside of turning to Heidegger instead of to Sartre and Beauvoir is that the conceptual apparatus of the former is less cognitively impregnated and more focused upon the constitutive role of feelings in making sense of human experience as a worldly form of dwelling. This focus is crucial if we want to understand what aging fundamentally comes down to from the first-person perspective, as I will attempt to show.

A person’s grasping of a phenomenon is a part of the ongoing, living activity in the world that Heidegger refers to as her understanding. But this understanding must always be attuned in order to be meaningful: “Every understanding has its mood. Every attunement understands.”Footnote 30 Heidegger shuns a cognitivist perspective and gives feelings, primarily in the form of moods (attunements), an important position in his philosophy. Moods open up the world to human beings in a precognitive way: “A mood has always already disclosed being-in-the-world as a whole and first makes possible directing oneself toward something.”Footnote 31 Moods shape the way we understand and articulate phenomena in the world, and also, ultimately, the way we understand ourselves and other persons. The attunement of every situation points towards how things in the world matter to persons because they are felt to be such and such—dangerous, enticing, sad, and so on.Footnote 32

Since Heidegger wants to develop a “fundamental ontology” dealing with the Being of beings he is reluctant to explicitly acknowledge the embodied nature of Dasein’s being-in-the-world.Footnote 33 This explains his refusal to engage in philosophical anthropology or seriously address the subject of how the results of empirical sciences—which he refers to as “ontic” instead of “ontological” endeavours—could be utilized to understand our being-in-the-world.Footnote 34 Heidegger himself would probably consider my approach below a flawed aberration into philosophical anthropology, but as phenomenologists like Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Helmuth Plessner have shown, there is much to gain by taking our embodied and social conditions more seriously than Heidegger did.Footnote 35 In the case of the phenomenology of feelings, taking the body seriously means to acknowledge the embodied nature of attunements, considering them to be “existential feelings” in Matthew Ratcliffe’s more recent terminology.Footnote 36 Attunements, such as anxiety, sorrow, boredom, joy and happiness, are embodied moods that bring us to the world by resonating through the sounding board of our lived bodies. We feel a mood in the way we experience the world, but we also feel it in and through our own bodies.Footnote 37

According to Heidegger, every activity is attuned in a way that brings out its significance for us. The different moods in question need not be powerful or directly paid attention to, but they are there as the constitutive ground of our being placed in the meaning pattern of the world. Indeed, we do not choose the moods we find ourselves to be living in; the moods in question overwhelm us and cannot easily be changed. Some moods are more pervasive and attention demanding than others; it is probably impossible to suddenly find oneself in intense pain or joy without taking notice of the mood in question, for example. More often, however, moods reside in the background of our attention but all the same provide the world we live in with meaning and coherence. These moods are real—we are irritated, pleased, sad, or curious—but we do not focus directly upon them; instead we focus upon the things and possibilities that appear to us through and in the moods in question when we act in the world together with others. Moods do not only affect the valence—goodness or badness—of individual things a person encounters in the world; they affect the whole way things show up to the person. The world of the pain sufferer is totally different from the world of the happy enjoyer, in wholes as well as bits.Footnote 38

6 The suffering involved in aging

The study of Beauvoir made clear that to become old will include plenty of painful feelings. Suffering is arguably a necessary part of a human life through all its stages, but it appears to increase when we grow older. Or does it? This depends upon how we understand and define the phenomenon of suffering. With the help of Heidegger’s phenomenology, it becomes possible to approach suffering as a particular way of being attuned: As a suffering-mood overwhelming a person and threatening her integrity and intactness. Suffering involves painful experiences at different levels of the person’s being-in-the-world—that hang together through the suffering mood—but are nevertheless distinguishable by being primarily about embodiment, engagements in the world together with others, and, what I would like to call a person’s “core life values.”Footnote 39

The basic idea behind such a phenomenological characterization of suffering is that it consists in a painful feeling, which is not only a bodily sensation but also an unhomelike mood in and by which one finds oneself delivered to a world in which it is hard to feel at home. Suffering is an unhomelike form of being-in-the-world in which either my body, or, my everyday doings, or, my life project as a whole, turns foreign and hard, or even impossible, to master and enjoy. Suffering moods standardly include emotions that are about the things I can no longer do in the world together with others, or, about myself as the person I am no longer able to be in the company of them. The concept of core life values in my characterization refers to Charles Taylor’s idea of making “strong evaluations” in life and attaining “self-respect in the eyes of others.”Footnote 40 Personal identity depends on the priorities I more or less consciously set for myself—what I enjoy and find important to do—and the way I manage to enact moral and other values making me into the person I want to be—or at least can tolerate being—in the eyes of others.

