The virtue of vulnerability: Merleau-Ponty and Minuchin on the boundaries of personal identity

Document Type

Book Chapter

Publication Date

2023

Department/School

History and Philosophy

Publication Title

Philosophical Health: Thinking as a Way of Healing

Abstract

This chapter offers a phenomenological account of the importance of vulnerability to our existential health as human selves, and explores the role that a lived phenomenological practice can play in our philosophical health as individuals and as groups. Part One engages with the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in order to argue that we are ontologically vulnerable, in the sense that our identities and perspectives on the world are not simply our own, but are always emergent from – and forever dialogically intertwined with – the behaviours and perspectives of others. Part Two argues that vulnerability is not only an ontological state but a lived activity: it is an immovable feature of our existence that we can take up and ‘live’ in more or less honest and healthy manners. In short, vulnerability is a virtue, in an Aristotelian sense. Part Three demonstrates the virtue of vulnerability (and its related vices) through a case study from structural family therapist Salvador Minuchin. If a central phenomenological insight is that personal identity is always already interpersonally accomplished, then psychological problems should not be sought ‘in’ the individual but rather in the interpersonal systems to which the individual belongs: the fundamental premise of Minuchin’s family therapy. Finally, Part Four argues that in order to properly see ourselves as parts of systems rather than as ontologically distinct individuals – what happens in successful family therapy – we must adopt something like a phenomenological perspective on ourselves and the world....

Comments

L. McMahon is a faculty member in EMU's Department of History and Philosophy.

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