Part Three: Age and Time

Sara Heinämaa Transformations of Old Age Selfhood, Normativity, and Time Also I myself will die-like I was once born, developed into adulthood and got old. But the question is, what this means. This statement could well be from Simone de Beauvoir's late work, The Coming of Age, but it could equally well belong to Sartre's or Merleau-Ponty's reflections on the temporality of the human condition. It comes, however, from a more distant source which is less familiar to contemporary feminist theorists and philosophers of life: the quote is from Husserl's reflections on the finiteness of human existence.1 The cited paragraph illustrates well Husserl's mature insight that death and birth, together with historicity, unconsciousness, and sexual difference, belong among the transcendental problems to be studied by genetic phenomenology (Husserl 1970, 187–88).2 The philosophical task is not to explain these phenomena but to explicate their meanings and their roles in the constitution of intersubjectivity and objectivity (Husserl 1970, 187–88).3 This chapter discusses Simone de Beauvoir's approach to old age within the methodological framework of classical Husserlian phenomenology. My aim is not to offer a historical reconstruction of Beauvoir's The Coming of Age nor a comprehensive reading or a detailed interpretation of her text. Rather, I will focus on three insights that I find philosophically most important and tenable in Beauvoir's work, and I will develop these insights into a systematic account of the phenomenon of aging. I will argue that aging is fundamentally a personal transformation, a change in one's relation to oneself, to others and to the world which is not accountable by mere biological or social factors. My critical-con-  Husserl 1992, 332; cf. Husserl 1989, 89.  Genetic phenomenology studies the temporal order of meaning constitution. It does not confine itself to the investigation of particular histories but, by the methods of eidetic variation, aims at illuminating the essential steps and phases in all temporal institution or establishment of meaning and sense. The mature Husserl argues that static analyses are a necessary part of phenomenology but not sufficient in themselves because phenomenology aims at accounting for the structures of meaning as well as for their geneses and origins (Husserl 1960, 66–81; 1968, 208– 17; 1978, 316–20). For an introduction to genetic phenomenology, see Steinbock 1995; cf. Bachelard 1968; Sokolowski 1964.  For an account of birth and death as transcendental problems, see Steinbock 1995, 134–37; cf. Steinbock 2001, xxxii–xxxiv; Heinämaa 2010a and 2010b. For an account of sexual difference as a transcendental problem, see Heinämaa 2003, 21–23, and Heinämaa 2004. structive approach to The Coming of Age aims at making a new contribution to the philosophy of aging but at the same time it is intended to demonstrate that we-as today's theorists of the human condition-have much to learn from Beauvoir's fearless approach and her clear insight. In my understanding, The Coming of Age is a methodological twin sister of The Second Sex. In a very similar fashion as in her first extensive study of the human condition,4 Beauvoir offers a double illumination of her subject matter. She tackles the problem of the old age-as she tackled the problem of sexual difference-in two different ways, first empirically and then philosophically. The first part of The Coming of Age discusses experiential findings, from the fields of natural and human-social sciences, biosciences, sociology, anthropology, ethnology, and history. The second part takes another approach and proposes a different task for reflection. Beauvoir starts from lived experiences and treats them as particular examples of experiencing. She does not proceed by inductive inferences or by empirical generalizations. Instead, she sees as her task to capture the necessary structural features of the experience of aging, "the constants" of "human reality," as she herself calls them. This approach to lived and intentional experiences can best be characterized by classical phenomenological concepts: the philosopher begins from singular experiences and aims at capturing the first person givenness of experiencing; his5 task is not to dwell on particulars or to generalize over them but to proceed to study the necessary structural features of all experience. The two reductions- the transcendental-phenomenological reduction and the eidetic reduction-are needed to liberate the investigation from all natural and habitual presuppositions concerning the experienced object and the experiencing subject. By purifying his consciousnesses from theoretical and practical positionings and from traditional preconceptions, and by imaginatively varying the experience thus purified, the philosopher is able to bring into focus the constants of conscious life. He is not just interested in the structures of his own personal life, or of the lives of his contemporaries, but aims at finding the constants of all human  Beauvoir uses the term "la réalité humaine" ("human reality," in English). This is usually understood as a translation of Heidegger's "Dasein" but it covers what Husserl calls the meaning or the sense of human existence (e.g., Husserl 1993).  I use the male pronouns "he" and "his" in the neutral sense which refers to a human being. I have chosen to do this, because my quotes are from the English translations of Beauvoir's works which follow this problematic convention (the corresponding problem strains, of course, the original French text). In my own language (Finnish), personal pronouns lack gender marking so that this problem does not occur. 168 Sara Heinämaa life-intimate and familiar life but also historically distant and culturally alien. In this enterprise, his best alliances are the historian, the novelist and the poet.6 We find this aim clearly explicated by Beauvoir at the beginning of the second part of The Coming of Age.7 Beauvoir does not rest satisfied with reporting the plurality and richness of human experiences but proceeds to describe and analyze the universal features that transcend cultural and historical peculiarities. She writes: [w]e can try to isolate the constants and to find the reasons for the differences. ... To be sure, the state of the aged has not been the same in all places and at all times; but rising through this diversity there are constants that make it possible for me to compare various pieces of evidence independently of date. (279, italics in the original)8 To be sure, the investigation of the constants of human life is not Beauvoir's primary interest. Rather, her main goal is to put forward an ethical and political argument concerning the dignity and respectful treatment of human beings. However, her ethical and political claims rest on her existential-phenomenological insight into the universal structures of human life, and the critical development of this insight is goal of my essay. Beauvoir's existential-phenomenological claim about aging is that it concerns three fundamental ontological structures of human life: its temporality, its objectification in interpersonal relations and its necessarily bodily dimension.9 On the basis of her remarks, I will develop three arguments about the phenomenon of aging: first, the claim that aging presents itself to us originally as a personal metamorphosis; second, the idea that this metamorphosis involves a radical change in the habitual self-objectification of the person; and third, the thesis that aging affects not just our futural horizon but equally all temporal registers and ultimately the whole structure of lived time.  