Forma de Vida: Can you tell us about your work until Aspiration?
I wrote my dissertation at UC Berkeley. I graduated in 2008 and wrote it on weakness of the will, when you really think you should do something but you do it differently. I wrote the dissertation and you get in the job market, you go and give talks in different places and then people ask you questions. And I got really good questions that basically completely destroyed my dissertation. Normally, after people write their dissertation, they publish that dissertation. But my dissertation was just destroyed by the interrogations that I received, so my first few years as an assistant professor were just in a kind of reconstruction mode: “I’m gonna fix this, I’m gonna rewrite it.” I kept rewriting it and I rewrote what I thought was a particular good version and I gave it as a talk at MIT; and a graduate student there made a very good objection to it. She made me realize a case of weakness of will that did not seem to fit my model, although I thought I could fit it in. Then, somehow over the course of thinking what I was trying to fix, I realized that what I had was maybe a bad theory of weakness of will but a good theory of something else and that “something else” was actually what I was really interested in, and that was aspiration. It was almost as what happened was, I kept the theory but I switched the topic. And that was how I ended up writing on aspiration. So I did not all set out to write on aspiration. In the end of my book there is a chapter on weakness of will which is a limited case of the general theory of aspiration, but I kept realizing that I had been trying to speak about the more general phenomenon. That is how I came to write on aspiration.
FdV: Could aspiration be an activity in itself? Could there be someone who is an aspiring agent who just likes to aspire but irrespectively of the activity (i.e., someone who is in the constant process of becoming different things)?
I think that there is a lot of heterogeneity when it comes to how aspiring people are. Some people are just more of an aspirational type of person than other and they are always trying to come to value something new. Also, some times in life are more aspirational than others: people are more aspirational in their late teens and twenties than in any other time in their lives—in my experience of people. Also, and this may be distorted by my own bias, women are somewhat more aspirational than men. These are some differences I experience in how aspirational someone is. But I think that what it means to be more aspirational, you still have to be directed on to some particular value at any given time, there has to be something you are trying to appreciate. What I suppose makes you more aspirational is that as soon as you get to the point of appreciating that thing pretty well you are sort of itching for something new. You have a kind of generalized valuational curiosity. And I think that is something people have but I think that should not be confused with something that I discuss in the book where you are sort of aspiring to something but not to anything in particular: for example, the case of Americans who travel to Europe to find themselves, I have the suspicion there is nothing you are going to find, because there is nothing you are really looking for. I think you could be an aspirational character, an aspirational person in virtue of repeated cases of particular of aspirations.
FdV: One of the main examples in your book is the case of someone who aspires to be a music lover and I thought that interesting because if you switch the examples a little bit there are certain curiosities, for instance, the relationship I have with my aspiring will vary depending on the difficulty of the activity. So, aspiring to be, say, a music lover, is not very costly; but say you are aspiring to be something like a pastry chef, how would you describe the relationship between my object of aspiration, or my activity, and the cost, or my own limit.
There is one example I talk about in the book, I can’t remember the exact terms of it, where people often want to ask questions like: “What if you have to choose between these two options?,” “What if you have to choose between the career of a rocket scientist and orchestra conductor?” I think it is worth noting there are very few people who are in the condition to make that choice, because getting into a position into which those two options are an option for you, you already would have had to invest so much into classical music that you would not have spare time to learn rocket science. A lot of aspirations take a lot of your life both in terms of a given time, and also take many years, that they may still leave some room for a few additional aspirations, like the classical music case, so you could think of it as costly in terms of the cost being how much it shuts out other aspirations. You could also just think of it as being a larger-scale project. I think that that is right, and that when you embark on these things you are in fact saying, “I’m not going to do anything else that takes up so much of my life.” But usually you do not have a concrete particular to which you can compare it with, because usually you have already invested so much that you have not invested a similar amount in some other possibility.
FdV: But how would an individual talent play a role in that choice?
One thing is that we manage aspiration many of the times creating circumstances, like getting into a pool that is cold, where you go tip toe in the steps—you do not just jump in the deep end—you go little by little so that your body gets used to the cold. One thing that works like that is school. In school you have these opportunities to see what your talents are. In most things people do with their lives, the question of their natural talents is relevant to those things. Me, I am extremely unmusical in just about every respect, so a career in classical music would not be a wise choice for me to embark upon and that was pretty obvious to me at a very young age. When I was young, I was very interested in music, I was interested in singing, but I was just terrible at it. Essentially, we put people, quite young people who are almost pre-aspirants, in these environments where they get to have some sense of where their talents lie and also what their passions are, what they like. Because you will be better at developing the talents that correspond to things that really speak to you. I do think we make these large-scale choices on the basis of having some sense, but it never feels enough, it never feels you have a complete sense that you could be confident that you will be good enough. That is a big part of aspiration, feeling that nagging worry, “Am I good enough to really grasp this particular valuable? Have I the right amount of skill to actually make it to the end?”
