Aspiration means a strong desire, longing, or aim; ambition.
Agnes Callard has written a book about something she thinks is 'aspiration'. Is she right?
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.”
This is 'discovery' not 'aspiration'. The goal of aspiration is fixed in advance. Columbus aspired to find a sea route to India by travelling west. He failed in his aspiration but discovered something useful.
Aspiration, as I understand it, is the distinctive form of agency directed at the acquisition of values.
Education, not aspiration, is this form of 'agency'. We may aspire to gain such and such type of education- e.g. admission to Medical College. But what happens in Medical College is education and training. You are not taught how to aspire to be a Doctor. You are taught how to be a Doctor. You may come to hate your profession. You may start aspiring to become a comedian or a dancer. But you may have to stick with being a Doctor so as to pay the bills.
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 agent may contribute to this, but there must be some external factors involved. I may come to greatly value being a surgeon. But if I butcher every single patient who comes under my knife, I may have to give up the profession- more particularly if my license is revoked.
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 explanation of how we come to breathe air is not that we work to achieve this result. The air must pre-exist. Similarly things we come to value have to already exist in some manner outside ourselves. We may believe otherwise. We might say 'I really value having this beautiful thought or insight which I came up with all by myself'. The problem here is that you didn't create your own brain. You are deluding yourself.
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.
This is only true to the extent that we could meaningfully say that the breather does not have air she would like to have and therefore expands and contracts her lungs to move herself toward a better breathitarian condition. This is just goobledegook. It is not a contribution to knowledge.
She senses that there is more out there to value than she currently values,
there's more air out there than is currently in her lungs
and she strives to come to see what she cannot yet get fully into view.
But this is exactly what happens when you walk closer towards something you could only see indistinctly from a distance!
The difference is that values aren't things you can see. If you tend to walk towards flowers- you value flowers. If you run away from naked girls, you don't value sex of a particular type. It is quite true that you may value particular flowers or particular naked girls more by reason of close examination. But your values haven't greatly changed. They have just become more specific.
The work of aspiration includes, but is by no means limited to, the mental work of thinking, imagining, and reasoning.
Aspiration need involve no work whatsoever.
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, he must listen to music or visit museums or drink wine.
No. Reading descriptions or seeing paintings is good enough. We may aspire to go to Heaven. This aspiration may grow more and more intense without out ever visiting the place.
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.
No. One tries to get into 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 eating more vegetables.
Or one may not. I bought a fancy exercise bike when the lockdown began. It is gathering dust. But it is prominently displayed so visitors can see I have good aspirations.
If one seeks to appreciate some person, one might invite him for coffee.
That's an odd way to put it! We say 'if you like a guy, you invite him for coffee'.
If one aspires to be religious,
nothing further is entailed. However aspiring to be seen as religious may entail going to Church.
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 the effort to (re)connect with God on one’s own terms.
Thus, what one values is revealed by one's behavior not by one's aspiration.
If one’s goal is to value civic engagement, one might explore community activism.
No. You can read books about how civic engagement is cool and makes your dick larger. Actually exploring 'community activism' will disillusion you very quickly.
We aspire by doing things,
No. We may do things to fulfil aspirations but then again we may not.
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.
That has not been the experience of the women in my life. Indeed, the complaint is that I do certain things worse and worse. Also, I tend to put on a lot of weight over the course of the relationship.
In the beginning, we sometimes feel as though we are pretending, acting or otherwise alienated from our own activity.
Also, the cat can read my thoughts.
We may see the new value as something we are trying out or trying on rather than fully, committally engaged with.
No. We see the 'role' not the 'value' as something we are trying out. It is my firm belief that everybody who went to a better School than I did tried out very degrading types of sexual activity. That is why posh people give me a wide berth.
We may rely heavily on mentors whom we are trying to imitate or competitors whom we are trying to best.
So this is just Tardean mimetics with a bit of Girardian mimetic desire thrown in. But aspiration can be non-rival and involve no activity of any kind.
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 simply not true. The fact that we are still doing a job is a sign that we are getting paid more for less effort than in any other field. On the other hand, as we get older, we start to see much more value in professions we stayed the fuck away from. On the other hand, we have a much more deflationary view about our own line of work.
This is how we work our way into caring about the many things that we, having done that work, care about.
The reverse is the case. We have to take greater care when we are novices. Then the thing becomes second nature. We stop talking about caring. People may think we are unfeeling. But then they hear we are really good at our job and so they hire us when they need a really careful worker.
The English word “aspiration” is a good, if not a perfect, label for the concept I aim to explicate.
This simply isn't true. Conscientiousness is more apt. It is one of the 'big five' factors measured in personality tests. Philosophically speaking, there was a notion of synderesis (innate values) which conscientious people developed such that, even with out the aid of revealed religion, they came close to Christian virtue. This 'praxis' was worthy of study.
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.
Since Callard uses words badly, she ends up talking nonsense.
