In Defense of Agnes Callard's Philosophical Life
UChicago professor Agnes Callard calls herself a ‘philosopher’, which is a brave stance for a human being to take in the modern era
UChicago professor Agnes Callard calls herself a ‘philosopher’, which is a brave stance for a human being to take in the modern era:
When a philosopher opens their mouth, people expect deep things to come out of it. Philosophers don’t always enjoy this; to avoid it, they might even say instead, “I am a professor” or “I teach Plato” or “I am in academia.”
When I was an undergraduate pondering what to do next, a professor of mine—not a philosopher—advised me, “Even if you get a Ph.D. in philosophy, don’t ever call yourself a philosopher. Kant, Socrates—those people were philosophers; you’re someone who reads or thinks about philosophy.” He felt that by calling myself a philosopher, I would be putting on airs, claiming to be deeper than I was. I did get a Ph.D. in philosophy, and I do call myself a philosopher, and that does, just as the professor feared, sometimes lead to disappointed expectations.
The risks of such a stance are demonstated by the reactions of various big names to a profile on her:
Recently, a New Yorker profile of me by Rachel Aviv drew more on her conversations with me than on my written work. While many readers said they loved the profile’s intimacy and directness, those same features seemed to outrage others—although the critics were split on the question of what exactly was wrong with the profile, and with me. Some were struck by how ordinary and boring I sounded—Steven Pinker reported finding it “disappointing” to learn how “shallow” I was, and Joyce Carol Oates called my concerns “banal-stereotypical”—whereas others found me strange: a “weirdo,” a “freak,” a “monster.” The two sides of the opposition couldn’t come together on whether I was “embarrassingly familiar”or bizarrely unrelatable, but one thing they did agree on, and complain about, was that I had failed to come across as someone possessed of great profundity. And they’re right: Deep down, I am not deep.
Let’s take a look at the critics’ issues with Callard. Oates says that the piece is “banal-stereotypical notions dressed up in philosophy-speak”, but doesn’t elaborate. Pinker does do so. He concurs on the charge of banality:
and then argues for other, better analyses:
Honestly I think Pinker is missing the point. Signaling, adaptations, genetic interest and mate selection criteria — these are all fascinating topics in evolutionary psychology, but criticizing a philosopher for not seeing her problems through an evolutionary psychology lens is a case of not staying in one’s own lane.
Meanwhile, Callard provides the perfect philosopher’s response: “I am not deep.” For anyone who has read Plato, this should immediately hearken back to Socrates saying he “knew nothing.” By this, Socrates was not claiming that he was more ignorant than anyone else, but that everyone who claimed to know things was in fact pretending. Similarly, Callard’s frankness in discussing the ‘banal’ problems of her life doesn’t mean that she’s a banal person, but that those who criticize her are probably pretending to be less banal than they really are.
In this light, Dreher’s criticism of Callard in The American Conservative is fascinating material. Dreher’s piece provides by far the harshest criticisms of Callard:
I say that as background for the contempt I feel towards Agnes Callard, a University of Chicago philosopher, and the colleagues who justify her scandalous behavior. In a New Yorker profile, we learn that she fell in love with one of her students, divorced her husband and father of her children three weeks later (with his consent), and ran around making philosophical justifications for what she had done, almost bragging about it. Eventually she and her lover, Arnold, married, and later they moved in with Ben, her ex-husband. Naturally, these philosophical types are Beyond Good And Evil, and petty bourgeois morality.
… It seems to this reader that Agnes is being a self-centered hooch, but dressing it up as some kind of philosophical virtue. The fact that she has autism explains a lot. A fundamental characteristic of autism is the inability to empathize, or at least empathize easily, with others. Agnes seems to treat others as objects, and not to grasp how hurtful her actions might be. If you go on through the story, you'll find that Agnes appears to be leaving the door open to leaving Arnold too, and to justifying it philosophically. It's all like a chapter in Paul Johnson's great book Intellectuals, which is about how monstrous some great thinkers behaved towards people in their private lives.
