Ageing, Life, and Philosophy

This post by Anna Videbaek Smith reports on the proceedings of a workshop on ageing and philosophy at the University of Nottingham.

  

On the 8th of June, the University of Nottingham hosted the EPIC Project workshop, “Ageing, Life, and Philosophy.” The event featured presentations by Saloni de Souza (Bath Spa University), Nga Chun Josh Law (University of Bristol), and Victoria Cluley (University of Nottingham).

The workshop opened with Saloni de Souza’s exploration of immortality in a talk entitled “I Want to Be Forever Old?” Souza introduced Bernard Williams’ conditions for a choiceworthy life, noting that Williams does not consider immortality a choiceworthy life for anyone. Souza then distinguished between two forms of immortality: the Babylon 5 model, where death is eliminated and physical ageing stalls at one’s physiological prime, and the Struldburg model, which similarly removes death but involves continuous physiological ageing. 

With this groundwork in place, Souza challenged two assumptions: (i) that Struldburg immortality cannot offer a choiceworthy life, and (ii) that Babylon 5 immortality is clearly preferable to the Struldburg model. To address (i), Souza disputed the claim that progressive physiological ageing necessarily entails a loss of pleasures and memory, suggesting that other benefits may offset any such losses. Regarding (ii), Souza questioned whether immortality necessarily involves a loss of categorical desires. While it may be possible to develop new categorical desires or find different ways to fulfil existing ones under a Babylon 5 model, ongoing physiological ageing may complicate this process. 

To mitigate this concern, Souza noted that physiological decline need not correlate with cognitive or moral decline, and that adapting to physiological ageing may prompt shifts in our categorical desires or the way we pursue them. Finally, the talk provoked discussion about how life cycles and the concept of ‘biographical disruption’ apply to ageing more broadly.

After lunch and a walk around Nottingham’s scenic campus, Josh Law presented a chapter from his PhD thesis, “Habit in Later Life: Repetition Without Stagnation in Beauvoir’s Old Age.” Law aimed to identify the optimism in Beauvoir’s otherwise pessimistic Old Age by exploring the role of habits in later life.  As Beauvoir takes old age to involve a reduction of future possibilities, we may wonder whether authentic transcendence is even possible at this stage of life. To examine this, Law drew on Beauvoir’s notion of old age as a ‘normal abnormality’: a paradoxical mode of existence where the ‘abnormal’ becomes the governing norm of daily life. 

Using the example of the paralysed painter, August-Pierre Renoir, Law argued that habits can enable older individuals to find a new, if fragile, sense of normalcy. Importantly, this does not hold for all habits, prompting Law to distinguish between two types. Invertebrate habits can be understood as “the habit of having a habit,” reflecting withdrawal, rigidity, and stagnation. This is contrasted with what Beauvoir calls ‘the poetry of habit,’ denoting habits that are integrated into our lives, providing us with a sense of “ontological security.” Law maintained that this latter type of habit can anchor older individuals in our shared social world and enable them to engage in repetition without stagnation.

The final talk, “The Relationship between Older Age, Health Inequality, and Race: Philosophical Interpretations”, was delivered by Victoria Cluley. Building on her work with the ‘Understanding Frailty’ Project, Cluley and her co-authors explored the interaction between ethnicity and the experience of frailty in old age using an anti-racist, photovoice approach. They provided 69 participants from six ethnic groups with digital cameras, instructing them to photograph their day-to-day activities to capture their experience of growing older. This culminated in 1,126 pictures depicting everything from pets to religious practices and bouncy houses at family functions. 

Several key themes emerged, including experiences of racism, the role of purpose, and the inherent diversity of older individuals as a social group. Particularly relevant to the EPIC Project were several photos depicting healthcare settings. This prompted participants to recall experiences of testimonial injustice in healthcare contexts, which they largely attributed to their race and old age. Cluley observed that some of the more privileged Black British participants referenced structural racism to make sense of these experiences. Interestingly, the participants of Indian or Caribbean descent, who tended to come from more disadvantaged backgrounds, did not invoke this concept. Perhaps the lack of access to a concept like structural racism can itself be considered an epistemic injustice. 

More information on this project can be found here.

Author bio

Anna Videbaek Smith is a DPhil candidate in philosophy at the University of Oxford. Her research explores ageism as an intersectional form of oppression, focusing on its moral, epistemic, and aesthetic dimensions. Prior to joining Oxford, she completed an MA (Hons) and an MLitt, both in Philosophy, at the University of St Andrews.

Phenomenology, Speech and Belonging: A Workshop Report

This post by Lucienne Spencer reports on the proceedings of a phenomenology workshop held at the University of Bristol.

