WRITING

PUBLICATIONS

“The Cartesian Passions as Inclinations and Descartes’ Alienated Anthropology ,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, forthcoming.

Download the penultimate draft here. 

Abstract. The passions occupy an uncomfortable position in Descartes’ philosophical anthropology: not only do they seem to live somewhere in between the mind and the body, but they also seem to straddle the divide between active volitions and passive perceptions. On top of this, commentators have struggled to determine whether the passions play a representational role in the mind or a purely motivational one. This essay addresses these interpretative issues by showing that Cartesian passions are what Tamar Schapiro calls inclinations, emotions that incline us to perform mental actions. By providing a more accurate picture of the passions, the essay also challenges the popular idea that the Cartesian passions help unify or reveal the unity of Descartes’ human being, an idea that looks to mitigate the criticism that Descartes offers a starkly dualistic anthropology. This essay argues that, to the contrary, Descartes’ conception of the passions exposes his thought to precisely this criticism, reinforcing his dualism and promoting an alienated, mechanical perspective on the mind.

WORKS IN PROGRESS

Essays

An essay on the nature of desire (title redacted for anonymous review; draft available upon request)

"Desire: An Imaginative Power" (draft available)

This essay lays out the conception of desiring that I develop in my dissertation. Drawing upon the post-Kantian understanding of the imagination as a practical, worldly power, it argues that desire is an imaginative activity in between creation and perception. According to this conception, desiring is neither a projection of interest onto the world nor a perception of reasons within it, but a free, imaginative activity similar to considering or creating a work of art. Desiring is our effort to see things as reasons-giving for us, and its main constitutive principle is to avoid alienation from our reasons for action. I argue that this conception of desiring is superior to contemporary “motivational dualist” views like Schapiro’s and “motivational monist” views that conceive of desiring as the perception of a reason. Unlike these views, the imaginative conception I develop allows us to understand how it is possible to be estranged or alienated from what we ourselves want.

"Schiller’s Alienation Critique of Kantian Ethics" (draft available)

In this essay, I argue that Schiller’s analysis of modern alienation also serves as a criticism of Kant’s ethics and its moral psychology. According to Schiller, Kant’s conception of freedom and practical reason overcorrect for the eighteenth century’s empiricist biases and tendencies, leaving his philosophy powerless to address two of the era’s most pressing cultural problems: profound alienation—the harboring of attitudes that conflict with one’s rational assessment of their objects—and widespread fragmentation—the highly partial and disjointed realization of the full ideal of human character. For Schiller, the modern human being’s alienation is especially likely to manifest as a lack of appreciation for the significance of its intimate relationships with nature, particular places, and particular people. By reconstructing Schiller’s argument to these conclusions, I try to show the depth and continuing relevance of his criticism of Kant’s practical philosophy. 

“Irrational Influences”  (draft available) considers the familiar idea that we can be culpably led astray by irrational influences that exert a kind of “pressure” on our action and decision. When these irrational influences are thought of as internal, they tend to be identified with our passions, inclinations, or desires: Tamar Schapiro, for example, includes the power to exert a kind of counter-rational pressure on the will as one of the defining features of inclination, and similar ideas show up throughout the contemporary literature on practical irrationality. When these irrational influences are thought of as external, they tend to be identified with other people and their manipulation: Marcia Baron and Allen Wood, for instance, describe forms of manipulation that exert a kind of irrational pressure upon the manipulated person’s practical decision-making. In this essay, I consider the problems that discussions of internal and external pressure face by applying an impersonal, physical metaphor to understand personal and interpersonal phenomena. I argue that we can avoid these problems and get a better grip on the relevant notion of pressure if we think about it in terms of navigating or negotiating an imaginative landscape. Not only does this approach disabuse us of the idea that our inclinations all generally exert a kind of pressure on us, but also it helps mark the similarities and differences between the irrational influence of alien desires and that of other people.

“The Bodily Appetites” (draft available) focuses on those desires that seem to be closely associated with the body, like hunger, thirst, and lust. Unlike other kinds of desires, the appetites are not grounded in reasons that we can attribute to the person who has them. They could seem to be more like experiences we suffer than activities in which we engage, and hence might appear to mark a limit to the extension of a more active conception of human desire. This essay argues that, to the contrary, we can understand the appetites as a personal activity if we let go of a mechanical way of looking at the body. I compare Descartes’ and Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the bodily appetites and develop the latter’s notion of a “motive” as it plays a role in his exposition of existential time and space as the fundamental forms of the self-conscious body.

“Dejection and the Question of Metaphysics” (draft available) considers the role that post-Kantian discussions of dejection and despair give to the imagination in asking and answering “the question of metaphysics”—the question now widely associated with Kant of what rational assurance we have that our thought and its categories “reflect” or “make contact” with the world. The intriguing idea that comes up in Romantic discussions of dejection is that this metaphysical question is not one we can entertain in a disaffected mood, but one we can only grasp by becoming (or entering the condition of a person who has become) practically and imaginatively disoriented in relation to the world as such. While Heidegger develops a version of this idea, this essay will try to reconstruct its Romantic origins in Kierkegaard’s writing on despair and truth. 

“The Expressive Theory of Art” considers the aesthetic theory that claims art is an expression of the artist’s feelings. It aims to show that we can rescue such a theory from being implausibly self-oriented if we understand the artistic expression of feeling as a representation of what the artist or her subjects find imaginatively satisfying in a topic or object.

Book Projects

On the Nature of Desire

An expansion of my dissertation, this prospective book would make the case for an imaginative conception of desire that helps resolve a deep tension in modern ethics. This tension lies in balancing two attractive ideas: first, that our ethical ideals come from the necessary conditions of self-conscious life, and second, that self-conscious beings are precisely those who create their own life-ideals and confer authority upon them. The first idea maintains that what is worth doing is determined by the kind of creatures we are, whereas the second allows that we play a greater role in defining what is worthwhile, and that reasonable people might disagree without being confused or mistaken. These ideas appear to conflict when applied to the topic of happiness, because while the first suggests that any authoritative ethical ideals guiding our pursuit of happiness must apply universally, grounded in general features of our self-conscious condition, the second denies both assumptions and leaves greater room for creativity. My proposed conception of desire aims to incorporate what is attractive about these two seemingly conflicting ideas into a satisfying understanding of human happiness. It suggests that our desiring should be governed by a principle of identification that provides a flexible foundation for humanistic critique, and that most of what is worth wanting is not fixed by any general facts about the human condition but is determined by our own imaginative activity—realized through human creativity, indexed to special contexts and environments, and ultimately requiring interpretative methods of evaluation. 

An Affliction of the Air: Despair in Modern Life

This prospective book would explore the mood of despair by investigating representations and discussions of this profound form of alienation in 19th and 20th-century literature, art, critical theory, and philosophy. While social scientists have analyzed the impersonal social formations that breed discontent and psychiatrists have offered physiological accounts of what causes depression, my book would consider a low mood whose origin can only be understood through the perspective and imaginative interpretation of people and their practices, precisely because it constitutes a form of cognitive confusion. Unlike sorrow, a heavy sadness concerning a great loss of value, or penseroso melancholy, a gentle and maybe even pleasant sense of the transience of things, dejection or despair of the sort I plan to focus on is a numbness in which the ideas of interest, motivation, or value themselves seem strange. The book will argue that this mood is a form of alienation from the world as a whole and the other as such that throws light on the fragility and special ethical and political significance of intimate bonds within modern forms of life. In this way, the book will also try to show that we can make sense of the depth of modern alienation without indulging in any kind of nostalgia for earlier, less democratic social arrangements.