0:00
[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at arcades.in conversations withth
Search this video
0:21
tyler.com today I'm here with ag Miss card who is a philosopher at the University of Chicago she has a new book out called aspiration the agency of becoming but like a true philosopher she philosophizes about many things so let
0:43
me just start with a simple question why didn't Plato just write what he meant why is there the form of a dialogue at all I think it's reasonable to conclude that one thing Plato meant to do was to preserve the memory and the activity of
1:00
Socrates so there was this guy there was this amazing guy who walked around asking people questions and thereby inventing a new way of thinking and a new way of life but he didn't write anything down right and I think not just Plato but a lot of people didn't want
1:17
that to die with Socrates so I think that's that was one of Plato's motivations and yeah what he did was a good way of achieving that goal but does Plato even like Socrates so if I read these dialogues it seems to me ocres is full of fallacies I tend to side more
1:33
with protagonists and with the sophists you readed dialogue such as me now oh learning has to be recollection and you go through the arguments for that conclusion they seem absurd so half the time isn't Plato making fun of Socrates
1:46
are really trying to tell us I Plato and better than Socrates I don't know what Plato is trying to tell us I don't think in the Mino he doesn't quite come out and say learning is recollection here's what he does he's faced with a paradox
1:59
that puts forward right to the effect that there's no point to try to inquire about anything ever right because you can't inquire about what you don't know because how would you even know how to start and you can't inquire about what
2:13
you do know because why would you inquire about what you already know right therefore is crossing the bridge kind of problem that comes up in your work yeah so so might to just give up right and Socrates says well let me tell you a story and he tells kind of a long
2:25
story about sort of the opposite of the afterlife the pre-life right lives we had before we were born and you know maybe we can inquiry can make sense because we're in some sense remembering knowledge we had in the pre-life okay
2:40
and then after he says that he says now this all might be wrong I can't really stand by any of it here's the bit though that I'll stand by we'll be better and braver if we inquire than if we don't so even Socrates couches the theory of
2:54
recollection in a kind of ethical framework similar ethical framework to what he'll couch later the myth in right at the ends of some of the dialogues now I don't see Plato I don't see where Plato is saying that that's wrong in a
3:09
way Socrates is already saying it here's the kind of oversimplifying question that philosophers generally don't like but for our readers if you were to read all the dialogues which I believe you have and boil it down into a kind of
3:22
bottom line essential takeaway what what's going on in them as a whole not the laws but the ones with Socrates what's your take could I maybe can I give my take on like all the dialogues that are conventionally dated before the Republic say including Republic one so
3:39
that's a lot of dialogue don't worry about Tas right exactly so I think that well a couple different things but maybe I'll give like two two things that are going on is there's a set of ethical doctrines that are the groundwork of
3:57
socrates's life that are being laid out in those dialogues and they have slogans so they're actually really easy to um give you in terms of bullet points they're things like a good man can't be harmed weakness of will is impossible
4:09
knowledge is virtue doing Injustice is worse than suffering it those are sometimes referred to as Socratic intellectualism right so there's socrates's rules for living so one of the things the dialogues are doing is giving you that I think the other thing
4:23
they're doing is giving you what philosophy is at the time that is they're showing you philosophy as I understand it Socratic philosophy is a kind of solution to a problem well sort of Meo problem but it could be put in a
4:39
bunch of different ways about how to acquire knowledge like how do you acquire knowledge when you don't have it and Socrates sort of came up with a method for doing that and his method was I call it the adversarial division of epistemic labor so if you and I both
4:53
want to find the truth right we can actually um divide up the process of finding the truth or acquiring knowledge into two like subordinate jobs and you do one and I do one and if we each do our job together we can inquire so that
5:05
that's what I take Socratic philosophy to be doing and the dialogues present that to us I can't help but read the dialogues through the lens of Adam Smith so let me give you my takeaway message which I may be strange but tell me what
5:16
you think I read the earlier ones as a whole as a fundamental critique of the division of labor so even at the end of euth ademus there's the statement well don't listen to the philosopher it's really without philosophy M so everyone
5:31
is a fool including Socrates who pretends to be so epistemically modest but every now and then that is made fun of division of labor plays a central role in The Republic but I think the Republic is ultimately critical of the
5:43
idea of division of labor people's professions are either put forward in the dialogues or the Athenians are supposed to know who these people are and none of them are in a way as reasoners that impressive and it's about how there is this virtue to the
5:58
well-ordered mind philosophical mind in the Republic but in what was modern society for Athens this was now impossible and you have blundering fools walking around who basically you poke fun of by writing up what they said I
6:12
think first that the division of labor say between the speaker and the interlocutor sorry between the refuter and the interlocutor right so between let's say Socrates and Mino I think that's quite different so there was a kind of a reason why I said like that
6:26
was the moral of everything up to the Republic and I think in the public you get you really get like Plato's Wheels start turning sort of in a way more than socrates's right and so I think what you get is the image the idea that maybe you
6:40
don't need an adversarial division of epistemic labor maybe one person the philosopher can do it all on his own and the city in which there is this division of labor right is is being used as a analog for the soul right where that's
6:53
all that's going to be within one person right so within one person you can have all the different jobs you don't need anybody else in a sense you can do it by yourself and that's I think I take that to be a platonic thought rather than a
7:02
Socratic thought it's a platonic let's say way of deploying a Socratic thought but let maybe let me say something about sort of taking a step back sort of like about your overall approach the approach that I'm hearing coming out in several
7:16
of these questions so it's not I would say that the dominant reading of Socrates in the literature has always been to think that he is at least some of the time either being ironic or being made fun of by play and I don't share that reading one thing
7:32
that's interesting is that Plato at several points has socrates's interlocutors accuse him of irony yes right use they use the word Aon irony our same word and Socrates in the apology says now you guys are going to think people are always saying this
7:45
