SSStttooonnnyyy BBBrrrooooookkk UUUnnniiivvveeerrrsssiiitttyyy The official electronic file of this thesis or dissertation is maintained by the University Libraries on behalf of The Graduate School at Stony Brook University. ©©© AAAllllll RRRiiiggghhhtttsss RRReeessseeerrrvvveeeddd bbbyyy AAAuuuttthhhooorrr... Vulnerability’s Demands: Need and the Relational Self A Dissertation Presented by Katharine Wolfe to The Graduate School in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy Stony Brook University December 2015 Stony Brook University The Graduate School Katharine Wolfe We, the dissertation committee for the above candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree, hereby recommend acceptance of this dissertation. Eva Kittay Distinguished Professor, Philosophy Edward S. Casey Distinguished Professor, Philosophy Anne O’Byrne Associate Professor, Philosophy Gabrielle Jackson Assistant Professor, Philosophy Susan J. Brison Professor of Philosophy, Dartmouth College This dissertation is accepted by the Graduate School Charles Taber Dean of the Graduate School ii Abstract of the Dissertation Vulnerability’s Demands by Katharine Wolfe Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy Stony Brook University 2015 Persons, in the words of Annette Baier, are “essentially second persons” (“Cartesian Persons” 1981, 172). Not only are we ‘second persons’ insofar as personhood arises through a childhood in the care of others, and insofar as each of us is born new in an old world where our entry has always been preceded by others; persons are also second persons insofar as we each know ourselves as a ‘you’ before knowing ourselves as an ‘I’. This work explores one strand of what it means for the self to be thus bound to others. A self so bound is a self that not only experiences deep needs for the care of others but that is also able to experience a robust set of needs to care for others, many of which take the form of second person needs. Second person needs occur when another’s needs give rise to corresponding needs of one’s own to either care for her directly or to see her needs otherwise answered. Against a tradition that, since the days of Plato, has characterized need as a form of poverty or lack, I begin my relational account of need by approaching it as a form of vulnerability. To be in need is to be vulnerable to harm. Second person needs are one of the immersive ways in which we experience vulnerability’s intimate demands. Second person needs express an intertwinement of our welfare with the welfare of others powerful enough to make responsiveness to another’s need an urgent and dire part of our own good. Second person needs tend to expand and intensify as one’s relational bonds are enriched and deepened. While exposing one to the prospect of deep, even life-shattering harm, second person needs thus cannot be reduced to liabilities, for to be without these needs would also mean existing without caring and holistic investments in the welfare of others, something that is a crucial aspect of a good human life for most persons. These positive dimensions of need have long gone without note in philosophy much as have need’s relational dimensions. My dissertation corrects these oversights. iii Table of Contents INTRODUCTION. Second Persons: An Introduction to Relational Need………..……………………….1 Vulnerability’s Demands…………………………………………………………………………………...1 The Ethics of Relational Need……………………………………………………………………………...6 CHAPTER ONE. Together in Need: Relational Selfhood, Vulnerability and Ethics…………......……...14 Relational Need……………………………………………………………………………………………14 Need and Vulnerability……………………………………………………………………………………22 Second Person Needs……………………………………………………………………………………...32 Vital Needs in Oppressive Climates…………………………………………………………....................38 Personhood and Care……………...………………………………………………………………………44 Caring About Need: A Proviso………………………………......………………………………………..57 Between Need and Autonomy……………………………………………………………………….……60 CHAPTER TWO. Need and Relational Autonomy: The Bonds of Care……...…………...…….……….67 Relational Autonomy……………………………………………………………………………………...70 Frankfurt on Autonomy and Care……………….………………………………………………………...79 Volitional Necessity: At the Crossroads of Need and Autonomy……………………………………….101 Conclusion: Troubling Investments of Care……………………………………………………………..111 CHAPTER THREE. Born Supported: Need and Selfhood in a Shared World…………………..…..….116 Intentionality and the Self….…………………………………………………………………………….122 Embodiment in Being and Nothingness...………………………………………………………………..130 Being-for-Others in Being and Nothingness………………………………………………………….….143 A Relational World………………………………………………………………………………………151 CHAPTER FOUR. Beyond Hunger: Sartre, Levinas, and Second Person Needs…….……………...….160 Need and Desire in Being and Nothingness……………………………………………………………...164 Need in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason…………………………………………………………171 Sartre and Levinas………………………………………………………………………………………..186 Second Person Needs and Ethics………………………………………………………………………...200 AFTERWORD. The Burdened Virtue of Second Person Needs?