> Philosophers are trying to make the story that humanity tells about itself better. > <cite>Agnes Callard</cite> > In life we’re all mediocre chess players in the sense that we can’t see with clarity 20 moves ahead. Maybe we can see a couple of moves. But there are things that we can unclearly see and that’s a really important part of the story. You can work your way to seeing these things more clearly. A lot of life isn’t about trading pieces but rather about getting that clearly into view. > <cite>Agnes Callard</cite> Where have my values come from? How much should I trust them? Can I improve them? For Callard, aspiration is about the rational, purposive process of learning to value something that you don’t already value. It is distinct from ambition or self-cultivation—they’re both about getting something you already value. Aspiration should be a central topic for philosophy, in so far was we’re wondering about how we should live, what we should care about, and how to understand ourselves. An account of aspiration will also influence your account of what we’re up to when we do philosophy. Is moral philosophy like empirical science, a branch of mathematics, or is it more about crafting adaptive stories? Here's [[Tyler Cowen]], reading Agnes: > **COWEN:** When I read Plato, it seems obvious to me that one of the most striking features of Socrates is that he has never raised a child. Under the second Straussian reading of your book, you’re saying parenting needs to be much more central to ethics and decision theory, and that there’s something badly wrong with philosophy that it isn’t. > > Again, you can’t quite come out and say that, but in various indirect ways you say it, or at least you show it. This is, in part, a theory of how so many things in our life are more like parenting than we realize, and if you don’t have the parenting experience, there’s something deficient in your understanding of the world. Plato worried about poets and politicians using rhetoric to spread misinformation, unsound arguments and bad values. If he were around today, he'd have similar concerns about advertising, television, and social media. One thing about aspiration is that the process is hard to understand, and hard to explain and justify to ourselves, let alone to others. [[A culture that values legibile plans and outcomes may inhibit aspiration]]. I’ve not read Callard's book yet, just some reviews and interviews. Her account of valuing seems central, but I don’t understand it yet: > Harry Frankfurt said we need desires about desires in our architecture of the self. But that’s not enough. You also need values. And values aren’t just urges, you need a cognitive component where you evaluate the thing as genuinely good. They [also] involve an emotional or affective component where you feel a sense of loss if a thing is destroyed, then also a motivational component, desires. I recently heard [[Adam Curtis]] express concern that machine learning systems simply reflect our current selves back to ourselves, rather than trying to help us become better. What would [[machines that mentor]] look like? I imagine Curtis' [most famous documentary](https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/p00ghx6g/the-century-of-the-self) might pair well with Agnes' book. Compare also: [[Bernard Williams]], [[Tristan Harris]], [[Patrick Deneen]] and [[Yuval Noah Harari]]. [[Learning to aspire]] is a central challenge for individuals and society. If Callard can help us understand how this works, and how to do it better, that’d be cracking. <div class="video video--youtube"> <iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/XOnZjo8PX2o?modestbranding=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> </div> Places to start: - [Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything (Conversations with Tyler)](https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/agnes-callard/) - [A Strange Argument for the Commonplace (Agnes replies to Tyler)](https://www.cato-unbound.org/2019/01/14/agnes-callard/strange-argument-commonplace) - [Courage, Meta-cognitive detachment and their limits (Eric Weinstein interview)](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/23-agnes-callard-courage-meta-cognitive-detachment/id1469999563?i=1000466482782) ## Appendix 1. Callard on Pessoa Callard thinks we should read Fernando Pessoa as a philosopher. She made me try _The Book of Disquiet_, which begins like this: > I was born in a time when the majority of young people had lost faith in God, for the same reason their elders had had it – without knowing why. And since the human spirit naturally tends to make judgements based on feeling instead of reason, most of these young people chose Humanity to replace God. I, however, am the sort of person who is always on the fringe of what he belongs to, seeing not only the multitude he’s a part of but also the wide-open spaces around it. That’s why I didn’t give up God as completely as they did, and I never accepted Humanity. I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshipped; whereas Humanity, being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species. The cult of Humanity, with its rites of Freedom and Equality, always struck me as a revival of those ancient cults in which gods were like animals or had animal heads. > > And so, not knowing how to believe in God and unable to believe in an aggregate of animals, I, along with other people on the fringe, kept a distance from things, a distance commonly called Decadence. Decadence is the total loss of unconsciousness, which is the very basis of life. Could it think, the heart would stop beating. I wondered what Nietzsche would make of Pessoa, and she had an [interesting response](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wt0VifWu84M&t=9474s) on Nietzsche: > The Gorgias and The Republic both have a Nietzsche character who pathologises morality and says morality is a kind of disease, is a kind of fake language we use that covers over the real truth and the people who are real men know that this is how we should talk. And so then you’re like OK Calacles, OK Thrasymacus, tell me: how should we really talk? What is the healthy? And it just collapses. They have nothing to say, they contradict themselves. Calacles goes from an extreme hedonism to immediately dumping that hedonism. Thrasymacus says oh the great ones are the rulers. No no the ruled who rebel, those are the good ones. And they’re like—lost. And I think Plato foresaw that there would be this unmasking move that Nietzsche does in one way, that Freud does in one way, that Girard does in one way, that Foucault does in one way, this unmasking move that we’re gonna like take over human thought, where it’s like there’s a big lie or something, and I’m going to tell you the truth. And then you’re like… ok, what’s the truth? And they can’t say it! It’s like, there are no words to say it. Because all our morality words have been taken over by the lie. And so my own feeling is the only road where you get anywhere is de-pathologising. What sense can we make of this? What forms of intelligence and insight and goodness lie behind the Christian approach to punishment? > > […] > > Leon Kass was a teacher of mine, very beloved, and he used to say that the beautiful is the skin of the good. There’s this sense that the aesthetic has to somehow point us to the moral. But then Nietzsche never tells us how.