Uma análise existencialista sobre a velhice e o contraponto ontológico-materialista ao existencialismo

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the phenomenon of old age in Simone de Beauvoir and make a counterpoint to Existentialism through historical-dialectical materialism. This is a bibliographical research which had as its methodological resource the immanent text analysis and was based on the Marxian materialist ontological perspective and the works: The Old Age (1990), by Simone de Beauvoir, Realism and Existentialism (1960) and Prolegomena and For the Ontology of Social Being (2018), both by George Lukács; and Carlos Nelson Coutinho‘s The Structuralism and the Misery of Reason (1972). The text is structured in three sections: in the first two we carefully approach the fundamental elements treated by Beauvoir about old age and in the last section we make a critique of Existentialism starting from Lukács and Coutinho, and thus we return to the main elements and categories present in the existentialist tendency of Simone de Beauvoir showing the counterpoint to her thinking. For the author, aging refers to a process of decline which must be analyzed in its multiple biological, psychological, social and existential aspects, which are articulated in an indefinite movement, not fitting general definitions of what is old age in itself. Beauvoir‘s thought highlights the field of ideas, conceives human phenomena from the meanings and points of view that individuals elaborate. Thus, knowledge is limited to contingent and variable data, depending on the immediate circumstances of individual experiences. As part of the existentialist current, the author overestimates the individual, takes the outside world as a fortuitous scenario in which the subject will realize his purely abstract and subjective freedom. It conceives of old age in a pessimistic way identifying it as a ―fatality‖, leaving the elderly individual with only an inner and subjective protest, given the roles and statutes imposed by the adult majority. Given the limitations apprehended in the existentialist analysis of old age we affirm the relevance of historical-dialectical materialism to the knowledge of human phenomena. Since such perspective apprehends the category of totality, dialectic and is directed to the knowledge of the object itself as a reality independent of consciousness with immanent laws and relationships that go beyond its immediate appearance. Only historical-dialectical materialism articulates freedom and necessity and conceives of history as a complex process in which individuals participate in its construction but do not suppress the objective causality of the natural and social world. Instead of falling into pessimism, such a methodological perspective apprehends that thought is the product of objective reality and at the same time can contribute to praxis and indicate paths for its transformation.