The distinctiveness of human aging I: Anthropological and developmental foundations

Abstract While aging is a general phenomenon that characterizes virtually all species, human aging entails mechanisms of stability and change that comprise distinct or unique features of the species homo sapiens. Such mechanisms occur in two interrelated but analytically distinguishable domains, an ontogenetic domain encompassing distinctly flexible structural features of the human organism (world-openness, hard-wiring for flexibility), and the other focused on humans’ uniquely dynamic relation to the environment, encompassing both internalizing processes (habituation) and generative activity (world-construction, imagination). Given this dynamic foundation, biological aging is an incomplete process, which requires human actors to create and sustain the life-worlds they inhabit, worlds which comprise the conditions within which their own aging is constituted and reproduced. The result is the manifest empirical reality of marked cultural and historical variations in human patterns of aging. This means that those who seek to understand human aging must carefully consider how its constitutive dynamics are embedded in culturally and historically specific contexts.