Cf. Beauvoir 2004a; Husserl 1983, § 70, 145–48; Merleau-Ponty 1964.  The methodological clarification is located in a similar way in The Coming of Age as in The Second Sex.  Cf. Beauvoir 1996, 361; 1989, xxxvi.  In the beginning of the second part of The Coming of Age, Beauvoir lists the following components of the experience of aging: body, image, time, history, praxis, others and the world, and argues that these are co-implicatory and cannot be studied in isolation (1996, 279). Transformations of Old Age 169 The Event of Aging The first crucial insight that we find in Beauvoir's treatment of old age concerns the ontic sense of aging: The phenomenon of getting old does not consists of any progressive deterioration or slow alteration but of a sudden event or series of such events. More precisely, aging is experientially not a gradual process but is an unexpected happening that takes us by surprise. Beauvoir uses several different terms to emphasize the event-character of aging; she talks about "a surprise" (292), "a revelation" (290), "a metamorphosis" (283), "a transformation" (290) and "a crisis" (379), and writes: "The fact that the passage of universal time should have brought about a private, personal metamorphosis is something that takes us completely aback" (283). And in another section: We must assume a reality that is certainly ourselves although it reaches us from the outside and although we cannot grasp it. There is an insoluble contradiction between the obvious clarity of the inward feeling that guarantees our unchanging quality and the objective certainty of our transformation. All we can do is to waver from the one to the other, never managing to hold them both firmly together. (290) Thus, Beauvoir offers a very different account of aging than the one we know from the empirical sciences of life and nature. The aging human body is not equated with deteriorating animal organisms or compared to vegetable life. The phenomenon of human age has its own meaning structures and it determines its own parameters of investigation that undermine all kinds of naturalistic and biologistic reductions.10 Beauvoir's philosophical approach differs also from that of the social sciences in which the person is studied primarily as an individual in a collective of individuals. Beauvoir accounts for aging in the first person perspective: she asks primarily how the change presents itself, or is given, to the person who undergoes it (279). Others are not excluded from this type of investigation, but they take part in the constitution of sense only as co-constituters and thus depend on the constitutive activity of the experiencing person. As co-constituters others cannot determine us from outside but need our active participation and communicative co-operation.  This methodological argument is best known by the powerful formulation that Heidegger gave to it in Being and Time (1992), but the argument has deep roots in the phenomenological and existential traditions. For these roots, see Heinämaa (2010a and 2010c). 170 Sara Heinämaa Before proceeding to study the two other insights into old age that we find in Beauvoir's discourse, it is necessary to spend some time critically investigating the concepts with which she operates while describing aging as a metamorphosis. It is important to notice that the concepts that Beauvoir uses to emphasize the suddenness of aging are of two different kinds. On the one hand, she uses the ontological concepts of metamorphosis and transformation but, on the other hand, she also operates with epistemological concepts, such as discovery, revelation, and realization. These two types of concepts have different implications. The concepts of metamorphosis and transformation propose that aging is, or involves, a change in one's fundamental way of being, i.e., an ontological change.11 The epistemological concepts, on the other hand, give the impression that it is merely the cognitive experience of coming to know one's new state that is sudden and that the transformation itself is or may be gradual and relatively slow. So we must ask what Beauvoir's position really is on this matter: Does she argue that aging itself is sudden or does she just propose that our realization of the phenomenon comes unexpectedly? Was my judgment hasty, when I claimed that the first result of her reflection concerns the abruptness of aging? In my understanding Beauvoir's philosophical discourse does not choose between the traditional alternatives of knowing and being or the epistemological and the ontological. The fundamental tension or ambiguity that she thematizes is not that between inner knowledge and external reality, or between inner sense and outer substantiation. Rather, the tension is between two different forms of self-relating, one proceeding by immediate experience and the other constituted via relations with other subjects (Beauvoir 1976, 55). Both ways of relating to oneself involve epistemological as well as ontological parameters. At the beginning of The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir thematizes the duality of the human condition as follows: "The continuous work of our life," says Montaigne, "is to build death." ... Man knows and thinks this tragic ambivalence which the animal and the plant merely undergo. A new paradox is thereby introduced into his destiny. "Rational animal," "thinking reed," he escapes from his natural condition without, however, freeing himself from it. He is still a part of this world of which he is a consciousness. He asserts himself as a pure internality against which no external power can take hold, and he also experiences himself as a thing crushed by the dark weight of other things. (7, emphases added)  On the historical-philosophical problems involved in the concepts of metamorphosis, see Songe-Møller 2008. Transformations of Old Age 171 The crisis of aging accentuates this necessary ambiguity of our existence, the transcendental fact that we are constantly given to ourselves both directly as a unique viewpoint to the whole world and via others as a worldly thing among other worldly things. At the same time the phenomenon exacerbates the cognitive tension between inner