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Human aging seems quite straightforward: a mere consequence of the passing of time. However, aging poses many conceptual problems, and some of the most basic of these questions have to do with understanding what it means to live in time and to live time. A popular way to approach aging is to categorize it according to age as time since birth. This assumes that aging develops in synchrony with chronometric time, which is discredited by a vast amount of empirical results that underline the many differences between persons of the same ages. In a response to this false assumption, there have been attempts to discover intrinsic clocks of aging that, unfortunately, presuppose that human aging can be understood as a closed system that evolves over time, undisturbed by contextual influences. Besides such objectifying approaches to human aging, there have been approaches that acknowledge the participatory perspectives of human action and experience. These two main approaches are often opposed to each other as objectifying versus personalizing approaches, which continues a long tradition in which chronometric time has been opposed to lived time. Following Ricoeur, narrative emplotment has been suggested as a way to acknowledge, interrelate, and articulate both perspectives, in a quest to learn more about that seemingly simple process of human aging.

DOI: 10.1057/978-1-137-39356-2_5

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