Resumen de The emotional self: a relational view
Emotions are experiences that connect us to others in deep and meaningful ways, however, there is something about them that makes them, at the same time, the most intimate of our experiences. The way in which I understand the latter departs from the notions of privacy or interiority which are central to the debate on the asymmetry between the first and the third person. The notion of intimacy to which I allude here is linked, rather, to the experience of being vulnerable. As is well known, we can only feel an emotion for something we care about and, in this sense, every emotional experience is an experience in which we are exposed, that is, in which there is something at stake for us. From this perspective, inquiring about the intimate aspect of our emotions involves exploring the way in which we are tied to the things that matter to us.
Analysing the way in which our self is vulnerable to what surrounds it is a crucial task for anyone who thinks that knowing oneself is a basic requirement for a meaningful life. Although emotions are closely related to a large number of elements – the body, the world, others, values, etc. – the problem of the self that expresses and exposes itself in emotions seemed to have a certain priority over other related questions. From a somewhat naive perspective, I wondered how it was possible to study the connections between our emotions and others or the world without first examining the way in which the self is involved in them. It seemed to me that the most basic feature of our emotions is that, in them, the centrality of the self is undeniable: I respond emotionally to an object because such an object has something to do with me, that is, it concerns me. And this is so regardless of what the object of the emotion is, the proportionality of the response, the truth or falsity of the beliefs involved, and so on. This conviction led me to dive into the problem of the self in emotions as a prior and, in some sense, separate question from the set of elements mentioned above.
Throughout the work I have developed in this thesis I have nevertheless come to question the idea that we can approach the self as a reality that is separate from the world, the body and others. Paradoxically, my interest in understanding the intimate aspect of emotions – where the vulnerability of the self would most clearly manifest itself – has led me to the belief that what is specific about the self that is expressed in emotions is its intimate relation or deep continuity with the world, the body and others. In a certain sense, in my attempts to focus on the self, I have had to retrace the path that I thought would lead me to it in order to return to a series of elements – that are usually understood in opposition to the self – without which the self can be no more than a mere theoretical simplification.
In this thesis I have argued for the need of revising the way in which the subject is usually understood in the current philosophical literature on this topic and of approaching the self from a more relational view. In particular, through three different papers, I have defended three thesis that, taken together, aim to put into question what I call “the divided conception of the subject”.
