research

What does it take for a desire to be intelligible? The dominant approach, following Anscombe, holds that a desire is intelligible when its object is seen as desirable, and disputes only how desirability should be understood. I argue that this approach is an absolutist one, on which intelligibility is grounded in a desirer-independent property of the desire’s object, with belief as the subject’s route to it. I then argue that its two popular elaborations of this approach fail. The Apparent Goodness thesis’s belief condition can be satisfied while puzzlement survives, so the relativity of intelligibility is pushed further rather than explained; the Natural Attraction thesis reverses the order of explanation between human nature and intelligibility. I propose instead Intelligibility as Normality: a desire is intelligible to someone iff they acknowledge it as normal for those who have it, where acknowledgment consists in locating the desire within a practice of mutual recognition they share. Normality here is articulative: it characterizes the kind of individual the desirer is and that it is practice-conferred. The result is that the intelligibility of desire is essentially social: a relation between persons, not between a person and an object’s properties.

When is deep interpersonal influence good? A prominent answer holds that legitimate influence engages the recipient’s rational capacities, while illegitimate influence bypasses or overrides them. Call this Rational Scrutiny (RS). I argue that RS is incomplete. My case is Raskolnikov’s transformation through Sonia in \textCrime and Punishment. Sonia offers no arguments and invites no deliberation; Porfiry Petrovich, who does engage Raskolnikov as a reasoner, fails to move him. Yet Sonia’s influence is recognizably good, and it is neither rational persuasion nor manipulation. I develop a positive account of it as interpersonal resonance: the activation and amplification of a latent capacity in one person by another’s manifestation of the corresponding capacity. Resonance differs from rational influence in mechanism—it is activation rather than deliberative uptake, and from manipulation in its psychic genealogy.

Recent accounts have characterized loneliness as an emotional response to the thought that desired social contact cannot be had, or a receptive experience that represents the absence of certain relational goods as bad. Such accounts take the lonely person’s experience to represent transparently what they want or lack. I argue that this is true of one kind of loneliness but not of another. The familiar kind is indeed an emotion arising from a frustrated desire for company, and about it the existing accounts may be right. But there is another kind those accounts cannot accommodate: a loneliness that consists in the unintelligibility of one’s own experience to oneself.

Drawing on Hannah Arendt’s characterization of loneliness as the loss of one’s own company, I argue that self-intelligibility requires acknowledgment from others, i.e. the availability of shared practices within which one’s experience can be articulated and acknowledged. When this requirement goes unmet, an experience can fail to be intelligible to the person whose experience it is. The lonely person of the second kind is not someone who knows what they want and cannot get it, but someone left without the resources to articulate who they are.

How do we explain actions out of love for one’s deceased beloved? Contemporary theories of love that adopt the approach of identifying the practical reason love gives us have a difficult time offering a satisfactory explanation. According to the benevolence theorist, love essentially consists in the lover caring for the well-being or happiness of the beloved for their own sake. Yet, they have a hard time establishing that the deceased beloved has any well-being or one that can be promoted or harmed. According to the ends-sharing theorist, love consists in sharing in the beloved’s pursuit of ends or projects that are significant. But they fail to account for cases where we defy the beloved’s death wish out of love.

In this paper, I argue that acting out of love for one’s dead beloved or more generally, love in the absence of the other, motivate an account of love which looks beyond the popular approach. More specifically, I propose that loving someone consists in sharing a practical stance with them, where this means that the lover experiences what happens to the beloved as what happens to themselves in a particular way.

What can our reactions be to someone who is completely unintelligible to us? According to some accounts of intelligibility, someone who is completely unintelligible to us is someone with whom we share nothing—no shared desires, feelings, experiences, etc. According to the standard view, represented by Anscombe, the sort of reactions we would have towards a completely unintelligible person can be no other than treating them as a “babbling loon.”

My claim is that reactive attitudes other than the ones dehumanizing the other is possible, and one such attitude is acknowledgement. Drawing on and developing further the works of Stanley Cavell, I argue that acknowledging the unintelligible person consists in acknowledging the legitimacy of their desires, feelings, and experiences, and one basis for such acknowledgement is love.