CEPPA Talk (in-person & online) – Lucy O’Brien (UCL)

Title: Autonomy and control over one’s social self-consciousness

Abstract: Humans have the capacity to absorb – to feel – others’ feelings. More particularly we feel others’ feelings about ourselves: at least as long as we are awake, we are subject to being self-consciously affected in our interactions with others. We are capable of social self-consciousness, and such a capacity plays a critical part in our general capacity to care about, calibrate, and organise human life. In this talk I want to consider a subject’s relation to her own affective social self-consciousness. Two areas I will consider are (i) a subject’s practical management of their social self-consciousness, and (i) a subject’s appraisals of their own social self-consciousness. I will suggest that the latter concern can be thought of in the context of a general problem of the rationality of deference. I suggest that our self-appraisals should be understood as allowing for a kind of necessary instability, tension, and opacity. In so far as our self-conscious lives, are rationally permeated with the appraisals of others, we risk standing in an uncomprehending, but committed, sense of ourselves and our value

Location: Edgecliffe G03