Research Overview
I work mainly in three areas: (1) contemporary social and political philosophy, (2) the history of 19th and 20th century continental philosopy, and (3) the history of 19th and 20th century anti-colonial and Africana philosophy.
Thematically, my research examines how the dependence of human beings on one another to fulfill our needs can threaten values of community and freedom. Social dependence can threaten values of community in a society that is arranged such that people do not value those they depend on outside of what they can get from them. As an example, in contemporary societies, most people are compelled predominantly by their own self-interest to work and exchange with others who depend on them. If they do not cooperate, they cannot eat, let alone pursue self-realization. In my work, I reconstruct arguments claiming that this downgrades community as a value; community tends to become merely instrumentally valued, and we become alienated from one another. Certain kinds of social dependence can also threaten freedom. The price of getting what one needs in modern relations of dependence is often that that one has to give up one’s labor to others, becoming a tool for others to use, through a wage, gender expectations, or national and racial subordination.
In my research, I also explore the question of how social dependence could be arranged differently, in order to avoid these ills. I reconstruct arguments which hold that social dependence could take on a form of a communal reciprocity that is valuable in itself, and which upholds human freedom. To build these arguments, I draw on the political thought of those who actively engaged in working class, anti-colonial, and gender liberation movements, which are often neglected in academic philosophy (more on my project to teach these here). I also draw on figures like Rousseau, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Fanon.
Papers
Peer-Reviewed Publications
“Kierkegaard on Time and the Limitations of Imaginative Planning”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. XCIV No. 1, January 2017. 144-169. | Download here
Abstract: In Practice in Christianity, Kierkegaard claims that the imaginative planning of projects that require ongoing effort over time always fails to represent them accurately. This paper explores one particular reason Kierkegaard gives for thinking this—that the imagination is incapable of capturing the temporality of such endeavors, and it is this temporality that constitutes their greatest difficulty. This is significant for Kierkegaard because he believes that the tasks involved in self-determination—including the tasks of the moral life and of the religious life—belong to this class of endeavors. But if true, his claim raises questions for all projects that use imaginative planning. This paper explores Kierkegaard’s texts on the matter and argues that his claim centers on the fact that in one’s imagination, one cannot face ongoing resistance that is entirely outside one’s control as one does in the actual world. This contributes to a picture of Kierkegaard’s moral psychology that presents having a powerful imagination alone as quite insufficient for practical striving, and that places practice and willful endurance in whatever task one is attempting as central to learning it. One cannot learn how to do such tasks from another or from one’s imagination, according to Kierkegaard—the only teacher is experience, and, crucially, time.
Papers Under Review/In Progress
“Fanon on Racial Alienation and the Racism in Our Heads” | Under Review | Email me about this paper
Abstract: According to a view widely held by both theorists and laypeople, the racism in our heads fundamentally consists of racial prejudice: negative attitudes about what particular racial groups are like. I argue here that Frantz Fanon, in his book Black Skin, White Masks, rejects this widely held view, instead proposing a theory of racial alienation. Developing a Marxist idea, Fanon claims that alienation obtains when social forces systematically produce relationships in which people disregard or instrumentalize certain others. In a racist society, Fanon argues, people internalize racially coded relations of alienation as their inner models for the relationship of self to others. These relationship models, rather than negative attitudes about racial groups, are what the racism in our heads fundamentally consists of for Fanon. I reconstruct Fanon’s lesson as being that mental racism cannot be overcome merely by targeting racial prejudice. To cut mental racism out at its root, this entire model of alienated relationships, in which the ideal Self depends structurally on disregarding or instrumentalizing some Other, must be undermined. In making this argument, Fanon synthesizes Marxist alienation critique with insights from psychoanalysis, and offers an account of anti-Black racism (and other forms of colonial racism) that is both materialist and psychological.