…………………………………….....209 Eudaimonistic Judgments………………………………………………………………………………..210 Burdened Virtues……………………………………...…………………………………………………216 The Politics of Need……………………………………………………………………………………..223 iv Second Persons: An Introduction to Relational Need Vulnerability’s Demands In 1981, Annette Baier made an engagement with Descartes’ Meditations the occasion for an articulation of an elegant view of the self as relational. In her essay “Cartesian Persons,” Baier maintains that even a God could not be a person without a childhood in which that God were surrounded by other persons, cared for in the arms of other persons, and came to know herself as a self through another’s recognition (1981, 181). We become persons through the ties to others that precede our entry into the world, that surround us as we grow, and that hold us fast even in our last days of life. Considered attention to the role of language in childhood development carries Baier to a description of persons as essentially “second persons” (180). Not only are we ‘second persons’ insofar as personhood arises through a childhood in the care of others, and insofar as each of us is born new in an old world where our entry has always been preceded by others; persons are also second persons insofar as we each know ourselves as a ‘you’ before knowing ourselves as an ‘I’. Baier explains: “My first concept of myself is as the referent of 'you', spoken by someone whom I will address as 'you'… The second person, the pronoun of mutual address and recognition, introduces us to the first and third” (186). This work turns to the second person relationships through which all of us first come to know ourselves to explore one strand of what it means for the self to be constitutively bound to others. A self so bound—a self that is a ‘you’ before being an ‘I’—is a self that not only experiences deep needs for the care of others but that is also able to experience a robust set of needs to care for others, many of which take the form of what I call ‘second person needs.’ Second person needs occur when another’s needs give rise to corresponding needs of one’s own to either care for them directly or to see these needs otherwise answered. Need is not a vestige of life’s physiological demands that stands impervious to the relational bonds at the heart of human life. Instead, some of the deepest human needs, with second person needs to care for others among them, are rooted in the relational self—the self that experiences itself as a ‘you’ addressed by another before experiencing itself as an ‘I’ standing alone. 1 Against a tradition that, since the days of Plato, has characterized need as a form of poverty or lack, I begin my relational account of need by approaching it as a form of vulnerability.i,1 To be in need is to be vulnerable to harm. This prospective harm becomes real harm in the event that a need goes unanswered. Yet those things that we need in order to avoid harm are not necessarily things that we lack. As Soran Reader has persuasively argued, one can need something very dearly which one already has such as the clean drinking water and the home free from toxic environmental pollutants that First World privilege invisibly grants to many who would feel the dire pangs of these needs if luck found them born in another country (2007, 599). Need’s characterization as lack is contested not only by the truth that our needs remain needs even when they are satisfied, but also by the relational quality of many of our deepest needs, including second person ones. One’s needs do not end with the necessities of sustaining one’s bare, physiological life (if physiological life is indeed ever ‘bare’). They also include the necessities of our relational welfare. These necessities can be even more fundamental to one’s overall health and flourishing than one’s physiological needs alone insofar as personhood is founded and sustained through relational ties. Some of the most vital relational needs include the need to be loved by one’s life partner, the need for respect from one’s peers, and the need for recognition of one’s agency and interests by the other persons with whom we all share this world. Yet even this set of relational needs captures only part of the relational needs that many people experience as integral to their sense of self and that must be answered in order for that self to be sustained. Together with the need for love, friendship, respect, and recognition stands a set of relational needs of a different tenor. These are those needs that I call second person needs. This set of needs as a whole might be summarized under the heading of one very powerful and wide-ranging human need: the need to care for others. In addition to having a need of one’s own for clean drinking water and a home free from environmental pollutants, for instance, many people will also experience the need to be able to offer both of these things to their child, to the stranger passing by who is on the verge of collapsing from thirst, or to the friend of years gone by who finds herself alone and down on her luck, seeking refuge for the night.