User:Jacobisq/Passibility

Passibility is the capacity to experience suffering, an openness to experience, a quality which has been central to changing interpretations of personality, from medieval to modern times.

Personality
Classical thought counterposed to the Stoic ideal of Impassibility an alternative view of personality, that of experiential engagement with multiple circles of social reality. Galen might stress the material aspect of such engagement, Justinian the socio-legal, Cicero one's various roles and social obligations: the quality of openness and passibility was common to them all.

The transition to modernity saw Descartes's vision of the self as a detached autonomous consciousness, prior to political, human, and bodily activity and exchange, increasingly replace passibility as a central metaphor for the self.

Learning theory

 * Wolff-Michael Roth argues that passibility through sensation must inevitably precede Constructivism in human learning: it is cognition via passibility that brings the emotional element into learning.

Music

 * Lyotard saw the convergence of listening to music with a sense of belonging as creating a state of passibility: what he called obedient listening necessarily entailed experiencing passibility.

Religion

 * John Donne saw passibility as the essential feature distinguishing the human from the divine.