7: Spotlight - Agnes Callard

The debut of a column

Hello, world,

If I had all the money in the world (for me, I only want money to buy back my time since my current lifestyle is the lifestyle I want to live, with some marginal changes such as well…um…a house and a recently newly acquired value of maybe being a parent one day), I often think that one activity that I would want to do is read the entire catalog of a thinker, put together a really intensive podcast on the said thinker, and then move on. I’m training to be a political scientist but what I really am is an autodidact. And this is the best time in human history to be an infovore!

I am a generalist who loves to focus yet loves to keep moving, too. My favorite thing to do when I’m not working on explicitly academic stuff—which right now consists of me working on two different ideas, one which will be my dissertation, which I can discuss at a later time—is to dive into a topic, thinker, or subfield and read-up all that I can on it before moving on. Of course, “all that I can” gets disrupted by new interests but I always—and this is true—come back. I keep stacking interests. So in this column, The Spotlight, I want to use it to introduce readers to thinkers or ideas that are super rewarding to get into if one has the time.

So since I don’t have all the time (read: money) right now to have the above-mentioned podcast due to prior commitments (commitments that I love and in no way regret), I can’t necessarily spend the amount of hours that would meet my standards for a really really phenomenal audio exposition of said thinker(s), I am resorting to at least using some of my newsletter space (which I have committed to!) to at least profile what or who I’m currently curious about. The Spotlight column will sometimes feature people or ideas I’ve only recently become aware of (like this one) or longstanding ideas, mentors, inspirations, and so forth that have long influenced or enraptured me.

I’ve recently become intellectually obsessed with Agnes Callard, and I’ve been trying to inject or absorb all things Agnes Callard ever since. I now bring you the debut edition of The Spotlight.
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The Spotlight: Agnes Callard

I first heard of Agnes Callard when she was in discussion with Robert Wright on the eponymously titled show hosted by the later. Callard, born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1976, is one of the most idiosyncratic and fresh voices and writers that I’ve come across over the last 6 months or so. She has been teaching at the University of Chicago in their department of philosophy since 2008.

Agnes specializes in ancient philosophy and ethics but her writing on contemporary affairs and the contemporary role and state of philosophy is what is the most compelling to me at this stage of my life. In “Why Philosophers Shouldn’t Sign Petitions,” Agnes dove into the debate in the professional community of philosophers about deplatforming, “the academic branch of cancel culture,” as she calls it. Her argument is that philosophers should not signs petitions regardless of their content or demands. A priori, I love this stance; posteriori, I love this stance. Her basic point is that petitions signed by experts are impositions of authority and, in her words, “[she] want to bring people to believe only what they, by their own lights, can see to be justified; I don’t want them to believe something because I am one of the many people who think it.” Being sensitive to roles, status, power dynamics and authority bias is crucial for an educator. Self-awareness is necessary. I find this lacking in the very people who need it the most.

Another extremely relevant and consequential issue is what the psychologist Shoshana Zuboff has come to call the era of “surveillance capitalism.” Callard weighed in on the current privacy, security, and Big Data debate on its myriad effects on an essay on The Stone, the philosophy blog on The New York Times’ website, nominally about the “cost of tweeting about her kids,” in which she attempts (I say attempts because I don’t think she nails exactly what she was trying to say here, especially with her ill-placed baby analogy) to argue that text-based communication has given us more control than we often think, especially when compared with phone calls, for example; however, the cost is that we have lost interpretive control. We have more control than ever in constructing when and how we respond to stuff; yet as soon as we press send, or comment, or compose and publish, we lose all possibility in controlling how we will be interpreted.

The reason I showcase this Stone piece is Callard is trying to add value, although in a not all-too-novel way, to a current debate that is both concise yet subtle. She calls the situation the Great Control Swap and the article leaves you wanting so much more; she is good at making concise and compelling arguments (or at least assertions)—she leaves you plenty of space to disagree which is what good philosophers do. One big reason Callard is interesting is you know what she thinks which makes her work easier to wrestle with than fence-sitting mushy work.

Callard, who dislikes public philosophy, was invited to write a column in the philosophy magazine The Point on public philosophy and I have been obsessed with her sharpness, heterodoxy, and learned and wise installments. My favorite is her column called “Against Advice.” I often think about how hollow and useless I feel after I am asked for advice; something Callard writes here puts categories on what I feel: I know people often need coaching—hands-on, deliberate, personal, time-consuming help, and not advice. I am quite paternalistic (I really crave the same back, by the way) and I often want to help more than I can even though coaching is really what most people require to really achieve so many goals in life. Giving instructions to specific questions can be fine; giving advice to someone you don’t know can be deeply harmful because generic “go get ‘ems” tend to not only be worthless but more often can be detrimental. Agnes says this:

“The problem here is a mismatch between form and content. Instrumental knowledge is knowledge of universals: whenever you have an X, it will get you a Y. I can give you such knowledge without our having any robust connection to one another. Knowledge of becoming, by contrast, always involves a particularized grasp of where the aspirant currently stands on the path between total cluelessness and near-perfection. What are her characteristic weaknesses; where does she already excel; what nudges could she use? Only someone who knows her knows this. An aspirational history is full of minute corrections, dead ends, backtracking, re-orientation and random noise. It is as idiosyncratic, odd and particular as the human being herself.”

And she finishes with:

“The moral of every great person’s story seems to be that they were not trying to retell another’s. Indeed, one of the paradoxes of advice seems to be that those most likely to be asked for it are least likely to have taken anyone else’s: their projects of “becoming” are the most particularized of all.”