FdV: Taking your particular about poor singing skills: if we imagine someone who has poor skills singing but still aspires to sing, can such a person, while knowing it would never become a great singer, still be called an aspirant if his only goal was to blend in quietly within a choir?
I do not feel confident about this, but I am inclined to think about talent in terms of the degree to which you can make yourself useful to others in relation to the value in question. As someone who is not musical, there is still a fair amount of musical appreciation I can do. Those of us who are not very artistic can still appreciate art, so we can still grasp the artistic value in that sense as recipients of it; but we do not become producers of that for other people. So, your talents really are a way of talking about your usefulness to others in their appreciation of value; it is like if I am a good player, a good composer, then that means I can in effect produce musical value for others. That is how I would think of talent: how useful you are—and sort of intelligence maybe is a general word for it —, how useful your mind is for other people. When you call someone smart, their mind is usually useful for us. That which counts as talent depends on what other people need from you.
FdV: Having in mind a text you wrote for The Point, on torturing geniuses, would the mind of such geniuses be useful for other people?
What I want to say in that piece is that we have almost like this myth of the genius where the fact they are, let’s say, so useful to us in one very specific way excuses the fact that they might be very difficult for us to live with in a bunch of other ways. From our point of view, that calculus makes sense, but from their point of view it screws up their life. A person is not just something to be of use to others, they have to enjoy their own life. I think we do something bad to geniuses by accommodating them in these ways, as if we were paying them for their incredible usefulness. Living in the world, living with other people, there is this side to it where that is how you enjoy your life, how you connect to others, driving for yourself. In effect we are shortchanging them in being too accommodating.
FdV: Could aspiration also be a trait of character, in the sense that the aspirant is someone with tendency to self-discipline or to a kind of self-discipline?
There is not straightforwardly such a trait that is going to be indifferent to cultural circumstances, because some people are just way too self-disciplined to even notice whether they are enjoying, appreciating, or making progresses; there are forms of self-discipline that are actually deaf to aspiration. A lot of the question of success for many people, not for those that we labeled geniuses, but for a lot of people is something like: “How well are you able to get feedback from your environment?” Basically, aspirants need help, because they do not know what they are doing. Part of what it is to have our talent is to have the sort of features not only that are useful to others but also that others around you can help you develop. Whether, in some sense, you are good at aspiration is going to be a function of your fit with your environment. To some degree you can manage that fit, but suppose you are living in a culture where there is a strong prejudice against people like you doing the thing you want to be doing: that is going to be a major obstacle, and it is not that you are bad at aspiration, there is just a bad fit. In most cases, apart from the geniuses’ cases (and I think it is even true in a lot of the geniuses’ cases), it is a question of whether the person ends up in a hospitable environment in one way or another.
FdV: Is there a circumstantial aspect to being an aspirant?
Yes, in so many ways. One of them is just which possibilities show up to you. The circumstances themselves of course are not just straightforwardly given, because people also work to change their circumstances. But still, what kinds of new circumstances are open to them is also not an infinite number of new circumstances and they need help to get to that point. You might think of your parents as being the first helpers, they are the kind of universal aspiration helpers as they are trying to help you sort whatever you want to do. For that very reason many people, like my kids, if I tell them, “That’s a good picture,” they will naturally say, “Of course you say that.” That is exactly why we should gravitate from our parents to people who just are not going to be supportive no matter what. We actually do not want people to be supportive no matter what. We want actual real feedback. There is this sort of complicated process I do not describe in this book from transitioning from this universal supportive but in that not totally aspirational environment to some other environments and sort of explore them to find a good fit.
FdV: We talked about geniuses: is the aspirant someone necessarily monomaniacal and unaware of circumstance and of help? Can we say that part of the rationality of aspiration implies dealing with unforeseen circumstances?