about me they're always thinking I'm being ironic okay and I think that he isn't I just think that he is serious in everything that he says but it's really hard to read him that way there's a way in which our tendency to think that
7:59
Socrates doesn't really mean it is a way of pulling his words away from us because like if he doesn't mean it it doesn't have a kind of bearing on us right so I actually think ethically it's a reading that we ought to try to resist
8:12
that there's a kind of something there in text that's more difficult and more challenging that we escape from if we think either that Socrates is being ironic or that Plato is being ironic about Socrates just as sorry I should
8:28
have said the people who accuse Socrates of being ironic are like thus and calicles like they're they're not the good guys or the friends right so there's a you know the fact that it's those people accusing him suggests at least something about how Plato wanted
8:42
us to think about the charge of Socratic irony now why is it that people read these dialogues if it's truly a conversational form we could listen to them you could teach your class by having people listen to a podcast of cedo and Socrates fedis and Socrates but
8:57
no one does that you could put them on tape and release it and I think actually more people would listen to us why is that what does it tell us about the nature of philosophy also I think that certainly in the ancient world they
9:07
would have been spoken but that doesn't mean that's the best way to receive them it just means that well there were certain limits at that time I think that my own feeling is the ideal way to engage with the dialogues is to read them and then talk about them with
9:20
people ideally you talk about them with the text in front of you so you can quote bits and read bits out loud but I I guess I personally I think it might depend on you know personally like how you take in information or something but
9:31
I I want to be able to stop and I want to be in a kind of control over my thinking about like the argument because a lot of the time what's going on in the text is the presentation of an argument and one thing that I think must have
9:45
appealed to Plato about the dialogue form is that there is no I can't think of any more direct way to just put propositions on paper like arment or you know whatever Papyrus doesn't it cause us to overrate propositions by contining your answer I think Plato rated them
10:01
highly so there there's a question what what rating he wanted you know rating he had right if you you know you read I mean any philosopher right you read Kant you read Adam Smith you read Hume and you're looking for the arguments right
10:13
but in Plato you don't need to look because Socrates would like so do you think this yes do you think this yes you think and that just shows you what the argument is but I think that taking that in it's easier to take that in visually
10:23
then through hearing now you gave a recent talk I think at Princeton as to why philosophers refute each other so much as a method for doing philosophy is one philosopher trying to refute another say through the medium of a public talk
10:37
do we do too much of that or too little in philosophy so I actually ended up giving a different talk at Princeton but I did give that talk at Michigan okay I changed my mind last minute anyway I think we do roughly the right amount of
10:48
it in philosophy I I wrote that talk because there's been a lot of discussion about the under representation of certain groups of people in philosophy women and minorities and the fact that some practices that we have in
11:04
philosophy might be contributing to that so there can be quite a lot of rudeness and just nastiness in the way that people conduct themselves and that perhaps that kind of aggression is putting groups of people off of the discipline and I think that's an
11:18
important reflection that we're having however in the context of that I've I heard several people say yeah why do we even refute one another why why are we doing it that way and that made me think uhoh somebody better explain why we're
11:29
doing that cuz that's really important we have to do that we have to not do it badly we have to not do it in an inhumane way but I think it's essential to philosophy it's sort of what philosophy is though we refute one
11:39
another but that's because in a sense I agree with Socrates so I think we do the right amount of it though I think there's some amount of it's being threatened right now if I look at at least some parts of the American legal system there's a kind of adversarial
11:52
method I'm not sure that works well if I look at many parts of the American private sector in business bus meetings people aren't focused on refuting each other they work together in small teams and they try to improve each other's
12:05
arguments private sector to me on average seems to work better than the legal system so why don't we do more philosophy like this someone presents a paper you then have seven or eight people stand up it's kind of assumed most arguments are wrong or insufficient
12:19
and those seven or eight people try to improve on what the person said they can only say positive things only build up the argument in various ways and then at the end everyone goes away it's like well is this project worthwhile almost
12:31
like Venture capitalists most of the time no but sometimes the initial talk and those improvements will be so good people will say like oh if most ideas are wrong to begin with and this is rationally known why spend all this time
12:43
on reputations I think we all think that our ideas are right at least at the time that we're proposing them but that can't be rational right I think that it's actually rationally required in the sense that to believe like like say I
13:00
say I believe there's snow on the ground outside that's a belief of mine right and then I also believe that's true right and then I can also say there's snow on the ground outside those are just three ways of saying the same thing
13:11
right so in order to have any beliefs at all you have to think that those some beliefs there noow beliefs but the is there free will beliefs you figure whatever you think it's probably wrong I think most I mean if you if you go to a philosophy talk about free will like
13:26
it's they're not going to say that there's free will or there isn't they're going to say and complicated that they they can say we say what we we can say right and at the very least we believe it at the time and I think that's quite important you
13:39
know when you say most arguments are bad arguments or wrong I mean I think in a way that's that's right but I think we can't it's really hard to be the socrates's interlocutor I mean it's much harder to be the interlocutor than to be
13:52
Socrates and I think Socrates very much appreciates that he's very grateful to his interlocutors and he Praises them constantly to put something forward is an act of courage and especially when you know people are going to tear it
14:04
down but I think tearing it down is the right response so let me defend that as opposed to the helping um so about the you know justice system versus the private sector generally speaking they have different goals right generally speaking most of the private sector is
14:19
not aiming at Justice and it's not aiming at the particular form of justice but it's aiming a truth right getting something done by blending synthetic knowledge I don't know whether aiming at truth either what I mean would mean by
14:31
aiming at truth is aiming at knowledge and I I would think that most of the time the knowledge would be at most kind of proximate goal but not an ultimate goal I think that the reason why we have adversarial systems for pursuing certain
14:45
