The Lesson of Coronavirus: Experiencing Values, Experiencing Oneself

E-workshop dans le cadre du cycle « Conversations on values and value experience » organisé par Roberta de Monticelli, résidente chercheuse 2019-2020 de l'IEA de Paris.

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Présentation

Recent phenomenological research has focused on self-experience, essentially, within two contexts: research on the pre-reflective embodied-enactive self-consciousness, where classical phenomenologists were already at home, since Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the lived body and bodily selfhood; and a more recent trend of research on so-called self-conscious emotions, such as, paradigmatically, shame, embarrassment and humiliation, but also pride, contempt, envy, jealousy, which are “self-conscious” in a further sense: they entail positive or negative self-evaluations. While current debates (Zahavi 2014, Deonna, Rodogno, and Teroni 2012, Salice and Montez Sanchez 2016, Breyer 2018) essentially address the question whether such evaluations are social in their nature or not, I shall argue that both parties share an extremely thin picture of our selfhood, as characterized by a complete lack of independence relative to the awareness, whether personal or social, we form of it. This no-independence assumption entirely preempts the question of truth or falsity of any self-assessment, whether social or not; in short it deprives self-knowledge of any seriousness. The reason of this banalization of the reality of (our)selves lies in the crying absence of a phenomenological analysis of value-experience: as such, and as a self –disclosing mode of experiencing reality. The Covid-19 pandemia will work as a background of shared value experience to provide evidence for my argument.

Keywords: Values, Value-experience, Self, Self-conscious Emotions, Phenomenology, Coronavirus