The Heuristics of Fear: Can the Ambivalence of Fear Teach Us Anything in the Technological Age?

Abstract

The paper assumes that fear presents a certain degree of ambivalence. To say it with Hans Jonas (1903-1993), fear is not only a negative emotion, but may teach us something very important: we recognize what is relevant when we perceive that it is at stake. Under this respect, fear may be assumed as a guide to responsibility, a virtue that is becoming increasingly important, because of the role played by human technology in the current ecological crisis. Secondly, fear and responsibility concern both dimensions of human action: private-individual and public-collective. What the ‘heuristics of fear’ teaches us, is to become aware of a deeper ambivalence, namely the one which characterizes as such human freedom, which may aim to good or bad, to self-preservation or self-destruction. Any public discussion concerning political or economic issues related with human action (at an individual or collective level) ought not to leave this essential idea out of consideration.

Ethics of Sustainable Development from the View of A. Badiou’s Critique of Contemporary Ethics

“…Roberto Franzini Tibaldeo lists reasons which according to Jonas decide about the attractiveness of the heuristics of fear as a tool for popularizing desirable values and ideals in the social awareness. Among them the most important part plays the power of fear to consolidate all the dimensions of human existence as for example individual and collective, rational and emotional, theoretical and practical and its ability to stimulate imagination (Tibaldeo, 2015). So the heuristics of fear has nothing to do with the construction of ethical theory because it is the method of presentation of issues brought up in it.…”