The point of the reference to other persons in my characterization—when suffering expands from bodily sensations to include the worldly realm and core life values—is not that a person’s priorities and identity are ultimately up to others to decide upon, but, as Beauvoir insists, that my feelings and thoughts are mediated by way of them. I have no authentic way to escape my radical life choices by way of leaving them to others, but I am nevertheless not in the situation to control my life and ensure that things turn out the way I want them to be (including how other people judge me). My body, my world and my personal identity are not only mine but also other to me in a fundamental way. Alienation may certainly serve as a motivator of changes regarding my life choices—anxiety and all the other feelings of boredom, injustice, disgust and absurdity explored by existential philosophers—but alienation is nevertheless in the end not only a good but also a bad thing because it prevents me from enjoying life and becoming a person I can positively identify with.

When a person turns old the body tends to increasingly show up as alien to her. Not only is more or less chronic pain—due to different diseases—part of old persons’ being-in-the-world, but the lived body tends to display patterns of immobility, resisting the habits and wills of the elderly. Being in pain, feeling shaky, dizzy or fatigued and not being able to move with the ease and transparency of previously established activity patterns are standard experiences of old age. As mentioned above, I think Beauvoir tends to downplay the importance of such naturally-induced bodily infirmities in her analysis of becoming old. Bodily experiences of alienation form a core part of all somatic illnesses and this is no less true for the infirmities induced by aging. We tend to adapt to bodily pains and difficulties of movement if they are gradually brought into being during a longer stretch of time, but the sudden nature of finding oneself old is often due to an alienness belonging to the experienced patterns of the lived body itself, rather than demanding the objectifying gazes of other persons.Footnote 41

Somatic illness is not only a bodily sensation but also, at least in cases beyond the very mild and short lasting, a feeling that affects our attuned being-in-the-world, a mood of suffering that alienates our everyday doings and life prospects.Footnote 42 In cases of aging, however, there may also be more sources and grounds for feeling alienated from the meaning patterns of the world than experiencing bodily infirmities. A common feature of becoming old is to feel that one no longer belongs to the present world, but rather to a past one; an experience of alienation which does not have very much to do with embodiment, but rather with predominant norms of excellence which no longer recognizea as familiar and realizable. By the same standards, old persons may feel that they no longer matter or have a meaningful place and role to fill in the present world, a homelessness which transforms itself into a feeling of decreased self-worth in the (at least imagined) eyes of others. If it is not possible to regain some form of homelike being-in-the-world and self-respect by way of changing one’s priorities and receiving support and affirmation by others, aging will turn into a relentless process of gradually increased self-alienation, not only because of bodily decrepitude but also because the old person no longer feels her core life values to be in tune with younger persons’ ideals and standards of excellence.

This, indeed, is very much Beauvoir’s view on aging: The only persons who can hope to preserve some kind of meaningful and dignified existence after having turned 65 are rich people, who can pay for the necessary support and self-affirmation brought by others, or, intellectuals, who can continue to ponder upon the meaning of human existence and publish books, despite becoming useless to their fellow beings in a more practical sense.Footnote 43 The reason Beauvoir looks so darkly upon the prospect of becoming old in her book is probably not only that she has recently turned 60 herself and feels the nag of time affecting her sexual appeal and the standing of existentialism in France. It is also that this very theory she has identified with and contributed to since the 1940s (existentialism) nurtures an inherently negative view on the past in relation to the future. This is a view that existentialists (Sartre and Beauvoir) have inherited from the phenomenology of Heidegger and have made into a political credo—the old forms of human life must die in order for new ways of existing to appear—which is not present in Being and Time.

According to Heidegger, the human being [Dasein] exists as the future possibilities of its being-in-the-world established by way of its own past as “having-been.” This model is essentially future driven:

Anticipation of the most extreme and ownmost possibility comes back understandingly to one’s ownmost having-been. Dasein can be authentically having-been only because it is futural. In a way, having been arises from the future.Footnote 44

But in Beauvoir’s version, the past is not only structurally dependent upon the future, the past is something that burdens and imprisons a person instead of (as in Heidegger) providing the possibilities for her future projects:

For human reality, existing means existing in time: in the present we look towards the future by means of plans that go beyond our past, in which our activities fall lifeless, frozen and loaded with passive demands. Age changes our relationship with time: as the years go by our future shortens, while our past grows heavier.Footnote 45

This seems to be an unnecessarily dark picture of what it means to have a past (a “having-been” in the language of Heidegger). The past is arguably not only something which provides me with a gradually heavier rucksack of unnecessary luggage which prevents me from realizing new projects. Rather than putting me in chains, the past is a series of projects which have made me into the person I am. Beauvoir’s sharp distinction between consciousness as such and its contents prevent her from seeing this:

