Gail Weiss (Professor of Philosophy and Human Sciences, George Washington University)

The ‘Normal Abnormalities’ of Disability and Aging: Merleau-Ponty and Beauvoir

“What is so disconcerting about old age,” Beauvoir maintains in The Coming of Age, “is that normally it is an abnormal condition.” (Beauvoir 1996: 285)  The “abnormality” of old age, she argues, is not due to anything inherently pernicious about elderly bodies or about the aging process itself, but rather to persistent societal prejudices against the elderly who “are looked upon as an inferior species.” (Beauvoir 1996: 286)   As she previously illustrated with respect to women’s bodies in The Second Sex, Beauvoir once again presents her readers with a common experience that exposes a phenomenological anomaly, namely, normal aging bodies that are viewed (by themselves as well as by others) as abnormal. 

In the Phenomenology of Perception,  Merleau-Ponty also challenges conventional understandings of normality and abnormality by arguing that allegedly “abnormal” human beings who have sustained serious physical and psychical injuries or who have congenital conditions that result in non-normative styles of perception, motor abilities, and/or language must not be regarded as a species apart from the “normal” individual but instead enable us to arrive at a better understanding of perceptual norms and how they are intersubjectively constructed.  Asserting that, “specifically intellectual disturbances, those of judgment and meaning- cannot be considered ultimate deficiencies. . .” Merleau-Ponty suggests that while for the “normal” person, cognitively-impaired individuals’ experiences may seem impoverished, these individuals continue to inhabit space and time in meaningful ways even if the significance they attribute to their experience is markedly different than that which the “normal” person attributes to it. 

In this paper, I draw upon both Beauvoir’s and Merleau-Ponty’s work to argue that rejecting pathologizing attitudes towards elderly and disabled people is a necessary step to developing a more accurate and more ethical understanding of the richness and diversity of bodily norms.

Gail Weiss is Professor of Philosophy and Human Sciences at The George Washington University.  Her areas of specialization include phenomenology and existentialism, feminist theory, and philosophy of literature.  She is the author of Refiguring the Ordinary (Indiana U. Press, 2008), Body Images: Embodiment as Intercorporeality (Routledge 1999), editor of Intertwinings: Interdisciplinary Encounters with Merleau-Ponty (SUNY 2009) and co-editor of Feminist Interpretations of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Penn State Press 2006), Thinking the Limits of the Body (SUNY 2003) and Perspectives on Embodiment: The Intersections of Nature and Culture (Routledge 1999). She is currently completing a monograph entitled, Beauvoir’s Ambiguities: Philosophy, Literature, and Feminism and has published numerous journal articles and book chapters on philosophical and feminist issues related to human embodiment.

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