Sciences of Aging and Anti-aging in Modernity

This chapter focuses on the sciences of aging. For biomedicine perceives of aging as a pathological problem tied to discourses of decline and dependency. The medical science “problem” approach to aging can be related to how human subjectivity was structured as occidental modernity crystallized, when, beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the “social sciences,” industrial capitalism, and bureaucratic politics simultaneously developed novel ways of objectifying individuals and populations in Western societies. The emergence of Western rationality was accompanied by a growth of scientific traditions such as positivism, each intellectualizing the nature and extent of individuality. Empirical observation, reason, and science are major themes of the modernist project. This is a set of beliefs about validating knowledge that has consolidated modernism.