aspiration review

Here’s the deal with Neurath's boat:

You and your crew set sail. Your boat’s ok - it floats, steers reasonably well, and everyone fits on board. But now that you’re out in the ocean, you don’t get to come back. If shit breaks, you have to fix it, and no one’s coming to deliver you new supplies. You don’t have to keep the boat exactly as it is - if some part starts to rot, you can jettison it completely, you can reconfigure the boat whatever way you choose. The only constraints are your imagination, carpentry skills, and your need to keep the boat afloat. 

This is a far better thought experiment to describe the human condition than the more famous Theseus' ship (where you maintain the ship over time by replacing each plank as it wears out, keeping the structure exactly as it was). True lifelong transformation, rather than a copy of what was there before with slightly fresher wood. 

Transforming the boat into something wholly new is the eponymous topic of Agnes Callard’s book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. I’ve been semi-following Agnes Callard for a while now, after first hearing her interview about aspiration on EconTalk. She was recently back with another good one on anger. A lot of her philosophical work is grounded in human interactions and topics that are actually relevant to most people’s lives, like aspiration. 

“Aspiration” is working to acquire new values, before you have a clear idea of what those new values will mean. Her main concern is whether we can be rational about our aspirations - when we don’t fully grasp the reasons we will grasp in the future, can we still make a truly rational decision?

The topic of aspiration is very on theme for “jolting around in the dark” and I got a lot out of this book. I am aspiring to be a better writer, but I’m not yet there and I am really struggling with getting this post into better shape, so we’ll settle for this bundle of scattered thoughts. 

Part 1 - Some oft-used definitions

Aspiration - seeking to acquire a new value through exposure and practice. 

Self-cultivation - changing to be in line with our current values or acquiring smaller scale skills (ex. learning to play the guitar)

Ambition - optimizing on values you already hold (ex. pursuing career status or making a lot of money)

Proleptic rationality - reasoning based on a weak grasp of your reasons (because you haven’t fully acquired them yet)

Intrinsic conflict - when you find your attention divided between two value sets, where one value set is completely at odds with the other. This type of conflict can only be resolved by aspiration, because you must aim to fully acquire one of the value sets and fully discard the other (because you can’t fully hold both at once). 

Akrasia - weakness of will, which Agnes Callard calls a form of intrinsic conflict. 

This was a very philosophical book, in that many things were defined and there were many arguments over those definitions. If that bores you, I cannot recommend this book, but defining terms was an aspect I really enjoyed. At times I felt she was defining her way into solutions, but I do think the way she delineates aspiration vs. self-cultivation vs. ambition is very useful and will help me think through my goals more clearly. The distinguishing characteristic of aspiration is bettering your grasp of why you are doing something over time. 

It’s probably not worth going into here, but her specifics on intrinsic conflict felt much more like defining herself into a solution where intrinsic conflicts were conveniently defined to be the type of problem only aspiration could solve and then guess what, big spoiler aspiration is revealed to be the only solution to these intrinsic conflicts. 

Part 2 - Some cool concepts

• I absolutely love the way she cast befriending others as a form of aspiration. When you first meet someone, you have no real idea what there is to value about them, but you have an inkling that there is something there. You have to spend energy getting to know what there is to value and your ability to truly value them grows over time. Getting to know them and learning what you value in them is undeniably transformative. 

• I liked her description of the relationship between aspirants and mentors. Mentors presumably have already acquired the values aspirants are seeking, they know the way or at least a way and can provide pointers or let you know if you really aren’t getting it. Models and feedback are important. 

• I liked this version of the definition of proleptic reasons for aspiring (of the many given): belief that X is valuable plus a desire to know why X is valuable. Doing something rationally or intentionally usually means you can say why you are doing it. Aspiration is different - the why is to eventually know why you are doing it. You have a hunch that it would be worthwhile to acquire some value, but you can’t get behind the full why until you completely acquire it. 

• A useful distinction - flailing vs. deepening. If you don’t have the slightest grasp on the value you are trying to acquire, you’ll just flail. You don’t know how to start or even move in the right direction. Aspiration is more about taking a loose, bare grasp on a value and progressively deepening it until you actually hold it. 

