I just finished Agnes Callard’s excellent book, Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. And I wholeheartedly support her call to action:
My hope, then, is that this book will generate energy and optimism and good faith toward the construction of ethical theories (of decision, psychological conflict, and responsibility) that comfortably accommodate the phenomenon of aspiration.
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The best I can hope for, then, is that reading this book will allow one to cling more tenaciously to the goal of recognizing the agency of becoming, even in the absence of full theoretical resources for doing so.
While I share Callard’s hopes of developing the concepts of aspiration and the agency of becoming, I part ways with her regarding the degree of rationality involved in the process of aspiration — the embracing of novel values.
Here is how she describes her concept of aspiration:
The name I will give to the rational process by which we work to care about (or love, or value, or desire . . .) something new is “aspiration.” Aspiration, as I understand it, is the distinctive form of agency directed at the acquisition of values. Though we do not typically come to value simply by deciding to, it is nonetheless true that coming to value can be something the agent does. The explanation of how we come to value, or to see-as-valuable, so many of the things that we once did not is that we work to achieve this result. The aspirant sees that she does not have the values that she would like to have, and therefore seeks to move herself toward a better valuational condition. She senses that there is more out there to value than she currently values, and she strives to come to see what she cannot yet get fully into view.
I agree with this description with the important caveat that I think the process of aspiring to new values is primarily an arational one, i.e., reasoning plays only a minor role in the process.
Callard agrees that conventional reasons do not play a role in aspiration, so she invents a new kind of justification, which she calls proleptic reasons. Here is how she describes them:
And yet — I will argue — it is a fact of life that people act not only from, but also, at other times, for the sake of acquiring, knowledge of value.
If those actions are to be rational, then rationality cannot require accurate foreknowledge of the good your rational action will bring you. Thus I will defend the view that you can act rationally even if your antecedent conception of the good for the sake of which you act is not quite on target — and you know that. In these cases, you do not demand that the end result of your agency match a preconceived schema, for you hope, eventually, to get more out of what you are doing than you can yet conceive of. I call this kind of rationality “proleptic.” The word “proleptic” refers, usually in a grammatical context, to something taken in advance of its rightful place. I appropriate it for moral psychology on the model of Margaret Little’s phrase “proleptic engagement”, by which she refers to an interaction with a child in which we treat her as though she were the adult we want her to become. Proleptic reasons are provisional in a way that reflects the provisionality of the agent’s own knowledge and development: her inchoate, anticipatory, and indirect grasp of some good she is trying to know better. Proleptic reasons allow you to be rational even when you know that your reasons aren’t exactly the right ones.
I embrace the concept of proleptic (something taken in advance of its rightful place), but I would not apply the concept to reasons. I think it is more fruitful to apply proleptic to justifications. Proleptic justifications are taken in advance of reasons. The pursuit of novel values is not predominantly rational — it is primarily imaginative and rhetorical (i.e., a process of persuasion).
As I don’t have the time to craft a well structured essay reviewing Callard’s book, what follows are my reflections on various passages from the book.
The process [of aspiration] as a whole exemplifies a distinctive form of practical rationality, one not structured by a single moment of intention or decision at its inception; the rationality of the agent I seek to describe changes and indeed solidifies over time, as the agent becomes increasingly able to respond to the reasons for action associated with her new values.
I think at best such a process is ‘quasi-rational’ (and quasi-imaginative and quasi-contingent and quasi-passionate). The idea that the aspirant’s rationality ‘changes’ and ‘solidifies’ implies they weren’t solid (fully rationally justifiable) to begin with.
This shift to new values resonates with Kuhn’s analysis of the shift to a new scientific paradigm.
The work of aspiration includes, but is by no means limited to,
the mental work of thinking, imagining, and reasoning.
I would add feeling. Also, I think Callard has under-emphasized (but not ignored) the role of imagination, which I think is central.
I use the word [aspiration] to describe the process of rational value-acquisition.
Aspiration is at best, quasi-rational, or to use Callard’s term proleptic rationality.
If we want to understand how substantive value-change is possible, we will have to introduce a new kind of reason, one directed not at satisfying wants but rather at generating them.
We do indeed need to introduce a new kind of agential process, but I don’t think it’s fruitful to characterize the process as rational. Or to put it another way, we need to introduce a new kind of justification or explanation, one that is not based on conventional kinds of reasons.
The nature of that agency, as I shall argue, is one of learning: coming to acquire the value means learning to see the world in a new way. But this, in turn, means that the process of valuing motherhood and the process of becoming a mother are not two separate events flanking a moment of decision, but rather one and the same process. The job of this book is to describe that process, which I call aspiration.
