by Dr. Michael Mawson, Senior Lecturer in Systematic Theology & Ethics and Research Fellow in the Public and Contextual Theology Research Centre at Charles Sturt University, Australia.
What is the significance of human aging—especially of our bodily and cognitive decline—for who and what we are as human beings? In what ways should we draw upon and make use of technology(s) for negotiating aging and its negative effects? How does this use of technology itself begin to shape how we understand and experience ourselves as aging beings?
In my ongoing work on these questions, I recently came across a short book by the Austrian-born philosopher and essayist Jean Améry: On Aging: Revolt and Resignation (1968). Améry’s book consists of five essays, each of which engages a different aspect of aging: ‘aging human beings in relation to time, to their own bodies, to society, to civilisation, ultimately to death.’ (xxii). Central to Améry's work, as the English translator summarizes, ‘is his determination to look at the phenomenon of aging without blinking, to assess it without sentimentalizing, consoling, or mincing words about the horrible nature of what he sees’ (xviii). In what follows I summarise a few of Améry’s key insights, and then suggest how these might complicate some of our standard ways of appealing to technology for responding to aging.