Agnes Callard: recommendation

Transcript context

…OK. What’s the worst thing to say to infertile couples? [laughs] I think there are so many bad things to say, it’s actually kind of hard to come out with a good thing to say. Maybe the best thing to say is to listen and not to say anything because the idea of saying anything at all suggests that you’re giving advice, and that suggests that you’re in a position of knowledge, which you’re probably not until you’ve spent a lot of time listening to them. I’ve read your book, which I liked and also enjoyed very much, and I have two Straussian readings of your book. I’ll present you with each of them. Just to be clear to the reader or listener, these are either things you never say, or perhaps even disavow explicitly. So when I say this, reader or listener, don’t think this is what the book is. It’s not. It’s my Straussian take on it. The first take is that within the book, you have this big integrated account of much more than just aspiration. 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 in how you get to the other side. So you’re tying together what you call proleptic desire — akrasia or weakness of the will. You have this hybrid theory of value about both doing and valuing something, and how both are needed, and how intrinsic conflict 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 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 Straussian reading number one. What’s your response?…

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