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 extrinsic rewards such as status, money, or parental love. The aspirant, as I use the word, never aims 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 access to the distinctive value of helping people with their medical problems.
Which could be done as nurse or as a paramedic or just as a person with a reputation for giving good medical advise- though this may involve visiting a Doctor to get the proper prescription.
Though she takes herself, pre-medical school, to have some conception of what that is and why it is valuable, she (knows that) she does not really know what it is like before engaging in the work whose value she wants to access.
She values being a doctor. She may find she is shit at being a doctor. This does not mean her values have changed. What has changed is her knowledge about herself.
A medical student whose final target was money, the approval of her parents, or social status would not count as an aspirant in my sense;
but a person who doesn't go to medical school but values being turned into a miracle worker who can cure any disease does qualify as an aspirant.
The ambitious medical student is not seeking to acquire a value:
Yes she is. It is the value to other people of getting to see a Doctor who can write a prescription.
she takes herself to have full access, even before entering medical school, to the value of having money, the approval of her parents, or social status.
No she doesn't. The value of actually having money is much greater than just valuing having money in the same way that eating a burger is better than just wanting to eat a burger. Why is Callard assuming that a girl who isn't a Doctor gets as much approval from Mummy and Daddy as one has become a Doctor? How the fuck do you get 'full access' to something four or five years in the future?
She does not hope that medical school and residency will teach her the value of these things.
Yet, that's exactly what happens. She soon learns there is much greater value in being a Senior Doctor rather than a junior Doctor.
She hopes only that it will help her satisfy the values she already has.
No. She knows that Med School is likely to change what she values in the Medical field. Originally, she may have thought- 'I want to be a Psychiatrist- like Frazier- then she discovers that Psychiatrists are despised. She ends up as a Proctologist because she knows, all joking aside, those guys save lives.
She has too much access to the value in question to count as aspiring toward it. More generally, the word ‘aspiration’ is sometimes used interchangeably with having a hope or wish or long-term goal to bring some result about. These agents will not count as aspirants in my sense, unless the sought-after end is one whose value those agents are also seeking to learn.
Callard has some crazy notion that College is supposed to change you into something very special indeed. But her own very expensive education has turned her into a cretin.
I will also restrict the term ‘aspirant’ at the other end of the spectrum, by withholding it from people who have too little antecedent access to any value that they might acquire.
So Callard isn't even an aspiring philosopher. She is simply a fool.
It is not a stretch of the English word ‘aspirant’ to describe a young adult who sets out to Europe to ‘find herself’ as an aspirant.
Yes it is. If you say 'my daughter just bought a Eurail Student pass coz she's an aspirant', people will think she is as ugly as shit and is aspiring to get deflowered in some country where the women are indistinguishable from goats.
She won’t count as an aspirant in my sense, however, unless there is something more specific she is trying to find .
A cock.
Adventures are not typically aspirational, and a sign of this is that they rarely feel like work.
Nonsense! One can aspire to hook up with lots of hotties.
The aspirant is trying to change herself in some particular dimension; she is not merely open to changes that might come.
To avoid dying, we tend not to be open to most changes that might come. It's also the reason we don't pick up dog turds and eat them.
She grasps, however dimly, a target with reference to which she guides herself.
If she has a target, she has a value. The value does not change even if she chooses a better target on moving closer. Seeing a target dimly has nothing to do with grasping a value dimly. Not having a target may suggest that one's grasp on a value is dim.
It is not always easy to determine how much of an antecedent grasp of value someone has, nor to ascertain how much of a grasp someone would have to have in order to count as an aspirant.
But it is always easy to determine that Callard is talking bollocks.
My point here is only to note that my use of the word “aspirant” is philosophically charged in such a way as to pick out all and only the cases in which the project of becoming someone is also the process of appreciating the values distinctive of becoming that kind of person.
But Callard can point to no such person. The fact is, there is no Momus window into the heart. We can, at best, appreciate values we think inhere in a person. We have no access to the values themselves- which, in any case, only exist as a figure of speech. We say 'x has good values' when we mean 'x is good' and 'y has no values' when we mean 'y is bad'. It may be that x and y seem alike in competence. What we are getting at is that, in a pinch, you should trust x more than y.
Aspiration is rational, purposive value acquisition.
No. That is a description of paideia or education of a vocational or elite type.
Callard considers Alcibiades to be an 'aspirant'. Yet the speech of his she quotes from the Symposium discloses him to be a charming rogue who wants to be seen both as Socrates's student- and thus capable of moral regeneration- as well as a smart guy who will get ahead and profit the polis by so doing.