• Asymmetry in the morality of aspiration: 

• You can be condemned for not sufficiently aspiring, but it’s not really possible to aspire to bad things (see: does anyone think of themselves as evil). 

• People deserve credit for the amount they had to aspire to become the people that they are. (ex. how much moral credit people deserve for not being racist now vs. not being racist in the 1700s)

• Loved her final thoughts in the conclusion on the importance of recognizing others as aspirants. You should treat people differently when they are grasping for a value and don’t yet understand it. She chose the example of aspiring to motherhood, and then having to deal with infertility. By most definitions of rationality, the mourning of aspirational loss that infertile young women experience isn’t rational. They don’t actually know what it means to be a mother, so how can they have a rational reason for being sad about not being that way? Do we really want to say that sort of mourning is irrational? And should we downgrade the tragedy of their loss because they had no way of knowing what it was that they lost? 

Part 3 - Some questions and doubts

• I don’t totally buy proleptic rationality. I think you can be more or less rational about how you pick your mentors and choose between spending your time on serious aspirations (ex. becoming a better person) and more frivolous ones (ex. becoming a wine connoisseur). But I am not convinced that all aspirations are rational, and I was bothered by how she defined aspiration in a way to force her arguments. 

• Can you be rational about a process rather than a single decision point? The slow process does a much better job of describing what most people go through when acquiring new values. But she describes the experience of waking up to the idea that you are already in the process of aspiring toward something. That resonates with me, but then how are you being rational about it before you notice it?

• I was not content with how we should think about choosing what to aspire to. Callard would also admit this piece was missing - she is very open about the fact that the rational theory for aspiration is incomplete. 

• Does the level of credit for aspirational progress apply to how much time people dedicate to aspiration vs. other things? How quickly do they act on their aspiration? Is that dependent on how well you grasp the thing you are aspiring toward? Or the quality of mentors available to you? 

• Unclear to me what it would mean to call an aspiration “irrational” and if “irrational” is undefined, how can we hope to judge whether an aspirational decision is rational? Maybe part of it is understanding when a particular aspiration becomes closed to you? Those are the types of things that might be “proleptic facts?” Not sure about this. 

Part 4 - Some stuff it will make me think about

• I am extremely curious how explicitly most people think about acquiring new values. Self-cultivation and ambition seem much more common. 

• Signalling came up when I was talking about this book with someone. He was wondering how people wanting to seem like the type of person who does X could be distinguished from wanting to be the type of person who does X.  Basically, Callard describes the early stages of aspiration as a kind of signalling, which casts signalling (pretending to be who you want people to perceive you to be) in a much more positive light than usual. The other response is that only you can really know if you’re past the signalling stage of aspiration (and even then, it’ll probably be hard to tell). And no one else can get you there. Sorry. 

• Flailing is a good word to help me recognize it in myself.

• Thinking about aspiration requires you to be much more honest about which values you actually have. When you have a “weakness of will” moment, that is really you acting in line with your values, they are perhaps just values you are trying to drop. I’d like to spend some more time reflecting on which values I currently hold are standing in the way of values I’m trying to acquire. 

• I have a hard time reconciling this kind of thing, which generally resonates with me, with my disbelief in free will. I aspire to one day fit it all together. 

• I have been thinking a lot about how to spend my time in this framework: you are not just doing something you are acquiring values so make good decisions with that in mind, especially if it’s a choice between something I currently enjoy vs. work to eventually enjoy something in the future in a more natural way. 

• Aspiring is work. 

Big main conclusion: We should want to have some theory of rationality around aspiration because it plays such a central role in decisions we make and who we become. If it’s not rational, we give up a lot to just shifting around in the wind. 

Overall, I would only recommend the book to people who are interested in the philosophy of rationality and decision theory. It spends so much time on different frameworks of rationality that will really bog you down if you’re not interested. If you are more interested in the general topic of aspiration and how it might relate to your life, the EconTalk interview is probably a good place to start. There are also a couple videos of Agnes Callard talking through her main points. 

So what are my current aspirations?

• Friendships in progress.

• Writing (publicly - not a value I currently hold).

• Appreciating poetry. 

I have other works in progress, but I think they fall more in line with self-cultivation.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

• Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night