Writes Rachel Aviv in "Agnes Callard’s Marriage of the Minds/The philosopher, who lives with her husband and her ex-husband, searches for what one human can be to another human" (The New Yorker).
... Agnes said Arnold worried that they’d given me the impression that their marriage was a success story.... When we talked again, I asked them about the ways in which they weren’t as happy as they appeared to be. They spoke to me on Zoom from Agnes’s office, which she had turned into a kind of magical kindergarten: bright stars, circular mirrors, and L.E.D. lights hung from ropes wrapped in yarn of different colors; the walls were covered in fabrics featuring flowery blobs; a table had large polka dots.
“It’s not like this thing that we do, which is constantly talk about philosophy, is a happy activity,” Arnold told me. “It’s just as difficult and problematic and fraught an activity as what I take it many couples would do together.”
“I guess I would go even a little further than Arnold in saying that this territory is pretty often painful,” Agnes said. She was sitting at her desk, wearing a pink dress with large llamas on it....
[Arnold said,] “When Socrates says that philosophy is a preparation for death, he’s very clear that he doesn’t mean you’re supposed to commit suicide. It’s just that there’s some way in which philosophy could stand up to the task of making you able to deal with death when it comes.”
“The corresponding claim,” Agnes said, “would be that somehow the project of marriage would make you capable of being alone.”
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40 comments:
"It’s just as difficult and problematic and fraught an activity as what I take it many couples would do together.”
WTF?
Spoiler alert! If you haven’t seen the latest Chris Rock special, don’t read this comment.
*******
As Chris Rock put it, let’s interview Arnold. Here’s the question: How does it feel to know that your ex-wife is sucking the dick of her former student in the same apartment where all three of you live?
How does it feel? Like a rolling stone? Like a complete unknown?
These three people aren’t fully human.
And how does this story end up in The New Yorker? Are they proud of their perversity?
Philosophy ain't what it used to be.
No Aristotle tag?
I hope after that address a pretty philosophy student sought out Ben. Maybe she already had.
Will the dramatization be in English, French or German?
Two words: Faithless bitch.
You enter into a marriage and create children within it, you have duties and obligations to both your spouse and your kids. Blithely throwing all that away? For what?
People like this are filth.
I note that nowhere in her odyssey of self-gratification and betrayal did she consider her children's welfare and right to have a stable home. Once you've created the kids, you've an obligation to them to see things through, not go haring off after your latest emotional whim.
I cannot take people like this at all seriously. Self-indulgent, oblivious to the effect her decisions have on others who're dependent on her; it'd be one thing if the kids were grown and out of the house, but when they're still young and in need of stability?
I honestly cannot forgive my father for doing that to us, forcing a divorce from my long-suffering mother. The rat bastard destroyed any stability in my childhood, and then, instead of withdrawing and following his own selfish desires, he insisted on remaining an ongoing source of instability and friction. Sorry f*ck couldn't even be bothered to pay the $75.00 a month child support he owed for the last three years I was in high school, which I felt the moral obligation to pay my mother back while I was in the Army.
I really have no use for people like this; if you're not going to take the responsibilities seriously, then have yourself sterilized and don't marry. If you are the victim of legitimate abuse, by all means, divorce; that's not your fault. To simply do as this "philosopher" did, flitting from one flower to another? Unforgiveable. The fact she still has a job teaching is ridiculous, and an indicator for why the academy is utterly corrupted. She married a student; how is that different because she's a woman?
Re-cast the sexes on this, and people would be screaming for a lynching. Because "woman", it's all OK, to be admired and held up as a good example for others to "self-actuate".
And, people wonder why I come off as a misogynist. Things like this make misogyny almost a moral imperative, and create a justification for refusing women in general any agency, if this is what they're going to do with it. Those kids weren't even a concern of hers, so far as I can tell.
I'd love to know what would have transpired if it were her husband that did this to the marriage. I doubt he'd still have his job, or his kids.
“The corresponding claim [to the claim that philosophy prepared you for death],” Agnes said, “would be that somehow the project of marriage would make you capable of being alone.”
How is that "the corresponding claim"? Marriage and solitary life are more or less opposites. Is philosophy the opposite of death?