goals is that there's actually a tension inside the goal itself the goal sort of threatens to pull itself apart so in the case of Justice right we have the goal that we want to convict the guilty and we want to acquit the innocent and those
15:01
are not the same goal and they pull apart a little bit because if you're really really really committed to acquitting the innocent you'll be like look if there's any doubt if there's any possible doubt of any kind right we should AC quit and then you're not going
15:12
to get to the other goal so it's that tension inside of the goal itself of Justice that's generating the need for the adversarial system I think there's a similar tension inside the goal of philosophical knowledge it's one that I
15:26
think was best articulated by William James and his famous article the world to believe so there's the goal of having truths you want to have some truths I mean you don't just want to be a skeptic right you want to have some beliefs you
15:37
need beliefs for living your life and everything like that on the other hand you don't want to believe anything false and James thought that the sort of Science and epistemology of his time was too obsessed with that second goal right
15:52
well if there's any doubt at all just don't don't believe it and he was pointing out that we had this other goal too I don't agree with James about how we solve the problem but I think he's right that there's a real problem there that the goal threatens to pull itself
16:03
apart and it's in those contexts I think that the adversarial division of labor makes sense now as you know Plato has a whole work the Symposium which is about a number of different you could say almost competing speeches about Eros in
16:15
the nature of Love who has the best speech and why well of course I'm going to say either Socrates or alabes I like aristophanes's speech too it's it's beautiful socrates's speech affects me the most intellectually I think when I read it
16:32
it's one of the places that I go to for understanding the theory of the forms and what it would be for one to work one's way up to a form something like that there's a there's a it's a short concentrated bit of text that addresses that issue so that's really
16:47
great but alabes of speech is more moving to me and it's one of the places that I would go to in the Corpus for trying to understand what it's like to to meet someone like Socrates and to encounter to like for him to be in the
17:02
world with you to be one of the people in the world that's around Socrates alab speech is the best place for that so those would be my two favorites for different reasons let me give you part of my take on Symposium and then you
17:12
give me a your interpretation or a better interpretation I think of the dialogue much of it is being about people actually aren't that interested in EOS so if you think about eles so much of a speech is putting down of Socrates and keeping him at a length and
17:29
saying well you're not so great you're not as modest as you appear to be and most of the speeches have these long digressions from the topic of Love most of the speeches as pure logic I don't find very impressive I think the
17:41
dialogue as a whole is extraordinarily impressive but it's through the failings of the speeches and it's striking that at the end what people really just want to do what Danny conman told me once is sit around talking to their friends and
17:54
they want to get drunk so self intoxication is in some ways a more fundamental concept than OS and there's a complacency even at the beginning people are getting drunk in the speech of aades he's talking about alcohol early on multiple times the one person who
18:11
really focuses on love and gives you a compelling vision is Aristophanes he exactly is the dramatist he does false things his account of being split from your other half and then reunited is obviously false but completely wonderful
18:24
and Brilliant and beautiful so we have this myth of love and Eros which is at the center of society but it's actually something we pretend we're much more interested in than what we're we really care about and that's like talking with
18:36
our friends our petty rivalries getting drunk and just sitting around what's your take one bit of textual evidence against at least a part of that is that they decide not to drink that is soes doesn't drink no no they all um they all actually at the early in the dialogue
18:53
they say this is we what we usually do is get drunk but they they had gotten drunk the night before they've got hangovers and they decide for the purposes in order to have a more civilized conversation not to drink that
19:03
all gets overturned with the arrival of albies but for the the first bunch of speeches actually there isn't any drinking or maybe it's maybe it's moderate I I'm actually maybe not remembering but it's maybe moderate drinking but in any case they cut back
19:14
on the drinking in order to speak so there's a sense in which the the dialogue presents the kind of friendly conversation the kind of friendly conversation they're having is being a bit intention with the drinking what do I think the dialogue as a whole is about
19:27
I think at least thing it's about is suggested by the frame and the ending it's about the cult of Socrates so that's the very at the very beginning right people are telling stories about Socrates and they're also um imitating
19:39
Socrates they're like walking around Barefoot and stuff right and and there I do think there's a bit of like a joke Socrates gave rise to a whole bunch of Socrates imitators right as well as people who Socrates people who would
19:52
write what Socrates wrote like zenfon and Plato and Plato is reflecting on this on the kind of role of Socrates in the culture and so you you start with that and you end with alabi saying like here's what it's like to be around
20:06
Socrates to be affected by Socrates right and that question the question of the role of Socrates in the culture right and the place of the kind of speech he gives in the context of the kinds of speeches other people gave right you know what's it like for
20:22
Socrates to be one among many speakers in a group I guess I find it hard not to think that that's at least in part about the question of was he guilty that Did the Athenians make the correct decision did he corrupt the youth was he a
20:38
positive influence in this culture or not I do think that's at least some of what the Symposium is about and I think Plato is trying to defend Socrates he's trying to say let's take exhibit a for the claim that Socrates corrupted the
20:52
youth alabes right and let's look at let's get to the very heart of what socrates's effect on alabes and let's look at him slipping away from Socrates like towards ambition let's look inside of that and see who fault is it who's
21:07
responsible and I think his answer in the form of alab speech is that alabes is responsible but isn't alabes himself self condemning Socrates so he calls him at least twice a Marcus who is you know pummeled and killed for having hubris
21:22
and it's implied in Greek mythology I think that he deserves it and alabi says well you know I wouldn't go near you without a guardian and almost implying that was the more rational attitude I mean who whose side is he on oh I think
21:35
alabes is blaming Socrates question okay um I I think Plato is not agreeing so that is I think that Socrates has a really interesting response to alabi's speech so alabes gives this whole speech about like it's horrible to be in love
21:49
with Socrates look at what he's done to me right he's put me in this terrible state so alabes in effect is making the case against Socrates right then Socrates says it's really clear what you've been doing you've been trying to become the lover of agathon and make
