New Fear Vocabulary

Abstract

What is fear?' This common question for most everyone who is interested in fear, usually starts the conversation of meaning by searching for a definition. Typically, these days especially, the reductionism of such a definition of fear is usually to say it is an emotion or feeling, then to claim it is found in the amygdala of the brain, and further the scientific approach wants to capture and control and delimit what fear is and what fear isn’t. Such a long traditional and even current approach has always seemed to me to be far too restrictive and distortive of what is going on when humans talk about fear, imagine fear and attempt to manage fear. I and others herein, especially from the field of fearism (i.e., philosophy of fearism), have not been content with the traditional reductionistic approaches to the topic of fear. We have asked larger questions, beyond merely the scientific way of framing the problem of fear, and have found we are better off to be creative and expansive, as well as include the scientific and retractive, and to re-imagine critically the very way humans perceive, conceive and reproduce knowledge-power about fear. 'What is fear knowledge?' has been a much more important question in my own research. A new vocabulary is required to tap-in to that exploration.