Maybe it is. But - not a philosopher - I've always considered philosophy to be the practice of thinking deeply about life, death, and other big questions affecting the human condition. I would see the corresponding claim as something like, "marriage can make you capable of experiencing love deeply."
Note: I haven't thought very deeply about that corresponding claim. I gave it a couple of minutes. But my lived experience is that thirty years of marriage (thirty-two if I include my brief, youthful first marriage) and twenty-five of parenthood have taught me things about love I never could have imagined in the absence of these commitments.
And that may not be all bad. Philosophers used to be significant figures pushing beautiful and dangerous ideas -- you know, Wittgenstein, Sartre, Karl Popper, Hanna Arendt. If any of these folks had sizable formations of determined followers, the world could be either much nicer or much lousier than it is. Of the lot, Popper was the most beneficent, and we'd all be the wiser by adopting his epistemology. At least the Democrats wouldn't even attempt to espouse the new economics for fear of being shoved en masse into padded cells. He's currently persona non grata at Yale and many other schools (quote/unquote), which explains why Joe Biden is president.
Unfortunately for the 21st century, today's philosophers are just whiney hedonists struggling to justify their nastiness. They'd like to be admitted to the STEM treehouse (no girls or whankers allowed!) but the sociologists are far closer to the head of the queue than are the philosophers, which only goes to show how dissolute hard disciplines have become. Not a single student in 53 Illinois school can do math at grade level. Who cares? None of them will be able to count the Biden dollars required to buy a Big Mac. Prices will soon be reckoned in pallets of cash, so the calculations will be superfluous in any case.
Blessed paywall! Keeps me from wasting any more time on these philosophist fruitcakes.
Asymmetrical marriage my ass.
New Yorker hits bottom, keeps digging. Explain to me why I should care about these poor mixed-up people?
DB: Arnold is #2. Ben is #1. But then I have not seen the special. Prefer to get enlightened on marriage by reading rather than watching.
Maybe there should be more cogito in the Smith marriage.
They're not as creepy as Simone deBeauvoir and Sartre. Just from the brief snippet given, it does seem that she has more agency than Simone so that's progress....Off topic: Lenin's wife fixed him up with a younger, prettier woman. Trotsky's wife didn't fix him up with Frida, but she would arrange to be discreetly out of the house when they had their liaisons. I don't know if this qualifies as "me,too" or "her,also". It does seem, however, that feminists give revolutionaries and their complicit wives a pass. The Bolsheviks had wives that the husband in Ibsen's play could only dream about.
Apart from ties of family/DNA, what is the locomotive pulling us toward meaning in our relationships? Is it the sense that we are invisible unless seen by a caring other? It seems inescapable that the locomotive is ego. A hunger for validation. It's much more than nerve endings.
"No Aristotle tag?"
Lots of Aristotle in the article, but I didn't select any of it for quotation, therefore, no tag.
If Aristotle is butthurt over this omission, let me know.
"She married a student; how is that different because she's a woman?"
It's not.
The article puts that right in the beginning for all to see and judge.
There's a discussion of this article at Reddit — https://www.reddit.com/r/uchicago/comments/11kl0vk/new_yorker_article_on_our_one_and_only_agnes/ — and the top-rated comment is:
"I know it’s relatively common, but I still think that professors becoming romantically involved with their students is creepy as hell. Even leaving age gaps and things like that aside the power imbalance makes the whole scenario ripe for abuse. Even though she reportedly gave up any authority over his academic progress once they started dating, what’s to stop her from bad mouthing or even blacklisting him if their relationship goes sour? Academics would like to think that his work would carry him as far as his abilities allow but we all know that reputation is essential in our small and insular circles and that established voices have huge sway over how a newcomer is received."
"How is that "the corresponding claim"? Marriage and solitary life are more or less opposites. Is philosophy the opposite of death?"
No, the claim about philosophy isn't that it's the opposite of death but that it prepares you for death.
Philosophy is to death as marriage is to being alone. That means that marriage prepares you for the state of being alone. It's a process. You can't die properly without going through philosophy and you can be alone properly without going through marriage!
For myself, I might say you can be married properly without going through the process of being alone.