22:06
me fall in love with you and Socrates essentially saying look you've turned away from me and you you hate the fact that you're in love with me I.E with you know the philosophical life I mean look it's it's sort of up to the reader whose side you're going to
22:23
come down on right and whether or not Plato comes down on Socrates or alabes I don't know about that but I I guess at the very least there are materials in the Symposium for what would have been you know what is socrates's response to
22:37
the claim that he corrupted alabes socrates's response is no alabes didn't try hard enough he turned away from he had the door open to him and he walked the other way now I have a friend who's interested in longevity research to
22:50
switch topics and he tells me there's maybe a 10% chance that I actually will live forever due to possible scientific advances I'm skeptical but let's just say I were to live forever how bored would I end up and how do you think
23:03
about this question I think it depends on how good of a person you are so I think that and the good people are more or less bored oh they're less bored one thing is that if you're you're kind of having to live with yourself for a very long time right
23:19
if you're Immortal or even just live for a couple thousand years right and a bad self I think is hard to live with but by bad I don't just mean sort of like let's say cruel to people or unjust I also mean not attuned to things of Eternal
23:38
significance I think you can get by in a 100-year life not being too much attuned to things of Eternal significance because there's so much fascinating stuff out there and one can go from one thing to the next and not get bored but
23:52
if we're talking about eternity or even thousands of years you better find something to occupy you that is really riveting in in the way that I think only Eternal things are so I think that what it's really what you're really asking is
24:06
something like could I be a God and I think well if you became Godlike you could and then it would be okay let me give you a hypothesis you can react to it that which is cultural say listening to music I would get bored with even
24:19
though wonderful music maybe continually will be created but those activities which are more primeval more biological so parent in sex food sleep maybe taking a wonderful shower that are quite brute in a way uh maybe I would substitute
24:35
more into those as an immortal yes I don't see why you wouldn't get just as bored of bodily Pleasures but you're programmed for those to be so immediate and riveting right you you evolv to be maybe an 80-year-old being or perhaps
24:51
even a 33y old being so you were riveted on things like reproduction and getting enough sleep and that stays riveting even when you're on this program to live 80,000 years at least some of those activities stay riveting for us over the course of Our Lives because their
25:07
meaning changes so eating say right I like to eat when I was five and I like to eat now but I eat very differently than I did then and and if I didn't if I hadn't sort of changed and developed how I eat and what I eat I think I would
25:22
have gotten bored of it and so there's a question about the limits of that development right how high up can one go with eating won't hunger always be the best sauce I think that hunger will always make you want to eat but will hunger is hunger enough to make
25:37
eating kind of meaningful to you and deserving of your attention in that way and I think it isn't let's say we felt the world had 30 days left an asteroid was coming a supernova whatever how would or should we behave then and are
25:52
the people who are good do they have a better time than the people who are not good yes for slightly different reasons I think virtue the more virtue you have the more difficult the circumstances can be in which you still act and live well right
26:09
so if you're in relatively easy circumstances like even just being an okay person is enough but when you start I don't know being in a position let's say it's similar to like being in a position of power I think having power
26:24
of any kind wealth political power makes life more difficult in the sense that you need more virtue to live well and I think in the case where there's 30 days left you would need to be a good person to not give into very human and very
26:39
understandable panic in order to live well for the remaining 30 days I mean this would also it's different but not that different from the case in which you find that there's 30 days left of your life right s similar issues are
26:51
going to arise I think it's it's worse in the case where there's 30 days left for everybody but we often describe people in those situations as having courage or being admirable and I think it's because the situation calls up The Virtue that's in them I have an
27:04
acquaintance who does high energy physics and he told me just about a week ago there's a 98% chance the universe is infinite and there are an infinite number of near copies of me now I don't believe that actually but he knows more
27:17
about physics than I do let's say that we true does that or should that in some way change the kind of meaning I give my life and in the background here I have Samuel sheffer's argument which you know very well you studied with him that for
27:30
our individual lives the notion that Civilization continues after us has a truly major significant impact on what we do now even though we're gone so a future civilization matters that much these near copies of me out there I'll
27:44
never be in their light cone I mean does or should that matter at all so I don't think Sheffer would say it does or should matter because his his thought is that the valuing that I do now is actually predicated on certain assumptions that I make about future
28:01
generations and these other copies um my valuing isn't predicated on them because I didn't even know about them until like a couple minutes ago right so I couldn't have been um but you can still ask should they matter right and you know I
28:15
haven't thought about that but I thought about a related question that comes up with you know David Lewis's philosophy so David Lewis you know makes a kind of similar point in the field of sort of metaphysics as opposed to physics saying
28:26
that there are these these possible worlds that are real though they're not actual we live in the actual world right and I have these counterparts in the other possible worlds and you the part of his theory that I always had the
28:36
hardest time with is the ethical part because it looks like if I do a good thing then in a sense like I know my counterparts because all the other possibilities have to be so to speak saturated so my counterparts are going to do bad the bad thing so am I just
28:50
keeping my corner of the possible World space clean and like how could that be how could you make sense of motivation if those worlds are real right and so there far from thinking that I ought to take my counterparts into account I kind
29:06
of think I'm actually morally obligated not to because I go down a chain of thought that says it doesn't matter what I do because all the possibilities will be real in any case now the late Derek parfit or at least some time slice of
29:20
the late Derek parfit toyed with the hypothesis that if we had a a weaker belief in the continuity of self we would fear L and there's a paper I read recently that suggests at least based on Paul evidence that Tibetan Buddhist monks who have a pretty weak degree of
29:36
belief in the continuity of the self and pole as such that they fear death more than people from other religions what's the best philosophical way to think about this question well it seems to me the first question is ought we to fear