Some of the workshop speakers. From the left: Luciennce, Josh, Jae, and Ellie

On 26 November, the University of Bristol hosted the EPIC event entitled ‘Phenomenology, Speech and Belonging’, chaired by Havi Carel. These three key themes brought together by Anthony Fernandez (University of Southern Denmark), Nga Chun Josh Law (University of Bristol), Ellie Byrne (University of Nottingham), Jae Sul (University of West England), and Lucienne Spencer – that’s me! – (University of Oxford),

The event was kicked off with a talk by keynote speaker Fernandez. He considered how phenomenology can be operationalised as a rigorous research method through Phenomenologically Grounded Qualitative Research (PGQR), pioneered by Fernandez and his team. After bringing to light some of the benefits and drawbacks of more traditional phenomenological research methods, Fernandez cleared the way for PGQR as an innovative alternative that fills the gaps in the current research methodology. A distinctive feature of PGQR is the frontloading of phenomenological concepts within the study design, which will allow researchers to better draw out the ‘existentials’ (e.g. affectivity, body memory, etc.) of the participant’s being-in-the-world. At present, Fernandez and team are developing a tightly focused interview guide for PGQR, and will later reflect on distinct methods of phenomenological analysis. I imagine that those who, like myself, are attempting to shove phenomenological concepts into ill-fitting qualitative frameworks are relieved that this work is being done! These new and alternative methods of phenomenological research feel much needed, and I look forward to seeing what Fernandez and team develop in this space.

The following talks were connected by an implicit ambition to apply phenomenological methodologies and concepts to better understand the barriers to intersubjective cohesion experienced by three vulnerable groups: those in psychiatric therapy, older people and second-generation migrants.

I was up next, with a talk that mined Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of speech expression to consider how certain kinds of speech expression can lead to intersubjective attunement in the therapeutic space (‘speaking speech’) and how other forms of speech expression can inhibit this attunement (‘spoken speech’). Merleau-Ponty describes how speaking speechcan facilitate intercorporeality between the Self and Other, where we inhabit one another by taking up each other’s speech. In contrast, Spoken speech can be compared to what Ian James Kidd refers to as ‘vices of banality’, whereby concepts in illness are not properly treated with the reverence or complexity they deserve. For example, a person may be fobbed off with a ‘look on the bright side’. when discussing their depression. I suggest that Spoken speech both inhibits meaning-making in the therapeutic space and inhibits the vital intersubjective attunement between patient and healthcare professional. While my quest for the audience to do the hard work for me in considering the implications for speaking and spoken speech in AI went unanswered (I’ll have to get round to doing this myself…), I faced interesting suggestions to consider the ‘empty speech’ discussed in psychoanalysis and Heidegger’s idle talk.

Next, Law presented a chapter from his PhD thesis on Beauvoir’s existentialist phenomenology of old age. Law aims to understand how Beauvoir challenges conceptions of old age as a pathological decline of a transcendent being-in-the-world. Moreover, Law observed that Beauvoir’s account disrupts the established dichotomy between transparency in health and opacity in illness, positioning old age in an ambiguous space between the two. This results in a paradoxical state of what Beauvoir calls ‘normal abnormality’. As such, Law suggests that in Beauvoir’s depiction of old age, there is an oscillation between a visible and invisible body. Law’s talk also examined what Beauvoir perceives as a shift in the experience of temporality: rather than an open expanse of possibilities, one’s future feels limited, curtailing ambitions for future projects. This prompted Law to consider the role of the habitual patterns of embodiment in Beauvoir’s account, and how one can achieve a form of flourishing, rather than stagnation, within habitual patterns – what Beauvoir calls ‘the poetry of habit’. Law’s talk provoked discussion of ageism and how it can pathologise everyday acts, such as hobbies and habitual routines.

The final talk of the day was by Byrne and Sul, who discussed the phenomenology of belonging and psychosis in second-generation migrants. Their talk began by exploring evidence that the risk of psychosis is sustained (and in some cases even increased) in second-generation migrants compared to first-generation migrants. Byrne and Sul asked why this is the case and suggested that we may find the answer in a phenomenological account of familiarity and belonging. Drawing on the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz, Byrne and Sul examined how the migrant’s identity as ‘The Stranger’ persists even to second generations, despite the fact that they ought to have a familiarity and sense of belonging to the place in which they are born and grow up. They considered a number of phenomenological explanations for this disruption, including a breakdown in ‘mutual reciprocity’ and ‘epistemic familiarity’. This occurs when there are difficulties in a second-generation migrant’s capacity to recognise the behaviours, gestures, and expressions of others, and in turn a lack of recognition and uptake from others. A key idea that arose from this talk was that of second-generation migrants being caught between orienting (at least) two worlds, two cultural patterns, in which they are expected to display fluency.

Author bio

Lucienne Spencer is a Postdoctoral Researcher in Mental Health Ethics within the NEUROSEC Team in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford. She works under the Wellcome Trust funded ‘Social Emotions’ project. She also leads the NeurOx Young People’s Advisory Group. Her research primarily focuses on phenomenology, epistemic injustice and the philosophy of psychiatry.