certainty and objective knowledge. Both tensions-the ontological and the epistemological-constantly characterize our condition, but the metamorphoses of maturation and aging bring them to the fore (Beauvoir 1996, 292–96). Thus understood, aging is a transition from one existential situation to another both of which involve an ontological as well as an epistemological duality: we are given to ourselves and we know ourselves directly; but due to our relations to others we are and we understand ourselves also through intersubjective mediation. This complex structure is brought to change in the event of aging. Thus we have to ask: What part of us, or who, exactly is changed in this metamorphosis? Beauvoir's The Coming of Age gives us an important clue also about the subject of the transformation. Embodiment and its Two Aspects: Alienness and Normativity The second important insight that we find in Beauvoir's discourse concerns the particular aspect of our selfhood that undergoes the metamorphosis of aging. Beauvoir argues that it is not the whole of me that changes in the event of aging but only one part of me, i.e. one moment or sense of selfhood. In her own words, it is "the other in me" who suddenly turns old (1996, 288/306 and 294/312, translation modified, emphasis added). She elaborates this insight further by stating: "Within me it is the other-that is to say the one that I am for others-who is old: and that other is myself [moi]" (284/302, translation modified, emphasis added). It is worth studying this paradoxical formulation in some detail while keeping in mind the existential question: Who is it exactly that turns old in this metamorphosis? The first part of Beauvoir's formulation gives a simple answer to the question above: the aspect that turns old in me is the one that is given to others and exists primarily for them. This answer invites the notion that the aged person is like a mask or a role that we have to accept or assume because of our social dependences. Some sections of Beauvoir's reflection support this line of interpretation. Her quotes from Marcel Proust and André Gide, for example, introduce the metaphors of masks, costumes, disguises, roles and play-acting (cf. 1996, 289 and 296), and the Sartrean concepts of image and the unrealizable that she uses 172 Sara Heinämaa also suggest the idea of an imposed change (291–93).12 The quote from Proust's Time Regained (Le temps retrouvé), in particular, is efficient in transmitting the alienating aspect of aging while picturing the aged person as if in a constant masquerade, wandering among acquaintances and friends whom she cannot recognize and who cannot recognize him: "At first I could not understand why I found some difficulty in recognizing the master of the house and the guests, and why everyone there was 'made up'-a make-up that usually included powder and that altered them entirely. The prince ... had provided himself with a white beard and as it were with leaden soles which dragged at his feet, so that he seemed to be playing the part of one of the Ages of Life." (Quoted in Beauvoir 1996, 289/307) However, the second part of Beauvoir's formulation challenges the metaphors of masks, roles and play-acting by identifying the aging other with the subject itself. "Within me it is the other ... who is old," Beauvoir writes, but adds: "and that other is myself." I want to argue that this paradox must be understood in the frame of Beauvoir's existential-phenomenological account of embodiment. The crucial idea here is that our own bodies are always given to us in a double way: originally and immediately as systems of sensibility and motility, and secondarily and mediately-via our relations with others-as perceptual and movable objects. These are not two separate realities but are two sides or dimensions of one complex phenomenon. This means that, when we speak about the "mask" of old age (296), we must keep in mind that this "mask" is not separate from our own flesh. Rather, it is the "outer side" of our own sensibility and motility, intertwined with the sensations, movements and affections that give us our own bodily processes as well as the external events. This "mask" can never be thrown off, never separated from our sensuous-motor and affective experiences.When we finally drop it, we must also let go of life. The theatrical metaphors of mask, role and play-acting are illuminative in thematizing an internal fission within the aged subject, between his cogito ("I suffer," "I cry") and his external appearance ("he suffers," "he cries").13 But  Compare this argument to Beauvoir's and Sartre's interchange in Adieux where she ends up claiming that the experience of temporality that Sartre claims to have is "completely abnormal" (Beauvoir 1984, 418).  In The Coming of Age, Beauvoir distinguishes between two senses and two constitutive moments of selfhood, the self as the agent of cogito and the self (moi) as a transcendent object ("psychological pseudo-realities") (Beauvoir 1996, 291 and 398; cf. 1984, 420–21). I have argued elsewhere that, despite her loyalty to Sartre, she never accepted his early argument in his The Transformations of Old Age 173 these metaphorical tools become misleading if we conclude or imply that being aged is a performance, a social or cultural convention or an artificial production. Being old does not mean that we have agreed to play the role of the aged person or have taken this role on us in order to adjust to the reactions, requirements and expectations of others.We do not act old.Why would we? We submit to old age and become old (cf. Beauvoir 1996, 375 and 540). Beauvoir accounts for this paradoxical condition in Sartrean terms: she explains that we do not experience our age "in the for-itself mode" but encounter it in our being-for-others.14 According to her, the disparity comes from the fundamental fact that we learn to differentiate between youth and old age in the faces and bodies of others, and only later come to realize that this distinction also applies to our objectified selves.We do not immediately connect the quality of age to ourselves but by mediation, via our perceptions of others and the other's perceptions of us. Moreover, Beauvoir suggests that we can never relate this quality to our absolute being-for-ourselves (291). She states: "Old age is particularly difficult to assume because we have always regarded it as something alien, a foreign species: 'Can I have become a different being while I still remain myself?'" (283) The disparity that Beauvoir thematizes can be described more precisely in phenomenological terms in the following manner. The condition of "being old" concerns myself in so far as I am objectified as a perceivable and socially significant body, i.e., given to myself as part of the perceivable and instrumental world that is equally accessible to all agents. This objectified self is not the only aspect of my corporeality. In addition to it, and prior to it, I am given to myself as a touching-touched and moving-moved power. My primary corporeal self is neither a perceivable thing, given equally to all perceivers, nor an invaluable object of the communal world; rather my primary corporeal self is my lived body as it is constituted to me in tactile and kinesthetic sensations, in self-touching and in spontaneous movement.15 The disparity is thus between my body as an intersubTranscendence of the Ego that the ego is nothing but a transcendent object (Heinämaa 2003, 57– 61); cf. Björk 2008.  