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My Heart Is Yours: The Phenomenology of Self-Revelation in Affective Consciousness

2022; Springer Nature (Netherlands); Linguagem: Inglês

10.1007/978-3-030-91928-3_8

2215-1915

Ellie Anderson,

Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy

A central insight of phenomenology is that affective consciousness is the unique mode of consciousness that reveals other persons as persons. Here, I argue that a largely unacknowledged corollary to this insight is that affective consciousness also reveals us to ourselves. Drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s account of “the look,” I suggest that the feeling of being an object for others is in tension with the feeling of being a subject, but that this tension catalyzes the dynamic of selfhood. I connect this to Jacques Derrida’s and Jean-Luc Nancy’s accounts of auto-affection, in which the self is an identity-in-difference. I then examine the affective consciousness of loving and being loved by another. Engaging Anthony Steinbock’s framework of moral emotions, I agree with Steinbock that love is a moral emotion of otherness but argue that it may also be considered a moral emotion of self-givenness and a moral emotion of possibility.