The Problem of Unfreedom Yarran Hominh Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2021 © 2021 Yarran Hominh All Rights Reserved Abstract The Problem of Unfreedom Yarran Hominh Can unfree people make themselves free? Some people are unfree because of the social and political conditions in which they find themselves. To become freer would require changing those conditions; yet changing them requires the exercise of freedom. So it seems like they must already be free in order to become free. Drawing on John Dewey, W.E.B. Du Bois, and B.R. Ambedkar, I argue that the unfree can make themselves free. Unfreedom involves external constraints and how those constraints shape people’s agency. Becoming freer involves coming to know, from the inside, how our agency has been shaped. We can change that shaping and in turn the social conditions. The problem of unfreedom is a vicious cycle. Social conditions constrain agency, which in turn further entrenches the social conditions. A virtuous cycle is possible. Agents can change their conditions, reducing the constraint on their agency, in turn enabling greater change. Conditions are unstable, and agents can take advantage of that instability. Table of Contents Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................... iv Dedication ........................................................................................................................................... vii Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Dimensions of the Problem of Unfreedom.................................................................. 7 1.1 Some methodological preliminaries ........................................................................................ 9 1.2 The challenge from externalism ............................................................................................ 15 1.3 The motivation and grounds for externalism ...................................................................... 22 1.4 Overcoming unfreedom – “revolution” .............................................................................. 30 1.5 Overcoming unfreedom – “reform” .................................................................................... 45 1.6 Modernity and the problem of unfreedom.......................................................................... 51 Chapter 2: Dewey and the Tragedy of the Human Condition .................................................... 56 2.1 Tragic themes from the tradition .......................................................................................... 60 2.2 Periodising Dewey’s sense of the tragic ............................................................................... 67 2.3 Dewey’s conception of tragedy ............................................................................................. 72 2.4 Tragedy, pessimism, evil ......................................................................................................... 94 2.5 Tragedy and the problem of unfreedom ........................................................................... 103 Chapter 3: Dewey’s Critique of Political Democracy in Market Society ................................. 111 3.1 Background: Dewey, Hegel, and Lippmann..................................................................... 115 i 3.2 Political democracy and democracy as a social idea ........................................................ 119 3.3 Dewey’s critique of political democracy ........................................................................... 125 3.4 Dewey’s critique of market society .................................................................................... 138 3.5 The vicious cycle .................................................................................................................. 159 3.6 The double-sided moral psychology and the possibility of transformation ................ 162 Chapter 4: Ambedkar and the Annihilation of Caste ................................................................ 169 4.1 Preliminaries: situating my reading of Ambedkar ............................................................ 171 4.2 The structure of caste as graded inequality ....................................................................... 174 4.3 The “religious sanction” and the moral psychology of group interest ......................... 180 4.4 The “legal sanction” and the hardening of caste ............................................................. 190 4.5 Transformational strategies for change ............................................................................. 201 Chapter 5: Du Bois and the Self-Interested Orientation of Racial Capitalism ...................... 207 5.1 The early Du Bois’s moral psychology of racism ............................................................ 211 5.2 The systemic interconnection of racism and capitalism ................................................. 218 5.3 Self-interestedness as orientation ....................................................................................... 230 5.4 Concluding remarks on responses to unfreedom ............................................................ 240 Chapter 6: What is an Orientation? .............................................................................................. 246 6.1 Du Bois and the self-interested orientation of whiteness .............................................. 249 6.2 The metaphysics of orientation – patterning, fit, and expression ................................. 254 6.3 The epistemology of orientation – interpretation and the priority of self-knowledge266 ii 6.4 Hermeneutical self-knowledge ........................................................................................... 276 6.5 Hermeneutical self-knowledge and the problem of unfreedom.................................... 283 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 292 Forms of unfreedom .................................................................................................................. 296 From unfreedom to freedom .................................................................................................... 298 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................................... 306 iii Acknowledgments Any one person’s thinking is in actuality the result of the work of many hands, and I have been so very fortunate before and during the writing of this dissertation to have had such warm and supportive friends, mentors, and colleagues. My deepest gratitude and warmest appreciation must go first to my sterling committee, each of whom has left their individual mark on my soul. To Akeel Bilgrami, for unwavering generosity and strength of spirit. It is rarer perhaps than Emerson thinks to recognise one’s thoughts in another. But in Akeel’s case those thoughts always did come back to me with a certain alienated majesty, and it was never with shame that I received my own thoughts from him, but with a deeper recognition that they were mine. Michele Moody-Adams taught me the kindness of criticism and depth and precision in reading the canon. She encouraged in me the freedom of crossdisciplinarity, and every one of her suggestions led to improvement in my work. Robert Gooding-Williams combined breadth of philosophical vision with careful and generous reading. Bob is a model of how to draw philosophical insight from historical and historicist meticulousness. Philip Kitcher, from my first year at Columbia, was the firm hand I needed. The pragmatist tradition is by far the better for his sensitivity, insight, and nous. And José Medina, there at the start of this project and again for the dissertation’s completion, was a model external examiner, supportive, sharp, and generous in criticism, with a feel for the spirit animating this dissertation and for where I fell short of it. To Carol Rovane and to Christia Mercer, for many kindnesses rendered, conversations had, and intellectual and personal support. To Lydia iv Goehr, for wonderful lightness of touch and guidance, and to Francey Russell and Dhananjay Jagannathan, for being guiding lights closer along the way. To those at the University of Sydney – Rick Benitez, exemplary philosophical spirit, Socratic mentor, friend; David Macarthur, for inciting the first few academic philosophical flames in me; Moira Gatens and Millicent Churcher, for putting on the conference where this line of thinking was first written down, and for their support and friendship years before and since; Omid Tofighian, Elena Walsh, Linus Huang, Catrin Donovan, Louise Richardson-Self, and Elena Gordon, for being there at the start of a long and ongoing journey with Minorities And Philosophy; Ronan Williams and Tim Smartt, for the long hours with Wittgenstein; Lucy Smith and Laura Kotevska, philosopher-pals extraordinaire; and Ben Cross and Jeevan Hariharan, for companionship in the years learning how to teach philosophy of law. To David Dyzenhaus, Cheryl Misak, and Andrew Franklin-Hall, for their generosity of spirit to a