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Callard — Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming

Agnes Callard's Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (Oxford University Press, 2018) is the canonical philosophical account of rational value-acquisition — the process by which a person comes to care about something she did not care about before. Her central contention is that becoming a new kind of person is not something that merely happens to us, nor something we simply decide; it is a temporally extended, agential, practically rational process. The aspirant acts now for the sake of values she does not yet fully possess, guided by an inchoate grasp of a good she is trying to know better. Callard's key innovation is proleptic reasons — reasons that are acknowledged as incomplete by the agent who acts on them, but which nonetheless rationalize her pursuit because they anticipate, and help produce, the fuller reasons she will come to have. The book is framed against L. A. Paul's Transformative Experience (2014) and Edna Ullmann-Margalit's "Big Decisions" (2006), which each conclude that decision theory cannot rationalize major life-changes; Callard agrees with the critique of decision theory but rejects the conclusion, locating the rationality of transformative becoming in the extended work of aspiration rather than the instant of choice. For Deep Ambition, Callard supplies the forward-looking phenomenology that pairs with Bovens's backward-looking rationality criterion (see adaptive-preferences): she answers the question "how do you rationally pursue a value you don't yet hold?" — which is precisely what a reader in the "Treading Water" chapter is trying to do.

The Puzzle of Aspiration

The book opens with the Augustinian paradox that "our hands are already full" (Introduction, p. 6). We can only reason from the values we currently have, yet the aspirant is trying to acquire values she does not yet have. If she already grasped the value of, say, classical music, she would have no need to aspire to appreciate it. But if she does not grasp it, how can its value serve as a reason for her to act? The aspirant is, Callard writes, "trying to change herself in some particular dimension; she is not merely open to changes that might come. She grasps, however dimly, a target with reference to which she guides herself" (p. 8).

Decision theory makes the puzzle sharp. A rational decision presupposes stable preferences: you choose the option that best satisfies the desires you already have. But transformative choices — parenthood, emigration, conversion, the decision to become a classical musician or a physician — are precisely cases in which the preferences one reasons from are not the preferences one reasons toward. As Callard puts it: "The desires one already has are themselves only fully intelligible in the light of the desires one will have. One's present condition is, as it were, a simulacrum of the value condition one hopes someday to be in" (p. 31).

This puzzle has often led philosophers to conclude that value-acquisition must be either non-rational (a kind of drift, conversion, or accident) or not really value-acquisition at all (just the manipulation of existing preferences). Callard's project is to identify the third option: a distinctive form of rationality that "is not the rationality of deliberation, calculation, preference or decision" (p. 9).

Proleptic Reasons

The book's most influential concept. A proleptic reason is a reason acknowledged as incomplete — one the agent treats as a placeholder for the fuller reason she will come to have if her aspiration succeeds. The word "proleptic" means taken in advance of its rightful place. Callard adapts it from Margaret Little's phrase "proleptic engagement" (treating a child as though she were the adult we want her to become).

Callard's paradigm case is the music-appreciation student (Chapter 2). She takes the class because she wants to come to love music, but she does not yet love it. To get through the symphony, she motivates herself with things that aren't the intrinsic value of music — a chocolate reward, the essay grade, the image of herself entering a concert hall on a snowy evening. She knows these are not the "real" reasons for loving music. They are placeholders. Yet she is not being irrational:

"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." (p. 42)

Her reason has two faces: a proximate face (the chocolate, the grade, the romantic image) that reflects who she is now, and a distal face (the intrinsic value of music) that reflects who she is trying to be. The two faces combine into a single reason because she is in transition. "Her reason is double because she herself is in transition" (p. 43).