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In this way, the book shows that aspirational assessment and aspirational change are both best understood in the light of one another. It challenges the prevailing assumption that basic or fundamental preferences (desires, values, etc.) are the kinds of things you can only reason from, by exposing a way we have of reasoning toward them.
We have a way of approaching novel values that involves reasoning in some way and to some degree, but to say that we reason towards novel values seems to overstate reason’s role in the process of aspiration.
In the next chapter, I will describe the special kinds of practical reason that figure in the thinking of such an aspirant. She sees that she does not, at the moment, fully grasp all there is to be said in favor of continuing on her aspirational course. She does her best to make the decision in the way that she would make it if it were feasible to postpone it until she were fully acquainted with the value in question. She may do so by, e.g., imitating fellow aspirants, by seeking advice from mentors, by imagining what things will be like for her in one or two years’ time. This kind of reasoning will be imperfect, since the person engaging in it is doing her best to adopt a point of view that is not (yet) her own. What I will argue in the next chapter is that the imperfection characterizing the rationality of the aspirant is not a matter of irrationality, but rather of a distinctive kind of rationality that I call “proleptic.”
Clearly, proleptic reasoning is not what we conventionally think of as reasoning. This raises the question of how imperfect reasoning must be before we no longer call it reasoning. Proleptic reasoning seems to be at best a form of quasi-reasoning. But to the degree it also incorporates imagination, it is also a form of quasi-imagination. So why privilege reason over imagination?
Something can be imperfect in virtue of being undeveloped or immature, as distinct from wrong or bad or erroneous. (There is something wrong with a lion that cannot run fast, but there is nothing wrong with a baby lion that cannot run fast.) When the good student of music actively tries to listen, she exhibits not irrationality but a distinctive form of rationality.
This is a strange way to protect imperfect reasoning — to characterize it as immature, not erroneous. A baby lion that does not run fast does not run at all — it merely stumbles its way forward as quickly as it can. One could thus argue that someone who reasons immaturely doesn’t reason at all — they merely stumble their way to a conclusion or decision in some way, e.g., using their imagination and/or their desire. The fact that a stumbling form of locomotion may one day mature into swift running doesn’t seem to be a strong reason to label such locomotion immature running. Similarly, the fact that a stumbling process of justification may one day mature in rigorous reasoning doesn’t seem to be a strong reason to label such a process immature reasoning.
Proleptic reasons are provisional in a way that reflects the provisionality of the agent’s own knowledge and development: her inchoate, anticipatory, and indirect grasp of some good she is trying to know better. Proleptic reasons allow you to be rational even when you know that your reasons aren’t exactly the right ones.
This resonates with Tiantai Buddhism’s opening the provisional to reveal the real. But this is the only mention of provisional reasons! Once again, calling proleptic justifications reasons seems like it’s blurring important distinctions between arational justifications and rational ones. It seems like an attempt to claim aspiration as a rational process simply by blurring the lines between rationality and arationality.
The problem posed by large-scale transformative pursuits is this: they require us to act on reasons that reflect a grasp of the value we are working so hard and so long to come into contact with, but we can know that value only once we have come into contact with it. And yet the cost of granting that such ends are pursued for no reason, or bad reasons, would be to restrict the scope of practical rationality very greatly. For most, if not all, of the experiences, forms of knowledge, ethical and intellectual traits, activities, achievements, and relationships that we value are such that the pursuit of them is both large in scale and transformative. It is true that even if we were forced to characterize the choices by which we move ourselves toward all of those ends as irrational, we could still rationalize engagement with the ends once achieved. But if this is all there is to practical rationality, we should be disappointed. For every rational choice to continue in some pursuit will be adventitiously predicated on a series of irrational choices to begin that pursuit. We should expect more from our reasons than maintenance of a mysteriously attained status quo. I propose, therefore, to introduce a species of reasons to meet this expectation.
This seems a bit like a circular argument:
(a) Practical reason should have a wide scope.
(b) But if proleptic justifications aren’t reasons, then practical reason would have a narrow scope.
(c) So, because (a), let us define proleptic justifications as a species of reasons.
I see no strong argument for attempting to characterize the aspirational process as a primarily rational one. Also, I don’t agree that most of our practical reasoning concerns large scale, transformative pursuits, so excluding such pursuits would not substantially narrow the scope of practical reason.