Also other types of conditions accentuate the tensions between being-for-oneself and beingfor-others, e.g., mental and physical sickness and injury, exceptional ugliness and beauty and different types of deformation. Cf. Jenny Slatman's phenomenological interpretation of bodyimplants (Slatman 2009; Slatman and Widdershoven 2010), and Gail Weiss' discourse on Siamese twins (2008).  Cf. Sartre 1998, 404–45; Merleau-Ponty 1995, 90–97; Husserl 1993, 86 and 152–58; Husserl 1970, 213–15. 174 Sara Heinämaa jectively given entity in the world and my body as the center of all my worldly attachments. My situation in the perceivable world and in my personal environment changes constantly, throughout my whole life: I am now here in Helsinki working in my office and yesterday I was in Lisbon swimming in the Atlantic. I was sick and now I am well. I have been tired and exhausted but now I am happy and energetic. All these qualities are given in different ways both to myself and to others, and due to my relations with others I also gain an external perspective on my states and qualities. Occasionally, my immediate self-givenness and my appearance in the intersubjective world may conflict. I may look tired but feel energetic; I may appear sad while just being attentive. Such partial conflicts do not usually mark any global, all-encompassing divergence between self-givenness and intersubjective appearance. Some events, however, inflict a comprehensive change or a crisis of existence. The fundamental equilibrium, established in childhood and youth between self-givenness and objective appearance, is then shaken (283–86). The bodily self that we grasp immediately and "internally" by sensations, movements and affects does not anymore correspond to the bodily self that we know "externally," by the mediation of others. In this sense my existential situation has changed. Beauvoir argues that the disparity that marks the event of becoming old is usually inflicted by the reactions of others. She claims that the revelation of aging comes often from outside and is always connected to my existence for others. "The aged person comes to feel that he is old by means of others, and without having experienced important changes; his inner being does not accept the label that has been stuck to him-he no longer knows who he is." (292) So according to Beauvoir, age concerns myself primarily insofar as I am for others. However, this objectified sense of self is not foreign to me or imposed on me, but is part of myself insofar as I live in relations with others and insofar as they take part in the constitution of the perceivable world with me (cf. Beauvoir 1984, 420–21).16 In other words, my external appearance does not remain outer or alien to me-it cannot-as it always already is included in my being in the world. Beauvoir emphasizes that no actual others, no scornful looks or pitiful talks, are needed to trigger the metamorphosis of aging. Our body-as it is given to us in our personal dealings with the world-always implies the look of the other. At the age of sixty, she writes, "Lou Andreas Salomé lost her hair after an illness: up  Cf. Beauvoir 1976, 55, 61, 71 and 91. Transformations of Old Age 175 until then she had felt 'ageless'" (1996, 287). To enter the metamorphosis of aging, it is enough that we experience a disparity between the two aspects of our bodies: our bodies as our familiar practical and expressive means of accessing the world, on the one hand, and our bodies as publicly observable objects of the world, on the other hand. The very same duality manifests itself abruptly already in the transformations of childhood and adolescence, but in old age it receives a specific function, that of announcing our death. The material objects that now fall off from our bodies, or appear on or in them, do not signal a rebirth, as they did in childhood and youth, but function as emblems of an ending: falling hair, cracking teeth, shaking spotted hands, dropped eyelids, thick yellow nails-shadows of our skull. It is worth studying more closely the givenness of these peculiar "things" which oddly belongs to our bodies but at the same time are alien to us,17 for they disclose something crucial about the metamorphosis of aging. My point is not that aging is restricted to such phenomena. In addition to them, it also involves drastic changes in our bodily powers and motor capacities. However, I believe that an important general feature about aging is more easily explicated by studying such ambivalent "body parts" than by focusing on the weakening of skills and capacities. This feature is the uncanny character of old age, its abnormal normality or "normal abnormality," as Beauvoir puts it. Distancing from Beauvoir's account, however, I want to argue that old age is not just given to us by the reactions of others and does not just concern our bodies-for-others but also involves changes in the habitual norms of lived bodiliness. So let us study how our most material body parts disclose themselves to us in the process of aging. When teeth, hairs and nails are separated from our sensing, living bodies, they function as full-fledged material objects accessible to all perceivers equally. They fall to the floor in the very same manner as any worldly objects, and their destruction does not cause any sensations of physical pain or distress in our bodies. Moreover, these objects can be observed, manipulated and studied from different viewpoints-both by ourselves and by others. Usually, they are handled as  Julia Kristeva's term "abject" captures nicely the ambivalent character of such "body parts": "A massive and sudden emergence of uncanniness, which, familiar as it might have been in an opaque and forgotten life, now harries me as radically separate, loathsome. Not me. Not that. But not nothing, either. A 'something' that I do not recognize as a thing. A weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant, and which crushes me. On the edge of non-existence and hallucination, of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me" (1984, 2). 