THE OPENNESS OF VULNERABILITY AND RESILIENCE

Abstract

A positive reconceptualization of vulnerability involves a number of levels of inquiry; arguably, a fundamental or, at least, central level is the phenomenology of vulnerability with which I am concerned in my paper. By drawing on existential phenomenology and by engaging with Pamela Sue Anderson’s positive account of vulnerability, I develop a phenomenological conception of vulnerability as “openness” and pursue it in new directions which connect it to the metaphysics and epistemology of vulnerability. This approach brings to the fore the possibility of resilience in the face of serious adversities which affect our lives, and draws some ethical implications in relation to this. I engage with recent work in the area of the phenomenology of illness to elaborate certain parts of the investigation.

Keywords:

• phenomenology
• vulnerability
• resilience
• understanding
• illness

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

This is a revised version of my presentation given to the conference in honour and memory of Pamela Sue Anderson to whom the paper is dedicated. I am grateful to Adrian W. Moore for his comments and suggestions, and to Pelagia Goulimari for editorial help and support. Thanks are due also to members of the audience at the conference for some excellent discussion.

1 This is a view pursued recently by philosophers such as Pamela Sue Anderson in her work on vulnerability and Havi Carel in her philosophy of illness. In the last two years of her life, while she was fighting cancer, Anderson developed a life-enhancing, ethical approach to vulnerability understood as openness to affection and, more specifically, love. Following her diagnosis of a serious, life-threatening respiratory illness, Havi Carel has developed a complex and thorough phenomenological investigation of illness, which can be understood as a form of bodily vulnerability. Both philosophers’ lives display an extraordinary resilience.

2 My eclectic approach draws on Pamela Sue Anderson’s view of vulnerability as openness and Martin Heidegger’s ontological phenomenology of “openness” in general.

3 See Anderson, “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability.” In her work on vulnerability, Anderson focuses on such an ethical approach and its political implications.

4 I take over the phrase “dark myth” from Anderson. I draw here on her “Towards a New Philosophical Imaginary.”

5 See Tuana.

6 Anderson, “Towards a New Philosophical Imaginary” 9; see also her “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability.”

7 The notion of “intersectionality” has been developed by relatively recent feminist thinking in order to redefine the notion of gender and power relations informing it. I think it can be usefully employed to tackle the complexity of the notion of vulnerability.

8 See especially Anderson, “Arguing for ‘Ethical’ Vulnerability”; “Towards a New Philosophical Imaginary”; “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability.”

9 Anderson, “Towards a New Philosophical Imaginary” 8.

10 Anderson, “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability.”

11 See Dotson.

12 An interesting example can be found in Fulford, “Values-Based Practice”; “Facts/Values.”

13 See Anderson, “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability.”

14 Cf. Hornsby.

15 Tuana 3.

16 I draw here on Tuana and on Anderson’s engagement with it (in Anderson, “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability”), but use a phenomenological approach.

17 Spelman.

18 Anderson, “Silencing and Speaker Vulnerability.”

19 For this sketch of the concept of understanding at issue here, I continue to draw on Heidegger, and to some extent also on A.W. Moore’s notion of “making sense of things” and his discussion of ineffable knowledge. See Moore, Evolution 5–6; “Ineffability and Religion”; Points of View 175–76.

20 I owe this phrase to Stephen Mulhall. See Mulhall 293.

21 Carel 45.

22 Ibid. 68.

23 Ratcliffe 8.

24 Carel 94.

25 Ibid. 105.