07/03/23 18:54:16
@daily @agnes-callard
Reading this profile on Agnes Callard. It’s fascinating how her idea of life may align with that described by Sellers.
[Her book, “Aspirations”] argues that people can embark on a path toward a destination, a new way of being a person, that they can’t yet see or understand—a process that she calls aspiration. When aspirants make decisions, they are guided by the possibility of a future self that does not yet exist. They imitate mentors or competitors, risking pretension, because they understand that their current values are deficient; they haven’t made room for another way of seeing themselves or the world.
Philosophers often describe love from the outside, but she could provide an inside account. Her experience had prompted her to reinterpret a famous speech, in the Symposium, in which Socrates, whom she considers her role model, argues that the highest kind of love is not for people but for ideals. She was troubled by Socrates’ unerotic and detached view of love, and she proposed that he was actually describing how two lovers aspire to embody ideals together. True lovers, she explained, don’t really want to be loved for who they are; they want to be loved because neither of them is happy with who he or she is.
She has this fascinating notion of wearing ones heart on their sleeve. In that, there is no privacy for the philosopher, they are the composition of their thoughts at that moment.
“It’s not that she lacks interiority,” he said. “It’s that she has a low view of the significance of that interiority.” As she saw it, thinking is not something that one person can do alone. It takes two people to have a thought.