My past is the in-itself that I am in so far as I have been outstripped; in order to possess it I must bind it to existence by a project; if this project consists of knowing it then I must make it present to myself by means of bringing it back to my memory. There is a kind of magic in recollection, a magic that one feels at every age. The past was experienced in the for-itself mode, and yet it has become in-itself; in remembering we seem to attain that impossible synthesis of the in-itself and the for-itself that life yearns for, but always in vain.Footnote 46

As I pointed out above, the analysis of old age in Beauvoir is carried out in full analogy with how she addresses and understands the situation of women in The Second Sex. The other important influences on The Coming of Age are the autobiographical works she published in several volumes during the first half of the 1960s, starting out with Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter in 1958, including the account she gives of the death of her own mother in A Very Easy Death.Footnote 47 The time she spent on remembering and narrating her own past not only provided her with phenomenological insights regarding memory and temporality, it also made her rather bitter regarding what such a projects does to the person involved:

A friend said to me,‘I find very old people touching because of the long past they have behind them.’ Unfortunately this is just what they do not have. The past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and which will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can still be seen is colorless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me. Here and there, I see occasional pieces whose melancholy beauty enchants me. They do not suffice to populate this emptiness that Chateaubriand calls ‘the desert of the past.’Footnote 48

It is hard to know if Beauvoir’s experience of making the past into a desert, by way of thinking and writing about it, is typical, but there are certainly memoirs that paint a more fertile picture of what it means to remember. Proust comes to mind here, and his case could hardly be put aside as “inauthentic” which is, of course, the standard existentialist response to rosy pictures of childhood and youth. However, Beauvoir’s main mistake in denigrating the meaning of the past is not that the attempts to bring into memory what has happened will always be deadening. It is rather that the main effect of the past on the future is not enacted by way of conscious acts of remembrance—as she tends to emphasize—but by way of embodied patterns of feelings gradually shaping the core of one’s life values and identity. Being-in-the-world is not only a cognitive but also and more basically an emotional process, this is what Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty refer to as they talk about the “facticity” of the self.Footnote 49 According to such a “factical” phenomenology of aging, the past is not only something that I may return to by way of memories, the past is always already at work in my experience of existing as this particular person with a set of sedimented habits and preferences, carried forward by a bodily feeling and framed by a more or less explicit self-narrative.

As we grow old our past extends and our future shortens. Although this is a rather un-phenomenological way of putting things, from the point of view of aging it is in many ways a fitting description. Do we, in addition to this changed position on the individual lifeline, experience the flow of time as speeding up or rather as slowing down as we grow older? Beauvoir, as a matter of fact, ascribes validity to both of these views: Life tends to flow faster when we get old because there is so little time left to do things, and, at the same time, old people are often hit by boredom, making the flow of time slow down, because the social situation of old people prevent them from being involved in any important projects.Footnote 50

7 Aging and flourishing

We have surveyed some major reasons for making life a never-ending series of sufferings in old age: Bodily pains and disabilities preventing everyday activities that used to bring joy and satisfaction, alienation from a world ruled by the ideals of younger generations, loss of meaningful life projects, experiencing the contempt or pity of other persons and thereby losing one’s self-respect. In all these cases the old person feels alienated—from her body, the world and her own life-story and self-identity—because of failed projects or a lack of meaningful possibilities. In this sense, suffering consists in an absence of what Aristotle termed flourishing: The process in and by which a person becomes herself and prospers by realizing her human capabilities. In the philosophy of Aristotle, flourishing (eudaimonia) is thought of as the realization of the true and valuable human capabilities, which are embodied by way of moral and intellectual virtues.Footnote 51

Aristotle believed there to be an objective answer to the question of what characterizes good versus bad human lives. Such a position could certainly be questioned by pointing out how we disagree about matters in normative ethics, cherish different activities and set different goals in life for ourselves because of different views on what, in the end, makes a human life worth living.

A phenomenological theory of flourishing would respect such differences by making self-realization individual, in the sense of every person having to find out what matters to her and what are her true potentialities to be developed.Footnote 52 The insistence upon individualized human flourishing would still respect the fact that a number of bodily and worldly conditions tend to make it easier to realize all sorts of human life projects. Lists of such minimal goods have been worked out in the so-called human capability approach by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum.Footnote 53 A phenomenology of flourishing would also find substantial overlap in the individual views on what counts as virtues in contrast to vices in the moral sphere, although such views have changed substantially over time and may also vary considerably in between cultures.

