#Agnes Callard

[hoyatype]

“agnes callard’s marriage of the minds”, by rachel aviv in the 14 mar 2023 issue of the new yorker.

agnes callard’s aspiration: the agency of becoming changed my life. or rather it taught me how to change my life and told me it was worth doing. worth aspiring towards a different self, one i understood poorly and only partially but nevertheless desperately wanted to become. i’m fascinated by her and how she lives her life

[yepthatsacowalright]

"All fiction offers up the possibility of escape from everyday life, but great fiction allows us to explore what we otherwise look away from. Books and movies offer opportunities to ponder the great questions about the meaning of marriage, of friendship, of career, of politics, of suffering--and, yes, also of life and death. Fiction can make untimely questions askable--but only in relation to fictional characters. That is a serious limitation. We approach the lives of others with a kind of boldness that seems impossible for our own. When we come back to reality, and to the course of our own lives, we are, like Tolstoy, stuck 'telling ourselves tales.' When Ferrante describes 'the terrifying moment of serious reflection,' it is clear that she has confronted the Tolstoy problem."

-Agnes Callard, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life

[bookjotter6865]

Three Things… #5: The Mashup

Reading, Watching, Doing This is a place for me to hold forth on matters both serious and silly. You are invited to participate.  Forgive me readers, it has been 6 years, 2 months and 6 days since I last three-thinged. Disgraceful, is it not? For my sins I must say half a dozen ‘Hail Atwoods’ and abstain from eating chocolate cake until at least Sunday teatime. And it jolly well serves me…

[rendakuenthusiast]

Now that it's been some time since those articles about Agnes Callard divorcing her husband to marry a grad student hit the internet, I wonder what Ben Callard is up to. The articles about the situation did make him seem like a meek and cucked guy in their shared living situation; and I wonder if he feels that way himself (regardless of whether anyone is writing about it in a public space), and what, if any, other relationships he has been in since.

[spookyabuki]

The humanist was never really in the business of making progress. Her job is to acquire and transmit a grasp of the intrinsic value of the human experience; this is a job whose difficulty and importance rises in proportion to the awareness that all of it will be lost. It is the humanist’s task to ensure that, if and when [the end of the world] should arise, things will not stop mattering to people. We must become the specialists of finitude, the experts in loss, the scientists of tragedy.

—Agnes Callard, quoted in "The Optimist’s Apocalypse," in Guernica, originally from "The End is Coming," in The Point

[chicago-geniza]

Agnes quotes Ian Hacking in this essay and I quoted the same source in my notes the other day but about how the vampire Armand experiences himself and interacts with the world (re: sexuality, ~neurodivergence) because he is from the 15th century and although he has persisted through time to the present day, his subjectivity has not been mediated by human institutions (or social norms) since his turning--indeed he can't really be said to have "lived in a society" at all since mayyybe Paris--so the only way he knows how to be a person (identity-wise) and experience himself in a society is like. As a slave in the brothel, as an apprentice-concubine in the palazzo, as a cult leader in Les Innocents, and as a director in the theater. These are all roles in strict hierarchies; they are job descriptions. If Armand thinks about his "sexual orientation" at all it would probably be in terms of BDSM or "Greco-Roman" pederasty. And if you tried to explain autism to him he would stare at you unblinking and say "I am a 500-year-old vampire." He should read Ian Hacking though I think Armand would get a kick out of Ian Hacking

[hoyatype]

We aspire by doing things, and the things we do change us so that we are able to do the same things, or things of that kind, better and better. In the beginning, we sometimes feel as though we are pretending, play-acting, or otherwise alienated from our own activity. We may see the new value as something we are trying out or trying on rather than something we are fully engaged with and committed to. We may rely heavily on mentors whom we are trying to imitate or competitors whom we are trying to best. As time goes on, however, the fact (if it is a fact) that we are still at it is usually a sign that we find ourselves progressively more able to see, on our own, the value that we could barely apprehend at first. This is how we work our way into caring about the many things that we, having done that work, care about.

agnes callard, aspiration: the agency of becoming

still a little upset tbqh that everyone was dunking on agnes callard in march, after that one new yorker article…i don’t care what she’s done in her (entirely consensual and imo ethically permissible) first and second marriages…her work has changed my life and that is something to honour in a contemporary academic philosopher.

aspiration is what taught me to not be afraid of trying to become someone new. to not be embarrassed of aspiring towards something before having attained it. to see my self-conscious striving towards a different self as something admirable about me, worth cherishing instead of criticising.

[drdemonprince]

now i understand on an emotional level how it feels to really want to read a book and connect with an authors understanding of the world and to not be able to. a rare experience for an american english speaker who is spoiled with access and by being centered literally all of the time. obviously i understood intellectually the scope of this problem before all this but because i dont have empathy its still emotionally instructive to actually experience it myself

[thethinkerybook]

"I once asked the best teacher I ever had why she no longer taught her favorite novel, and she said that she stopped teaching a book when she found she was no longer curious about it. The humanistic spirit is, fundamentally, an inquisitive one." - Dr Agnes Callard, article "I teach the Humanities, and I Still Don't know What Their Value is" December 2, 2023

[gcu-sovereign]

[Minds Almost Meeting] Fertility again (Robin Hanson & Agnes Callard, with Lyman Stone) #mindsAlmostMeeting

https://podcastaddict.com/minds-almost-meeting/episode/193191015 via @PodcastAddict

Exactly halfway through, recommended!

It's very funny that the spectre of an Amish takeover is explictly invoked, but NOT a Haredi one. The denial of that future is given the same reason in both cases, but the Amish explicitly delight in labor, whereas I've heard the same complaints in English langauge coverage of Israel's politics for...20 years?

[hoursofreading]

I’m writing this at the end of a long work day. I don’t really want to write—I want to scroll on my phone, I want to text a friend, I want to read something fascinating and totally banal, I want to gossip about a friend’s housemate’s coworker’s ex’s dating life.

What would Agnes Callard do? She would tell me (I think; I’m parasocially projecting onto her) that if I want to be a writer, then I need to devote myself to the task of changing my values—pushing myself to value working on my writing, instead of valuing the tempting, totally irrelevant things on my phone. She would tell me that the resistance to doing the work is normal. She would tell me that I have to do the work anyway.

[ilciambellano]

Travel is fun, so it is not mysterious that we like it. What is mysterious is why we imbue it with a vast significance, an aura of virtue. If a vacation is merely the pursuit of unchanging change, an embrace of nothing, why insist on its meaning? One is forced to conclude that maybe it isn’t so easy to do nothing—and this suggests a solution to the puzzle. Imagine how your life would look if you discovered that you would never again travel. If you aren’t planning a major life change, the prospect looms, terrifyingly, as “More and more of this, and then I die.” Travel splits this expanse of time into the chunk that happens before the trip, and the chunk that happens after it, obscuring from view the certainty of annihilation. And it does so in the cleverest possible way: by giving you a foretaste of it. You don’t like to think about the fact that someday you will do nothing and be nobody. You will only allow yourself to preview this experience when you can disguise it in a narrative about how you are doing many exciting and edifying things: you are experiencing, you are connecting, you are being transformed, and you have the trinkets and photos to prove it. Socrates said that philosophy is a preparation for death. For everyone else, there’s travel. 

Agnes Callard - The case against travel (New Yorker)