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Callard: Marriage of the Minds (Aviv Profile)

Rachel Aviv's March 2023 New Yorker profile of the University of Chicago philosopher Agnes Callard — a portrait of a thinker whose private life became the central laboratory for her own philosophy of aspiration. Callard left her husband Ben for a former graduate student, Arnold Brooks, and now lives in a three-adult household where Ben, Agnes, and Arnold co-raise three children. The piece is notable for Jason's book Deep Ambition because Callard does not treat her preference shift as something to be defended or tidied — she treats it as ongoing philosophical work, and articulates, in her own voice, exactly the "cope vs. transformation" ambiguity the Treading Water chapter is trying to unfold.

Who she is

Agnes Callard specializes in ancient philosophy and ethics at the University of Chicago. She is also a "public philosopher" who writes columns for The Point and The New York Times, co-hosts a podcast ("Minds Almost Meeting") with Robin Hanson, and runs a late-night campus event series called "Night Owls." Her first book, Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (Oxford, 2018), won the 2020 Lebowitz Prize for philosophical achievement. Born in Hungary, she emigrated with her parents at age four; her sister Kata Gellen is a professor of German studies at Duke. Callard was diagnosed with autism in her thirties — a fact she connects to her "immunity to the pull of a certain received structure of meaning," her tendency to notice the conventions that most people absorb without examining.

Her colleague Jonathan Lear says Agnes "approaches every conversation as if it were integral to her life's work, as it was for Socrates." Ben Callard, her ex-husband, calls her "the least complacent person I've ever met."

The central story

In spring 2011, Arnold Brooks — a first-year graduate student, twenty-seven, working on Aristotle — came to Callard's office hours every week. At the last session of the quarter, as he ate a cookie she'd baked, Arnold said, "I think I'm a little bit in love with you." Agnes, thirty-five and married to philosopher Ben Callard with two young sons, replied: "I think I'm in love with you, too." The next day, flying to New York, Agnes felt she was "having a revelation in the clouds" — that she had, for the first time, access to an "inner experience of love" that showed her she had been pretending in her marriage.

She told Ben. They talked for a day. Ben initially urged time and therapy; the next morning he called and agreed they should divorce. The divorce was finalized within three weeks. "I think to an unusual degree Agnes sort of lives what she thinks and thinks what she lives," Ben said.

A year later Agnes married Arnold. Ben gave the toast. Years on, the three of them share an apartment and co-parent three sons (the youngest, Izzy, is Arnold's son; the two older boys Ben fathered). Ben takes a roughly equal share of childcare. They never separated their bank accounts. Ben and Arnold camp together, co-teach a course on paradoxes. They have held a public campus event called "The Philosophy of Divorce." Callard's best friend, Yelena Baraz, says all three children "genuinely gained a parent."

Her life as a test of her own philosophy

Aspiration argues that people can embark toward a self they can't yet see or understand, guided by values they have only glimpsed. Callard saw falling in love with Arnold as her first direct inside-view of that process. As she told her students in a 2011 keynote titled "On the Kind of Love Into Which One Falls" — delivered with both Ben and Arnold in the front row — true lovers "don't really want to be loved for who they are; they want to be loved because neither of them is happy with who he or she is."

But the profile's deepest move is that the philosophy is not vindicated. Twelve years in, Callard is explicit that the transformation has been harder than the early vision suggested. "I think there was something right in that vision, but it has been so much harder than I thought it would be. To change — but also just to be in love, like, to relate in a really loving way to another person. It's like once you start trying to do that you come up against all of your limits." She adds: "I never realized how fundamentally selfish I was before I met Arnold."

The marriage is less happy, in an experiential sense, than her marriage to Ben. "In her marriage with Ben, Agnes had never wondered whether the relationship was going O.K. But, with Arnold, she said, 'we've often had the kind of stress and struggle of, like, is this working?'" She now sees her marriage to Arnold as a preparation for eventual divorce — not as prediction but as philosophical orientation: "It's a preparation for the time when you won't need another person in order to think."

This is the key angle for Jason's book. Callard neither recants the aspirational move nor pretends it has been redeemed. She keeps both the original projection ("you owe them the very existence of the ideal in you... you owe them your projection") and the ongoing difficulty in view at the same time.

Key quotes

  • "Radical change, becoming a wholly other person, is not out of the question. There is suddenly room for massive aspiration."
  • "If you're a real philosopher, you don't need privacy, because you're a living embodiment of your theory at every moment, even in your sleep, even in your dreams." (tweet)
  • "Becoming a wholly other person is not out of the question."
  • On marriage as institution: she was "losing the spirit of marriage for the sake of the convention."
  • On the "worked-out" framing: "It's a very narrative, novelistic approach to my life, and the only area of my life that I see in such a progressive way is the pursuit of knowledge. The proof of success or failure is her insights, she said, not the plot of her life."
  • Aviv's summary phrase, endorsed by Callard: "immaculate divorce" — a divorce without grief or sorrow or pain. "The only barrier to our getting divorced is our wanting to continue to be married."
  • Closing line: "I think grateful acceptance can be loving, but I think exacting demands can also be loving. Marriage has an amazing PR team, for 2 decades it has been continuously telling me, 'This is good, this is how it is supposed to be, this should count as enough, lots of people don't get this much, you should accept this and move on to other concerns' — and I feel increasingly emboldened to say, 'No thanks, I'd rather keep working and searching and striving.'"

Why this matters for Deep Ambition

The "Treading Water" chapter asks: when a reader's ambition cools, is that defeat (adapting downward, cope) or transformation (a value shift worth trusting)? Callard is the forward-looking phenomenology — the claim that acting-as-if is exactly how values get acquired, and that the new self is allowed to be murky to the old one. But Callard's life supplies the harder companion truth: acting-as-if doesn't settle the question. Twelve years after the revelation-in-the-clouds, Callard refuses to score the result. She won't call it a success story, and she won't call it a mistake. She calls it ongoing.

For a book about ambition value-shifts, this is more useful than a clean case. The Aviv profile gives Jason three things: (1) a biographical anchor for citing Callard as a living thinker, not just a text; (2) a case where the aspirational move was public, philosophical, and still unresolved — the reader's own dilemma at full scale; (3) a vocabulary ("grateful acceptance" vs. "exacting demands," "immaculate divorce," "marriage as preparation for divorce," "losing the spirit for the sake of the convention") that sharpens the book's central distinction between rational reorientation and sour-grapes adaptation. Callard's refusal to let marriage's "PR team" tell her what counts as enough is, essentially, the stance Jason's book is arguing readers should take toward their own ambitions.

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