Aspiration for me falls into the category of learning. If you ask, “Are they [aspirants] being perfectly rational?,” well, they have to learn, so no. Imagine there is some kind of math, when you know how to do it, you can do it in a perfectly rational way; when you are learning how to do it, you often have false starts, you are exploring the possibilities. What I want to say is that rational is how you learn, it is not irrational, but it does not look like the perfectly rational case when you already know. When you are in the learning case, there are going to be surprises: if you try something and that is a dead-end, that is an unforeseen circumstance. Just in the pure sense of learning, it is going to be involved with dealing with stuff showing up that you just did not expect. There is something in the connection you drew between genius and aspiration, in that there is something narcissistic about aspiration. This is why I think a lot of people may think it is great to be an aspirant your whole life, but aspirants are self-directed, they are very interested in the question, “I am developing into the person I want to be?” There is a kind of self-inward focus. A lot of people in a certain point of their lives want to move on pass developing yourself to actualizing the values that you already learned to value in the path you are going through. That can be more straightforward than the outward focus. It is not monomaniacal, but it is more self-focused, self-directed. Aspirants are characteristically self-aware, a lit bit embarrassed, a lit bit pretentious in the sense of pretending to something they have quite not got yet. There is this complex of the self that will characterize the aspirant. It is the same sense as the learner of math is self-conscious of what he is doing in the way the knower is not. They are self-conscious in that sense.
FdV: In an interview, you stated that you believe Pessoa is a philosopher. How does Pessoa come into in your live?
I am just writing something on him for Harper’s right now, so he comes in in so many ways. I read his biography over the summer and I met with Richard Zenith, who is his editor, translator, and biographer just two days ago when I went to Casa Fernando Pessoa and so I am full of Pessoa right now. I think that maybe the place I would start with Pessoa is The Book of Disquiet—and I know mostly The Book of Disquiet, not the poems. It offers you this really like renegade phenomenology, where he is telling what it is like to live your life and when you read what he is saying you realize that every other time you thought about just going through your day and living your life, having a conversation with someone, going to bed, waking up, all of those things, you thought about it through a framework that filtered it in a very specific way, according to some specific conventions. I’ll give an example: there's a passage where he says [paraphrasing], "I’m talking to someone, and they are saying words and they are saying words to me and I am saying words to them but I can’t remember, I’m not paying attention to what they’re saying and I can’t remember what I said, but the thing I can tell you perfectly is the exact movement of muscles on their face, how their face moved while their talking.”[1] It is a wonderful passage and it captures something of the restlessness of Pessoa’s attention. There is this sense we have of “here is stuff you pay attention to”; here is something to pay attention to whenever you are in a room. And if we were to draw this room, if I were to draw it later, you would realize what a poverty of experience I had of the room in terms of what I pay attention to. Pessoa just pays attention to so different things and so he is organizing his experience in a different way and showing you the freedom of the possibility of doing that. You could be having a conversation and you could be paying attention to the muscles on the person’s face, not to the words they are saying. There is this question, there is this challenge that that poses, which is: Where is the meaning in the conversation? Our intuition is that the meaning is obviously going to be in the words and what Pessoa is saying is that maybe the meaning is in the muscles of their face. Why are we so sure it is just the words? Just because someone told you that? I think one thing I love in Pessoa is that kind of radical phenomenology. I loved reading his biography and reading his struggle to live. I was telling Richard Zenith that while reading Pessoa's biography the whole time I just wanted to hug him. He is this person who really struggled with his own loneliness and with trying to connect to people, and just solved his problem by becoming many people. I feel that he struggled with the contingency of life, the fact that there are all these accidents to it and that he says: “I’m Portuguese, I’m born in Portugal, I’m totally committed to that, but also now I want to be an English poet, now I want to be a woman dying of tuberculosis; why do I have to be just this one person?” So you get this proliferation of identities that almost feels like a way of keeping himself company as well. When you read the biography, you see he had his close friends, his collaborators, but the friendships always get to a point when they break off. He really had a difficulty connecting to people, maybe because they were not sure who they were connecting to. There was not an underlying substrate. In some way it is like he sacrificed his social possibilities in order to explore these possibilities of self. I find that fascinating. And I guess that generally I find he has an idea of restlessness, unruliness—there is this word, translated into English, “unsleep” [“desdurmo”], that shows up a lot in the Book of Disquiet, “I sleep” and “unsleep,” that it is a way of being awake but still be dreaming. He has this sense that reality is not at all given to us in the straightforward way we think it is and that you can just resist. You can resist the conventional organization of your life and I have many times in my life felt like the call of that but not being quite brave enough to really lean in to it in the way he does, so I really admire him. I have kind of a hero worship of him in the fortitude that it takes to really attend in a systematic way to that possibility of total reorganization, or total disarray, of your life.
