Abstract
Shame in the deep sense of fear of exposure of human vulnerability (and not in the narrower sense of individual transgression or fault) has been identified as one mood or disposition of philosophical thinking. Philosophical imaginary, disciplinary identity and misogynistic vocabulary testify to a collective, underlying, unprocessed shame inherent to the (Western) philosophical tradition like Le Doeuff (1989), Butler (2004) and Murphy (2012) have pointed out. One aspect of collective philosophical shame has to do with disgust of or denial of embodiment insofar as it poses a threat to ideals of sovereignty and rationality (Nussbaum 2006). Embodiment reveals finitude, being dependent and exposed to others (Sartre 1984; Merleau-Ponty 2012; Landweer 1999; Zahavi 2014), and ultimately points to human vulnerability as rooted in an experience of fear of shame (Gilson 2016). If the inability to process shame of embodiment has resulted in disembodied notions of the human being that may lead to defensiveness, aggression or violence, how can a constructive processing of shame based on an embodied notion of the human being result in a way of philosophical thinking that is more vulnerable? And how can philosophical thinking that has its point of departure in vulnerability, neither in the sense of the victim nor the hero but as a self-conscious emotion, lead to philosophical dialogues that can unsettle vicious cycles of shaming and blaming and are productive for deepening philosophical reflection? Susan Brison’s (2002) work on sexual violence will finally be discussed as an example of such a philosophy.
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Notes
For a discussion of constructive effects of processing individual shame, see J. Deonna, F. Rodogno and F. Teroni, In Defence of Shame: The Faces of an Emotion, 2011.
For a broader discussion see Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir, Vulnerable in a Job Interview. Butler’s relational Ontology as a Response to (Neo)liberalism, University of Iceland, School of Humanities, Dissertation 2018.
This paper is written within the project, Embodied Critical Thinking, www.ect.hi.is that researches (1) how the embodied and entangled being-in-the-world is the ground from where we think critically. (2) ECT researchers explore (interact with) an embodied space of meaning, in which the fresh precision of experiential processes is as important and relevant for the philosophical discourse as arguments are. (3) ECT explores what this means in terms of what we think and how we think, in terms of academic practices as well as in terms of educational practices.
An example for a methodology of accessing knowledge stored in lived experience that can yield new insight and knowledge for research and theory is microphenomenology. See Petitmengin 2007.
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Thanks to Anna Gottlib, Steinunn Hreinsdottir and Donata Schoeller for critical comments on this paper.
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Thorgeirsdottir, S. Shame, Vulnerability and Philosophical Thinking. SOPHIA 59, 5–17 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-020-00773-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11841-020-00773-w