Sonia Ruth Kruks

Although Old Age, Simone de Beauvoir’s pioneering study of the oppressions of old age, is less well known than The Second Sex, it equally merits attention. Following a brief comparison of the two works, this paper provides a critical exegesis of Old Age. The work first considers the many ways in which becoming old is to become "the Other," and describes the forms of oppression to which the old are subjected, especially in modern capitalist societies. It next explores the lived experience of old age, insisting on the uniqueness of each person’s subjective experience while also examining the "constants" of experience that the elderly share. Simone de Beauvoir concludes the book with the demand for a radically new kind of society, one in which the old are able to continue to pursue free and meaningful projects. However, the paper argues, Simone de Beauvoir ignores the debilities that often limit action in extreme old age, and her notion of the project as radical freedom needs to be re-thought in less ambitious terms.

This chapter explores the contributions of Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt to describing and defending direct political participation. Although they disagree on many other matters, both view such participation as intrinsically valuable: as the enactment of human freedom. However, both also note that the “spaces of freedom” wherein such forms of political action are possible are always ephemeral. Although Arendt deeply laments the fleeting quality of such spaces and the impermanence of free action, her explanations as to why they do not endure are not sufficient. Sartre offers a further and more compelling explanation in The Critique of Dialectical Reason, where he demonstrates how free human action is always mediated by forms of materiality that will necessarily reify it.

Existentialism and phenomenology seem, at first glance, to constitute one of those rare strands of modern Western philosophy that converges productively with feminism. They form a tradition that opposes abstract, rationalist thought and is instead committed to elucidating concrete, “lived experience,” including experiences of embodiment and emotion. As such, they anticipate much “second‐wave” feminist thought that criticizes abstraction, beginning from accounts of women's concrete experiences and emphasizing the importance of personal politics. However, feminists engaged with the tradition have also cautioned that the main canonical figures remained ensconced in masculinism, since their allegedly generic accounts of “human existence” were tacitly grounded in male experience. During the 1980s interest in existentialism and phenomenology waned, as notions of women's experience increasingly came under suspicion with the poststructuralist, or “postmodern,” turn in feminism. But in the last few years interest has grown again, as theorists have sought insights from the tradition that might move theory beyond the impasses that postmodernism now seems to some to present.

There was a day in March 2020 when I discovered I was old. There had, of course, been quite a few previous intimations of impending old age, but they had not “really” defined my being for me. Some years earlier, I had been surprised when people started to offer me their seat on a crowded bus or train. At first, I politely refused the seat; later, I decided that I would accept such invitations because declining seemed ungracious, and because accepting would encourage this thoughtful behavior from which “others” would benefit. Recently, as my feet have begun to ache more, I have sometimes been happy to accept a seat on my own account. There have been other intimations too: some physical indications, such as needing a brighter light in order to read and stiffness in my knees. There have also been signs that my cultural, intellectual, and professional world, a world in which I have been deeply embedded, is passing: Students now live in an online media world that is alien to me, and a few of my colleagues have made it known that they find my research interests on Simone de Beauvoir a bit old-fashioned. But none of this actually defined me for myself as “old.” Surely, still an unremarkable, white, late-middle-aged woman, I did not think I “looked my age.” Surely, I had not yet become a member of that detested “foreign species” whose presence lurks within us all and that I, like most of us, so vehemently sought to deny.