Starting from a Metaphor: Phenomenology of the Status of Inertia

Abstract

My paper highlights some meanings of the metaphor of aging, used by André Gorz (1923-2007) in his homonymous article published in Les Temps Modernes in December 1961 and January 1962, the first part of which was republished by Gallimard in 2005 (copyright Éditions Galilée in 2004) as a coda to the new edition of one of his "most philosophical" pieces, The Traitor (1958), as noted by Christophe Fourel in André Gorz, a thinker for the 21st century (Éditions La Découverte, 2009, p. 10). Aging is a process based on inertia and generating – because aging also generates – more and more inertia. But what kind of inertia, that of continuing the movements testifying to the vivacity of body and mind, or that of resisting them, therefore of stopping the rest, of flowing into it while forgetting the previous momentum? To the healthy young man of 36, the metaphor of aging appears to have a bitter correspondence with the shock of suddenly feeling the end of existence while living it. The well-known tripartite division of life – childhood youth, maturity, old age – has been transformed into the youth, old age diptych because maturity itself has become the negation of youth, not a mere stable state but already a slope, a masked old age, a fact. If yet young, "he started over again" (André Gorz, The traitor, followed by The aging, p. 377) that is to say, he was the author of audacious movements that took into account only his aspirations of creativity, aging requires of him only the qualities that conform to the specific roles that are asked of him and that are expected to be assumed without the slightest doubt. The phenomenology of this becoming, meticulously dissected, envisages not only the transformation of the unique being who is the subject of the story (but not the master of the phenomenological approach as such because he is desperate before "the cowardice" of his “free choice” of “integration” into the anonymity of the “Others” producing the society which imposes this decline on him (“Aging (II)”, Les Temps Modernes, nº 188, January 1962, p. 829- 852 (830-832). Because the picture of the individual, torn between his existential resistance against all the factors that impose inertia and, on the other hand, the conformism that has become "his nature", extends into the representation of society which is the counterweight to this individual and at the same time frames him. The development of the metaphor of aging has involved the phenomenology of its elements, among which the principal, inertia, and the phenomenology itself has generated messages of social philosophy, pioneers of the powerful ideas commented on in the philosophical thought of the decades later. The phenomenology of the text is and describes awareness, namely the awakening of consciousness, and the metaphor is a manifestation of this process. The metaphor of the aging of the individual thus resonates with the theoretical descriptions of crises and decadence, of degeneration: here, of the capitalist society. The construction of André Gorz is a suggestive model. Today our conclusion in front of such models can only forget the hypocritical criticisms of the phases of the decline, indeed accomplices for their persistence: and, thus, to learn from the previous models. But, it must be emphasized, the metaphor of inertia refers to the awareness of the limits of the figurative meanings of such – and these – metaphors. The awareness of the text is an awareness of metaphors, too, and thus, they become means of intellectual resistance for man.