Another comment over at Reddit (it's a U Chicago subreddit):
"What bothers me... is... her arrogance when describing the whole fiasco. She acts like it’s normal to run off with grad students, or to dump your husband on a whim and subject your kids to a challenging parenting situation, all because she feels compelled to live a most philosophical life. She is lucky to have not (as far as we know) caused any great emotional harm in her epistemological relationship rampage. Yes, there is bravery in her decision to buck societal convention and shack up with her student. No, bravery is not a trait worth applauding when applied so recklessly."
To be fair, I think it's important to say that Arnold confessed love for her and she, committed to telling the truth, told him she loved him too. She then told Ben (the first husband) exactly what happened, and they talked for an entire day about it. "He encouraged her to take time before making a decision; she agreed to try therapy. But the next morning Ben called and said that she was right: they should get a divorce."
This was all just after the student and teacher confessed mutual love and the teacher just *thought* about what that meant. They got a divorced finalized in 3 weeks!
As for thinking of the children: "Agnes was extremely upset that the divorce would harm their children, but she felt that the alternative was that she would become a bad person. “I thought that I would become sort of corrupted by staying in a marriage where I no longer felt like I was aspirational about it,” she said."
And Ben lives with them, so the father did remain in the house. A new child arrived and these children are growing up together, with both children in the house.
An additional fact is that Agnes has autism.
"New Yorker hits bottom, keeps digging. Explain to me why I should care about these poor mixed-up people?"
They all teach at the University of Chicago.
Actually, Callard (who, if you look at her photos, is not exactly Scarlett Johansson) is living the dream: husband, ex-husband, kids, everybody gets along, and she is feted by her colleagues for her wisdom!
More in this article: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-marriage-monster/
Ben was the first husband. Mistake by me above. These throuples can be confusing. I couldn’t figure out what was a trans woman for a long time; best to call them former men.
The genius University of Chicago professor apparently doesn’t know that it is a statutory requirement for the judge to find that the marriage is irretrievably broken. In Nebraska, the judge also must find that efforts were made to keep the marriage together.
Maybe the tenured Agnes can write a book on fidelity. Isn’t that an ancient virtue?
In the movie “Sophie’s Choice” we figure out that Nathan is crazy when he screams at Sophie, “Fidelity is all I ask!” Sophie didn’t cheat on Nathan and she was completely in love with him.
No, the claim about philosophy isn't that it's the opposite of death but that it prepares you for death.
I wasn't saying that she claimed philosophy was the opposite of death. I was saying that the way she constructed her analogy was sloppy, because marriage is more or less the opposite of a solitary life. In order for the analogy to hang together well, philosophy : death ought to be a similar relationship to marriage : being alone, and I don't see how it is.
Marriage doesn't obviously prepare you to cope with aloneness, either, in the way that philosophy can prepare you to cope with death - just by thinking and asking questions about it. You can spend time in marriage thinking about aloneness, but it's certainly not the main point of marriage unless you're getting married primarily because of your fear of being alone, ISTM. And that isn't the recipe for a great marriage. IMO, at any rate.
In 1980 at Creighton Law, a Big Ten law school professor propositioned two of my female Catholic classmates. One of the women was married. At the time, Creighton had a bedroom and apartment in the law school and he was staying there after his lecture.
Man, I was shocked at the time. I later found out that two of my Creighton law professors were banging female students.
I read the article. I found it fascinating- (but), so very sad.
We’re all human. Aristotle, Socrates, Nietzsche- &Callard, sorry to burst her bubble.
I personally think this woman is afraid to be alone. The interesting thing I took away(ok, more than one thing) is that death is inevitable- divorce isn’t the endgame that death is. They are an apple and an orange.
I started to read the comments 1st- kinda harshed me, to be honest. Maybe b/c my 1st marriage was a 2yr disaster (he was never faithful, I had so much trust &I can’t see the color red(all those red flags I missed, obviously)). Maybe b/c people make mistakes early on and it’s so hard to view from the backward mirror an object that appears larger than it actually is. I’m being advised professionally to leave certain boulders buried- even after all the effort it took to dig the painful f/jet up and look it full in the face- yes, boulders have faces of pretty little thangs w/small asses and painted-on jeans- I’m human, too.
All said &done: 1) she’s nowhere as wise as she thinks she is &
b) she’ll never be “happily” married.
Too bad she never had a daughter.
PS to our good D Begley: the interview should be of Ben.
Arnold was the student/lover/2nd husband.