FdV: In the same interview you stated the following premise as problematic: “If you (truly, deeply) romantically love A you can nonetheless, while continuing to love A, fall (truly, deeply) romantically in love with B.” What would be the problems with such a proposition?
Here is how I came to discover that this is a controversial view. If you just google psychology websites and say: “What happens if I am married and I fall in love with someone else?”, the [answer you get] is “You have a problem with your marriage,”—that is what they will say. They all say this. I look at this and just think, “Why think that? Why not just think you also love another person?” From my point of view, it is straightforwardly obvious that there is no reason why it should be impossible to fall in love with a second person if you love the first person. I would say there is a kind of, let’s say, dogma that functions in the guarding of marriage that says it is impossible. Certainly, falling in love with another person is dangerous to your marriage, I do not want to deny that. But in a way you are being pressured to say, “I did not really love my spouse,” or, “I do not really love this person.” One thing that maybe underwrites that is the thought that people have choices about whether or not they can fall in love with people and that way we can blame them if they, say, wreck their marriages. We are very moralistic about marriage. The idea is: “Well, you promised to love this person and you chose to break your promise by also falling in love with this other person.” It could not be that this just happens to you, you are responsible for whether or not this happens to you (maybe you conducted yourself badly to make this possible in the first place, etc.) Then it is just easier to get the possibility of blame going, and I think that that blame functions, again, to safeguard to marriage. We have an interest in protecting marriage, since marriages are pretty fragile—it is easy to get divorce nowadays. There is a lot of normative sanctioning going on to hold it together and I think one of those sanctions is just this lie.
FdV: The last quote I would like to hear you about is your statement that “We do not shape our children that much.” But earlier in this conversation you mentioned the importance of parenting in your description of aspiration. How can these views come together?
I have been impressed by some of the empirical literature that says that there is a very heavy genetic component in terms of how children turn out in life. That is just the empirical claim, but that is not what I was mainly thinking about. There is a difference between giving someone some opportunities, where in effect they can make use of those opportunities to develop, and making them into the person you would like them to be. I do think parents can give their children opportunities and in that sense be supportive. But suppose you wanted your child to be interested in a certain kind of music or literature, and you really pushed hard to get them to be interested in it; maybe they are going to end up interested in it or maybe they are really going to hate you. Those are both possibilities. Given that going into it you want to know that those are both possibilities, in effect you are not shaping that much. The harder you have to push on something, the more the chance you are choosing between those two options, and that is not really shaping, that is just throwing the dice. In an important way I do not think your children are yours, they are just new people, a totally new individual who has not yet fully come online when they are born: they do not know how to feed themselves, they do not know if they should go to bed or not, but it is just another person. At a basic level, what right do you have to tell another person who they should be? That is coded into this idea, there is a moral judgment on my part that in effect is underlying that as well, because you should not try to shape your children. What you are really doing when you are trying to shape is flipping that coin, you can maybe indoctrinate them or you can turn them totally against it. The older they get the more it feels that you should follow their lead as to what type of person they are trying to be and you help them be that person but you do not get to pick that for them because they are an independent person.
FdV: From a Freudian point of view, wouldn’t the flipping of the coin be a form of shaping? Even if not entirely intentional?
What I meant by shaping is that you cannot decide that your child is going to have this set of cultural interests and then reliably bring it about that that happens. You can, I think, decide either they are going to have a version of that or they are going to hate it and I am willing to flip that coin rather than letting it see where it goes. You have some choices, it is not that parents do not have choices, but the choices take that form. I do think you have something more like agency with respect to yourself. So maybe that would be a relevant comparison.
FdV: In terms of specific interests, obviously they might be difficult to influence, but are not children, or new people in general, from the outset in need of some kind of advice, even if it is to goes against it?
