Agnes Callard on the Theory of Everything
Agnes Callard — philosopher at the University of Chicago — joins Tyler Cowen for Episode 38 to explore how we come to care about new things, why Socrates was not being ironic, and whether her book Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming is secretly a theory of everything.
Key ideas
- Socratic philosophy is an adversarial division of epistemic labour. Callard reads the early Platonic dialogues not as Plato gently mocking Socrates but as a serious demonstration of a method: two people divide the work of inquiry — one asserts, one refutes — so that together they can find truth neither could reach alone. She insists Socrates means every word he says, and that the comfortable reading (irony, self-deprecation) lets us avoid his demands.
- Aspiration is how we come to value what we do not yet value. Ambition pursues goals you already care about at greater scale; aspiration is the process of entering an entirely new domain of value — music you don’t yet appreciate, a religion you don’t yet believe, a teaching style you haven’t acquired. Because you cannot have the full reason for the change before the change, you act on proleptic reasons: part embarrassingly proximate (admiring people are in the class), part genuinely distal (the intrinsic value of classical music). Both faces are real.
- You can only aspire to something genuinely good. Callard tried and failed to tell a coherent story of a gangster aspiring to become a gangster; every telling collapsed into ambition — pursuing existing desires at scale. This is not an accident: we withhold the word ‘aspiration’ when the destination isn’t actually valuable. All aspirants are somewhat defective (they are, by definition, not yet who they are becoming), but the destination must be real.
- Adversarial refutation is essential to philosophy, not a cultural pathology. Philosophy requires it for the same structural reason the justice system does: the goal of knowledge pulls against itself. You want to hold true beliefs and you want to avoid false ones, and those two aims are in tension. The adversarial split externalises that tension and lets each person do one job well. The problem is rudeness, not refutation.
- Aspiration is step one of a theory of everything — but Callard doesn’t have the rest yet. Cowen’s ‘Straussian reading’ — that the book is the opening move of a complete theory of rationality, moral psychology, and moral responsibility — is, she says, basically right. But the subsequent step (what it is to be at the endpoint of aspiration, what makes a value genuinely good) is the theory she has not yet built, not one she is hiding.
Content
Socrates, Plato, and the adversarial division of epistemic labour
Callard opens by defending Socratic seriousness. The dominant scholarly reading holds that Socrates is often ironic, or that Plato is subtly undercutting him — and she rejects both. The dialogues, she argues, are best read straight: Socrates advances a set of ethical doctrines (a good man cannot be harmed; weakness of will is impossible; knowledge is virtue; doing injustice is worse than suffering it) and simultaneously demonstrates a method for acquiring knowledge. That method — adversarial division of epistemic labour — splits the work of inquiry between an asserter and a refuter. When both do their job honestly, together they can make progress that neither could alone.
She places the irony accusers in context: it is Versimicus and Callicles — the bad guys — who charge Socrates with irony in the dialogues. And in the Apology, Socrates notes that people always say this about him, and declines to accept the charge. Callard thinks the irony reading is ethically convenient: if Socrates doesn’t mean it, his words make no claim on us.
The Republic, she adds, marks the transition from Socratic to Platonic thought. In the earlier dialogues, the division of labour is external — two people, one task. The Republic proposes that the philosopher can internalise all three functions (reasoner, spirited guardian, appetitive producer) within a single well-ordered soul. That is Plato deploying a Socratic idea in a distinctly Platonic direction.
The Symposium as a defence of Socrates
Cowen reads the Symposium as evidence that its speakers are not really interested in Eros at all — they digress, they drink, they score points. Callard takes a different frame: the dialogue’s purpose is disclosed by its frame (worshippers of Socrates imitating him, walking barefoot) and its ending (Alcibiades’s speech). What Plato is examining is Socrates’s role in Athenian culture, and specifically the charge that he corrupted the youth. Exhibit A for that charge is Alcibiades, and the Symposium is Plato’s answer: Alcibiades had the door open to him and walked the other way. Socrates’s rejoinder to Alcibiades’s accusation — you’ve just been trying to make Agathon jealous and get me to pursue you — locates the failure squarely in Alcibiades, not in his teacher.
