Tyler Cowen: belief

Transcript context

…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. Every time I’d 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 talked about the aspiring student. So what I came to conclude was that the reason I was running into this roadblock is that you can only aspire . . . Let me put it this way: If we see someone, we only count them as aspiring if we think that the thing they’re moving towards is, in fact, good. We wouldn’t call it aspiration otherwise. If I think of Stephen Dedalus, the main character in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, that’s often considered a classic novel of aspiration. He seems to me like a jerk. He’s 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 kind of jerk to another kind of jerk. 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 they’re defective, and so the fact that Stephen Dedalus doesn’t instantiate his own ideals is a sign that he is an aspirant. The thing is that Stephen’s aspirations pull him away from other people, rather than towards them, and so it’s not actually that clear to me that his jerkiness gets sort of ameliorated over the course of the novel. His aspirations are aesthetic, but I think that . . .…

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