Aspiration Read online

  ASPIRATION

  ASPIRATION

  The Agency of Becoming

  Agnes Callard

  Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.

  Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.

  © Oxford University Press 2018

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.

  You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Callard, Agnes, author.

  Title: Aspiration : the agency of becoming / Agnes Callard.

  Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2018. |

  Includes bibliographical references.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017033630| ISBN 9780190639488 (hardback) |

  ISBN 9780190639501 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Change. | Becoming (Philosophy) | Practical reason. | Ethics.

  Classification: LCC BD373 .C35 2018 | DDC 116—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017033630

  This book is dedicated to my teacher Amy Kass,

  who made her classroom a theater of aspiration.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  I. Overview: Reasoning toward Value

  (a) How We Got Here

  (b) Valuing and Aspiring

  II. Outline of Chapters

  (a) Rationality

  (b) Moral Psychology

  (c) Responsibility

  III. A Case Study: Alcibiades

  IV. Self and Value

  PART I

  PRACTICAL RATIONALITY

  1. Decision Theory and Transformative Choice

  I. Ullmann-Margalit on Old Person versus New Person

  II. Paul on Deciding to Become a Vampire

  III. Self-Cultivation versus Self-Transformation

  IV. Privileging Second-Order Preferences?

  V. The Decision Model versus the Aspiration Model

  VI. Transformative Choice?

  2. Proleptic Reasons

  I. Large-Scale Transformative Pursuits

  II. Alternatives to Proleptic Reasons?

  (a) Vague Reasons

  (b) Self-Management Reasons

  (c) Testimonial Reasons

  (d) Reasons of Competition

  (e) Reasons of Pretense

  (f) Second-Order Reasons

  (g) Approximating Reasons

  III. A Dilemma: Flailing versus Deepening

  IV. Internal Reasons

  PART II

  MORAL PSYCHOLOGY

  3. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Conflict

  I. Introduction

  (a) Singling Aspiration Out, Fitting Aspiration In

  (b) Overview of Chapter 3

  (c) Defining Intrinsic Conflict

  II. Valuing: A Hybrid Account

  III. The Possibility of Intrinsic Conflict

  IV. Deliberative Irresolvability

  V. Intrinsic Conflict and Ethical Theory

  VI. Two Suggestions for Resolving Intrinsic Conflicts

  (a) By Identification (Frankfurt)

  (b) By Aspiration

  4. Akrasia

  I. Defining Akrasia

  II. Acting on a Weaker Reason?

  III. Akrasia and Intrinsic Conflict

  IV. An Objection: Moralizing Akrasia

  V. Species of Intrinsic Conflict

  VI. Akratics and Aspirants

  PART III

  MORAL RESPONSIBILITY

  5. The Problem of Self-Creation

  I. Self-Endorsement

  II. Self-Cultivation

  III. Neurath’s Boat

  IV. Escaping Strawson’s Dilemma

  (a) Normative Dependence

  (b) Priority of Created Self

  (c) Strawson’s Two Requirements

  (d) Self-Creation by Aspiration

  (e) An Objection: The Value Gambit

  V. Teleology and Agency

  (a) Backward Causation?

  (b) Two Conceptions of Agency

  (c) Aspirational Agency versus Self-Standing Action

  6. Self-Creation and Responsibility

  I. Aspiration versus Dialectical Activity

  II. Aspiration versus Ambition

  III. Responsibility for Self: An Asymmetrical Account

  IV. The Aspiring Gangster?

  V. Responsibility for Character: A Test Case

  Conclusion

  I. Defending Aspiration

  II. Motherhood and Infertility

  Bibliography

  Index

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The University of Chicago provided the context in which this book could be written. Especially helpful at the final stage were a fellowship I received from the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago for the 2015–2016 academic year and a workshop attended by my colleagues Jason Bridges, David Finkelstein, Anton Ford, Gabriel Lear, Jonathan Lear, and Martha Nussbaum.