Callard defends the proleptic species of reason by surveying six alternative attempts to rationalize aspiration without it (Chapter 2, section II): vague reasons, self-management reasons, testimonial reasons, reasons of competition, reasons of pretense, and approximating reasons. She argues each is insufficient by itself — but that each can be made to work only by helping itself to a proleptic variety of the reason in question. The aspirant's vagueness is a proleptic vagueness (ever-sharpening, felt as a defect to be remedied); her use of a mentor's testimony is proleptic (anticipating its own evanescence as she comes to see for herself); her competitiveness can be proleptic (competing "in order to become excellent, rather than in order to show that I already am," p. 48); her pretense is proleptic (she doesn't want to pretend forever — she wants to become the thing). Proleptic rationality, she concludes, is inescapable if we are to rationalize aspirational agency at all.

Proleptic reasons also pose a challenge to internalism about practical reasons — Bernard Williams's thesis that an agent's reasons must be reachable from her current motivational set by sound deliberation. The aspirant's reasons are not reachable from her current motivations — if they were, she would already have them. Nor are they purely external in the Parfit sense. They are a third thing: "not fully 'external' to an agent's motivational condition, but that also fail to be fully accessible to her at the outset of her project" (p. 9).

Response to L. A. Paul's Transformative Experience

Chapter 1 is Callard's systematic reply to Paul's influential 2014 argument that transformative choices (Paul's guiding example: deciding to become a vampire) cannot be made rationally on decision-theoretic grounds. Because you cannot know what the new form of life will be like before undergoing it, Paul argues, you cannot assign rational weights to its outcomes; at best you can privilege a second-order preference for discovery-vs-stasis. Paul concludes rational transformative choice requires giving up on "trying to decide based on the character of the particular subjective values of the lived experiences involved" (p. 121 of Paul, cited at Callard p. 29).

Callard accepts Paul's argument against decision theory but rejects Paul's framing of the problem. Paul and Ullmann-Margalit locate the rationality of transformation in a single climactic moment — the decision to board the boat for Israel, throw away the pills, accept the vampire bite. Callard's move is to relocate the locus of rationality: transformative pursuits are not decisions but temporally extended, agentially directed processes. "The decision marks neither the beginning nor the end of aspiration" (p. 38). The woman becomes a mother not at the positive pregnancy test but through years of increasingly motherly thinking, feeling, and acting. The pilgrim doesn't become a pioneer by boarding the boat — boarding is a step on a path that began long before and continues long after.

On Callard's view, the climactic moment is "a step on the path to becoming someone" (p. 38). Paul and Ullmann-Margalit, by staring at that step in isolation, miss the rational structure of the process that contains it:

"In fact, aspiration is nothing other than the process of gradually working oneself all the way into that thought, to the point where what one thinks it is like is what it is in fact like. Without disagreeing with Paul that there is some sense in which what she calls transformative experiences are 'fundamentally inaccessible' to those who do not have them, I am nonetheless going to set out to describe a path of rational access. We can think and act and feel and, more generally, work our way into motherhood. We can rationally bring ourselves to see things differently." (p. 34)

The distinction is not decision theory vs. something-else; it's the right unit of analysis. Paul asks: how do I decide, in this moment, between remaining as I am and becoming someone new? Callard asks: what is the rational structure of the years-long process by which someone comes to hold new values? The latter is answerable; the former, she concedes, is not.

Aspiration vs. Self-Cultivation vs. Transformation

A crucial taxonomy (Ch. 1, section III and Ch. 6, section III). Callard distinguishes three kinds of self-directed value-change:

Self-cultivation. Small-scale change grounded in the preferences you already have. Joining a gym to become someone who exercises is self-cultivation if your exercising serves your standing desire to live a long, healthy life. You can fully appraise the new preferences from your current vantage because they are instrumental to values you already hold. "I prefer to prefer to exercise because I prefer to be healthy" (p. 31). Self-cultivation does not raise the puzzle of aspiration because "the agent enters the choice fully equipped with the resources to appreciate and value the person she is making herself into" (p. 29).
Aspiration. Large-scale and transformative. You are trying to acquire a value you do not yet hold, not merely to reorder the preferences you do hold. The aspiring doctor is not seeking the prestige, income, or parental approval she already values; she is trying to grasp the distinctive value of helping people with medical problems, which "she (knows that) she does not really know… before engaging in the work" (p. 7).
Ambition. Large-scale but not transformative. The ambitious researcher, politician, or would-be Nobel laureate is "fully capable of grasping [the value] in advance of achieving it" (p. 138). Ambition is "characteristically directed at those goods — wealth, power, fame — that can be well appreciated even by those who do not have them." Ambition and aspiration can coexist in the same person and the same domain, but they are distinct forms of agency. Callard writes:

"Ambition is often salutary: the researcher who has the ambition of curing some disease, is, if she succeeds, a boon to mankind; likewise the politician who aims to ameliorate social ills or the inventor who discovers ways to make life easier for everyone. But because ambition both consumes much of an agent's efforts and does not expand his value horizons, it carries with it the danger of trapping him in what may be an impoverished appreciation of value. This danger is lessened if ambition does not entirely usurp the space for aspiration." (p. 138)

The ambitious graduate student "is trying to succeed instead of trying to learn" (p. 139). The aspirational student, by contrast, is "reaching beyond [herself], proleptically, in the manner of the aspirant" (p. 144). This exact distinction is what the Deep Ambition thesis needs: shallow ambition is Callard's ambition; deep ambition is Callard's aspiration turned toward life itself.

Intrinsic Conflict and Akrasia

Chapters 3 and 4. An intrinsic conflict (Callard's term) is one in which the agent's desires pull directly against each other because they belong to incompatible evaluative perspectives — not just because the world cannot satisfy both (which is extrinsic conflict). Frankfurt's "bitter wife," torn between mailing her husband's letter out of love and trashing it out of spite, is Callard's paradigm: her love and her hatred are each organized, valuing points-of-view, and each undermines the legitimacy of the other. She cannot step back and deliberate between them, because stepping back into one perspective means losing contact with the other.

Callard rejects Frankfurt's solution (resolve by identification with one desire and externalization of the other) because it does not dissolve the conflict — both desires remain present and active. Her own solution: intrinsic conflicts are resolved by aspiration. The aspirant does not deliberate her way to a synoptic verdict; she moves from one evaluative perspective toward another over time. "Instead of stepping back to a neutral point of view, aspirants step forward — little by little — into a state of lessened conflict" (p. 80).

Chapter 4 applies the apparatus to akrasia. Callard's provocative thesis: akrasia is aspiration writ small. Davidson's standard analysis makes akrasia incoherent (how can you act on a reason you have judged weaker?); Callard's alternative locates the akratic's conflict between two evaluative perspectives — the pre-deliberative one (the cookie looks delicious) and the post-deliberative one (I should stick to my diet). The akratic inhabits both, cannot survey both from a neutral point, and resolves by acting — either in line with her deliberative verdict (enkrateia) or against it (akrasia). "Those who puzzle over how it is possible to act against one's better judgment are, I argue, grasping a tip of the aspirational iceberg" (p. 10). Akrasia is a short-timescale intrinsic conflict; aspiration is the long-timescale version.

The Alcibiades Case

Callard's extended case study (Introduction, section III, pp. 11–20) is Alcibiades' speech at the end of Plato's Symposium. Alcibiades — Athens' golden boy, handsome general, famous for charisma and ambition — arrives drunk to praise Socrates. His speech is a confession that Socrates has made him see his honor-loving life as "not worth living," yet he cannot escape that life. He knows Socratic wisdom is the higher value; he cannot make himself feel it; he flees from Socrates "so that I won't spend my whole life sitting at his feet" (Alc. 216b).

Callard reads Alcibiades as a study in irrational aspiration — an aspirant who fails. He has Socrates' influence and his own talents; he has the inchoate grasp of wisdom he would need to aspire rationally; but he "interrupts his own pursuit in such a way as to make it discontinuous, incoherent, and ultimately fruitless" (p. 19). His two evaluative perspectives — honor-loving Alcibiadean arrogance and Socratic wisdom — are both his, neither dominant, neither abandonable. He is the irrational aspirant precisely because he cannot commit to the work of letting one perspective displace the other.