You might know I have a different thing I wrote against advice, where I say child raising falls more into the idea of mentoring than it falls under the possibility of advice. We do give our kids advice, but there is the question that when you are mentoring someone in effect you have a shared goal but you are the one in their territory. For instance, my student wants to learn Greek and I am thinking with him about the best possible way to do that. It is not like I walk up to him and say, “You have to learn Ancient Greek and I will mentor you through it.” And I think it is like that with children, almost by the time they are old enough to receive anything like advice. But you are seeing how to guide them towards the person they are trying to be. Maybe another underlying suspicion, or skepticism, behind this idea that you cannot shape your children is something that connects with a piece I wrote for The Point on the end of the world, which is that there is some tendency to see one’s children as vindicating oneself. I come from a family where this is somewhat the case, because my grandparents were all Holocaust survivors in Hungary and that older generation saw their lives as ruined and looked at my parents as the meaning for them; and then my parents (I left Hungary when I was a small child), their lives were always in turmoil and I feel that at some point it has got to be not the kids’ job to give the parents’ life meaning. It is important to live your own life in such a way that you can supply meaning for yourself, where you are not dependent on your child for that, and I think some amount of the shaping of one’s child comes from that feeling of almost reliance or dependence. I think it is too much to put upon a child.
FdV: You recently took a stand on the admission scandals in American universities. Could you give us a sketch of that argument?
What happened was that about fifty parents were found to have basically bribed whether admissions officers or people who knew admissions officers to get their children into colleges and some of these people were quite high profile (actors, actresses). It was less money than some people pay when donating buildings to get their kid in, so this was suddenly a cheaper form of cheating your kids’ way into school. And this was a huge scandal in the United States and there was like three or four months in which every op-ed was about this subject, and they were all called something like “The Real College Scandal,” where the “real thing” that happened was not this, the “real thing” was something else: the “real thing” is that people were taking prep classes for SAT’s, that some people go to private schools, or that the teaching is not properly evaluated, etc. It was an occasion to say everything that was wrong about the University and we would not get to the bottom of the scandal until we saw that the university is fundamentally broken and needs to be destroyed. It was this opportunity for vindictiveness for everyone who hates the University, which it turns out—I had not realized this until that moment—was a lot of people. To me it was just surprising: University is just this wonderful thing, why would people dislike it? (Since then I have come to understand some of that.) The first part of my response is: if you want to know what is wrong with the University, what it is doing wrong, you have to think about what it is trying to do, what is the goal, the function. I think there are maybe things a university in fact does that are not actually the main function of the University. [pointing to her backpack] For instance, this floor is holding my backpack, but it is not designed to do that. There are a lot of stuff in any given space that can have insularly functions, but there is a main function and that is what we want to know. So I think the main function of the university is not to provide employers with information about who is employable—it is one of the things in fact it is used for, but it is not the function of it. Another thing I do not think is the main function of the university is to rectify the qualities of society as a whole—maybe it can do more of that, but it is not the function of it. The university is being blamed for not doing a bunch of stuff that I do not think it is supposed to be doing. It would be a really big problem if it was not doing the real thing it was supposed to do. What I say it is supposed to do is to help people learn things they otherwise could just not work up the motivation and interest to learn if they did not have the help of other people. I basically think that all learning is aspirational and so what you have is a community that should be a good fit for anything you would like to learn in it.
FdV: What kind of obligations does the University have to other communities?
Anyone who lives anywhere has an obligation to the other people who live in that place. That is what it means to be a citizen, not just for an individual, but also for an institution, which is a kind of citizen of the place where it is in. So, the University of Chicago has some obligations to the community where it is in, namely the South Side. I feel these obligations for instance when I have events, I want them to be open to the public, so more people are able to come. (Right now I have not been able to do that because of COVID— I am not happy about that.) There are a lot of ways the university can do that, can be a good member of its own community. More broadly, what I say in that piece is that the university is concerned with the distribution of intellectual goods. Intellectual goods are ideas, books, theories, forms of understanding, forms of knowledge. The odd thing about these goods is that in some sense they are not rival goods, that is, people having them does not mean I have less of it, in fact it is the opposite (yet it is still really hard to distribute them). I think every university has some kind of obligation to distribute those goods more widely than merely within its own community: not just an obligation to its local community, but more broadly. That happens through many ways, and I see the part that relates to me: I do a lot of public philosophy in a variety of different ways, speaking to different audiences (on Twitter, for instance). I see that as an attempt to make these intellectual goods accessible more broadly because even people who have been to universities or graduated from universities have kind of lost touch with a lot of it and they have a yearning for it, I think. And that is my ultimate diagnosis of the college’s admission scandals: that all these journalists were really annoyed that they were not back in school and were not having the fun times they had in college when they had access to this wonderful world of ideas. That is an indictment in some sense of us and that we should somehow make it possible, create access for the global community as a lifelong thing, not only as something you do for four years.
