“I read the Quest for Certainty and Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy, then-newly rediscovered by Philip Deen. I was hooked! Dewey gave expression to a dissatisfaction that I had with much of the philosophy that I was taught, and gave me new tools for thinking. A reconstruction of philosophy, if you will.”
Yarran Hominh is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bard College. Before that he worked as a lawyer, taught both philosophy and law at universities in Australia, and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Dartmouth College. Working in social and political philosophy, philosophy of race, moral psychology, and pragmatism, he co-edits the APA Studies on Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies and is a past recipient of SAAP’s Joseph L. Blau Prize.
What does American philosophy mean to you?
There are two strands of the pluralism that is “American philosophy” that are particularly significant for me. The first is pragmatism, which of course extends beyond the traditional canon—indeed, beyond the Americas—and includes figures like B. R. Ambedkar, Hu Shih, and Enrique Dussel.
Part of what pragmatism means to me is philosophical inquiry that begins from specific problematic situations, each located within histories and in geographies. The second strand (or perhaps set of strands) of “American philosophy,” significant to me, begins from the situation of U.S. global hegemony, with its histories and geographies of imperialism and capitalist modernity. American philosophy in this key involves philosophizing from the midst of American empire. It means working with and among the different radical traditions of thought and practice that have been born in resistance to empire, whether Native and Indigenous philosophy, Latine philosophy, Black philosophy, or Asian American philosophy.
How did you become an American philosopher?
In a way, my becoming an American philosopher has been overdetermined, but by a series of contingencies. Let me sketch some of the many lines of influence.
I was lucky enough to have what is now, I think, largely impossible: a lot of intellectual “floating time” in Australia between my undergraduate degrees (in philosophy and in law) and starting my Ph.D. During those years, where my main practice was my (then-burgeoning, now well-defunct) musical career, I sustained myself with odd jobs in law and journalism, government scholarships, but largely by adjuncting across a couple of universities, teaching various courses across philosophy and law. (One could live like that, perhaps surprisingly, only as recently as a decade and a half ago, at least in Australia. Now it is utterly impossible to do and still have any sense of life.) My undergraduate advisor, Rick Benitez, mentioned Dewey to me during this time as someone who might be congenial. I read The Quest for Certainty and Unmodern Philosophy and Modern Philosophy, then-newly rediscovered by Philip Deen. I was hooked! Dewey gave expression to a dissatisfaction that I had with much of the philosophy that I was taught, and gave me new tools for thinking. A reconstruction of philosophy, if you will.
At the same time, I was doing some research in philosophy of law and constitutional theory which took me to a number of figures in that world who were pragmatist-adjacent, including Lon Fuller and Oliver Wendell Holmes. So I came also to pragmatism via its influence on 20th century American legal theory.
A few years later, just before graduate school, I was introduced to José Medina’s work by another of my philosophy professors, Moira Gatens. José showed me that philosophy could grapple with the problems that people face, and his work was also where I really first encountered the intersection of the two strands of American philosophy that I sketched in response to the first question.
In 2016 I came to Columbia University for graduate school. There I was lucky enough to read the classical pragmatists with Philip Kitcher and Du Bois with Bob Gooding-Williams. Those two strands kept popping up together. And, while at graduate school, I began co-editing the APA Studies on Asian and Asian American Philosophers and Philosophies with A. Minh Nguyen, which led me to think more carefully about Asian American philosophy.
How would you describe your current research?
My current research consists in a series of attempts to grapple with the present large-scale and structural challenges that the globe faces, in light of the histories of colonialism and imperialism that undergird our moment. I’ll quickly sketch two of those lines of thinking.
My book project, The Problem of Unfreedom, examines a practical problem that many groups of people at different scales face: that their unfreedom is self-stabilizing. People are unfree because of the social and political structures under which they live. Becoming freer requires changing those structures. But changing the structures requires exercising freedom. So, it may seem that people must already be free in order to become free. If that is so, can those who are unfree free themselves?
This formulation of the problem gives expression to what I take to be a deep and philosophically important pessimism, one that characterizes much of our moment. So to answer “yes” to this question requires, in my view, working through that pessimism and what it reflects truly about our world.
Another line of research concerns Asian American philosophy, which I take (with others like David H. Kim) to be philosophizing from or about experiences of being racialized as Asian within American empire. Kim, along with Maya von Ziegesar and Ron Sundstrom, are co-editing the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on Asian American Philosophy. I’m contributing a chapter to that handbook on Asian American alienation as a form of what I call “forced cosmopolitanism”: cosmopolitanism that is not a choice, but a position in which one is placed by American empire. This chapter is a part of a larger body of work on cosmopolitanism as philosophical method, drawing on Walter Mignolo and others, as a way of philosophizing in a global key. To philosophize from the midst of American empire should involve, I think, philosophizing across traditions in a world still dominated by U.S. hegemony.
What do you do when you’re not doing American philosophy?
Most of my current research, as is perhaps clear, does not comprise “doing American philosophy” in the sense of interpreting or explicitly drawing on canonical figures in the traditions of American philosophy. (I say this while fully committed to the thought that “American philosophy” in the broader senses that I outlined above is a constant part of my perspective on things.) Teaching at Bard College, thankfully and enjoyably, takes me very far afield from American philosophy, from Sartre and Lacan, to queer pessimisms, Fanon, improv movement exercises, and contemporary analytic work in the philosophy of gender, just to name a few things I taught in the last year. I also have a young child, who takes up much of my time outside work. More recently, I’ve found time to return to rock climbing, though (for now) mostly indoors in the bouldering gym, and to martial arts and meditative practices that, in another life, might have been my main teaching practice.
What’s your favorite work in American philosophy? What should we all be reading?
I often find myself returning to that searing though flawed criticism of American empire, W.E.B. Du Bois’s 1920 part-autobiography Darkwater. The other fairly constant presence in my teaching and thought is Maria Lugones, both her Peregrinajes/Pilgrimages essays (particularly her essay on world-travelling) and her work on the colonial/modern gender system, especially her essay “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.”
In a slightly different key, I would suggest people read the issues of the relatively short-lived newspaper Triple Jeopardy, published by the Third World Women’s Alliance between 1971-1975. It gives expression to a materialist conception of transnational intersectionality as a diagnosis of and response to U.S. imperialism, written by a multiracial group of Third Worldist women coming out of the battles of the late 1960s.
And, of course, one can always dwell in the capaciousness of Ralph Waldo Emerson. My current fave essay is “Circles”, which has some powerful advice for this moment: “There are no fixtures in Nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees.” So too, one might hope, for unfreedom.