29:49
death because then we can ask under what system will we fear it less I think it's rational to fear death but I also think the rationality of that is bound up with the demand for courage in the face of death so we ought to fear death
30:08
and we ought to in some sense fight that fear one thing that the fear of death can lead you to is to thinking that dying is the worst thing that can happen to you and that um like there's no fate worse than death and people can do
30:23
terrible things if they think that it's important to see that one's is valuable and has meaning and therefore to fear death but it isn't the most important thing that there is and so I guess in terms of um which metaphysics of personal identity we adopt I don't know
30:38
but if we were just going to let our ethics Drive our metaphysics I would say we should adopt the one that would make death worthy of fear on the one hand but on the other hand also make people see that there's more to the value of their
30:57
lives then so to speak just biological life let's turn now to your new book aspiration the agency of becoming there's a sentence from the book let me read it maybe you can explain it quote proleptic reasons allow you to be
31:12
rational even when you know that your reasons aren't exactly the right ones so what's a proleptic reason so what I'm trying to explain is how do people get themselves to care about things that they don't yet care about right so suppose that you want to come to
31:34
appreciate a certain kind of music that's example I use in the book more than you do and then there's a question well why should you do that like why should you take the music appreciation class right you might say well the value
31:45
of music I mean classic music is this great thing right but but you don't see it as valuable presumably that's why you have to take the class and so there's a a kind of paradox that would suggests well we should never try to get
31:54
ourselves interested or into new things because because in order to have a reason to do that we'd already have to have the interest and so prpic reasons are supposed to solve this problem and they are the reasons that you act on
32:08
when you are working your way into a new domain of value and what I say characterizes the these reasons is that they're kind of they have kind of two faces or they're kind of divided they have two parts and so the one part is like you know if you were to say what's
32:23
your reason like why are you taking this class right you might say well the inic value of classical music it's one of the great Goods that our civilization has produced something like that but like when you say that your words are going
32:32
to be a little bit Hollow because you don't if they ask you to say more you won't be able to say much right so that's not all of your reason that's just that's what I call the distal face of your reason right the the face that
32:41
looks away to the person you're going to become but then they're also going to be kind of bits of your motivation that are a little more embarrassing like oh you know a bunch of people I admire in the class or you know I think that people
32:53
will like me more I have some ideal of or some image or some fantasy of a kind of enriched life and I see classical music as part of that and I think those are also parts of the that's the proximate face of the proleptic reason
33:04
the part that you can now grasp but you can see that that's not all of it so you're still working on the classic and Socratic problems like how is change possible yes absolutely and you give an example of a parent may be having an
33:17
aspiration in a particular way but a gangster cannot have an aspiration in a similar way correct would you explain that briefly yes well I didn't think this when I started writing the book actually um I thought you could aspire to anything that you could value so I
33:31
think people sometimes value things that aren't valuable people make mistakes in valuing and I thought right well if if aspiration is the acquisition of value you could acquire false values as well as true ones and we want to tell the
33:42
story of how you do that right but as I was writing the book and I tried to tell that story I kept on not being able to tell it so I kept on like I tried to use the example of a gangster right someone who aspires to become a gangster and the
33:54
problem that I ran into was that when I would describe the process of the person um becoming a gangster I couldn't find a way to specify that what was going on there was aspiration as opposed to a phenomenon I want to distinguish from
34:08
aspiration called ambition right okay so when you're when you're ambitious you're not trying to come to Value something new you're just trying to satisfy desires or values you already have but that are maybe large in scale and every
34:21
time I tell the story of the aspiring gangster I found that it could equally well be read as the story of the ambitious gangster and there was no way to specify the difference whereas I didn't have that kind of problem when I
34:29
talk about the aspiring student so what I came to conclude was that the reason I was running into the road this roadblock is that um you can only aspire or let me put it this way if we see someone we only count them as aspiring if we think that the thing
34:45
they're moving towards is in fact good we wouldn't call it aspiration otherwise now if I think of Steven Deus you know the main character in James Joyce is a portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that's often considered a classic no
34:56
novel of aspiration he seems to me like a jerk so he's Vis visiting all these prostitutes he's misogynistic toward women somewhat uncaring toward his family wallowing in a kind of Irish misery in a way he's maturing but it seems to me he's moving from being one
35:11
kind of jerk to another kind of jerk so can aspiration be the province of jerks even if it cannot be of gangsters I think that actually all aspirants are going to be a little bit jerky it'll be characteristic of an aspirant that
35:23
they're defective and so the fact that Steven Deus doesn't instantiate his own ideals is a sign that he is an aspirin now the thing is that Steph's aspirations pull him away from other people rather than towards them and so it's not actually
35:39
that clear to me that his jerkiness gets sort of amelar over the course of the novel his aspirations are aesthetic but I think that he says yeah he says it's part of my view that people can't aspire to something without knowing that they
35:55
aspire to it so aspiration has to be trans as transparent as it can be given that you only have a partial grasp right so he couldn't be aspiring to something else that he is not aware of Stephen is from the very beginning of the novel he hears the sounds of words and he's
36:10
interested in their sounds and in the way that they connect up to one another and in he's asking himself questions about you know his place in the universe and what we see over the course of that is him working toward a kind of self-
36:28
understanding as an artist and I think he makes genuine progress there but you're right he doesn't make a lot of progress with respect to how he treats other people and that seems to be something that he doesn't care about that much and that's consistent with my
36:41
view so my view is only that when you aspire to something that thing has to actually be good you don't have to be good in other respects and how much is aspiration the result of a kind of crude mimetic desire as evidenced Say by Elena
36:53