I think this is beautiful. The whole thing is really worth the read, especially if you care about mentoring, helping, advising, teaching, parenting, being an uncle, an aunt, or sister, for example.

A Capsule Review of Her Book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming

Callard’s first book is quite ambitious and the moment I first heard her describe it on The Wright Show made me feel electric and sympatico with her mind: ah! that’s why I’m never bored; that’s what I’m always doing: I’m becoming; I’m an aspirant! And yes, I like to walk to the edge of rules and mores. I knew I had to read her book as soon as I could. Well “as soon as I could” ended up being Saturday, January 25, 2020-Thursday, January 30. Her question for the book is: how do people acquire new values? How do you make yourself care about something you don’t already care about? And her aim was to construct a complete theory and argument that answers the challenges of decision theory, moral psychology, and moral responsibility. What can seem mundane or obvious, she illuminates and really m a k e s you believe in self-creation in a way that I didn’t think was possible.

Callard defines aspiration as “aiming for a goal that you don’t fully grasp” (YouTube). In the book, it is defined as “the distinctive form of agency directed at the acquisition of values” (2018, 5). Callard defends aspiration as a particular type of rational behavior based on “proleptic reasons,” which are “reasons that you act on when you are working your way into a new domain of value” (Cowen podcast). This type of reason is generative and, if Callard is to be believed, requires new concepts and new ways of argumentation; new ways of thinking through the very essence of human striving and aspiration. As you read you really begin to connect dots.

If philosophy is its own time understood in thoughts, to paraphrase G. W. F. Hegel, then Aspiration is my own self-understanding (cultivating new virtues and loving the hard work of it, valuing aspiring more than ambition, being neurodivergent) articulated by a philosopher who I’ve never met.

“Leisurely self-contentment is ruled out for someone who sees herself as being in a defective valuational condition. Grasping new values is work,” she writes in the introduction of Aspiration (2018). I completely relate to this; it’s why I’m never bored. And I mean that; people who know me could attest, I am never bored. Now I have language that makes sense in describing why. I am an aspirant. In fact, I have a notebook that I started some years ago where I just list different potential values or virtues that I aspire to embody and perfect. And some of them would have been alien to a much younger Patrick, such as “dressing nicely and appropriately,” “being a man,” and “becoming a parent.”

Callard spends nearly 300 pages developing her theory of aspiration that is surprisingly—300 pages on what? you might think—captivating and immediately relevant. Tyler Cowen’s Straussian reading of this work is that Callard is actually developing a theory of everything but can’t yet reveal it (She responded that this was correct with one caveat: she can’t reveal her complete theory because she doesn’t yet know what it is). Callard really is arguing that so much confusion regarding decision theory, for example, is because we have too few categories regarding the reasons that human beings make choices! I love this. Her theory on the “agency of becoming” is a unique attempt at answering the set of assumptions and findings from three important fields (decision theory; moral psychology; and moral responsibility) regarding human behavior and beliefs. Her prose style allows her to engage in conversation with other philosophers who she is either building off or directly contradicting and challenging; in other words, Callard shows her work. Someone who really wanted to read the antecedents of her work can do so by using Callard’s footnotes, bibliography, and index.

In the end, Callard believes in “self-creation,” which requires free will, she argues. I don’t believe in free will as a philosophical matter (here is a blog post of mine on the subject); yet, her argument immediately jumped out at me as the strongest case for some sort of self-creation that I’ve ever heard. I disagree that self-creation requires free will. (That is funny to write - yet I strongly believe it.) This work doesn’t change my belief about determinism; however, it did enlarge and make my view of what I’m doing and what’s possible more colorful and expansive. It’s a view of human nature and human beings that I really find persuasive.

In the end, however, I’m not throwing out the conceptual categories regarding my perception of free will just yet.

And how could I?

Recommended Callard Content

Video:

This last video is Agnes explaining the thesis of her book Aspiration:

Audio

Conversations with Tyler, Episode #38 (April 11, 2018)
- Tyler Cowen in conversation with Agnes Callard

My Top 5 Callard Pieces

(1) “The Problems With Letters of Recommendation,” The Point (December 26, 2019).
Stand out excerpt from the article: “The teacher’s vision is not the one that matters. …I stand by my refusal to “be straight with” my students. I reserve the right to protect them from the narrowness of my own mind. They are capable of so much more than I can conceive of.”

(2) ”Half a Person,” The Point (September 5, 2019).
Callard had a miscarriage. Two actually. She writes beautifully about the experience, introducing the reader to the Swedish artist Hilma af Klint at the same time, whose art she experiences the same day of her second miscarriage.

(3) “Against Advice,” The Point (May 9, 2019).

(4) “The Philosophy of Anger,” Boston Review (January 21, 2020)
In which Callard argues that anger is both, morally corrupting and often a completely correct feeling. I like the tension in this piece; I like feeling torn in two after reading it. This, too, challenges my disposition and priors (anger is deforming and maladaptive).

(5) “Don’t Overthink It,” Boston Review (January 21, 2019).
There is no better way of learning than by doing, pushes back Callard. This notion cuts against lots of recent (and ancient) arguments and books about slow deliberation including the book she reviews. In this essay, Callard reviews the book Farsighted: How We Make the Decisions that Matter the Most, by Steven Johnson.

Follow Agnes on Twitter:

Agnes Callard’s Twitter (@AgnesCallard)

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I hope you enjoyed this profile or spotlight on Professor Agnes Callard.

Stay aspiring,
Patrick M. Foran