Sean Fen | Rhetoric

Bio:

My works usually reside at the intersection of the philosophy of life, ethics, and political theory. I have long been interested in offering a “processual” account of freedom and its maintenance (interpreted as an “achievement”), particularly regarding how the “fragility” of human life, which defines the essence of human living beings, serves as a condition for the achieved emergence of this notion of freedom, rather than viewing freedom as a pre-given, natural quality of humans or a mere status. This further leads me to ask how this free process discloses, constitutes, and endures a form of “worldly objectivity,” where the objective quality of the world derives from how a subject is uniquely and freely correlated/conditioned by an existential periphery (e.g., public space, sensible world, ecosystem) beyond subjective dominance. The formation of a subject is always anticipated by this site, place, or region, thereby illuminating multiple existential “distances,” i.e., a world, within the oscillatory intervals also made possible by other subjects’ distinctive correlations with the periphery in which they are situated, shared, and participated in. Worldling is a dynamic experience of living through a series of productive distances among free, subjective participants by which their fragile processes of becoming free are gathered and further objectively granted, though worldling is, by nature, similarly fragile and should be seen in the light of an achievement.

Drawing inspiration from Machiavelli’s discussion of “necessity,” Arendt’s emphasis on the frailty of human “action” and “power,” Heidegger’s later thoughts on “clearing,” and Jonas’s discourses on “metabolism,” all of which argue, in their respective ways, that freedom is futile and can only be reaffirmed or thrive in the multi-plays of worldly distancing, I aspire to provide a notion of freedom that emphasizes the experience of the vital becoming of human lives while leaving room for their formal, relatively stable personalized maintenance of freedom to be possible within the multiple phenomenological distances to which the plural free processes are distinctively incepted, intersected, and grounded.

The key concepts reproductively engender my thoughts include agency, life, intensity, individuation, worldliness, temporality, spatiality, personality, appearance, and necessity.

I received my B.A. in Political Science, with a minor in Sociology, from George Washington University and my M.A. in Social Sciences (focusing mainly on political theory and continental thoughts) from the University of Chicago. My M.A. thesis at the University of Chicago addressed how Machiavelli’s conceptualization of “necessity” demands an ethical-existential transformation of subjects, resulting in a particularly ferocious free ethos, and how that ethos can and should be maintained and continuously reproduced within a popular-democratic institutional context.

Research interests:

Political Theory (Machiavelli, Arendt, Foucault)

Ethics and Subjectivity

Phenomenology

Existential Philosophy

New Materialism

Process Ontology

Role:

Graduate Student