  For encouragement and feedback at vulnerable moments in my trajectory, I thank Sarah Buss, Rachana Kamtekar, Kate Manne, Berislav Marušić, Julie Tannenbaum, and Steve White. For patient support over the many years that this project has taken to congeal, I thank my editor, Peter Ohlin. For generously providing the beautiful cover art to a perfect stranger (though longtime admirer), I thank the artist Istvan Banyai. Arnold Brooks and Ben Callard read every draft, debated every argument, and helped me think every thought in this book. What clarity it has is due to the fact that Ben fought as hard as he did to remain a skeptic of aspiration. Its optimistic spirit comes from Arnold, who would always help me find my way back to the central idea.

  Writing this book, I have relied on extensive firsthand observation of the aspirants who have presented themselves to me both at home and at work. I owe thanks to both constituencies. First, my three children. Abe is such a bundle of outsized aspirations that those who know him have asked me whether this book is based on him. Macabee, who has the gift of feeling deeply and of understanding the feelings of others, is the glue that holds our family together. Izzy, the youngest, is just beginning to come into being, and that is wonderful in itself.

  My students have, for the past decade, been leading me to the topic of this book. Perhaps they did not always know they were doing it, and I certainly did not recognize it at first, but it is nonetheless true that they are responsible for not only my faith in the possibility of rational self-transformation but also my conviction in the urgency of demonstrating that possibility to others. In this regard, I owe a special debt to Amichai Amit, Stina Bäckström, Jason Bern, Gabrielle Bowyer, Noah Chafets, Maximilian Chaoulideer, Stephen Creighton, Danie Dorr, Romelia Drager, Daniel Drucker, Kenneth (Paul) Dueck, Cait Duggan, Alex Elnabli, Josh Epstein, Garrett Fox, Josh Fox, Peter Goldberg, Henry Gruber, Helen Hailes, Alex Hale, Dzan Herba, Kayla Higgins, Mark Hopwood, Julie Huh, Dan Ioppolo, Todd Isenstadt, Ethan Jerzak, Dake Kang, Claire Kirwin, Josh Kramer, Louis Levin, David Lind, Jennifer Lockhart, Michael Malpass, Matt Mandelkern, Anya Marchenko, Olivia Markbreiter, Max (Haney)
Maxwell, Jeremey McKey, Maria Mejia, Santiago Mejia, Bodhi (Shane) Melnitzer, Gillian Moore, Parysa Mostajir, Maya Nguen, Rory O’Connell, Claire O’Grady, Anne (Anastasia) Quaranto, Ajay Ravichandran, Emmett Rensin, Erika Rist, CJ Schei, Gabe Shapiro, Dan Telech, Eric Thurm, Josh Trubowitz, Doug Vaaler, Gareth Walsh, Sam Wigutow, and Sophia Wyatt.

  The book also draws on my own experiences as an aspirant, and so it seems appropriate to thank a few of the key players along that route. Among the many things for which I have my parents to thank, I would single out the difficult decision they made to leave their homeland and raise me in the United States. I thank my sister, Kata Gellen, for enduring my earliest and most irritating aspirational efforts, many of which were, for one reason or another, enacted on her. Even as adults, we are still growing up together. Likewise I thank my best friend, Yelena Baraz, for holding tight to me over the years, even as we each twisted, Proteus-like, through a variety of shapes. Finally, I thank my teachers Leon and Amy Kass, who fueled my own aspirations in the same classrooms in which I now do my best to emulate their example.

  ASPIRATION

  Introduction

  I. OVERVIEW: REASONING TOWARD VALUE

  (a) How We Got Here

  We can all think back to a time when we were substantially different people, value-wise, from the people we are now. There was a time when we were not even aware of the existence of some of the people, activities, institutions, and ideologies that now figure centrally in our lives. Maybe we had different political views or no political views at all; maybe we used to be religious, or used not to be; maybe we now feel deep ties to a place that is spatially, culturally, and linguistically far from where we grew up; maybe we find our interests and concerns resembling those of our parents more than we ever thought they would. We care about many things that we once did not care about. How did that change come about?

