UPC Keynote with Shannon Mussett
Undergraduate Philosophy Conference Keynote with Dr. Shannon Mussett, Utah Valley University
MUC Hickory-Hackberry Room
Friday, October 27, 2023 | 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM
The Lived Experience of Growing Old: Simone de Beauvoir’s Existential Philosophy of Aging
Simone de Beauvoir discusses all the stages of life: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age in detail. The last stage—growing old—brings to the foreground phenomena of slowing, breakdown, dissipation, and ultimately, cessation. Because of this entropic transformation, she believes that for most of us, “old age looms ahead like a calamity.” The inevitable decline accompanying aging is particularly problematic in societies that judge people by their social utility. During her life she witnessed the many ways that human beings become abject through the mechanics of social othering. Once a group (women, Jews, the poor, etc.) becomes othered, there emerges the problem of what to do with it. Can it be made socially useful through production and/or reproduction? Or, is it positioned as a collective drain to be marginalized and ignored? The case of the aged is an example of the latter. This talk first explores the ways that old age is existentially and temporally experienced, followed by a discussion of how the most negative effects of aging are exacerbated by societies that fix the elderly as useless social and political burdens.
***Please note the new location: MUC Hickory-Hackberry Room***