Existential phenomenologists—and I would include Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in this group among with Sartre and Beauvoir—will worry that the language of flourishing rather makes one think about the life of a plant in contrast to the temporality of human experience. My opening quote from Peter’s first letter in the New Testament inspires such analogies. Heinämaa, summing up her interpretation of Beauvoir’s theory of aging ends her paper in the following way:

[My] analysis implies that human life is not a continuous process of generation, blooming and decay, comparable to the life of a plant, but includes a series of radical transformations in which the self is lost and regained.Footnote 54

This is a valuable and important observation; a human life is full of crises involving self-interpretation, and the setting of new standards of success consist in moves structurally different from the way a plant may defend itself from parasites or stretch its roots and twigs in search of water and sunlight. It is, perhaps, in the case of humans, more intuitively attractive to talk about bodily flourishing than about self-realization in-total as a process of flourishing (or thriving or blossoming, to use similar words).

However, assuming that we are self-interpreting, or, as Plessner would put it, “excentric” animals, able to take a view on ourselves from the outside and evaluating our own condition, I still think it makes sense to pursue the concept of flourishing in the case of human persons, especially when it comes to aging.Footnote 55 Why so? Mainly because the age of flourishing—withering and fading away—appears to be so spot-on when it comes to characterizing the experiences of old age—as the book by Beauvoir certainly confirms. When the concept of flourishing is used in a phenomenological sense, we must, however, make space for the possibility of flourishing despite bodily decay, this is the difference between describing and understanding the life of human beings in comparison with other animals or plants.

How could such a flourishing despite or even in the process of withering take place? Beauvoir’s answer is that it may be possible for philosophers or artists to age with grace, they may still pursue intellectual projects that keep them young by relating them to the contemporary world and stay in touch with younger generations.Footnote 56 I think it is fair to say that Beauvoir worships the young, both in terms of looks and radical projects.Footnote 57 The best way to age, according to her, is actually to never become old. If the body betrays you in this existential project, you still, so to say, have the possibility of preserving a young soul. This is a view that has become dominant in the Western world since the late 1960s in which Beauvoir articulated her thoughts on aging, a view that has made it increasingly harder to flourish when you grow old despite the rise in number of expected life years.Footnote 58 Yet, the picture is a bit more complicated than that, since surveys in wealthy nations also show that healthy persons between 60 and 75 judge themselves to be happier than ever before.Footnote 59 This seems to indicate that flourishing in the process of aging is not only possible but actually a quite common phenomenon, up to the point when illness and disabilities overburden the old person.

8 Conclusions

What life factors determine if “flourishing while withering” is possible? Interviews and surveys suggest that a lot is gained by easing the demands of success and personal importance and instead cherish “the small things.”Footnote 60 Those things are exactly the activities that Beauvoir found the poor to be presently cut off from: “Immediate pleasures are either forbidden or parsimoniously measured out: love, eating, drinking, smoking, sport, walking.”Footnote 61 In addition to this, flourishing may be achieved by engaging in projects that are “larger than oneself,” that matter to others, not least to young persons or generations to come.Footnote 62Beauvoir restricts such endeavors to intellectual projects, but they may also be engaged in by doing such simple things as taking care of one’s grand children or working for a charity organization. Or, reading good books and listening to great pieces of music instead of writing or composing them (the way Beauvoir deems necessary).

Beauvoir would probably agree that the key to meaningful life projects in old age is to achieve some kind of transgenerational contact that broadens the horizon beyond the individual life stretch.Footnote 63 Yet, the images of old life she provides us with indicates that this is as a matter of fact impossible:

Former happenings and acquired knowledge retain their place, but in a life whose fire has died: they have been. When memory decays, they sink and vanish in a mocking darkness; life unravels stitch by stitch like a frayed picture of knitting, leaving nothing but meaningless strands of wool in the old person’s hands.Footnote 64

Perhaps the author is referring specifically to persons with dementia in this quote, but being located in the five-page conclusion of her long book, the metaphor of unravelling knitting as characteristic for an old person’s life is rather telling. Other phenomenologists, Hannah Arendt, for instance, work with similar but radically different metaphors to talk about the stretch of a human life, metaphors which make old age (and death) a bit easier to bear. Arendt speaks about a “web of human relationships” in which every human being by way of actions has the chance of entering a new thread, thereby making a contribution to something that is larger than herself and which will be preserved after she is gone.Footnote 65

The ongoing process of weaving is a more hopeful metaphor than unravelling knitting, although one must keep in mind that a woven fabric also ages and loses its colors. In the end, when all memories of persons who have added threads to it are gone, such a fabric also falls to pieces and vanishes. But it is possible to live in contentment with this insight, provided the weaving itself continues and produces new memories as the older ones fade away. This would be the phenomenological counterpart to the continuation of the line from Peter:

All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord stands forever.Footnote 66

The world (and words) of human beings will hopefully stand, if not forever, for a very long time yet to come. This is what we can hope and work for as we grow older. And this is also what can make aging a flourishing life-project despite the many forms of sufferings it inevitably involves.