ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author provides an obliquft, and perhaps obsessively blinkered, approach to Pamela Sue Anderson’s unified vision of our vulnerability to violence, need for and openness to love, and reflective self-understanding. She tries out more radical idea that the Pamela was seeking to locate an underlying metaphysical and ethical unity that makes the people human vulnerability, love and reflective self-understanding both possible and intelligible. In trying out the idea that she was seeking an original unity, the author draw on many discussions with her about her own thinking, puzzling, drafting, doubting, reconsidering and creatively progressing – all of which the author hope reflect what their conversations revealed about her own dialogues with herself, her “internal dialogues” with historical figures and her actual dialogues with contemporaries. In Spinoza’s account of psychology, emotions can be overcome not by reason but only by stronger emotions, all of which are grounded in ignorance except for love, which can be grounded in knowledge.