176 Sara Heinämaa waste, but sometimes they are preserved as memories; and in the developmental processes of childhood they have great symbolic value.18 On the other hand, as long as our teeth, hair and nails remain functioning parts of our sensing living bodies, they do not appear to us as full-fledged objects but serve as locations and means of sensation and as practical tools. Our teeth, for example, are less sensitive to touch and warmth than our skin but they still have proprioception as well as sensations of pain; and even if we do not have any feeling in our hair, it is constantly given on the scalp by its weight, warmth, position, and movement. In respect to sensibility, the function of these bodily elements is more integral to personhood than the function of incorporated devices, such as clothes and tools. When we lose them, we have to adapt to a change in the system of sensibility. To be sure, such changes are alien and external to our freely willing self. My hair, for example, may block my vision, and my aching teeth may prevent me from focusing on reading and thinking. Thus our bodies and our body parts may appear as obstacles or hindrances to our freely chosen projects. Such experiences form an integral part of the phenomena of sickness and aging. In a similar way as an infected eye may prevent me from seeing things at a distance or at the margins of my normal visual environment, a dropped eyelid may also limit my familiar visual field. Weakness in legs may prevent me from running and dancing, and trembling hands cannot cut or hit as steady hands can. In all these cases, my body appears as alien or contrary to my willing self, but it is crucial to notice that this willing self is not completely independent or separated from all sensibility. Two factors in particular must be emphasized here: First, my present lived body and its parts may appear as hindrances but this is possible merely because my willing self is habituated to a different body, a sensing and moving self with larger powers and broader environments. My eyelids are given to me now as dropped because they used to be light; my legs appear as stiff and weak because they were able to perform far-reaching movements. So my present embodiment appears as faulty against the background of my previous mode of embodiment and not against a general form characteristic of humans or against a disembodied, purely spiritual will. Second,  In all these cases, our body parts function as cultural objects with cultural values and meanings, and thus they can be compared to utensils and ritualistic objects. It is important to notice, however, that our body parts can also serve as nutrition for animals. This means that there are perceiving subjects in our environment that treat or can treat our bodies and organs as material for their own natural organic functions. Moreover, the experience of breast feeding demonstrates that this type of objectification is not restricted to our relations with animals: human beings also consume the bodily fluids of other human beings. Transformations of Old Age 177 our weakening sense-organs and limbs are for us the necessary, although disappointing, means of accessing the practical and affective surrounding and monitoring the perceivable field. These sparse teeth are now our only means of masticating food; these eyes with falling eyelids are the ones that we have for seeing; these stiff crooked fingers and these trembling hands are our means of pointing, grasping and caressing, and the heavy legs are the ones that move us around in space. The bodily means now available divert from the norms of our habitual perception and movement and from their optima.19 Together they produce an "abnormal condition" (285), not in relation to any external standard-that of perceivable things, physical bodies or other similar selves-but in relation to the standards that we have established for ourselves in our perceptual-motor life.20 At the same time, however, they institute another norm and another optimum. Thus old age can rightly be called a "normal abnormality" (286). This analysis suggests that our mirror image is only secondarily infected by age. We cannot realize that we are old simply by staring at the mirror or at the faces of others; we must already feel, or suspect, that we have changed before we can detect and identify with our new appearance in the reflection. Here my analysis diverts from the main line of Beauvoir's discussion.21 This means that aging is a complex phenomenon, and not simply captured by the distinction between being-for-itself and being-for-others.We appear as old in several different but related and dependent, ways: by certain objectivities that belong to the shared world, by departures from intersubjective optima, by deviations from our own habitual norms and by the establishment of new norms. In The Coming of Age, Beauvoir's argues that the crisis of aging can be handled in several different ways, some more successful than others.22 She points  On the phenomenology of norms and normality, see Heinämaa 2012b.  In The Normal and the Pathological, Georges Canguilhem emphasizes that the constitution of new profound norms is typical to childhood. This means that the condition of the child can be compared to the condition of the sick, or the old, but should not be identified with either one of them. Such an identification is "an absurdity because it ignores that eagerness which pushes the child to raise itself constantly to new norms, which is profoundly at variance with the care to conserve which directs the sick person in his obsessive and often exhausting maintenance of the only norms of life within which he feels almost normal" (Canguilhem 1991, 189).  Interestingly, Beauvoir includes also this idea in her account but does not work out its implications. She writes: "we must already have some cause for uneasiness before we stand and study the reflection offered us by the looking-glass" (1996, 287).  The argument is very similar to the one that we find in The Second Sex where Beauvoir shows that the feminine condition can be lived in several different ways, some more "happy" than others: the narcissist, the woman in love, the mystic and the independent woman (1989, 629– 178 Sara Heinämaa out that we may live in different forms of self-deception clinging to our former habits and coining essences (362). Alternatively we can affirm the transformation and do the best possible with the means and capacities now available. We can also remain vacillating between our two modes of givenness-being for ourselves and being for others (291), or else we can try to find a new equilibrium between these two appearances and establish new norms for our self-relation and for our relations with others (cf. 540–43). In any case, a comprehensive change requires that we renew our engagement to our goals and values and to those of others. Beauvoir expresses this insight in The Coming of Age with the same resoluteness as in The Ethics of Ambiguity: There is only one solution if old age is not to be a derisory parody of our former existence, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our life a meaning-devotion to individuals, to collectives, to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work. ... One's