  In accounting for the genesis of our new values, we often have occasion to mention the effects on us of forces outside our control, such as a fortuitous coincidence, an influential mentor, an inspiring locale, a tragic loss, a bitter betrayal, a domineering parent, the emergence of an innate facility, the process of getting older. Nonetheless, none of these sorts of factors can amount to the whole story. A mentor cannot implant a love of music; the betrayal cannot, of itself, create a devotion to independence; coincidence cannot produce love; being in a culinary mecca cannot make one into a chef; talents do not develop themselves. There is no doubt that our parents, friends, and romantic partners influence us deeply, but they do not fashion us. We have a hand in answering the question as to what things in the world are important to us, and our answers need not be, and typically are not, arbitrary or random. Agency, as distinct from mere behavior, is marked by practical rationality. Insofar as becoming someone is something someone does, and not merely something that happens to her, she must have access to reasons to become the person she will be. Giving a philosophical account of how it is possible for value-acquisition to be a form of practically rational agency is the project of this book.

  This project faces a difficulty: people do not seem to be able to choose or decide to have different values. A decision or choice is an act of the will that prefigures, accompanies, or is a constitutive part of some single action. The transition from indifference to love cannot typically be effected by way of deciding: no matter the strength of my will, it does not seem that I can muscle myself into suddenly caring. To be sure, the path to valuing sometimes includes momentary expressions of commitment: the moment when you say “I do,” or sign the adoption papers, or buy the one-way plane ticket to a foreign country. But these moments are themselves only part of the story, punctuating a longer process. Coming to value something tends to represent a deep change in how one sees and feels and thinks. Acquiring a new value often alters the structure of one’s priorities by demoting or even displacing something one valued before. Such changes take time, over the course of which one has done many different things in the service of value-appreciation. The later actions are shaped by the small changes that the earlier ones have engendered in such a way as to allow someone to slowly develop new priorities, concerns, and attachments. The process as a whole exemplifies a distinctive form of practical rationality, one not structured by a single moment of intention or decision at its inception; the rationality of the agent I seek to describe changes and indeed solidifies over time, as the agent becomes increasingly able to respond to the reasons for action associated with her new values.

  (b) Valuing and Aspiring

  We have a rich vocabulary for the many forms that positive practical orientations can take: in addition to valuing, we speak of desiring, wanting, loving, approving of, being attracted to, caring about or for, endorsing, preferring, being identified with, seeing as valuable, feeling impelled to, etc. Setting aside other differences between such terms, we can group them roughly into two psychological strata. There is a shallower stratum to which “desire,” “urge,” and “attraction” often belong, and a deeper stratum—one that runs closer to the heart of who the person in question is—to which “value,” “endorsement,” and “identification” usually belong. These terms are quite flexible, and context can suffice to make clear that, in a given case, the urge in question is a deep one, or the endorsement a superficial one. One marker of whether a given term, in a given context, runs shallow or deep is whether we’re inclined to preface it with “mere”—mere desire, mere attraction, etc.

  I will have occasion to refer to both kinds of practical attitudes over the course of the book. When I speak of “values” the reader can be sure I am picking out a deep practical orientation. Beyond this, I am disinclined to invoke a technical vocabulary that would reliably mark the difference between, e.g., loving chocolate and loving one’s child. For I would have to either artificially relegate such a term to a specific stratum or introduce a term of art to cover the lower stratum; and the risk of messing with natural language is that of becoming alienated from intuitions about the phenomena one is trying to describe. I prefer to speak loosely and colloquially of agents wanting, desiring, etc., and allowing context to clarify whether the practical orientation I am describing represents what really matters to the agent or is a case of mere wanting.

