Anility and time. Beyond the self-realisation

Abstract

The philosophy of age is mostly an inquiry into the temporal parameters of human existence. The aim of this article is to review the senile temporality as qualitatively different in time production (chronopoesy) from the temporality of youth and maturity. To achieve this I have considered different types of senile chronopoesy, especially its most radical version (eschatologic time), which correlates with chronoaesthetics of the decrepit and Christian Messianic time. As a result, I managed to identify the main conditions of transformation of time production while aging. I considered the problem, using comparative analysis, in the perspective of the methodological horizon of hermeneutics phenomenology (analytics of Dasein). The results of the study can be reduced to several points. The reduction of ‘age’ and ‘inner age’ future that requires an answer from Dasein determines a shift in the human temporality and configures the particular senile temporality. Changes are the most significant if man accepts his life as meaningfully completed, and the will to Other (that is good on its own) replaces the will for particular achievements (i. e., self-realisation). Goal-setting and the production of over situational temporality persist in eschatologic senility, while ‘heroic’, ‘finishing’ and petty senilities have no big goals and only situational temporality, uncompensated by the verticalization of temporality (by the orientation to the Other). The period between the substantial and physical eschatons is kindred to the time or the aesthesis of the decrepit and the Messianic time of Christian historiosophy as they all are forms of the present (end time). End time is an intransitive present, free from the past and future, correlated with the Other (that is timeless). Once started, it never ends and never become past until the end of the life.