Proleptic reasons and the structure of aspiration
Callard’s book begins from a puzzle: if you do not yet value something, you cannot have a full reason to pursue it. But people do enter new domains of value. How? Her answer is the proleptic reason — ‘proleptic’ meaning it anticipates a future self (from the Greek prolēpsis, a prior grasp or assumption). A proleptic reason has two faces. The distal face is what you say when asked: ‘classical music is one of the great goods our civilisation has produced.’ That is true, and it is your reason — but if pressed you cannot say much more, because you don’t yet fully grasp the value. The proximate face is the less presentable part: admirable people are in the class; you have a fantasy of a more enriched life. Both are real parts of your motivation. The two together let you act rationally toward a value you have not yet acquired.
The analogy to Meno’s paradox is explicit: you cannot inquire about what you don’t know (how would you start?) or about what you already know (why bother?). Aspiration is the practical resolution — you act on the partial grasp you have, and the doing makes the full grasp possible.
Aspiration and the gangster problem
Callard admits she started writing the book thinking aspiration was value-neutral — you could aspire to good or bad ends alike. But every attempt to tell the story of an aspiring gangster collapsed into a story of an ambitious gangster. The difference: ambition is the pursuit, at scale, of desires you already have; aspiration is the entry into a new domain of value. Because the gangster’s destination (violence, dominance) is not genuinely valuable, there is no new domain of value being entered — only familiar desires being pursued more single-mindedly. We simply do not use the word ‘aspiration’ for that, and Callard concludes the word tracks something real: aspiration requires a genuinely good destination.
This does not mean aspirants are virtuous in all respects. Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is, she agrees with Cowen, a jerk — but his jerkiness is characteristic of the aspirant, who is by definition not yet the person he is trying to become. His aesthetic aspiration is genuine (it runs through the whole novel, from his earliest response to sound). He simply makes no corresponding progress on how he treats others, because he does not aspire to that.
Aspiration as mimetic and error-prone
Aspiration is, she concedes, imitative — you follow people you admire into new domains. That makes it error-prone. Lila in Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend does aspire (she is not merely ambitious) when she chooses to marry Stefano; she is trying to become a woman who controls her own life. She is catastrophically wrong about the means. Callard accepts this as the price of aspiration: ‘I don’t think there is any other way to learn.‘
Adversarial philosophy and the structure of contested goals
Why do philosophers refute rather than collaborate? Callard defends refutation as structurally necessary, not culturally contingent. The goal of knowledge contains an internal tension: you want to hold true beliefs, and you want to avoid false ones. Those aims pull apart — radical scepticism satisfies the second but destroys the first. William James diagnosed this tension in ‘The Will to Believe’: the epistemology of his era was too obsessed with avoiding error, neglecting the aim of actually having beliefs. The adversarial structure externalises the tension: the refuter guards against false belief while the asserter guards against empty scepticism. Rudeness is the pathology to eliminate; refutation is the point.
Hamlet, Descartes, and the inner life
Callard reads Hamlet as a Cartesian before his time — trapped in the thought-experiment of systematic doubt, but without Descartes’s cogito to arrest the fall. The play insists that its protagonist’s inner life matters more than his actions, his title, or his wars. Its great formal device is the sheer quantity of his scenes: the audience lives inside Hamlet’s head in a way that makes the political plot feel like backdrop. When he says ‘I have that within which passes show,’ he is announcing the play’s true subject — the reality of the first-personal point of view.
The Callard production function
Callard moved from physics (confused by magnetic force going in the ‘wrong’ direction) to classics (Greek and Latin drew her) to philosophy (the substantive questions behind the texts were what she actually wanted). Her method for keeping up with the philosophical literature is largely guilt-driven: she follows her graduate students’ reading rather than journals, and attends talks. She describes changing her mind regularly under refutation — her entire dissertation was undone by a question in a job interview. She is currently aspiring in three directions: fashion (she became interested in clothing for the first time at 39), religion (struggling with belief in God and her relation to Jewish texts), and teaching (learning to listen rather than lecture in discussion classes).
Related
- Agnes Callard — guest; philosopher at the University of Chicago
- Tyler Cowen — host
- Consciousness — concept; the discussion of Hamlet’s inner life and the first-personal point of view connects to the philosophy of mind