The Riddle of Age

from Juvenescence

Nothing in the universe—be it the newborn infant or the universe itself—is without age. If a phenomenon does not age it is not of this world; and if it is not of this world, it is not a phenomenon.

We have on the whole a poor understanding of the essence of age, perhaps because our intellect evolved to deal more with objects in space than with the enfolded intricacies of growth, duration, and accumulation. Certainly we find it easier to spatialize time—to think of it as a linear or chronological succession of present moments—than to fathom the multidimensional, interpenetrating recesses of age. Indeed, we have a stubborn tendency to reduce age to “time,” yet what is time if not a prodigious abstraction, a flatus vocis? Only age gives time a measure of reality.

The most sophisticated philosophers think of age as a function of time, yet a careful phenomenological analysis reveals that we should instead think of time as a function of age. After all, any concept we may have of time has a way of growing old, of succumbing to an aging process. The same holds true for eternity, which shares in the general mortality of phenomena. Eternity no longer appears to us as it did to Plato, when he and his fellow Greeks turned their gaze to the stars. Nor does it appear to us as it did to Dante, when he and his fellow Christians contemplated the celestial spheres. Indeed, eternity has been largely subtracted from our ever-expanding cosmos, which we now believe had a beginning and will eventually have an end. Hence one could say that eternity has for all intents and purposes disappeared from our phenomenological horizons, that it has aged itself out of existence.

In Creative Evolution (1907) the French philosopher Henri Bergson exposed in compelling fashion traditional philosophy’s stubborn tendency to conceive of time geometrically rather than organically, yet for all his deep thinking about la durée and organic form, Bergson never put forward a philosophy of age. He offered merely another philosophy of time—one founded on biological rather than chronological paradigms. That represented a significant corrective and contribution, to be sure, yet there is more to the phenomenon of age than biology can account for, for humans are biological beings who create transbiological institutions that put cultural and historical elements into play in ways that Bergson, along with most other philosophers, leaves largely unexamined.

All living things obey an organic law of growth and decay, and in that respect human beings are no exceptions. According to the riddle of Sphinx, we walk on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and, if we live long enough, end up on three legs in the evening. Yet after he enters the city of Thebes, confident that he has solved the riddle, Oedipus discovers that there is far more to the story than that. The story in fact begins before birth and continues after death. In other words, unlike other living things, anthropos is born into humanly created worlds whose historical past and future transcend the individual’s lifespan. These worlds, which the Greeks called the polis, are founded upon institutional and cultural memory, conferring upon their inhabitants a historical age that is altogether different in nature than biological age. Since no human being lives outside of such worlds, with their legacies and traditions, we could say that humans are by nature “heterochronic” in their age, that is, they possess many diverse kinds of ages: biological, historical, institutional, psychological. By and by we will see how these various “ages” intersect with one another—both in individuals and in civilizations—yet here let us simply note for the record that, once anthropos arrives on the scene, the phenomenon of age increases in complexity as least as much as it did when life first gained a foothold on our planet. . . .

There are further complexities at work in the human inflections of age. If I say I am sixty years old, what exactly does that mean? What or who is this I? Is it...