and Leela in fante's my brilliant friend so it seems to me for instance Leela marri Stephano as part of a somewhat misguided apparation to be successful and accepted in mainstream and pretty early on in the marriage he's basically
37:07
beating her and raping her isn't this something unhealthy about aspiration it doesn't seem there she had ambition it seems it was aspiration and she went down this unknown path and did something actually quite desperate yes so I think
37:21
that aspirants don't really know what they're doing and so they're going to make a lot of mistakes um and she definitely makes a mistake with um Stephano and she clearly I mean I think she's trying to get out of marrying which one is it marchella or Mela one of
37:35
the Solara Brothers right and she becomes very enamored with this thought both her and Elena do of becoming the kind of mashion Atrix behind her life like she's going to take control of her life and they think her and L and Elena
37:50
think that they have found a way to be real agents in this world that is like pushing them around with respect to marriage now they're totally wrong about that even there's foreshadowing even as that's being told like oh it turned out
38:02
only Stephano was the one who was really in charge at some point Elena says this so I think um you're right that this um this was a misstep for Lyla and I also think it was aspiration does that show that aspiration so I think aspiration is
38:18
mimetic so um but I don't think it's crudely I mean I think it just is mematic um it's imitative and when we imitate we often go wrong and make missteps but I don't think there's any other way to learn one of my favorite sayings is that all thinkers are
38:32
Regional thinkers so when you come to mind one thing I know about you is you're you were born in Hungary you come from central European Jewish culture which has this fantastic 20th century tradition and there's a kind of stereotype of Hungarian central European
38:48
East European families as being pushing in a certain way or encouraging their children to Aspire and this being much more Central to that culture than it would be to a lot of other regions how has your personal background in that
39:03
regard fed into this book and is this a regional book in that sense well I'll tell you one story that I haven't thought of for at least a decade that that called to mind when I was little I remember this thing that my mother I have a terrible memory so I remember
39:15
very few things from my childhood but I remember my mom my mom is extremely into classical music I'm not at all um but she was telling me about there are two kinds of people Mozart there's a Mozart kind of bethoven kind so msart when he
39:28
thought of some music it was just perfect he could just write it down it was like he was listening to God right and Beethoven would sort of write it and rewrite it and rewrite it and cross it out and I don't remember that she ever
39:39
said this but I remember coming away from that thinking oh I guess I'm the Beethoven kind I never had the thought that there was any third choice like I have to be one of those those are the options either you're like Mozart or you're like
39:54
Beethoven and I do think I sort of came away from my childhood with the expectation like you better be someone you better you better be someone great here are the choices for you you know those are the only choices that there
40:04
are an aspiration what do you think of Jordan Peterson I had this odd feeling he only became known to me quite recently in the past couple weeks and I was listening to him talk and I was thinking he sounds a little bit like Socrates but not Socrates and I was like
40:21
what who is that who is he reminding me of and it's zenfon Socrates so I think he's the best instance of the self-help genre that I've ever encountered in the sense that he has these morals that he puts forward like tell the truth keep
40:36
your room clean pull yourself together go for the highest good those are good morals I mean I my 14-year-old listens to he listened to knew about Jordan peton before I did and he listens to him and you know listening to him I was like
40:48
oh I'm very happy my son is listening to this this is good for him this is at least a little bit of the internet that I don't have to try to pull him away from um but I think it's characteristic of something like the that genre of
41:01
self-help that it is part of a larger story and isn't the whole story in the way that philosophy aims to be so Peterson is pulling against certain cultural Trends and his morals are very good in that context right so they they pull you away when the culture is
41:20
pulling you too much in One Direction he pulls you in the other direction that's sort of what the work that he's doing that's really valuable but like in another culture it would be like really pernicious because it's not he's not
41:30
giving you the whole story he's sort of only giving a part of the story so that's how I experience him given what you understand about aspiration why are so many young American men apparently not even interested in looking for work
41:41
I don't know I think I just don't know okay what's the worst thing to say to infertile couples I think there are so many bad things to say It's actually kind of hard to come out with the good thing to say maybe the best thing to say is is to
41:55
listen and not to say anything because the idea of saying anything at all suggests that you're giving advice and that suggests that like you're in a position of knowledge which like you're probably not until you've spent a lot of
42:08
time listening to them I've read your book uh which I liked and also enjoyed very much and I have two straussian readings of your book and I'll present you with each of them just to be clear to the reader or listener these are
42:20
either things you never say or perhaps even disavow explicitly so when I say this read or listen don't think this is what the book is it's not it's my a and take on it the first take is that within the book you have this big integrated account of much more than just
42:37
aspiration so you talk about weakness of Will and you think of that as a way of being able to do something when you don't really have good enough reasons to do what you ought to do there's this kind of incompleteness and how you get
42:52
to the other side so you're tying together what you call proleptic Desire acaia or weakness of the well you have this Hybrid Theory of value about both doing and valuing something and how both are needed and how intrinsic conflict
43:06
ties into that so the straussian reading is you've produced this whole big theory of value and decision and choice you know you can't get away with claiming that so you put out this small piece of it but in fact since aspiration is a
43:21
matter of degree and even small events can trigger big changes if you have a good theory of aspiration consumption is aspirational in a sense you have a theory of everything so this book is like stage one of your Theory of Everything but you can't say it that's
43:35
St reading number one what's your response it's true that aspiration is step one of a theory of everything but it isn't true that the reason I I can't say what the theory is but that's because I don't have it not because I'm I'm hiding it what you've come away with
43:49
makes sense to me because the parts of the book are in different areas of philosophy in the three major areas of Ethics okay in decision Theory or theory of rationality in moral psychology and in moral responsibility and what I'm
44:00
doing is saying look if you want to give a theory of aspiration you have to kind of break the central apparatus that philosophers have been working with in each of these three areas if we don't do that then aspiration becomes impossible
44:12
