The Faces of Human Vulnerability
Abstract
The notion of vulnerability is one of the beliefs of a recent current of moral and political philosophy, namely care ethics. Stemming, especially, from the North American feminist movement, this care ethics, based on the rejection of a universal and abstract morals, privileges the relational dimension based on the orientation towards human vulnerability.Subject to the weight of the tyranny of normality and perfection, contemporary societies, glorifying the individual who is useful and performant, struggle to hide, or more often than not deny the vulnerability of human beings. The notion of vulnerability appeared not only as a mutual sign of any person who is in a dependent situation, but also as one of the constitutive dimensions of the essence of living beings and of their life environment. In this article, the notion of vulnerability will be studied by identifying the representative themes of human vulnerability particular to their life and its conditions of being. Firstly, the hypothesis proposed by Freud in Le malaise dans la culture (2010)represents the underlying basis of this study on human vulnerability. Next, two important concepts guide the study proposed: the vulnerability inherent to human subjectivity, from the perspective of Lévinas, and the one akin the process of socialising of human beings, from the perspective of Habermas.
References
Freud, S. (2010). Le malaise dans la culture [Discomfort in culture] (D. Astor, Trans.). Flammarion. (Original work published in 1930)
Habermas, J. (1987). Profils philosophiques et politiques [Philosophical-Political Profiles] (F. Dastur, J.-R. Ladmiral & M. de Launay, Trans.). Gallimard. (Original work published 1971)
Habermas, J. (1992). De l’éthique de la discussion [On the ethics of discussion] (M. Hunyadi, Trans.). Cerf. (Original work published 1991)
Kant, I. (1990). Opuscule sur l’histoire [Booklets on history] (S. Piobetta, Trans.). Garnier Flammarion. (Original work published 1963)
Lévinas, E. (1998a). Totalité et infini : essai sur l’extériorité [Totality and infinity: an essay on exteriority]. Le livre de poche.
Lévinas, E. (1998b). Éthique comme philosophie première [Ethics as a primary philosophy]. Payot.
Lévinas, E. (2004a). Éthique et infini : Dialogues avec Philippe Nemo [Ethics and infinity: Dialogues with Philippe Nemo]. Le livre de poche.
Lévinas, E. (2004b). De Dieu qui vient à l’idée [From God who comes to the idea.]. (2nd ed.). Paris: Vrin.
Lévinas, E. (2006). En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger [By discovering existence with Husserl and Heidegger] (4th ed.). Vrin.
Lévi-Strauss, C. (2009). Anthropologie structurale II. Pocket Agora.
Mill, J. S. (1994). Utilitarismul [Utilitarianism] (V. Muresan, Trans.). Alternative. (Original work published 1863)
Nussbaum, M. (1986). The fragility of goodness: luck and ethics in greek tragedy and philosophy. Cambridge University Press.
Spinoza, B. (1981). Etica [Ethics] (I. Segall, Trans.). Editura Ştiinţifică şi Enciclopedică. (Original work published 1677)
Copyright (c) 2021 LUMEN Proceedings
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Selection and peer-review under responsibility of the Organizing Committee of the conference.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 Unported License, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
© LUMEN Proceedings Series 2022 . The LUMEN Proceedings Open Access volumes are distributed under the terms of the 