If someone says that large-scale transformative pursuits can be rationalized by familiar, X-ish reasons, the proleptic reasons theorist will try to demonstrate that only a (proleptic) subspecies of X-ish reasons can hope to rationalize a distinctively aspirational pursuit.
Proleptic reasons are — I conclude — the reasons that rationalize large-scale transformative pursuits. A proleptic reason is an acknowledgedly immature variant of a standard reason. A proleptic reasoner is moved to φ by some consideration that, taken by itself, would (in her view) provide an inadequate reason for φ- ing. But she is not moved by that consideration taken by itself; rather, she is moved by that consideration (be it competitive, testimonial, approximating, etc.) as a standin for another one. The proleptic reasoner uses the only valuational resources she has at her disposal, namely her current desires, attachments, etc., both to mark the inadequacy of those very resources and to move herself toward a better valuational condition.
Again, why do proleptic justifications have to be a subspecies of reasons? Why can’t they be a hybrid species of justification — a species that combines desires, reasons, imagination, intuition, and imagination? This combination of resources perfectly describes the resources used by a rhetorician to persuade their audience! In fact, proleptic justifications sound a like persuasive rhetoric: aspirational pursuits rely upon rhetoric to persuade the aspirant to pursue transformative new values. Thus the process of aspiration is most fruitfully understood as a rhetorical one!
Whatever the disadvantages of Williams’s internalism, it might seem to be in a better position to accommodate proleptic reasoning than weak internalism. Indeed, I believe Williams himself may have thought that by emphasizing the role of the imagination in reasoning, he was skirting the worry about philistinism I’ve been pressing here. When Williams warns against an overly narrow conception of what a “sound deliberative route” may consist in, reminding us that “the imagination can create new possibilities and new desires” ([1980] 1981: 104– 105), he may have large-scale transformative pursuits in mind. For it is true that we use our imaginations to grasp the value that a radically new form of life has to offer us. The problem is that we cannot do so well enough to generate an internal reason. The music student uses her imagination to generate a fantasy about a snowy evening, and this imaginative work may well be crucial to her forward progress. But she cannot, in fantasizing in that way, foresee the real value that music will bring for her. Imagination simply doesn’t have that power. No matter how loosely we hold the reins, deliberation will not plot a course from the agent’s present condition to what I have called the distal face of her proleptic reason. We cannot attribute to the aspiring X-er imaginative or heuristic resources that so far outstrip her current motivational condition that she is able to imagine her way into the intrinsic value of X.
Though the aspirant cannot directly imagine a future intrinsic value and use that as motivation, she can imagine associated values (the social aspect of going to the symphony, having deeper conversations about music, etc.) that motivate her sufficiently to listen to enough classical music for its intrinsic value to emerge spontaneously. Again, I would claim that imagination plays the primary role in aspiration, not reason. (In this I follow in the footsteps of Richard Rorty.) We imagine a host of ancillary benefits from the transformative novel value, and they persuade us to engage in the aspirational pursuit.
This is akin to the Tiantai Buddhist concept of upaya, skillful (or expedient) means. In chapter 7 of the Lotus Sutra is the story of travelers seeking a great treasure who are about to give up in exhaustion. So their guide creates a magical illusory city for them to rest in as a tangible goal to keep them going. It disappears when they reach it, but as a result of the illusion enticing them forward, they are now close enough to find the treasure.
Because a process of learning some new form of valuation is not the same as a process of articulating or rendering consistent the values one already has, proleptic reasons break every internalist’s mold.
This is the central issue: aspiring to new values is not the same as applying existing ones. But it doesn’t just break every internalist’s mold; it breaks every rationalist’s mold! It opens up to some form and degree of arationalism (in the form of rhetoric). Thus I would recast the description as follows:
Because a process of learning some new form of valuation is not the same as a process of articulating or rendering consistent the values one already has, proleptic justifications break every rationalist’s mold, but fit every rhetorician’s mold to a tee.
Aspiration is a rhetorical process — based on persuasive justifications — not a rational one — based on rigorous reasons.
For the internalist, letting “aspiration” into one’s subjective motivational set simply means letting in a tendency to be motivated in an incoherent and procedurally irrational way. What the internalist cannot do is to derive the good music student’s reasons not merely from her aspiration but from her rational aspiration. For her theory, as I’ve been arguing, gives us no way to see how that phrase could be anything but an oxymoron.
I don’t think Callard has shown that rational aspiration is not an oxymoron, along with oxymorons such as inchoate reason, proleptic reason, and retrospective reason. Aspiration is an amalgam of persuasive factors, only one of which is based on reasoning.