clearly it's possible but if you do that if you say if you give up on saying the first part of the book internal the idea that all reasons are internal that all of our motivations can be explained in terms of antecedent desires if you get
44:23
rid of that then you're left thinking well how do we explain decision and choice right we're going to need another new Theory and your thought is I have it and I haven't given it and but the truth is that no you have given it at least
44:36
part of it I mean I've given the part of it that says that it's going to have to accommodate this phenomenon but I don't actually think that you can extrapolate from that the whole Theory and the reason is because aspiration is
44:49
itself look aspiration is a theory of change and of how we become someone but that theory is is in a way secondary the the primary theory is goingon to have to be like what's it like to be someone right what's the theory of the end point
45:01
of aspiration that's what I haven't given though there are many theories of that that are incompatible with aspiration and those theories I've refuted I think that's not to say that you can use the theory I've given of aspiration to generate a theory of say
45:16
what kind of end states are worthwhile to Aspire to and what what is it to be in those States here's my second stra in Reading when I read Plato it seems obvious to me that one of the most striking features of Socrates is that he
45:30
has never raised a child and 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 and
45:44
again you can't quite come out and say that but in various indirect ways you say it or at least you show it and this is in part a theory of how so many things in our life are more like parent ing than we realize and that if you
45:57
don't have the parenting experience there's something deficient in your understanding of the world what says you I think that Socrates had a very parental relationship to it comes out in the feto that's the best place for it to the young men who were his followers
46:13
you're right that's not the same thing as raising like you know a young child he did have children but who knows how much I mean from from again from the FED suggests yeah I don't believe that if you haven't had the experience of parenting yourself that means you're
46:29
necessarily missing something I I I think I I can't know that but I do think that philosophy has like there are many aspects of The Human Experience that are under theorized by philosophers and parenting but not just parenting but a
46:43
whole range of phenomena that go with it right so basically a lot of the ethics of sexuality or something I mean there there bits of that that have been addressed but there's a lot of it that hasn't I don't know that any philosopher before me has ever asked
46:58
that question that you asked me right I ask it in my book like what what does one say to infertile couples or what is the ethics of how you deal with people who are infertile I think that's an important ethical question and I I think
47:08
that as far as I can tell it isn't a question people have asked before so I do think that that it's an important area of human life that hasn't been sufficiently theorized and maybe you're right were we to do so better that would
47:22
affect our theory in other areas Shakespeare's Hamlet is he a philosopher and if so is he a cartisian I think he definitely reminds me a bit of dayart in that he is not just he but the whole play is kind of Trapped a bit in Hamlet's head I
47:38
mean I don't know of any other play where you get this I mean it's so relentless the kind of Hamlet person he's in so many scenes right he's the other characters aren't I I as I see them aren't very welldeveloped or well drawn characters and Hamlet you know his
47:53
monologues are like like meditations on the nature of life and emotion and they're not really speeches about the action of people around him right so he seems in this weird way apart from the world and he seems kind of trapped
48:12
inside his own head and uh so it's almost like maybe somebody you know deart has this sort of thought experiment that he engages in in the meditations right systematically doubt everything that you believe and see what you come to and what dayart
48:27
comes to is a kind of real truth as a that he can build upon inside of his own mind and and something my students often ask me about that is like what would happen if you doubted and you doubted and you doubted and you never came to
48:41
anything like you there was never there wasn't a stop what guarantee did Day card have that that it would stop ever anywhere right um that you wouldn't just become kind of despondent and have nothing you could trust anymore and I I
48:52
think that Hamlet at least in the early part of the play he's a bit like that he's a bit the character of deart if he hadn't found anything to like the I think but did deart find something is decart an earlier version of the Contemporary
49:07
argument that we're living in a simulation where the evil demon is the simulation rather than basy and reasoning so dekart that argument certainly traces to dayart but he thought one could get out of it right so he thought he had refuted that he says
49:21
right he says he's refuted let's put it that way so so you can trace it to him but but you end up back in the mind of God in a way right so it's not an evil demon but you're living in a universe God has created sure but that's the real
49:36
world the whole question is is about being connected to reality as opposed to being a kind of figment right and if you're living in the world God created God can create real things and so you're living in a real world why did
49:49
Shakespeare tell this story about a royal family that doesn't matter historically because they all killed each other why not tell the the story of foron Bross I I think one of the things that makes Hamlet so powerful is that it's about how the inside of an
50:05
experience or the first personal point of view on it is significant so people are significant not only for what they do but for how they live inside of their skin or something like that right and I think Hamlet's first speech um or sorry
50:23
it's not first but you know he's talking I think it's the beginning of too he says um something like all his mourning he's being criticized for mourning his father too much those are but um trappings in the suits of Woe and I have
50:35
that within which passes show right so Hamlet is from the very beginning pointing to kind of his inner life and the Play points us to that to the reality of the inner life of people where their kind of Royal status and their large actions and their fighting
50:51
in wars and all that becomes kind of irrelevant becomes the background why as a philosopher and also a classicist are you more interested in reading works of fiction now in some ways that's what I take away from from what I know about
51:05
what you're doing and more interested in reading works of fiction now you mean that than at other times there might be many other philosophers so I think that many reasons but maybe one of them that pops to my head is that often in
51:16
philosophy we're trying to theorize some phenomenon so say we're trying to theorize aspiration we're trying to give a theory of it or weakness of will right and the way we do it as philosophers is by using we often use example at least
51:26
to lay out the problem right so here's an example of such and such the problem with examples though is that they can collapse under theoretical pressure right so there's a constant kind of impulse to rewrite the example and to say oh well what was really going on was
51:42
