Love and Vulnerability

Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson

Pelagia Goulimari

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000330816
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie de la philosophie

Love and Vulnerability: Thinking with Pamela Sue Anderson developed out of the desire for dialogue with the late feminist philosopher Pamela Sue Anderson's extraordinary, previously unpublished, last work on love and vulnerability. The collection publishes this work for the first time, with a diverse, multidisciplinary, international range of contributors responding to it, to Anderson's oeuvre as a whole and to her life and death.

Anderson's path-breaking work includes A Feminist Philosophy of Religion (1998) and Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion: Reason, Love and Epistemic Locatedness (2012). Her last work critiques, then attempts to rebuild, concepts of love and vulnerability. Reason, critical self-reflexivity, emotion, intuition and imagination, myth and narrative all have a role to play. Social justice, friendship, conversation, dialogue, collective work are central to her thinking.

Contributors trace the emergence of Anderson's late thinking, extend her conversations with the history of philosophy and contemporary voices such as hooks and Butler, and bring her work into contact with debates in theology; Continental and analytic philosophy; feminist, queer and transgender theory; postcolonial theory; African-American studies. Discussions engage with the Me Too movement and sexual violence, climate change, sweatshops, neoliberalism, death and dying, and the nature of the human.

Originally published as a special issue of the journal, Angelaki, this large, wide-ranging collection, featuring a number of distinguished contributors, makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning interdisciplinary research on interpersonal relations, sympathy and empathy, affect and emotion.

VULNERABLE AND INVULNERABLE

two faces of dialectical reasoning

sabina lovibond

In her most recent work, my sadly missed friend Pamela Sue Anderson was engaged in a creative rethinking of the facts of "mutual vulnerability in philosophical relations.”¹ The idea of vulnerability usually has negative connotations: to be vulnerable is to be exposed to violence. In order to follow Pamela here, however, we have to think of it as potentially positive too — that is, as a condition of openness to the love of one’s neighbour, and as an ability to form “bonds of affection that would enhance life,” as Paul Ficldes puts it in a helpful commentary.²For certain academic purposes, a valuable approach to the formation of such bonds may be found by venturing out of the study or library and towards a more collective way of working, as advocated in particular by Michele Le Doeuff in her classic paper “Women and Philosophy.”³ This is a source from which Pamela will have drawn abundant inspiration, not least because she and Michfele had a track record of collaboration extending over many years.

Of course, any attempt to picture the experience of vulnerability as life-enhancing may initially strike us as fanciful, or as lacking in sensitivity to life’s “harsh realities.”⁴ Pamela is aware of this difficulty, but wants to take a step back and derive some general existential insight from our particular moments of disorientation and abjection – to give due weight to the ever-present possibility of being cut loose by one’s audience when one presumes to speak; of being ridiculed or ignored. This involves a bold imaginative projection on to the recognized bearers of intellectual authority of the kind of thing that happens routinely to people who don’t look or sound right for the setting in which they undertake to express themselves – for example, by reason of skin colour (like bell hooks⁵); or by simply being female, which seems to be at the root of Pamela’s appalling account of the quasi-pornographic humour, or pornographic quasi-humour, she met with herself on a visit to the philosophy department at one of our leading universities.⁶ An admonition is, in effect, being issued here. Don’t forget, master-thinkers: no one is in a place of absolute safety as regards credibility; you, too, depend on the civil and respectful attitude of those you are addressing, an attitude which you perhaps take for granted; you might dowell toask yourselves how it would be if this were withdrawn.

I want to suggest that Pamela’s embrace of the idea of vulnerability, or of the “precarious-ness” of life, can be understood – at any rate in its application to philosophy – as pointing to our alienation from the founding values of the discipline we are supposed to be practising: that is, from philosophical enquiry in the tradition we inherit from Plato. As I will try to explain, what I have inmind is notthe transient experience of some kind of sour mood but a general or structural condition of alienation.

