PHILOSOPHY
An odd thing happened this week. On June 28 I responded to an article in the New Yorker by Agnes Callard titled The Case Against Travel. Essentially I responded to her complaints about traveling by agreeing that people who were traveling just to collect souvenirs or to put check marks by famous tourist sites that they weren’t interested in, shouldn’t travel. If she got worn out walking and didn’t see anything that interested her in Paris then she shouldn’t travel, either. But I felt that she should let the rest of us have a good time traveling, travel, without mocking us.
Yesterday Susie sent me another article about Agnes Callard. A friend who lives in Wilmington, NC, has a friend who is a boyfriend of Kata Gellen who teaches German studies at Duke, who is the sister of Agnes Callard. The friend knows about Agnes and thought that Susie should read this New Yorker article about Agnes, Marriage of the Minds, written by Rachel Aviv under Profiles (New Yorker, March 6, 2023).
This article is an interview with Agnes and is about how Agnes, a philosophy professor at the University of Chicago who models herself on Sophocles, whom she is an expert on and would like to emulate in her life decisions, approaches every decision as a philosopher. The major life decision she made as a philosopher, who was happily married to a philosopher, Ben, with whom she loved to talk about philosophy, was that when a 27 year old student, dedicated to Aristotle came to her office a number of days, her conversations with him about Aristotle were so engrossing that he fell in love with her, and she with him. She realized that she had never felt the full inner power of love in her life. Within three weeks she was divorced from her husband, who thought she was doing the right thing, moved in with Arnold with her two kids and then after a year married Arnold and moved back in with Ben so that the kids wouldn’t have to go back and forth on weekends. Arnold and Ben are good friends and apparently everyone is happy except that Agnes and Arnold sometimes fight (she never fought with Ben) and she is not sure yet as a philosopher that she has everything right, with a second divorce, philosophically determined, possibly the next step.
I am not a philosopher so I am having trouble making heads or tails of this. But I think it relates loosely to The Case Against Travel. Apparently she travels in a rational, philosophical way with a clear understanding of what you get out of travel, which she equates with travel changing your life in some way and not simply stimulating you and making you feel more alive for a while. All that walking hurts her feel with no apparent payoff so she is down on travel.
She enters her second marriage the same way it appears, talking about Aristotle with Arnold is more rewarding than talking general philosophy with Ben, is my interpretation. But another odd thing happens to her. Out of the blue she feels an emotion with Arnold that she has never felt before, true love. Most people have had crush after crush before finally settling on someone, she apparently never has felt love before and this shocks her into suddenly making the switch.
Somehow, to me anyway, this sudden crush, which she then has trouble maintaining, philosophically anyway, is similar to the “travel is fun” comment that she dismisses in the first travel article. Emotions seem to be hard to deal with, at least in a rational way, which is something that everyone who has crushes and resentments and feelings of betrayal knows pretty well, complete confusion. In fact, the emotions that energize us and drive us through life are often bewildering. Some people read how to books to figure things out, but most people feel their way through the best way that they can. Agnes seems to have an ideal marriage in mind, a Socratic ideal form, but most people go with the flow and make the best the can without aiming for an ideal marriage, which with expectations unmet is not likely to last very long anyway. Divorce however suits Agnes fine, when you can’t reach your expectations you don’t get caught in a conventional, duty filled marriage, you try again.
But the bigger problem this raises for me is how we combine reason and erotic crushes and loving entwined marriages and the irony of knowing that way we are living falls short of what could be. How do we combine four ways of getting along that don’t seem to fit very well together with emotion being more powerful than rationality. Agnes solves this by being as cerebral as Socrates and finding a rational philosphical ideal pattern. But I’m not as smart as she is or as dedicated and most of the ideal answers I come up with will turn out to be duds. All I can do is balance along and hope that I don’t rock the boat too much and sink the ship.
So this is my second attempt to deal with Agnes Callard’s take on how to live my life.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 