life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion. (540–41/567; translation modified; cf. Beauvoir 1976, 67; Heinämaa 2012a) We have seen that the transformation of aging includes several phenomena: operative organs loose their liveliness and get overloaded by their materiality; our actions and performances come constantly short by common standards but also by our own standards of normality; others react to us in unexpected ways, and we ourselves find it hard to recognize our reflection in mirror. We certainly get old in the eyes of others, as Beauvoir argues, but at the same time, we also get old by a fundamental transformation of our own lived bodies. In addition to these bodily changes, external and internal, aging also involves a change in our temporal horizons of experiencing. Contrary to the common sense conception according to which aging means that our past grows and our future shrinks, I will develop in the following the Beauvoirian insight that aging affects both horizons equally and that it means, at worst, a collapse of the horizontal structure of lived time in whole. 715; cf. Heinämaa 2012a). These "justificatory types" should be compared with those that Beauvoir distinguishes in The Ethics of Ambiguity: the infantile, the serious, the nihilist, the adventurer, the passionate altruist and the artistic critic (ch. "Personal Freedom and Others," 1976, 35–73). I have clarified the Kierkegaardian background of this methodology of types in my Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference (2003); cf. Björk 2008. Transformations of Old Age 179 Temporality, Death, and Future Beauvoir's third insight concerns the temporality of old age. She argues that the metamorphosis of aging brings with a radical change in the temporal form of experiencing, that is, a change in the tripartite structure of past, present and future. She claims that both the lived future and the lived past undergo a fundamental change in this transformation: the future which has gaped open is suddenly closed, and the past which has felt light and vivid weights now heavy. The aged find themselves trapped between two monoliths: "A limited future and a frozen past" (378).23 Following Sartre, Beauvoir claims that the critical change in the metamorphosis of aging is the closure of the futural horizon. For the infant, the future is without limits (375–76). For the young person, the future is an infinite field for possible activities and happenings. The mature and the middle aged see the years in an indefinite series, coming one after another. The aged person, in contrast, is the one who is able to imagine an endpoint, and more: he is the one who sees an ending and must live in its proximity. The future has lost its stretch; life is finite; and each year, each day and each moment is framed by the idea of a final halt-impossible but inevitable24: [t]he very quality of the future changes between middle age and the end of one's life. At sixty-five one is not merely twenty years older than one was at forty-five. One has exchanged an indefinite future-that one tends to regard as infinite-for a finite future. In earlier days we could see no boundary-mark upon the horizon: now we do see one. (378/400, translation modified) The closure of the future is immediately reflected in the lessened dynamism of the past. As our futural projects shrink and shorten, as their time-span diminishes, they cannot support our contact with the past anymore. In order to posses our past, Beauvoir argues, we must bind it to existence by futural projects (361). When death comes to limit our time span, the narrative structure of our life breaks down and our memories flout free without temporal anchors. Finally, instead of being remembered, the past is relived and repeated in empty gestures. Beauvoir compares the final past to a wreck and describes its foundering as follows:  Cf. Beauvoir 1996, 416; Beauvoir 1984, 420.  For the idea of death as an impossible possibility, see Martin Heidegger's Being and Time (1992); cf. Heinämaa 2010a. 180 Sara Heinämaa As I was moving forward, so it was crumbling. Most of the wreckage that can still be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen: its meaning escapes me. Here and there, I see occasional pieces whose melancholy beauty enchants me. They do not suffice to populate this emptiness ... "the desert of the past." (365) Usually we describe old persons by saying that they have many years behind, a long existence or even a whole history (361). Beauvoir rejects this commonplace notion and argues that instead of accumulating, the past collapses in the last phases of our life. Objective accounts can attach a long history to each present, but this is possible only in the third-person perspective.25 For the aged themselves, the past is given in a completely different way. Rather than extending by length, it grows heavy, loses its flexibility and succumbs to an obscurity. The metaphors of weight and heaviness describe the experience more accurately than those of length: without the support of an open future, the living present cannot sustain the weight of the enormous past. Thus the whole structure of lived time trembles when the futural horizon is closing. This Beauvoirian analysis of aging renders the aged person as an anomaly. It must be emphasized, however, that the old age is not a paradox as such, but presents itself in this way in the conceptual framework that defines human subjectivity by freedom and transcendence.26 The aged person has come to the vicinity of a limit, which cannot be overcome (Beauvoir 1984, 420).27 Moreover, he must live in the nearness of this limit, and find or create meaning despite her inability to transcend death. Thus, his existence questions the idea of life as pure transcendence. Despite the negative tone of her descriptions, Beauvoir claims that meaningful life is possible at the frontier of death. She argues, however, that this possibility remains empty or merely conceptual unless we transform our individual and communal lives completely: Once we have understood what the state of the aged really is, we cannot satisfy ourselves with calling for a more generous "old-age policy", higher pensions, decent housing and organized leisure. It is the whole system that is at issue and our claim cannot be otherwise than radical-change life itself. (1996, 543) Beauvoir contends that in the nearness of death, our future horizon can open onto new dimensions. Our activities and projects can refer, trans-generationally,  Cf. Heinämaa 2010c, 81–85.  Cf. Beauvoir 1976, 70 and 90–91.  