Research

Lines of research

My research primarily focuses on the nature, value and limits of self-knowledge. In my approach, I combine insights from French phenomenology, analytic philosophy of mind and language and moral psychology to analyze how we come to know (and fail to know) ourselves in different situations. My current research has two strands: 1) accounting for the different types of self-knowledge and first-person authority and the various obstacles to them and 2) the role of inter-personal relations in the effort to know oneself. I will begin with my monograph and then outline my ongoing work.

Self-Knowledge and Practical Reflection

When we express our present mental states in the first person, we seem to speak with an authority that is not shared by third-person statements about those states. If I say, “I believe that p” or “I want that p,” and my sincerity is not in doubt, that usually settles the question of what my belief or desire is. But if such “avowals” are expressions of self-knowledge, it’s unclear what they are based on, since they don’t seem involve observation or inference. The standard line in analytic philosophy has been that, if there is any genuine knowledge here, it must be based on the putative “privileged access” a person has to their own mental life (or some suitably deflated version of it).

In my monograph, I critically examine the theories of two philosophers who challenge that idea, Richard Moran and Charles Larmore. Both of them take selective inspiration from Sartre to argue that it is practical reflection and not theoretical reflection (any sort of introspection or self-observation) that grounds first-person authority. I defend this idea against some objections, but show that it is inadequate to account for how we know and avow our desires and emotions, as opposed to beliefs and intentions. The limitations can be overcome, I argue, by drawing on the phenomenological aspect of Sartre’s approach that Moran and Larmore leave aside.

First, I show why Sartre rejects introspection as an adequate means of self-knowledge, emphasizing its characteristic errors and occasions for bad faith. Then I show how Moran’s and Larmore’s notion of practical reflection is inspired by Sartre. Practical reflection involves an act of commitment that forms one’s attitude, rather than simply discovering an already existing state. Since we are not only spectators of ourselves, but agents capable of “making up our minds” by reflecting on the reasons to have (or abandon) certain attitudes, the question of what we think or want is not limited to what we can observe or infer about ourselves. I speak with special authority about my belief because, in avowing it, I am not primarily describing my mental state, but making or expressing a commitment. Moran’s version of this approach has drawn criticism, most pointedly from Quassim Cassam. I show that Cassam’s objections miss their mark, in part because he misconstrues Moran as a Rationalist, neglecting the Sartrean, existential dimension of his position.

The centerpiece of the book is my own critique of these approaches. I show that they do not account for our ability to speak for our desires and feelings. In order to know one’s heart, so to speak, it is not enough to reflect on the reasons one has to desire or love, or to consider what is objectively good or lovable. Rather, our first-personal awareness of our affective states is grounded in our capacity to describe the world as it appears in our experience. In other words, it is not only by practical reflection on our reasons, but by phenomenological reflection on the meaning of our immediate engagement with the objects of our feelings that we are able to say what we feel authoritatively. Objects appear to us spontaneously as “lovable” or “desirable”, for instance, and it is our relation to these apparent qualities that we thematize in avowals. I am also working on an article “Coming to Know What We Desire: a role for phenomenological reflection” that aims to show how this idea addresses limitations in current inferentialist theories, such as Krista Lawlor’s.

Future Research: the obstacles to self-knowledge and the role of interpersonal relations

Following my book, I am pursuing two avenues for further research. One is the problem of obstacles to self-knowledge, especially when the latter doesn’t concern one’s current mental states but lasting aspects of one’s being: one’s character, values, capacities, tastes and so on. Sartre addresses many of these themes. I am currently drawing on his less-read existential biographies and other texts to develop a framework for understanding persistent illusions about oneself, the kind of person one is, or what one really cares about. One example I am exploring is that of unavowable prejudices that manifest in the form of “implicit bias”, and the difficulty one can have in recognizing them and coming to terms with them. Of particular interest are cases where this may involve self-deception, and the ways in which self-deception is a particular failure of self-knowledge. Examining these phenomena from a Sartrean perspective involves reconsidering and possibly modifying what Sartre calls “existential psychoanalysis”, which seeks the “original choice” that defines each human being, on Sartre’s view. My hypothesis is that this framework can be adapted to seek the fundamental and spontaneous evaluations of the subject, that are not themselves chosen in some ungrounded way. This requires examining Sartre’s practice of existential psychoanalysis in his biographies, as well as comparing his critique of the unconscious with other phenomenological critiques, such as Michel Henry’s in The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis.

The other avenue for research concerns the role played by others in knowing and failing to know various aspects of oneself. My hypothesis is that there exists a kind of “second-person authority”, the authority of others to tell you how you are in their eyes, which is the only way we can know certain objective aspects of ourselves. This is especially true when those aspects clash with the image of ourselves that comes from our intentional engagement with the world. The solution I propose is a “dialogical” theory of self-knowledge of one’s character and values, building on work by David Jopling.

If certain kinds of personal relations can lead to illusion and alienation, can others provide a way of overcoming these obstacles to self-knowledge? To answer this question, I plan to engage both with the social sciences and with Sartre’s work. My article (in French) “Choosing to Mistake Oneself. Self-Knowledge, Bad Faith, and Other People in Sartre’s Baudelaire” in Annales de l’Institut de Philosophie de l’Université de Bruxelles, traces the Sartrean filiation of this idea in his first existential biography. For this project, I also seek to draw on other authors in phenomenology and critical theory such as Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Fanon, Honneth, Foucault and contemporary approaches inspired by them, while exploring the philosophical roots of the idea of another as a necessary mediator to self-knowledge in authors such as Plato, Aristotle and Augustine.