Laurine Blonk

Meaningful ageing. On the grey area between ageing and life in society. In the light of increasing appeals to consider meaningful ageing as a societal rather than a personal issue, both in public discourse and in academia, this paper discusses how De Beauvoir recasts life in society through the prism of ageing. I argue that De Beauvoir herewith provides an important corrective to tendencies to ‘under-socialize’ or ‘over-socialize’ meaning in later life. These tendencies can be traced back to the traditional conceptualization of old age as decline but also play out in recent critical phenomenologies of ageing. Through a critical discussion of the problems hereof, I elucidate how we can address these problems by articulating with De Beauvoir the grey area between ageing and life in society. By juxtaposing De Beauvoir with Arendt, I flesh out the implications for the politics of meaningful ageing.

This introduction to the special issue on the phenomenologies of aging explores the relative philosophical neglect of aging as a distinct topic. It critiques the naturalistic reduction of aging, which frames it primarily as decline, and examines the ethico-political implications of this perspective. In order to contextualize the possibilities of forming a new sustained philosophical debate on aging, we describe the earlier advances made in the field by notably Simone de Beauvoir’s work and the developments in critical gerontology, aging studies and the anthropology of aging and the life course. The introduction then programmatically states the need for a revitalized philosophical discourse on aging, suggesting that phenomenological inquiry can reveal the ontological complexities of intergenerational relationships and shared existence. Finally, we briefly introduce the contributions to this special issue by drawing forward the themes of corporeal temporality, generationality and the problem of sharing the world across generations.