Structure or Growth?

What aspiring humans require to be good

I’m plodding tediously through Agnes Callard’s book on Aspiration, which I don’t recommend. I love her public philosophy essays, available online in many places, from The Point to the New Yorker and the NYT and beyond.¹ Her analytic philosophy style engagement with decision theory and Frankfurt’s moral psychology of “intrinsic conflict” has been exceedingly dull. The examples are unrealistic, insipid, and interminably hashed out. “What’s a housewife to do when she both loves and is irritated at her husband?” “How irrational are you for eating that cookie when you shouldn’t?” Thankfully, I’ve traversed parts 1 and 2, and I’ll finish part 3 maybe today, which I’m hoping will have more to offer. It’s on moral responsibility.

In anticipation of a more expansive future post, here is one small nugget of inspiration from ch. 3 that did strike me. Callard is offering her theory of aspiration as a better resolution of Harry Frankfurt’s analysis of intrinsic conflict. We often find ourselves conflicted internally, that is, in our beliefs/desires — or as Callard reframes it, in our values. Her concept of aspiration is that it necessitates a rather paradoxical move from something we do not (yet) value (to the extent we want to, or should), to a place where we do value it, complete with full-on changes in belief, desire, behavior, will, and action. Aspiring, we’re eventually able to achieve a better and higher sense of moral responsibility and to become improved, better people.² Concerned Anthropocene citizens and lifelong learners will find aspiration a compelling phenomenon as it plays out in human culture, society, and psychology.

Almost by accident, as a segue into a reflection on Aristotle and his supposed lack of a concept of will, Callard sets out the following observation. She says Frankfurt favors “structural explanations” over Aristotle’s “genealogical” or historical ones.

It is a theme of Frankfurt’s work, early and late, to reject genealogical explanations in favor of what he calls “structural” explanations. He wants, for instance, to resist the idea—which he associates with Aristotle—that an agent could be responsible for what she does at one time in virtue of something she did at another, earlier time. What matters, according to Frankfurt, is what the agent wills or identifies with at the time of action, and not earlier. And so he endeavors to capture the ethically salient features of personhood in terms of relations in which the agent stands to herself (her desires, motives, commitments) at the time of action. But some of the relations in which an agent stands to herself might be essentially historical. To be an aspirant is to proceed away from some (rejected) past set of desires, commitments, etc. toward a different, anticipated future desire set of desires, commitments, etc. Aspiration is a form of ethical movement, and nothing can move in a moment. (p. 146)

It sounds technical, but the distinction being made here is huge. It underlies not only the psychological quandary at hand, about causality or identity — what “made” you the way you are? with what values do you “identify” right now? — but how whole cultures and societies progress through history, and whether they “progress” at all.

A “structure,” I take it, whether psychological and internal, or social or cultural, or ecological or technological or governmental, is a kind of given that organizes the way things are, in the present as Frankfurt says. It rationalizes, specifies, and constrains behavior and decision-making, even thinking, in some sort of system. Structure affects individuals as well as collectives.³

A “genealogy” or history, on the other hand, whether personal or national, of a population or species, age or era, traces change over time. Genealogy is concerned with origins, causality, development, growth, goals or ends, means for getting there, and seeing purpose or teleological directionality toward something, and away from something else. Aspiration is a profoundly genealogical phenomenon, so Callard is right to call out her difference with Frankfurt.

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But all this reminds me of the argument constitutionalists (let’s call them that) make against progressives, specifically thinkers who worry political and educational leaders like the Roosevelts (Teddy and FDR both), Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, and others, who, according to the critique, played awfully fast and loose with the founding framework of our country in order to push a vision of change and evolution, and of Progress.⁴

A war of metaphor ensued.

Should governance be essentially “mechanical” — i.e. a structural system of checks and balances, enumeration of separate powers, carefully defined rights, levels, and branches of government, constitutions, institutions, an appreciation for the rational and regulated order of things by natural law and (eternal and objective) truths and morals. It’s science. It’s even a sort of technology. Picture a well-functioning clock.

Or, is a more appropriate metaphor an “organic” one, envisioning a polity with dynamic powers, evolving, improving, adapting? It changes and grows with context, incorporating a wide range of relevant factors, never completely constituted or made, but always in process, working towards some end or goal, perhaps tentative and temporary or possibly an envisioned perfection. Picture a powerful animal, reaching, leaping, striving. Or, picture Hegel and the 19th century rise of historicism, a philosophical movement that comes comfortably to house Marx and much of the (progressive) Left.

Here is Ronald Pestritto on Woodrow Wilson during a podcast at American Mind.

That’s one of the more well-known ways Wilson has of expressing [it]… That’s a metaphor he uses on the campaign trail in 1912. If you can imagine—the language … is drawn from his book The New Freedom, which is simply an edited collection of his campaign addresses. So if you can imagine a candidate saying this on the campaign trail in 1912, the idea that the founders—he [Wilson] said they took Montesquieu, this French political philosopher who talked about separation of powers, they took him a little too seriously. They read him with true scientific enthusiasm, I think is the phrase that Wilson uses in 1912. So they had this sort of very fixed and mechanical view of things, but no, government’s organic. We progressives want to interpret the Constitution according to Darwin.

And yet, the context is a prolonged, deep complaint about the growth of “administration,” the deep state, and the institutionalization and bureaucratization of government, including the installation of experts — of scientists.⁵

For its part, conservatism, at least some versions of it, has a high regard for history and tradition, for conserving whatever from the past is good as times change. Partly it may be a reverence for unassailable eternal truths inherent in things at all times, a (God-given) cosmic order, but partly also, it’s a sort of reverse historicism that sees decadence and decay today, with a Golden Age lying in the past. A more activist conservative version, as we see emerging in the New Right, sees that Golden Age as potentially recoverable and lying in the future after all, recoverable through a new form of conservatively activist government. This is a vastly different sort of “progressivism.”

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Given the slipperiness between mechanism and organicism, between structure and history or genealogy, it seems clear we need both.

Aspiring people, cultures, nations, and species aiming to be better need both a solid structure and framework within which to grow and an imperative not to remain stuck in old forms and ways that no longer function and cannot adapt.

A structure provides foundation, sheltering roof, boundaries or walls, security, refuge, pattern and order, storage and resources.

Change, growth, evolution, adaptation, movement — generation, genealogy⁶ and history — these avoid stagnation, decadence, devolution, entropy, and decay.

Tiger in Water. Jeffrey Surianto. Pexels

1. Many links here. I’m tossed whether to order her new book coming out in January: Open Socrates. For my commentary on her New Yorker article, “The Case Against Travel,” see here.

2. Aspiration theory can also be applied to aesthetic goals like appreciating classical music, or a variety of other kinds of skill acquisition or areas of what we’d probably call personal growth.

3. Callard is at pains in her book to make room for aspiration amongst philosopher-rationalists and decision theorists, who see it as impossible or irrational, or who otherwise limit it.

4. More essays on progress or progressivism here at Pose Ponder: Hillsdale courses, (anti-)progressive history, Magoon, the question of (de)growth.

5. See Pestritto’s book, America Transformed, reviewed helpfully at City Journal and at Modern Age. There is also a reader of primary texts, including from Wilson as cited.

6. The root of both words is gen- meaning to produce or give birth.