Cf. Beauvoir 1996, 371–72. Transformations of Old Age 181 to the lives of future others, successors and descendants, in several generations (379).28 However, according to Beauvoir, this possibility is merely conceptual for most of us. We may imagine such openings, and we can find them described in historical, anthropological and ethnographic sources, but when we look around in the present, we notice that such prospects are given merely to few exceptional or privileged individuals. The trans-generational futurity is not an essential possibility of all humans as Sartre suggests nor a structural feature of human life as Levinas argues in Time and the Other (1987) and Totality and Infinity (1994). Beauvoir's analysis suggests that it is merely a historical possibility, an option for some but not all: "Generally speaking," Beauvoir argues, implicitly challenging Levinas' view, "the father does not see himself in his son. Nothingness swallows him entirely" (1996, 380, translation modified).29 The trans-generational opening of the future is a cultural and historical variable for Beauvoir, and not a constant of human life. She points out that it has been, and still is, possible for some people in some cultures, but she asserts that in modern industrial and technological societies this type of futurity is an inessential exception. Only certain specific and rare practices allow the development of personal achievements and accomplishments which can operate as starting points for new projects, not just for ourselves but also for others who follow us in time. Beauvoir argues that in modernity all production is subjected to consumption and tends to become mechanical (1996, 380–82), and that only individuals engaged in highly intellectual or spiritual activities are able to project a future which transcends the prospects of immediate utility. She discusses five examples of such professions: the scientist, the philosopher, the writer, the artist and the politician (388–434). Only in these few professions, can personal time, already barred by death and weighted down by the past, reopen and retain its reference to the future of descendents and successors. The majority of old people live barren, deserted lives in isolation, repetition and boredom. Beauvoir's disillusioned view is almost devastating: Past events, acquired knowledge retain their place, but in a life whose fire has faded: they have been.When memory cracks, the events sink and vanish in a ridiculous darkness; life unravels stitch by stitch like a frayed piece of knitting, leaving nothing but formless strands of wool in the old person's hands. (539–40/566, translation modified)  Cf. Beauvoir 1976, 60. For Beauvoir's philosophy of futurity, see Heinämaa 2010b.  Cf. Levinas 1987, 91; 1994, 267; cf. Sartre 1985, 535–39. For Levinas' discourse of transgenerational relations, see Heinämaa 2010b. 182 Sara Heinämaa The insight that only privileged people can gain a future from younger generations is operative already in The Coming of Age. It is not fully explicated or defended by arguments but it is clearly stated and well articulated in a few forceful paragraphs. I have provided a systematic explication here and have developed Beauvoir's view further. I have done this, not only for exegetic reasons but more importantly for systematic ones: I believe that Beauvoir offers us a fresh insight which is more accurate than the analyses of Sartre and Levinas. Both Sartre and Levinas argue trans-generational future is a structural feature of human life, but Beauvoir challenges this notion and claims that this form of lived temporality is not a constant but is a variable dependent on historical and social parameters. In order to see this controversy more clearly, I will turn to a later text by Beauvoir, in which the topic of aging and time comes forth with a new acuteness. This is Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (La céremonie des adieux, 1981) that Beauvoir wrote after Sartre's death on the basis of her notebooks from the 1970 s. In The Coming of Age, the idea of trans-generational future is discussed in abstract terms, but in Adieux the topic has a concrete setting and a personal emphasis: Beauvoir argues against Sartre, who functions in the dialogue as the main topic but also as a lifelong philosophical companion and interlocutor already marked by death. At the end of June Sartre began to suffer cruelly from his tongue. He could neither eat nor speak without pain. I said to him, "Really, this is a horrible year; you have troubles all the time." "Oh, it doesn't matter," he replied. "When you're old it no longer has any importance." "How do you mean?" "You know it won't last long." "You mean because one's going to die?" "Yes. It's natural to come to pieces, little by little. When you're young, it's different." The tone in which he said this overwhelmed me; he already seemed to be on the far side of life. (Beauvoir 1984, 19)30 I will end my discussion of the metamorphosis of aging by studying how the idea of trans-generational future that Beauvoir introduced in The Coming of Age is developed by her in the farewell-dialogue with Sartre. By this extension, we can further our understanding of the evolution of Beauvoir's thought but more importantly we gain a better understanding of the constants and the variables of the phenomenon itself.  Cf. Beauvoir 1984, 131 and 445. Transformations of Old Age 183 The Adieux Adieux can rightly be called Beauvoir's last philosophical dialogue with Sartre. The book is composed of two parts. The first part is a notebook and a biography of the last ten years of Sartre's life, starting with the aggravating symptoms of Sartre's illness in 1970 and ending in Sartre's death in 1980. The second part consists of Beauvoir's philosophical and personal conversations with Sartre, made in August and September 1974. Sartre is already very sick and almost blind. Beauvoir invites him to discuss a variety of different topics, philosophical, literary, political and personal. Old age is one of them. The "conversations" function as a recording of Sartre's final thoughts but they also witness a dialogue between two thinkers. Beauvoir proposes a topic, one after the other; she asks questions, presents her position, and thus invites Sartre to present his own views. Sometimes the answer is short and definite, and the two proceed together to the next topic. At other occasions, Beauvoir presses Sartre and argues against him or refuses to abandon a problem that she finds important. The themes of the conversations range from concrete to abstract and they move between the personal to the universal: work, writing and thinking; novelists and philosophers31; food, eating and sexuality; life, birth and death; politics, freedom and equality; memory and recollection; childhood and old age. The two last conversations focus on the topic of human life. Beauvoir starts by asking Sartre how he sees his "life as a whole" (1984, 425). Sartre answers by outlining a basic structure of human life that opens in birth and closes in death, but interestingly he also describes a final phase of old age in which life broadens toward the intersubjective and the universal: Generally, I see not only my life but all lives roughly in this way-a threadlike beginning that slowly broadens with the acquisition of knowledge and the earliest experiences, adventures, and a whole range of feelings. Then from a certain age that varies according to the person, partly because of himself, partly because of his body, and partly because of circumstances, life moves toward its close, death being the final closing as birth was the opening. But as I see it this time of closure is accompanied by a continual broadening toward the universal. A man of fifty or sixty who is traveling toward death, is at the same time learning and also experiencing a certain number of relations with others and with society, relations that grow wider and wider. (1984, 425–26)  Sartre and Beauvoir discuss the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Camus, but also Proust, Gide, Genet and Flaubert. 