“Racialization Without Pseudo-biology in Islamophobia and Beyond” | Under Review | Download draft here
Abstract: It is often claimed that ethnically diverse cultural groups like Muslims and Latinos are racialized in many contemporary societies. But this is puzzling if one takes racialization to involve assuming that members of a group share a biological essence. I offer an account of racialization that solves this puzzle. What I call socio-cultural racialization is the social construction of a fictional racial essence that is taken to be rooted in social facts rather than biological ones. It is this “racism without races”—racialization without the biological notion of race—that gets applied both to groups like Muslims and to groups like Black people that have also been biologically racialized. I argue that socio-cultural racialization has a wider justificatory force in our present world in which this biological notion of race is censured (at least officially) in most social and political institutions. I conclude by offering an original hypothesis as to why this form of racialization is less frequently recognized as ideological mystification than biological racialization.
“What is Kierkegaardian ‘Inwardness’? ‘Heartfeltness’ as Positive Freedom” | Email me about this paper
Abstract: Kierkegaard often exhorts his readers to cultivate their “inwardness,” but despite the centrality of this notion to his texts, he avoids directly characterizing it. In this paper I offer an account of inwardness as a type of positive freedom that is not on its own a moral ideal, but a morally-neutral ideal that is nonetheless crucial for morality. Inwardness, it turns out, is a bad translation of the Danish word Inderlighed, which is better rendered as “heartfeltness.” Kierkegaard’s Inderlighed is complex positive freedom to internalize or “take to heart” particular ideals and transform one’s life in relation to them. Kierkegaard departs from his idealist predecessors in locating his freedom in the psychology of the finite, embodied subject, and I will argue that the psychology of inwardness is well-supported by recent empirical and philosophical work on the will, drawing on work by Michael Bratman and Richard Holton.
Monograph (In Progress)
Made Into Strangers: The Marxist Concept of Social Alienation
I am at work on a monograph on the Marxist concept of alienation, which focuses on Marx’s early manuscript writings, and situates their account of alienation in broader philosophy discussions of alienation.
The core thesis of the monograph is that the Marxist concept of alienation is fundamentally about social alienation—a normatively deficient mode of relationship between people. In arguing this, I overturn the dominant received understanding of the concept of alienation, both in Marx interpretation and in critical social thought, where alienation is generally seen as fundamentally a matter of an individual’s relationship to their own life. Instead, I argue, the Marxist concept of alienation is fundamentally about people’s relationships to other people. A relationship of alienation is one in which people systematically regard one another as “strangers” in a particular sense: that is, they regard one another either indifferently or as mere tools, rather than as worthy of caring about for their own sake. It is the absence of the third, I argue, in the trio of French revolutionary values: “liberty, equality, brotherhood” (or more neutrally, community). However, according to the account of social alienation I develop, this deficient mode of relationship is not just bad individual behavior. Rather, it is a social-structural concept. We are made into strangers from one another by certain social forces—this mode is actually baked into our patterns of social interaction by structures that pit us against one another. Overcoming alienation, in turn, requires remaking social structures in a way that would allow individuals to care about their social fellows broadly (i.e., not just their intimate personal relations) for their own sake—fulfilling a socialist and feminist ideal of mutual concern.
Chapters 2-5 focus on interpreting Marx, while Chapters 1, 6, and 7 offer original arguments for aspects of Marx’s view that he himself does not argue for. As a result, I make both historical contributions, and uncover a rich but largely neglected set of philosophical resources for theorizing what the character of relationships in an egalitarian, democratic society should be.
Outline of Chapters:
Chapter 1: “The Drifting Meaning and Status of ‘Alienation‘”
Chapter 2: “The Human Flourishing Approach to Marx on Alienation”
Chapter 3: “Alienation, Reciprocity, and the Commodification of Human Need”
Chapter 4: “‘Species-being’ and Social Freedom in the Early Marx”
Chapter 5: “Alienated Labor and Alienation in Other Spheres”
Chapter 6: “Social Alienation as Relational Unfreedom”
Chapter 7: “Solidarity and Overcoming Alienation”
Feel free to email me about the monograph or any of its chapters.