  Our interest is, for reasons I will elaborate later in the chapter, specifically an interest in the rational process by which we arrive at new elements in the deeper stratum. Grasping new values is hard for us because, to paraphrase Augustine,1 our hands are already full. Without denying that parents and teachers may play an important role in such a process, we might nonetheless characterize it as one in which one habituates or educates oneself. It is a mark of being old enough to engage in such an activity that one already has interests, concerns, and projects that can serve as obstacles to acquiring new ones. Gaining a value often means devoting to it some of the time and effort one was previously devoting elsewhere. Sometimes one’s new value requires complete divestment from an old value, for instance when a former pleasure-seeker turns herself toward asceticism. Even in cases where our old value-outlook does not specifically contradict our new one, we often experience the effort of coming to apprehend value as a struggle with ourselves. Leisurely self-contentment is ruled out for someone who sees herself as being in a defective valuational condition. Grasping new values is work.

  The name I will give to the rational process by which we work to care about (or love, or value, or desire . . .) something new is “aspiration.” Aspiration, as I understand it, is the distinctive form of agency directed at the acquisition of values. Though we do not typically come to value simply by deciding to, it is nonetheless true that coming to value can be something the agent does. The explanation of how we come to value, or to see-as-valuable, so many of the things that we once did not is that we work to achieve this result. The aspirant sees that she does not have the values that she would like to have, and therefore seeks to move herself toward a better valuational condition. She senses that there is more out the
re to value than she currently values, and she strives to come to see what she cannot yet get fully into view.

  The work of aspiration includes, but is by no means limited to, the mental work of thinking, imagining, and reasoning. If a callow youth gets an inkling of the value of classical music or painting or wine, and wants to come to appreciate these values more fully, it will not suffice for him to think carefully about these things. He must listen to music or visit museums or drink wine. Let me offer a few more examples, some of which may strike the reader as more familiar than others. If one aspires to be a doctor, one goes to medical school. If one aspires to be more attuned to values of healthy living, one might become a member of a gym and transition one’s eating habits toward vegetables and whole grains. If one seeks to appreciate some person, one might invite him for coffee. If one aspires to be religious, one might spend more time at one’s church or synagogue or mosque—or, in another kind of case, one might deliberately stay away from those places in an effort to (re)connect with God on one’s own terms. If one’s goal is to value civic engagement, one might explore community activism. We aspire by doing things, and the things we do change us so that we are able to do the same things, or things of that kind, better and better. In the beginning, we sometimes feel as though we are pretending, play-acting, or otherwise alienated from our own activity. We may see the new value as something we are trying out or trying on rather than something we are fully engaged with and committed to. We may rely heavily on mentors whom we are trying to imitate or competitors whom we are trying to best. As time goes on, however, the fact (if it is a fact) that we are still at it is usually a sign that we find ourselves progressively more able to see, on our own, the value that we could barely apprehend at first. This is how we work our way into caring about the many things that we, having done that work, care about.

  The English word “aspiration” is a good, if not a perfect, label for the concept I aim to explicate. Since I use the word to describe the process of rational value-acquisition, I end up emphasizing certain of the ordinary language features of the word and de-emphasizing others. For instance, we often speak of someone’s aspiring to some career, as I did a moment ago when describing an aspiring doctor. In this kind of context, we may think that such a person’s primary hope is to acquire the skills and qualifications that further enable her to secure an extrinsic reward such as status, money, or parental love. The aspirant, as I use the word, doesn’t aim exclusively at any of these things. To be sure, she wants to go to medical school, to pass her exams, to succeed in her residency, to gain a position at an excellent hospital. Perhaps she even wants to please her parents. But her desire for all these things is a secondary manifestation of what she really wants, which is to provide the kind of medical assistance whose particular nature it is the job of her medical education to convey to her. Though she takes herself, before attending medical school, to have some understanding of medicine, she (knows that) she will only really grasp the specific good she is seeking to bring about by way of engaging in the work in question. (Consider the variety of medical professions: anaesthesiologists, obstetricians and psychologists provide very different kinds of help to people. The full understanding of the kind of medical assistance each provides is the province of the experienced practitioner, not the first-year medical student.)