184 Sara Heinämaa Here Sartre proposes that, in the nearness of death, a new intersubjectivity and through it a new futurity is constituted for the aging person. The perspective of the young and the mature adult are broadened and opened, and as a result the time of the experiencing subject can refer in a new way to the lived times of other diachronic subjects. Sartre's reflection suggests that this is a structural feature, a constant, of all human life: facing the impossible possibility of its own cessation, the singular human life opens onto the universal and futural humanity. He continues: A certain form moves forward its completion, and at the same time the individual acquires knowledge or patterns of thought ... that go in the direction of universality. He acts either in favor of a certain society or for its preservation, or in favor of the creation of another society. And this society will perhaps only appear after his death. In any event its development will take place after his death. In the same way most of the undertakings [projects] that concern him in the last part of his life will be successful if they are carried on after his death ... but will come to nothing if they end before it. (426) In another section, Sartre describes a naïve notion that he had of his existence in his early adult years. He believed that he could gain eternity by his literary and philosophical creations. He describes this notion as a secularized version of the Christian idea of immortality and explains that he rejected it already by his concept of committed writing (152–53).32 Motivated by the social and political turn in his thinking, Sartre now entertains the idea that we can choose to participate in long-term communal projects in which our successors continue and prolong our work for common goods or universal ends. In Adieux, he makes clear that such sharing is possible only in political and social activities, that is, in activities that are co-operative by definition. Whereas artistic creations remain tied to individual and personal interests, political and social activities point beyond the limits of one's personal life. Sartre summarizes his mature view by claiming that "there is a future that lies beyond death and that almost turns death into an accident in the individual's life, a life that goes on without him" (426). He seems to think that this is a general possibility, an option open in principle to all humans, even if realized only by few. Beauvoir intervenes here and points out that Sartre's "general" description applies merely to certain "privileged people" (426). She claims that in modernity,  Cf. Beauvoir 1984, 413. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir attributes this attitude to the personal type that she calls "the adventurer". She writes: "When he dies, the adventurer will be surrendering his whole life into the hands of men; the only meaning it will have will be the one they confer upon it. He knows this since he talks about himself, often in books" (Beauvoir 1976, 63). Transformations of Old Age 185 trans-generational future is possible but merely for intellectuals and artists such as Sartre and herself. For most people, all productive and creative activities with long futural perspectives and intersubjective bearing end with retirement, and the world as a whole is replaced by a shrinking personal environment. Old age, she states, rarely has the enlarging or broadening form that Sartre describes (426). In the light of these paragraphs, it seems to me that Beauvoir's understanding of the futurity of human life differs from the accounts offered by her contemporaries.Whereas Sartre and Levinas describe the trans-generational opening as a structural feature of human existence, Beauvoir argues that this type of temporality is not given with humanity but achieved in certain specific modes of co-existence. It is not a constant of the human condition but a variable. Beauvoir's view is informed by her historical comparisons but also by her sensitivity to personal, social and cultural differences. In Adieux it is accentuated by the contrast to Sartre's conception. The methodological lesson that we can learn from this interchange is that historical, cultural and interpersonal comparisons assist critical philosophical reflections by challenging our preconceptions of human nature. The work on free variation that aims at identifying the structural features of experience is not any armchair activity but is a demanding exercise that requires that we question our conceptions repeatedly. Exchange with empirical science and with history and the arts is indispensable since it strengthens our imagination and cures us of the overestimation of our own capacities of fantasizing. Conclusions I have argue$$, on the basis of Beauvoir's remarks, that experientially aging involves three characteristic factors that concern our whole existence and affect our conscious life in a comprehensive way. This implies that aging has a philosophical significance and that it cannot, as a phenomenon, be adequately handled by empirical life-sciences or social sciences. The three existential facts about aging explicated in this essay are the following: First, aging as a phenomenon is not a slow gradual alteration but is a sudden and thorough transformation. Second, aging affects our bodily self in its two central dimensions: we change both in our bodily being-for-others and in our being-for-ourselves. And finally aging does not just diminish our future expectations but also problematizes our relation to our own past. Thus understood, aging is a fundamental and all-inclusive personal metamorphosis and is not a contingent change in our outer appearance or social role. Further, the analysis implies that human life 186 Sara Heinämaa is not a continuous process of generation, blooming and decay, comparable to the life of a plant, but includes a series of radical transformations in which the self is lost and regained.33 References Bachelard, Suzanne. 1968. A study of Husserl's formal and transcendental logic. Trans. Lester Embree. 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