The case matters because it demonstrates aspiration's shape via its failure mode: you can tell aspiration is a real form of agency because you can identify its characteristic pathology. Alcibiades is "culpably failing to aspire sufficiently" (p. 20); his disastrous end (exile, assassination, the destruction of Athens) follows from an aspirational failure that Socratic influence could have forestalled but could not force. As Callard notes — echoing Socrates himself — virtue is not teachable. No one can do the work of appreciating a value on your behalf.

Self-Creation and the Priority of the Created Self

Chapter 5. If aspiration is the form of agency by which we acquire new values, then the aspirant is, in an important sense, the cause of herself — she is responsible for the person she becomes because she did the aspirational work that produced that person. Callard calls this self-creation. Her key move (section V) is to invert the traditional priority of creator over created. On the received picture (self-endorsement theories, self-cultivation theories), the early self authorizes or guides the production of the later self. Callard argues that this cannot explain genuine value-acquisition — the early self does not have the values the later self will have, so the early self cannot be the normative source.

The aspirational inversion: "the creator does not determine, choose or shape the created self; rather, she looks up to, imitates and seeks to become the created self. The source of normativity lies at the end of the process, rather than at the beginning" (p. 11). The aspirant is led by the self she is trying to become — a self she does not yet fully know, but whose shadow guides her actions. This is why aspiration is a form of teleology: the end (the acquired value) grounds the rationality of the process (the acquiring).

The asymmetry this creates (Ch. 6, section IV) matters: aspiration is learning, and since one cannot learn what is not the case, there is no such thing as "aspiring to be evil". The aspiring gangster, Callard argues, is not actually aspiring — he is either ambitious (he already grasps the values he pursues: money, power, fear) or he is aspiring toward something good (respect, family, belonging) that he mistakenly thinks gangsterhood will provide. We are responsible for good character directly (we aspired to it) and for bad character indirectly (we culpably failed to aspire to better). This is Callard's asymmetrical account of moral responsibility for character.

Why This Matters for Deep Ambition

Callard closes the deepest philosophical gap in the book's argument. The "Treading Water" reader is trying to move from shallow to deep ambition — from winning a scoreboard she now half-suspects is the wrong one to building toward values she can only imperfectly see from where she stands. Five operational contributions:

Vocabulary for the book's central distinction. Callard's aspiration-vs-ambition is the exact philosophical scaffolding Deep Ambition needs. "Shallow ambition" in the book maps cleanly onto Callard's ambition (pursuit of values one fully grasps: money, status, fame). "Deep ambition" maps onto aspiration (pursuit of values one does not yet fully hold, requiring self-transformation). The book should cite this distinction directly.
Legitimacy of acting now on reasons you don't yet fully understand. The Deep Ambition reader often feels fraudulent — she knows family matters more than status, but she cannot yet feel it the way she feels the pull of the old scoreboard. Callard's proleptic reasons dissolve this: acting on a half-grasped value is not hypocrisy; it is how value-acquisition works. You take the music-appreciation class. You decline the promotion. You call your parents. Your reasons have a proximate face (I should, it looks like what I'd want, my therapist says so) and a distal face (the value I am trying to come to hold). Both faces are real parts of a single rational process.
Why the shift takes years, not weeks. Callard's temporally-extended-process argument is the direct rebuttal to the "just decide" framing. You cannot decide to hold a value. You can only work your way into holding it. The Deep Ambition transition is, in Callard's terms, a "large-scale transformative pursuit" — the same structural category as becoming a mother, a doctor, a pianist, or a Zionist. These take years because they are the years of becoming.
Callard's response to Paul is the response to the cope accusation. The Deep Ambition critic says: "You're just rationalizing your failure; you haven't actually changed your preferences, you've just given up on the old ones." Paul's view would partly vindicate the critic — if you cannot rationally reason toward a new value, then a new preference that appeared after a setback is epistemically suspect. Callard's view does not. The preference that emerged through years of aspirational work is not the same as a sour-grapes flip; it is the rational product of proleptic agency. Combined with Bovens's backward-looking reason-restructuring test and Baber's behavioral test, Callard supplies the forward-looking leg: was this preference acquired through sustained aspirational work, or through a post-failure flip? If the former, it is rational, whatever its origin in disappointment.
The asymmetry: you are less responsible for staying stuck than for refusing help. Callard's conclusion emphasizes that aspirants are characteristically vulnerable and characteristically need teachers, mentors, and communities. "Aspirants are not alone in the swamp" (p. 154). The Deep Ambition reader who tries to make the shift in isolation — without a coach, a peer group, a partner who can see the distal self she is reaching for — is structurally disadvantaged. The book's coaching-practice backbone gains philosophical grounding here: coaches are, in Callard's sense, partners in the aspirant's work of seeing the value she cannot yet fully see for herself.