and essentially that impulse comes from the fact that there are certain changes you could make to the example that would make it theoretically easier to analyze and so there's a need I think for exam examples that that are going to
51:57
be a bit tough in response to that kind of pressure and I think one it helps if you didn't make the example and two it helps if the person who did really understood the thing that they're talking about and I think literature just gives us that maybe the third most
52:11
common question I receive is like what is mly Tyler's best defense for reading and indeed rereading classic Works rather than the latest book that just came out some kind of smart non-fiction uh what would you say is your offense of
52:25
reading and rereading the classics apart from your own professional reasons right so I I mean I read new fiction too so I believe in both but one thing that I've noticed is that I read the thing differently having read it multiple
52:43
times right and I'm a person who is very naturally pulled Along by plot so the first time I read something I'm very invested in the characters and I just feel bad when things go go badly for them and like a lot of my attention is
52:57
is drawn to that kind of just wanting them to be happy and make money and live well and get married and and it actually often will take me like a couple of readings before I can set that kind of aside and in a way read the work a little bit less
53:14
dionic for our final segment are you up for a few questions about the Agnes card production function I don't know what that is well you'll hear the question uh as I understand your career uh you started actually with physics moved to
53:28
Classics and then philosophy how would you describe that process in high school I was very interested in math and physics I think it was because there seemed to be truths there I got to college and two things happened so first
53:43
it's that the way that my high school offered physics they offered um up through so AP like a mechanics but not electricity and magnetism which was not where you usually start at Chicago but anyway so I had to start with electricity and magnet ISM in the fall
53:55
of my first year and the thing with magnetism is that the force goes in the opposite direction it goes to like a right angle to what you'd expect and that didn't make any sense to me and I just remember asking the teacher like how could the force go that way that was
54:10
sort of like not the question you were supposed to be asking you were supposed to just like follow the formulas and right so I was getting that in my physics class and at the same time I was taking it's a class called human being
54:21
and citizen in which we read you know the Odyssey and gen and Plato and the teacher of that class got me to see that questions like should you be a vegetarian those could be about truths too it just had really occurred to me that there were truths there that's how
54:38
I made the transition to um like they say let's say the humanities from physics I went to Classics grad school because I wanted to read more Greek and Latin and I loved doing that but at a certain point as you progress you start
54:53
to move towards like a dissertation ation and the closer I got the clearer it was to me that I did not want to write a dissertation in Classics and so I had to get out get off that train I went up through taking all the exams
55:04
basically and then I left I guess the questions that interested me were more like the substantive questions that the writers were talking about rather than something more like a literary question now you belong to this discipline called
55:19
philosophy and it puts out a bunch of outputs there are many journals people come give talks at your school there are working papers what's your method for sampling the output of philosophy as a discipline what's your strategy for
55:32
reading or not reading what comes out how would you describe that to us mostly my response to your question is like guilt I don't feel I do it very well a lot of what I end up doing is reading things new things because my grad students are working on them right so my
55:48
grad students will be working on a certain topic and then there'll be literature that they're using and so I'll be like oh I better I better read that I better get to know it so that's one way that I come to read things um yeah I go to talks and I go to
56:00
conferences and I I rarely will just kind of read Around in journals I will do that if there's something I'm working on and I'll read what's most recently been written on the things I'm working on but that this is why it makes me feel
56:11
guilty is I know there's really good stuff that I'm just missing because I happen not to be working on it not to have any students who are working on it and not to go to any conferences occasionally I'll hit it anyway like there's a there's been a big
56:26
recent upswell in literature on grounding kit fine at myyu and a bunch of other people and that at a certain point it seemed to me like it might relate so I read a bunch of that and learned that literature was very
56:37
interesting but that again that was an accident of thinking that it could connect up so that's that's what I do you have a professional reputation for being willing to change your mind not because someone has refuted you or maybe you feel you've refuted yourself in some
56:50
way how how exactly does that process happen and how rational do you think it is oh it's pretty much always because someone has refuted me you think so yes I've just been refuted many times when I was on the job market so like I just got
57:04
my PhD and I was giving talks my entire dissertation was refuted by one of my now colleagues who asked me a question in the job interview that yeah just showed me that the central distinction I was using in my dissertation didn't work
57:18
I then tried to rehabilitate a part of it just to give you some example and I had been working for about a year and I gave it as a talk at MIT and a graduate student there refuted it yeah but this has happened to me a number of times uh
57:31
so I would say most of the time I changed my mind because people show me that I'm wrong does having studied weakness of will help you better deal with it no I don't think so final question of our conversation what are your own aspirational beliefs is the
57:47
question what are my aspirations that is to what do I Aspire yes that's constantly changing of course that the answer to that question at the moment I would say I have three areas of aspiration that I'm working on right now
57:59
one is fashion so over the past couple of years for the first time I became interested in what I wore like I just had been indifferent to it for the first like 39 years of my life and then and then somehow I became non- indifferent
58:14
and I started to care about it and so that's area number one area number two is religion so I struggle a lot with my belief in God and with giving that a place in my life and also with kind of my relation to my religious texts and
58:33
this past summer I went to a conference on Spinosa and my monties that had a big effect on me it kind of pushed me to to think more in that direction so that's another direction in which I consider myself to be aspiring and then the third
58:44
one is teaching so there's a particular context I think I'm a good lecturer but I struggle in discussion classes is to not lecture to listen to people and I've been exper over the past year really I've been experimenting with how to do
59:03
that better how to listen how to teach teach people who are very new to the kind of talking and thinking that I'm doing with them Agnes callard thank you very much and again her new book is aspiration the agency of becoming thank
59:22
you thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the show