Again, this suggestion may appear counterintuitive. Some of Pamela’s remarks on the emotional incentives at work in philosophy sound highly critical in relation to the mainstream: for example, when she says that “Striv-ing for invulnerability – whether as the man with a gun for ‘self-protection’ or the philosopher with an argument for his shield against his vulnerability – puts us at a serious human risk. And it misses the opportunity that vulnerability canoffer.”⁷ The secriticisms are far from being groundless. It is true that military imagery (the ideal of immunity to any possible attack) is in the forefront of Plato’s mind as he develops his world-historic conception of “dialectic”–thatis, “conversation”inaspecial-ized sense, capable of leading us to the stable possession of truth. Most importantly,

If a man can’t define the form of the good and distinguish it clearly in his account, and then battle his way through all objections [hôsper en machêi dia pantôn elenchôn diexiôn], determined to give them refutation based on reality and not opinion, and come through with his argument unshaken, you wouldn’t say he knew what the good in itself was, or indeed any other good.⁸

This quest for argumentative “immunity” is obviously informed by an awareness that our current opinions or modes of reasoning may turn out to be faulty – and hence vulnerable to attack – in all kinds of unforeseen ways. If that is the case, we must be prepared to amend them accordingly, or to get rid of them. (There is no disgrace in changing one’s mind; only, one should try to do so lucidly and not in a way that generates muddle.⁹) But the point of these principles is to guide one towards an epistemic condition that will remain “unshaken” by any further criticism.¹⁰

And yet it is worth looking back at the ordin-ary(incomplete,imperfect)paradigm of conver-sation from which this idealized version emerges. What could be more “vulnerable” than the sacrificial figure of Socrates – and this, too, is a Platonic construct – who does not claim to know anything, since he concludes that “human wisdom has little or no value” and that the closest we can come to wisdom is to achieve an awareness of our own incapacity? And who claims to have dedicated his life to the service of God – even at the price of being reduced to extreme poverty?¹¹ Others may represent themselves as experts and earn fees for their teaching, but Socrates’ contribution consists in the much less marketable activity of discrediting various people’s false intellectual pretensions, an activity which (in principle, at least) does not even lend itself to impressive speeches but relies on the succinct exchange of question and answer.¹² I think it is fair to say that the attitude celebrated here, through the portrayal of Socrates as intellectual gadfly with no worldly status to defend, is precisely one of vulnerability – not just because it will never make him rich, but also by virtue of his acceptance of a state of constant exposure to the hazards of criticism and refutation; and fair to say, too, that the recommended mode of enquiry is collective – the quest for understand-ing in a setting of affectionate, often homoerotic friendship, though this can always be disrupted by scornful and hostile intruders. At all events, “Socrates” as we meet him at his trial seems to gesture towards those very realities of philosophical discussion – the contingency of our social experience, the chronic negativity and inconclusiveness of what is achieved – which “Socrates” in the Republic is seeking to transcend.

There are these two sides to the dialectical encounter as pictured at the outset of our tradition: on one hand the confession ofignorance, aporia, being-at-a-loss; on the other, the desire to rise above or escape from that state, to be no longer at a loss because rendered immune through critical discussion to the objections that could be levelled against one’s earlier views. Both sides are integral to the picture. The intellectual defence reflex is integral, because it is not actually pleasant to beat a loss:this is a con-dition for which one will want to find a remedy. Yet this condition, if fully experienced, is our mode of access to intellectual improvement:¹³ without a consciousness of the “precarity” of my present state of understanding, I will not be motivated to engage with others to fortify it.

It’s arguable, then, that the theme of vulnerability or precarity has been – at least implicitly – present in European philosophy almost from the beginning. But if that is so, the question arises as to why writers like Pamela (or like Judith Butler¹⁴) still take themselves to have so much critical work to do. One part of the answer to this question will be that Plato himself,with his craving for stability and perma-nence, all too readily loses sight of the positive value of what is “precarious” in our thinking. But we may also feel that the idea of precarity in its ancient (Socratic) guise is too abstract to express the concerns of“interloper”contributors to philosophy – I mean of those who, for one reason or another, don’t find themselves wel-comed into whatever in our own social experience has replaced the circle of affection (and diffuse eroticism) formed by Socrates and his young male friends. These concerns do not take up the entire space of Pamela’s recent thought, but they do provide one of its starting-points.

