Areas of research: Phenomenology (especially Merleau-Ponty, Husserl, Bergson, Heidegger), Philosophy of Perception, Moral Philosophy & Moral Psychology, Philosophy of Heroism, Philosophy of Love, Philosophy of Trauma.
I am mainly interested in addressing the relationship between sense perception and moral meaning: Is morality a mere product of the mind or is it based on our perception of physical things? I think about this problem via two other topics: 1) Morality as a traumatizing experience and 2) our experience of pre-perceptual moral judgements. Most of my work is anchored within the phenomenological tradition, which is to say that I’m interested in the necessary conditions for us to have perceptual experiences of morality, trauma and love as well as the relationship between the world in which these experiences take place and the self who lives these experiences.
First, I’m interested in unraveling morality as a traumatic experience in virtue of the bodily involvement required to experience morality in a traumatic way. We can be trapped into corporeal moral experiences that can shatter our sense of self, our sense of disposing of our body as well as our sense of the world (e.g: by doing good things, such as acting heroically or helping someone by sacrificing our bodily integrity, or by doing evil things such as injuring, aggressing, blocking or killing). I’m exploring the idea that by definition morality requires us to constantly destroy, disturb or disrupt some key assumptions we have about our body in order to make sense of the world. For instance, we assume our body navigates around objects a certain way until a dangerous threat appears and we start to relate to them differently than how they appeared. I believe that in some cases our ability to make sense of the world following our experience of morality requires us to breach the sense of reality that we had prior to that moral experience — as well as the sense of what our body is and what it could do. I believe these kinds of experiences can also be indicative of deeper norms and structures necessary for experiencing morality. One of my goals is then to look at how trauma can result from certain experiences of moral action and find out what kind of philosophical output it provides about our relationship to morality and our capacity to be (im)moral. This angle in my research is meant to help me address larger questions in moral philosophy such as the origins of good and evil in human experience.
Secondly, I’m interested in understanding how is it that we can act intuitively, spontaneously, in a moral or immoral way. In other words, what goes on when we spontaneously act morally or immorally? I’m looking, for instance, at experiences of spontaneous heroism and other kinds of moral experiences in which people do not act based on deterministic properties (like psychological conditioning, cultural conditioning, evolutionary or biological psychological strategies etc.) or deliberative behavior (processes of judging or evaluating the situation prior to acting), but rather based on their perceptions that serve as motives or guidance to act morally. This is in the optics of addressing larger questions in ethics, especially the perceptual nature of morality as well as how morality can be subjective based on the experience of objective moral properties at the phenomenological level.
On a bigger scale, my philosophical interests have been guided by the concept of intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity is the fundamental condition for there to experience morality, as you could not be moral or immoral if others didn’t exist — if there was not some sort of otherness or other side to your own actions. But intersubjectivity has different shapes and colors, so to speak, depending on the experiences we have. My research interest is precisely to see how these (perceptual) variations in intersubjectivity operate specifically in extreme experiences of life, such as in extreme morality, in order to find out more about our experience of the world broadly speaking — especially to also understand how concepts such as freedom, alienation and time can be derived from it. What I mean by extreme morality are experiences of spontaneous heroism, spontaneous horrific or traumatic events like crimes of passion, self-defense murder, spontaneous violence, and so on.¹ I am interested in cases where morality is experiential, perceptual, and appeals to extreme degrees of emotional affect in such a way that shatters or disturbs our sense of reality. My aim is to explore the phenomenological input of these experiences in order to understand what they can tell us about the nature of morality as well as how they can lead to trauma and various disruptions within our sense of self and our sense of what is real.
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Ph.D Thesis
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)
My thesis aims to retrace and analyze the development of French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s moral philosophy throughout his career. My goal is to demonstrate the hidden and remarkable relevance of his work in contemporary ethics as well as to improve our knowledge of his moral philosophy specifically, which is currently lacking. Although he remains perceived as the philosopher of sense perception par excellence, I want to argue, contrarily to some other interpreters, that there is in fact a serious ethical dimension to his work and that his seemingly lack of interest for ethics is based on a misunderstanding in the literature. In my view, these two sides of his work are intrinsically connected: his work on perception provides the basis for his moral philosophy and this connection is what allowed him to write on politics, moral values and human freedom.
I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s writings on morality provide many original contributions to contemporary ethics which remain underexplored, especially with regards to themes of moral responsibility, the opposition between freedom and political regimes, heroism, and moral meaning. What makes his contributions original, I believe, is the way in which Merleau-Ponty draws a link between sensorial experience and moral experience. On my interpretation, Merleau-Ponty’s interest for ethics is mainly guided by his concern about the nature of moral values, which are foward-looking and perceptual according to him, thus giving rise to experiences of moral perception. By combing through all his writings, including his lectures notes, drafts, unpublished works and war journal, as well as the secondary literature in French and English, I explain that morality, according to him, depends first and foremost on a perceptual experience in which perception plays the role of capturing moral and social norms insofar as perception is conditioned by the level of freedom that one possesses in order to perceive. Although his moral and political philosophy cannot be reduced to this, my thesis demonstrates that we must begin from this premise in order to understand the evolution of his thought on the various ethical issues that appear in his work.
Master’s Research Paper
My MRP (Major/Master’s Research Paper) is an exploration of the topic of heroism within Merleau-Ponty’s work. Merleay-Ponty makes a few ambiguous references to heroic behavior within his work, most notably at the end of the Phenomenology of Perception through a cryptic citation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. But his references to heroism have been totally underexplored in the scholarship on his work, and the few interpreters who paid attention to those have merely focused on the political undertone of these references. In this project, I provide a newer reading of these references by suggesting that they are exemplifying Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on perception and embodiment, and that heroism serves for him as the end-result of a contention between perception and freedom. This is also a further hint about his interest in accounting for a moral component of perception and phenomenology overall.
Throughout my interpretation of Merleau-Ponty on heroism I attempt to further inform modern testimonies about what I call spontaneous heroism, which are cases of civilians who spontaneously put their lives in danger in order to save others at risk of dying. My interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s work on heroism helps explain that spontaneous heroism is not the result of psychological conditioning but rather the result of people acting on the basis of moral significations that they perceive in those situations of danger.
Publications
See my CV for a complete list of my publications.