Santiago
Zabala is
ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of
Barcelona. His books include The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic
Philosophy (2008), The Remains of Being (2009)
and Hermeneutic Communism (2011, coauthored with G.
Vattimo), all published by Columbia University Press. His most
recent book is
Why Only Art Can Save Us. (2017)
In this age of disruptive innovation—where only the new,
profitable, and productive is valued—aging can become
a remedy to a culture excessively preoccupied with the future.
Indifference, irresponsibility, and ingenuousness usually result
from a failure of memory, which is symptomatic of such supposedly
disruptive innovators as Mark Zuckerberg and Vinod Khosla. Even
though they believe “young people are just smarter”
because those “over 45 basically die in terms of new ideas,”
a recent “rigorous study that looked at 2.7 million company
founders, economists at MIT, the US Census Bureau, and Northwestern
University concluded the best entrepreneurs are middle-aged.”
Plato and Kant already contemplated how the order of kinds of
knowledge was supposed to follow that of ages. Plato believed
that the leadership of the republic had to be reserved to the
elders who could contemplate the Good and guide citizens toward
a higher degree of humanity, and Kant thought that at least
sixty years were necessary to form a philosopher able to write
anything original. Leaving aside exceptions— Michel Foucault
died at fifty-seven—the issue today is that aging is still
treated as a problem, which Simone de Beauvoir noticed half
a century ago.
According
to the French philosopher, “old age is not, in itself
or necessarily a problem, though part of the problem of old
age is that we treat it as if it is.” This was true not
only in 1970 when La vieillesse (Old Age), was published,
but also today as is illustrated by a recent special issue of
the MIT Technology Review titled “Old Age Is
Over! If You Want It.” The editor explains that the issue
“is about big advances in longevity medicine that may
be coming soon.” Predictably, the predominant tone of
the articles (“What If Aging Were a Disease?” “Old
Age Is a Waste,” “The Anti-Aging Drug That’s
Just Around the Corner”) cites aging as a problem that
we can solve through technological interventions. In recent
years several Silicon Valley billionaires have begun funding
companies (AgeX Therapeutics, Human Longevity, and many others)
that specialize in developing methods for slowing or preventing
aging, something that they in particular (but some of us also)
desire.
The
wish to extend the human lifespan has a long tradition in many
cultures and religions. Science has turned this wish into reality.
The
wish to extend the human lifespan has a long tradition in many
cultures and religions. Science has turned this wish into reality
as the simple difference between life expectancy between African
and European countries demonstrates. In a number of countries
south of the Sahara life expectancy is less than forty years,
but in central Europe it’s seventy to eighty years. The
causes of this inequality exceed the strictly medical realm;
structural and sociological features play an important part.
But difference in life expectancy also occurs within developed
countries, where the opportunity to live is determined by race
and class. “In Chicago, the city with the largest disparity,
life expectancy varied by up to 30.1 years, and in both Washington,
D.C. and New York City it varied by more than 27 years.”
A recent study examining Australians’ life expectancy
found people living in outer regional and or remote areas had
premature death rates about 40 percent higher than those in
major cities.
Although
being alive is considered intrinsically valuable, there is a
fundamental difference between the desirability of being alive
within the limits of average life expectancy and beyond these
limits. The former implies a continuation that we have the right
to maintain, but the latter an improvement that is unavailable
to most people. But as the molecular biologist Manuel Serrano
explains, anti-aging medicine emerges both form research focused
on combating diseases that seem to be intrinsically connected
with biological aging and from research focused specifically
on slowing or even arresting the aging processes.
This
difference between these two sources is often overlooked when
aging is treated as a problem by scientists but also by philosophers
interested in these issues. Bernard Williams argued that immortality
would become intolerably boring, and utilitarian philosophers
such as Peter Singer are concerned that extending human life
would cause severe overpopulation, pollution, and resource shortages.
Against both of these philosophers John K. Davis recently argued
that we should expeditiously develop and make available technologies
that will radically extend human lifespans because they will
enrich the welfare of human descendants and trigger new social
arrangements. The problem with these views is that aging and
lifespan are treated as only an ethical matter; the existential
dimension is ignored.
Against
this medical and philosophical tendency to treat aging as a
problem or disease, it is necessary to recall the difference
between merely remaining alive and existing. While we are alive
at all ages, we exist only through those meaningful experiences,
relations, and activities that absorb us, that belong to our
Being. This is why old age involves—as de Beauvoir pointed
out—a changed relation with the world and with an individual’s
own history. Isn’t this what David Attenborough meant
when he presented his recent Netflix documentary A Life
on Our Planet by saying “I’m ninety-three years
old. I had the most extraordinary life, but it is only now that
I appreciate how extraordinary”? If we only know these
experiences after having lived through them, then aging is necessary
for existence and should not be treated as a problem. Pascal
Bruckner is right to observe that one “can remain alive
very late, but does one still exist, in the sense in which Martin
Heidegger distinguished the being that consists in itself from
the existent that projects itself forward?”
Old
age is existentially, not just biologically, a radically transformed
state of being that we must appreciate.
In
order to illustrate this difference, Bruckner distinguishes
between the future as a grammatical category and as an existential
category. The latter implies a continued existence that is no
longer contingent but wanted and desired. The former is undergone;
it involves passivity and resignation. Only those who age can
project themselves forward and strive for those meaningful experiences
that constitute their Being and so appreciate the time left.
This is why old age is existentially, not just biologically,
a radically transformed state of being that we must appreciate.
Many of our religious traditions, as Martien A M Pijnenburg
and Carlo Leget explain, also call upon this appreciation. For
Thomas Aquinas, for example, eternal life does not designate
a continuation of earthly life grounded on the conception of
an immortal soul but the fullness of a human life as it serves
God through others. In Buddhism, this fullness is the ability
to let go of the ego. As we can see, these traditions converge
on the fact that human beings miss the essence of life when
they focus on their biological self-preservation.
If
death is no longer considered the normal end of life but a therapeutic
failure to be corrected, it is because the goal of medicine—“that
armed form of our finitude” as Foucault called it—now
is to bring to a halt the triggering of cellular suicide and
thus prolong life beyond the accepted limits. In this way medical
research rests on the presupposition that “old age is
a problem on which all the failures of a society converge,”
as de Beauvoir said and also insists that the quantity of life
comes before its quality.
Against
this valuation of progress without quality—which is at
the heart of the indifference of the innovative disruptors—aging
can be valued as a transformed state of being that demands all
our attention. This is why Brucker believes that it’s
only “after fifty that we really have our lives in front
of us, when we can finally enjoy the youth we missed out on
at twenty because we had to earn diplomas, look for a job, prove
ourselves, excuse ourselves for being greenhorns, emerge from
childhood, get through the tormented first love affairs, and
carry all alone the burden of a brand new freedom.” The
existential reconsideration old age entails can become the key
to fighting the indifference, irresponsibility, and ingenuousness
common to disruptive innovators. Aging, rather than a problem
we must overcome, is a necessary condition for existing responsibly
among others. This is why we should “stop worrying about
Biden’s age, as Jennifer Senior recently said, we need
his wisdom right now.”
