emotion, disequilibrium and attentive compassion

The expression of emotions within the Community of Philosophical Inquiry (CPI) can be challenging. Despite Matthew Lipman’s insistence that emotions are choices and judgements, there can be a tendency to conflate the CPI’s reasonableness with an emotion-free space of rationality. Where feeling in the CPI is theorised, it is often read on a general level as atmospheric collective feelings that facilitators might ‘check-in’ with at the end or beginning of a session. However, the reality within CPIs is quite different. Emotions can arise suddenly, making their negotiation challenging for the facilitator. We theorise that, rather than calling for empathy, these moments require compassion, resourcing that account of compassion with the thought of Simone Weil and Ann Margaret Sharp. Theorising the negotiations of emotional contributions in inquiry with Sharp and Weil reminds us of the risk of reductively reading others whose emotions and situations are radically unlike us. Their account provides us with resources to explain how the productive CPI explores emotions together. In particular, Simone Weil supports our account of attentive compassion towards the world of the other, to theoretically explore what happens between participants in a fruitful CPI when emotions are expressed. To do so, we take Sharp’s account of the CPI, which we argue is deeply inspired by her reading of Weil. This paper frames the phenomenon of emotion expressed in the community through examples from practice, provides an account of attentive compassion through recent Weilian scholarship, and applies this to the CPI to frame it as a space of attentive compassion.