One contradiction-adjacent note: Callard's picture sits uneasily with some self-determination theory strands that emphasize current authentic preferences as the measure of well-being. On SDT's internalization continuum (see self-determination-theory), introjected and identified regulation are transitional, and the ideal is fully integrated motivation. Callard's aspirant is living in the transitional zone by design — acting on reasons she doesn't yet fully endorse, with the goal of coming to endorse them. The book should treat this as complementary (SDT describes the terminal state; Callard describes the path) rather than contradictory, but the reader who has absorbed pop-SDT ("do what you genuinely want!") needs explicit framing that Callard is describing a different question.

Additional Direct Quotes

Additional citable lines, beyond those quoted above:

"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." (p. 6)

"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." (p. 6)

"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, 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 fully, committally engaged with." (p. 7)

"Aspirants step forward — little by little — into a state of lessened conflict." (p. 80)

"Aspiration is a form of ethical movement, and nothing can move in a moment." (p. 79)

"In aspiration, it is the created self who, through the creator's imperfect but gradually improving understanding of her, makes intelligible the path the person's life takes." (p. 100)

"Ambition is marked precisely by value-stasis. The ambitious person, qua ambitious, is engaged in getting what he wants, as opposed to learning what he wants." (p. 143)

"Aspirants are characteristically needy people, since (they see that) their own conceptions of value are insufficient." (p. 154)

adaptive-preferences — Hub for Elster/Bovens/Baber/Mitchell; Callard is the forward-looking complement to Bovens's backward-looking rationality criterion
bovens-adaptive-preferences — Davidsonian reason-restructuring test, the rearview pair to Callard's prospective account
callard-replies-to-critics — Sibling article in this batch: Callard's replies to critics of the book
callard-on-deliberation — Sibling article: Callard's account of what deliberation can and cannot do
callard-marriage-of-the-minds — Sibling article: Callard on marriage as joint aspirational project
deep-ambition-book-thesis — The book this article most directly equips; Callard is a Tier-1 primary source for the shallow-to-deep transition
eudaimonia-vs-hedonia — Waterman's personal expressiveness and Ryff's six dimensions are the empirical correlate of Callard's aspirational work
motivation-and-goals — Brunstein & Gollwitzer's self-defining goals are empirical analogues of aspirational pursuits
self-determination-theory — Deci & Ryan's internalization continuum is the motivational correlate of proleptic rationality
kegan-stages-of-adult-development — The 3→4 transition is, in Callard's vocabulary, a large-scale transformative pursuit requiring proleptic agency
authentic-pride-patterns — The coaching move surfaces proleptic reasons rather than only current preferences
narrative-identity — Pals's two-step redemption sequences are the narrative form of aspirational becoming
jason-voice-and-style — The book's craft apparatus; Callard's conceptual precision is a model for philosophical depth in popular nonfiction

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