Alcibiades’ closing speech gives us access to what it feels like to struggle to be better than one is, and Plato’s presentation of that speech makes it possible for us to assess the rationality of Alcibiades’ attempts at value acquisition. My discussion of Alcibiades presupposes that there is such a thing as a rational pursuit of one’s own fundamental values;
This is crazy shit. Alcibiades was notorious for honeyed words and cunning deeds. The speech fathered on him has a political motive. It shows Socrates had tried to reform the rogue but the fellow was incorrigible. It is a mistake to raise up a lion cub in the city, Aeschylus says, but if you have done so, you must accommodate its ways. The point about Alcibiades is that he aspired to be nothing but himself and sought to seduce Socrates as part of his own project of self-aggrandizement. Indeed, Alcibiades would have ruthlessly sacrificed Athens itself. By contrast, Socrates offered himself as the pharmakos, scape-goat, for his City.
Callard takes Alcibiades's speech at face value. Why? She says Socrates could have interrupted him but did not. But this does not mean Alcibiades was telling nothing but the truth. It just means Socrates was well-bred though, no doubt, we may see a 'concealed narrative' (eirōneia) in his silence.
There is a distinctive form of rationality that pertains to the genesis of desire, a way of reasoning toward desire rather than from it.
Sadly, this is a distinctive form of lying. If you win the lottery, you will find all sorts of low-life have a great desire to serve you or save your soul or just help you get rid of your money. They may say that there are perfectly rational reasons why this is the case. Tell them to fuck off. How come they weren't banging on your door with handfuls of cash when you didn't have a pot to piss in?
When we reason from desire, our rationality consists for the most part in making good choices, knowing what is worth sacrificing, taking prudent risks. The excellent decision-maker knows when to jump on an opportunity and when to bide her time. Such rational activity doesn’t, of course, entail the presence of a process of reasoning. We often make good decisions without doing much thinking; indeed, we sometimes make better decisions by doing less thinking. The rational decider is good at making the choices that maximize the satisfaction of her desires (the realization of her values, etc.). In hard cases, she deliberates well; in easy cases, she does not deliberate at all, but immediately decides rationally. Decision theory is that branch of philosophy that offers a formal account of the optimal decision procedure that would be employed by such an agent, be it in the form of consciously articulated reasoning, reflexive rational response, or something that partakes of both. The decision theorist tells us what a rational choice consists in.
That's very funny. The truth is decision theorists ignored Knightian uncertainty or else didn't understand how co-evolved processes can tame one type of uncertainty arising from deterministic chaos.
Edna Ullmann-Margalit (who was smart but didn't know about Hannan Consistency)and Laurie Paul (who isn't smart but is a woman) have discussed the topic of large, life-altering choices from the point of view of decision theory. Since decision theory presupposes a subject who enters the decision-scenario with (some) fixed core preferences, they argue that decision theory cannot tell us how to be rational when the decision’s primary import is a fundamental change in those (core) preferences. I find their arguments to be, by and large, sound.
It isn't. It is obvious that you should follow a regret-minimizing strategy so if the thing goes tits up you can return to the last stable configuration.
I will go through them in the next chapter, though I will draw a very different lesson from their conclusions than they do. Instead of concluding that, because the decision theorist cannot tell us what it would be for an agent like Alcibiades to be rational,
Alcibiades was rational. He was gassing on about how much he lurved Socrates so that, at a later date, he could swear the fellow had reformed him and he wouldn't get up to his old tricks.
there is no fact of the matter about whether he acts rationally, I will argue that agents like Alcibiades—aspirants—exhibit a distinctive form of rationality that is not a matter of decision at all.
So this is a form of rationality which a stone could display.
Theorists of practical rationality have tended to focus on the question of how we rationally manage the values and desires agents already have. They attend to the case of value-acquisition, to the extent that they do, as a special case of desire-management.
This seems an odd way of summarizing the work of Kahneman,Tversky &c. The fact is you can make a lot of money doing this sort of analysis. Thus smart people do it while stupid people talk bollocks about how Alcibiades was an aspirant.
There is, of course, a form of desire-acquisition—a secondary form—that is simply a special case of desire-management. My topic, however, is primary desire-acquisition.
Has Callard discovered why we fall in love and what we can do to stop loving a really shitty person? She could make a lot of money if this were true.
In such a case, the desires one already has are themselves only fully intelligible in the light of the desires one will have.
After death? No. Only 'at the end of time'. Desires impact choice functions which can only be shown to be 'law-like' after the Universe ends.
One’s present condition is, as it were, a simulacrum of the value condition one hopes someday to be in.
We may hope to be immortal. Then, death happens. Sad.
If there is such a thing as rational change in one’s core values, such a change is not made by trying to best satisfy the values that one already has.
Why not? A meta-value- i.e. valuing a value- is still a value just as a meta-preference is still a preference. The thing affects behavior. Loads of money can be made, if you are smart, by studying this. If you are not smart one can be Dr. Callard whom Magnus Mallard calls a quack. But then he calls everyone a quack. The fellow is onto something. I should aspire to be like him, then we'd be a pair of ducks illustrating something very profound about 'Aspiration'. It's either that or my going back to pretending I have Asperger's. Sad.
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