Yet by the end of his piece, Dreher is admitting that he, too, is a monster of sorts:
My confession is that there is a lot of Agnes in me. For the last decade, a big part -- not "entire" or even "most of," but a big part -- of my writing career has been a discussion of my family. Not my wife and kids -- they have been intentionally left out of my writing, for the most part, at my wife's request -- but my mom and dad, late sister, and her kids. …
I have to criticize myself, in light of the Agnes Callard profile, and in the interest of honesty. I am a highly confessional writer, meaning that I do turn events of my own life into writing material. I know that there is nothing particularly interesting about me, but if I can find a way to connect the particular events of my own life to the universal experiences of others, then there can be meaning there. That can be read as a justification for oversharing, and I wouldn't fault you for it. Where my life intersects with Agnes Callard's -- and where my judgment of her has to be self-judgment as well -- is that I think I can be fairly accused of making real people unwilling characters in a story that I tell. …
I always tried hard not to let resentment have anything to do with the way I wrote, but though nothing comes to mind now, I can be reasonably sure that I did what Agnes Callard does in a different way: veiled low motives in high principle. …
I think Agnes Collard is a bad person for living the way she does. But in judging her, I recognize that I'm kind of judging myself too, insofar as I am guilty of callously treating real people close to me as characters in a story.
Dreher is admirably honest in critiquing himself, and I wish he would extend the same sympathy that he presumably has for himself, being able to understand his own motives, to her. In particular, his signaling out her autism as a kind of “gotcha” rather than as a basis for empathy seems cruel. Aviv opens her article by describing Callard’s bafflement at human conventions:
She is often baffled by the human conventions that the rest of us have accepted. It seems to her that we are all intuitively copying one another, adopting the same set of arbitrary behaviors and values, as if by osmosis. “How has it come to pass,” she writes, “that we take ourselves to have any inkling at all about how to live?”
In other words, Callard wonders, like Socrates, if we are living unexamined lives. The echoes of Socrates are again very clear, and now that I think about it, maybe Socrates was autistic. Either way, criticizing someone for not understanding these conventions is kind of “punching down”. I wonder how Dreher would describe Socrates’ marriage? Here’s a portrait of Socrates, his two Wives, and Alcibiades:
That’s Xanthippe, his first wife, pouring urine on his head. Meanwhile, his second wife, Mryto, “frees the nipple” in an effort to entice him, but Socrates ignores them both in favor of the golden-haired Alcibiades.
Socrates was not a great philosopher because he was a moral paragon. Rather, the essence of his philosophy is, as the stone says which he is leaning on, γνῶθι σεαυτόν: “know yourself”, know who you are. Recognize the truth about yourself, whether good or bad. Don’t prop yourself up with illusions of moral grandeur. Seek for the ideal of the Good, but don’t expect to find it in this corrupted reality.
So, in the end I think Dreher reflexively takes issue with Callard’s “degeneracy”, but because he is too honest to pretend he’s any better, ultimately unintentionally lends support to Callard’s points.
I’m all for pushing back against the downfall of marriage and other societal ideals. I just don’t think Callard is the right target. I’m sure there are plenty of people, whether conservative or liberal, who get divorced for equal banal reasons, but don’t share their stories in order to protect themselves. Dreher thinks Callard chooses to share as a form of bragging, whereas for me it’s clear that she is honestly trying to engage with questions about what is right through the context of her own life.
Jonathan Lear, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, said that Agnes approaches every conversation as if it were integral to her life’s work, as it was for Socrates. “She’s attempting to live a philosophical life, and this includes taking responsibility for the very concept of marriage,” he said. “Part of what I take to be her bravery is that she is looking around, asking, ‘Hey, I know all these couples have gotten rings and gone to the courthouse, but are they married?’ One thing you can do with that question is forget all about it and find some deadline to be anxious about. Or you can really hear the question, vividly. That’s the place where philosophy begins—with a certain anxiety about how to live the life that is yours.” …
After the talk, a colleague told Agnes that she was speaking as if she thought she were Socrates. “I was, like, ‘Yeah, that’s what it felt like,’ ” she said. “I felt like I had all this knowledge. And it was wonderful. It was an opportunity to say something truthful about love.”
And that is what philosophy is all about. We see how, in her own life, Callard did the normal thing — get married to another philosophy professor and have two kids with him. But then, she fell in love with one of her grad students. And as a philosopher, she felt compelled, not just to act, but to understand her emotions, analyze her options, and decide the right things to do.