Ultimately, says Pamela, the aim of her current research is

to set out possibilities for a new philosophical imaginary, in which vulnerability is (re)con-ceived as a capability for an openness to mutual affection […]In particular, developing reciprocal affections in vulnerability would help to revise a weak concept of love: reciprocity would facilitate loving affection in mutual, self and other relations. But this affecting needs to be learnt by allowing our-selvestoattendtoeachother[…]“tenderly,” respectfully, sincerely and so, lovingly.¹⁵

In passages like this, she seems almost to be speaking the language of exhortation or prophecy – proposing not merely a code of good practice for the academic philosophy seminar as we know it but a full-scale philosophical anthropology based on the idea of “vul-nerability as a universal,” although the “concrete manifestations [of vulnerability] will be socially and historically differentiated.”¹⁶

I don’t myself have a very clear idea of what it would be like to go beyond a mode of philosophical conversation answerable to the familiar imperatives of civility and unprejudiced attention – which, after all, are hard enough to live up to – and to move on to the development of “reciprocal affections in vulnerability” as described by Pamela. But I can certainly enter into the motivation for her project as it relates specifically to philosophy: namely, the wish to effect a change of heart towards the “interloper,” whether represented by oneself or by another. Viewing this project in terms of “concrete manifestations,” it’s clear that the post-1968 period was a time of real curiosity about the working of academic institutions and their accessibility (or otherwise) to socially subordinate groups: here we may think not only of Le Doeuff’s path-breaking work but also, for instance, of Pierre Bourdieu’s Homo Academicus, which deals in massive statistical detail with the determinants of progress in the French academic career structure, though it focuses almost exclusively on matters of class and geography.¹⁷ A reawakening of that curiosity today might be signalled by some fresh thinking of a practical, Le Doeuffian nature about what actually constitutes the vulnerability of women (and other non-privileged participants) in the current context of philosophical discourse.¹⁸ I assume Pamela would agree that those already discernible forms of vulnerability or precarity induced by the institutional politics of higher education – by being subject to sexual harassment, intellectual inattentiveness, social exclusion, inadequate mentoring, and so forth – will need to be addressed before we can do justice to the more utopian aspects of her vision. (And there may be colleagues and students working under various kinds of ideologically oppressive regime who would greet the list just offered, sobering though it is, with a murmur of “first-world problems.”)

However, a more fundamental difficulty now suggests itself.One might put it to Pamela:is it, in fact, possible to eliminate the ideal of invulnerability from the practice of philosophy?

After all, you yourself were a colleague – you, too, had to make it your business to transmit the principles of our craft to a younger generation, who can be pictured as undergoing a certain kind of apprenticeship in thinking. Some aspects of this apprenticeship are indeed of an ethical nature – for example, one learns that there is more to making progress in philosophy than merely winning arguments or keeping one’s initial position intact; and one takes on board the “principle of charity,” meaning that before embarking on criticism of other people’s views one had better expound or reconstruct them in the most favourable terms permitted by the available evidence, rather than wasting time on some self-serving travesty. All this belongs to the “open” spirit of philosophical sociability. But then – you too (Pamela) spent a large part of your working life preparing students for exams and advising them on their essays or theses. And in doing so you could hardly avoid the normal, and required, investment in values of immunity to criticism – of argumentative force, coherence, non-contradiction, validity, sound selection of premises, and so forth. Of course, cognitive “invulnerability” without qualification is a mere regulative idea, not something one expects to achieve within any noticeably adven-turous or interesting line of reflection.You aptly cite Le Doeuffon “the unknown and the unthought, which need to be reintroduced continually, in order to avoid a fixation on the completeness of one’s knowledge.”¹⁹ Still, the project of anticipating criticism and preparing to meet it effectively – this does not really seem detachable from philosophy per se, on any reasonably consensual understanding of that term. The acceptance of vulnerability does have an important role in philosophical thinking, but main...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Editorial Introduction
• ANDERSON’S LAST WRITINGS
• "LIVING A LIFE"
• ANDERSON’S CONVERSATIONS WITH OTHERS
• EXTENDING THE CONVERSATIONS
• Index