Ideas I’ll remember from “Aspiration” by Agnes Callard
I’m a longtime fan of philosopher Agnes Callard’s essays, but only recently read her 2018 book: Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. Below are a few of the ideas that will stick with me. (Note that these are my own interpretation of various concepts. Highly recommend reading the book itself—very provocative read.)
Feeling ‘inauthentic’ is part of aspiring
Callard defines aspiration as the rational process by which we work to care about (or love, or value, or desire) something new. “Aspiration, as I understand it, is the distinctive form of agency directed at the acquisition of values.” Let’s say we aspire to love classical music.
Callard argues that we come to care about something new by doing/working/practicing caring about them, not merely by deciding to care about it. Deciding to care about classical music doesn’t make you actually love it. Instead, we might take a class on it, or go to the symphony, or listen to it often. “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 ‘doing*’* can feel and look fake or inauthentic at the beginning. We put on classical music when really we’d rather listen to something else. We pinch ourselves to stay awake at the symphony because we’re rather bored. We borrow opinions from music critics because we haven’t yet formed our own.
“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.”
It initially struck me as rather counterintuitive that aspiring, a process that seems so wholesome and authentic (ie one really wants to become a classical music lover), can actually feel deeply inauthentic to the person who is trying to acquire that value. But, it makes sense. By definition I don’t yet have fully have the value I want to acquire. The feeling of inauthenticity, especially at the beginning, is inherent to the process of aspiration. It looks and feels inauthentic because, in a sense, it is inauthentic.
So what? There are a few ways in which I expect this idea may make its way into my day-to-day:
Normalizing and contextualizing feelings of ‘inauthenticity’ or ‘fakeness’ that can come up at the beginning of working to care about something new. If I feel awkward or inauthentic at the beginning, that’s actually an expected part of the process, and it’s OK. Keep at it.
Extending more compassion towards others who are early in their own process of aspiration. If some of their actions come across as fake, imitated or inauthentic, perhaps they’re also early aspirers. Support and encourage.
Proleptic engagement
Callard introduces a new type of reason—a proleptic reason—to explain how someone can be acting rationally even if she doesn’t deeply understand the thing she’s working towards, and knows that. Proleptic reasoning plays a central role in making the logic of her argument hang together.
But the part that resonated with me was the preceding concept of proleptic engagement:
“The word ‘proleptic’ refers, usually in a grammatical context, to something taken in advance of its rightful place. I appropriate it for moral psychology on the model of Margaret Little’s phrase “proleptic engagement”, by which she refers to an interaction with a child in which we treat her as though she were the adult we want her to become.
I think about a version of proleptic engagement with some frequency—in the context of friendships, relationships etc.—but have never had a name or phrase to describe it. It’s very possibly I’m being far too loose with the definition here…but anyways…I love the idea that we can hold a better, more full version of a friend or colleague or partner in our minds before they even see it for themselves, and that doing that can help accelerate them towards that better, fuller version of themselves. I’m very grateful to the friends, family, teachers, and colleagues who have done this for me.
Assessing ourselves and others based on our future selves (rather than critiquing our shortcomings relative to our existing selves) is much more expansive.
“I submit that the theorist of self-creation needs to get the creator self looking forward rather than backward: instead of imagining my future self as beholden to my past self, I suggest we imagine my past self as looking forward, trying to live up to the person she hopes to become.”
Other ideas that jumped out
You can’t really know what a value really means or feels like until the end of the journey. Definitionally, aspiring is a leap of faith.
“One can see in advance that one cannot see in advance all of what is good about parenthood or friendship or scuba diving or immigrating to another country. Transformative pursuits aim at values, the appreciation of what is connected to the performance of the activity (or involvement in the relationship) in question. Indeed, this is because the pursuits themselves form a kind of value-education, gradually changing the agent into the kind of person who can appreciate the value of the activity or relationship poor state of affairs that constitutes the end of the pursuit.”
“If you are trying to get better acquainted with some value, then you take your antecedent conception of that value to be inadequate. You act in order to grasp the value better, but your reason for wanting to grasp that value must be the very value you don’t yet fully grasp. Life is full of moments in which one contemplates some obscure value from a great distance. We can’t comprehend the value of child raising for us, let alone the value of the life of the child we will raise, before starting a family. We go to college for the education college will itself teach us to appreciate; we leave our hometown with the aim of making some foreign place home; we date in order to love, and get married in order to love in a new way; we choose a career because of the as yet unfamiliar joys of expertly doing the work in question, In pursuing these values, our attitude is not merely a hope or wish that we will one day come to appreciate them. We work to appreciate them, and this work is rationalized and guided by the values we are coming to know. In these cases, the full justification of what we are doing can come only at the end of the story. It is the end that provides the normative standards for assessing what comes before it.”
The difference between aspiration, ambition, and self-cultivation. Aspirational pursuits combine the property of being large in scale with that of being directed at change in oneself. Ambition has the former but not the latter. Self-cultivation, has the latter but not the former.
“Aspirational pursuits combine the property of being large in scale with that of being directed at change in oneself. Self-cultivation overlaps with aspiration the latter front: when we cultivate ourselves, we engage in a pursuit that is self-directed but in a small scale.”
“When a pursuit is large in scale without being transformative, I will describe the agent as ambitious. Wanting to cure cancer, make a million dollars, or win the Nobel Prize can, if understood in a sufficiently narrow way, count as a large-scale nontransformative pursuit. The key feature of such cases that allows one to classify them as ambitious is the presumption of value-stasis: one needn’t oneself undergo a value-change in order to succeed at the project.”
“An ambitious agent aims, usually over many years, to achieve something difficult and perhaps important. Nonetheless, the pursuit is not, with respect to value, a learning experience: she is not, as she proceeds, coming to a better and better grasp of why she is doing what she is doing.”
It’s rational to grieve the loss of something you never had due to proleptic reasoning
“Being cut off from one’s aspiration gives one reason to lament because the aspirant’s valuational condition was predicated on the value she now knows she won’t acquire. Proleptic reasoners act for the sake of a future apprehension of value…There is a distinctive kind of sadness appropriate to losing something you were only starting to try to get to know.”
“The aspiring parent does have reason-proleptic reason-to mourn her lack of access to the value in question, as the aspiring college student has reason-proleptic reason-to bemoan her lack of access to an abortion. The fact that the person doesn’t have full access to the value of what she has lost doesn’t remove the sting of loss. Rather, the person’s pain as a distinctive, aspirational character, in that what one mourns is never getting the chance to learn how valuable that child, or that education, would have been. One bemoans the life one never got to know.”
More on proleptic reasoning
“Thus I will defend the view that you can act rationally even if your antecedent conception of the good for the sake of which you act is not quite on target—and you know that. In these cases, you do not demand that the end result of your agency. match a preconceived schema, for you hope, eventually, to get more out of what you are doing than you can yet conceive of. I call this kind of rationality “proleptic.” The word ‘proleptic’ refers, usually in a grammatical context, to something taken in advance of its rightful place. I appropriate it for moral psychology on the model of Margaret Little’s phrase “proleptic engagement” (2008: 342), by which she refers to an interaction with a child in which we treat her as though she were the adult we want her to become. Proleptic reasons are provisional in a way that reflects the provisionality of the agent’s own knowledge and development: her inchoate, anticipatory, and indirect grasp of some good she is trying to know better. Proleptic reasons allow you to be rational even when you know that your reasons aren’t exactly the right ones.”