Feeling Vulnerable: Interpersonal Relatedness and Situatedness

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.