Rasmus Dyring

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.

The aim of this paper is to raise the question of aging as an ontological question. In critical dialogue with Heidegger’s exploration of the question of being, the first half of the paper argues that fundamental ontology, due to the way it relies on a methodological operationalization of the ontological difference, will remain blind to the ontological generativity of the differences that aging makes. I introduce the term gerontological difference as a name for this kind of difference. The second half of the paper explores the quasi-transcendental play of gerontological difference. Drawing on Foucault, Guenther and Agamben, I suggest that this play might be described in archaeological terms by tracing _the historical a priori_ in which age distinctions are operationalized biopolitically. Drawing on Derrida and Nancy, I argue that this archaeological view of the quasi-transcendental play of gerontological difference must be supplemented with a view of aging as material _différance_. According to this understanding of the quasi-transcendental play of gerontological difference, aging is an ontologically generative event that organizes intercorporeal tangles of coexistence and opens emergent fields of possible experience.

Building on a phenomenological analysis of the Tunisian Revolution, this article puts forward the concept of critical experience as a type of experience in which the very experiential structures prove subversive of otherwise established orders (e.g. political, ethical, technological, epistemological etc.). In order to trace the anarchic, but generative impulses of such critical experience, the article develops a variation of the phenomenological reduction called an anarcheological reduction. In the anarcheological reduction, registers of critical experience are accessed in which the aforementioned anarchic impulses elicit a constitutive quasi-transcendental structuring of fields of possible experience. In order to describe the always singular, contingent trajectories along which such quasi-transcendental structuring takes place, the term generative vector is introduced. The article concludes by specifying how the quasi-transcendental registers accessed in the anarcheological reduction are different from other quasi-transcendental registers and accordingly suggesting this type of reduction as a valuable methodological supplement in critical phenomenology.

In the past fifteen years, there has been a virtual explosion of anthropological literature arguing that morality should be considered central to human practice. Out of this explosion new and invigorating conversations have emerged between anthropologists and philosophers. Moral Engines: Exploring the Ethical Drives in Human Life includes essays from some of the foremost voices in the anthropology of morality, offering unique interdisciplinary conversations between anthropologists and philosophers about the moral engines of ethical life, addressing the question: What propels humans to act in light of ethical ideals?

In this essay, I undertake a critical phenomenological exposition of the conditions of ethical community as they present themselves in the light of the Anthropocene. I begin by approaching the present human condition by following Arendt in her considerations of what more recently has been termed the Anthropocene. I will take her notion of the process character of action as a lodestar in a so-called anarcheological reading of Aristotle that opens for a thinking of unbounded possibility and unbounded affinity and that shows how Aristotle’s ethics, like so many other ethical and moral theories, is really a project of metaphysical closure in the face of the poignantly sensed, but theoretically marginalized, anarchic apertures of communitary life. To prepare for an ethics capable of perpetually affirming, rather than closing off, these anarchic apertures of the human condition, I bring the insights won in the anarcheological reading of Aristotle into conversation with accounts of the ethical responses presented by the Native American nation of the Crow towards the end of the 19th century, when they – in a sense not-dissimilar to what we now experience in the Anthropocene – faced the end of the world. I conclude by extracting from this some elements for a thinking of ethics at the end of worlds that affirms the unbounded apertures of human community.