Abstract
My focus in this text is not the general notion of vulnerability (although it is important), but how one feels vulnerable. (1) In the first part, I will sketch the structure of such an emotional experience. (2) Then, I will try to explain why the recognition of another’s vulnerability is important in regard to emotional agency, emphasizing the difference between this kind of recognition and similar experience of empathy and social recognition. (3) In the third section, I will concentrate on the question of intersubjectivity of (mutual) recognition. However, I think that there is an inherent normative gap between the ideal of universal intersubjective mutual recognition with respect to emotional agency and the fact that in the social realm this recognition rests on culturally and socially dependent criteria of adequacy for such emotional experience. Moreover, the mentioned gap could put some persons in a situation (emotional exclusion) in which they don’t have a ‘right’ to feel vulnerable in their own way. (4) In the conclusion, I try to offer some practical possibilities to bridge this gap through emotion-oriented environmental structures.
Keywords
- Sense of inability
- Empathy
- Emotional exclusion
- Vulnerability
- Joint engagement
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- 1.
The concept of hodological spaces was applied previously by Kurt Lewin to explain the phenomenal perception of the world (Lewin 1938).
- 2.
Emotions were first explained as engagements with the world in a text by Robert C. Solomon, in which he defended his understanding of emotions as judgments. Solomon argued that from his perspective emotions are intentional, not primarily being ‘about’ something (like beliefs), but instead practically entangled in the world: ‘The scholastic concept of “intentionality” was also an attempt to make this explicit, to insist that the emotions are always “about” something (their intentional object). Thus, judgments have intentionality, but I think that the traditional notion of intentionality—and, I now suspect, the concept of judgment, too—still lacks the keen sense of engagement that I see as essential to emotions, keeping in mind that thwarted or frustrated engagements characterize many emotions. Emotions are not just about (or “directed to”) the world but actively entangled in it’ (Solomon 2004). Thus, engagement with the world here stresses a specific kind of intentionality—affective intentionality—which differs from the usual cognitivist notion of ‘aboutness’ insofar as it presupposes practical commitment.
- 3.
Salmela and von Sheve (2017).
- 4.
I thank Achim Stephan for the thesis that the criteria of adequacy of the formal object is socially and culturally dependent (2017).
- 5.
Ivković (2017, p. 78).
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Cvejić, I. (2021). Feeling Vulnerable: Interpersonal Relatedness and Situatedness. In: Rodríguez Lopez, B., Sánchez Madrid, N., Zaharijević, A. (eds) Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60519-3_6
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