Age, subjectivity and the concept of subjective age: A critique

This paper presents a critique and proposes a reformulation of the concept of subjective age. It questions the nature of ‘subjectivity’ used in framing the concept and the consequent failure to distinguish between ‘subjectivity’ and ‘self-identity’. I argue that age is not easily framed as a phenomenal (for-me) experience and that it is at least questionable whether aging or agedness possess what might be termed a ‘first-person’ subjectivity. What is usually referred to as ‘subjective age’ can be better understood as an aspect of an individual's self-categorisation or self-schema, derived less from its experiential aspect than from its widespread use as an identifier of people's social being – their they-self. Understood as part of a person's self-schema, ‘subjective age’ is less a subjective than an inter-subjective construct, reflecting one's place in society. Many of the correlates and consequences of ‘subjective age’ reflect a more general self-evaluation, derived from the network of inter-subjective relations in both system and life world experience, rather than the phenomenal experiences of embodied age. Integrating research on self-categorisation and social identity with ‘self-perceived’ age offers a clearer conceptual base from which to study subjective age, leaving the thornier question of the subjectivity of age to students of aging in the humanities and human sciences