PS to our good D Begley: the interview should be of Ben.
Arnold was the student/lover/2nd husband.
Since Aristotle has been brought up a couple of times already in the comments, let me make an observation:
“Yes, there is bravery in her decision to buck societal convention and shack up with her student. No, bravery is not a trait worth applauding when applied so recklessly."
The golden mean comes to mind. There are two vices corresponding to the virtue “bravery”: cowardice and rashness. While openly shacking up with your student may not be cowardly, it’s certainly not brave either. It’s rash - just another vice.
Quaestor, funny you should bring up math.
I kept thinking- marriage is not an equation w/a finite solution. It’s not even a concrete equation, at all. Each marriage is as unique as the 2individuals w/in it. Ever-changing as human nature is- it might be an experiment(daily)w/no end- it’s never answered.
Maybe that’s why she thinks it’s preparing for divorce. She has the end solution wrong. It’s death, as well.
Until death do us part…
Autism: A recently described, poorly and obscurely defined disorder which serves as an excuse for anything out of the every-day ordinary.
“ I wasn't saying that she claimed philosophy was the opposite of death. I was saying that the way she constructed her analogy was sloppy, because marriage is more or less the opposite of a solitary life. In order for the analogy to hang together well, philosophy : death ought to be a similar relationship to marriage : being alone, and I don't see how it is.”
Yet it IS the point she is making. It is laid out in the article.
“ “I think a lot of our fights boil down to Arnold thinking he’s already arrived at the final condition where he doesn’t need me anymore,” Agnes said, “and me trying to point out to him that he’s not as great as he thinks he is, so that he can see that he actually does still need me.”
“Arnold smiled slightly, his eyes cast down.
““And that actually is a way of understanding how marriage is a preparation for divorce,” Agnes went on. “It’s a preparation for the time when you won’t need another person in order to think.” She said that maybe that would be the title of her book about marriage: “Marriage Is a Preparation for Divorce.” She had written the line down in her notebook.”
"I think a lot of our fights boil down to Arnold thinking he’s already arrived at the final condition where he doesn’t need me anymore,” Agnes said, “and me trying to point out to him that he’s not as great as he thinks he is, so that he can see that he actually does still need me.”
Ouch. The narcissism in that sentence burns the eyes and rattles the brain.
Symmetrical relationship: equal in rights
Asymmetrical relationship: complementary in Nature/nature
Synchrony perchance harmony through reconciliation.
I think the fundamental error this woman has made is that she thinks that marriage is all about her. Her "needs", her gratifications, her pleasure. She doesn't conceive of any reciprocals being due from her to her husband or her children; it's all her, all the time.
The reality, I fear, is that is the mentality of a single person, unattached.
Once you enter into a marriage, you create a web of obligations and duties to others, first, to your spouse and then to any resultant children. If you're not up to that, don't call whatever you're doing in your personal life a "marriage", because it very clearly is not. It's a shallow mockery of such a thing.
Having married, you have responsibilities to others. Having had children within that marriage, you have obligations. Period. You don't get to just sever those at a whim; those children will forever be marked by what their mother did to them, regardless of what they might tell her to her face. She's fundamentally disturbed the foundations that a stable life must have, in order to grow properly. And, why? What did she gain from it? What did anyone gain from it, in that little ongoing tragedy?
Her first husband thinks that he demonstrated wisdom and forbearance by acquiescing to her little childish whims, but the sad reality is, the axe fell on his children's lives, wielded by one of the people they should have been able to implicitly trust, severing those lives at the roots.
Once you've taken part in creating a life, you have obligations. Duties. Responsibilities. You do not get to waive any of those, because you find them onerous and difficult to fulfill. You live up to them, or you show yourself for what you are: A shitty human being.
As a child of whimsical divorce and a faithless POS parent, I feel first for those kids. They're victims here, and the reverberations of this betrayal by their mother will echo down the long corridors of their lives, influencing everything they are, everyone they meet, and their very cores. It's only now in middle age that I look back at that divorce, when I was a pre-schooler, and realize the impact it had on the lives of my sister and I. It was a reasonably amicable divorce, as such things go, mostly because of my mother's unfathomable patience and willingness to serve as a doormat, but... I don't trust people at all easily, and I still feel the echoes of that bastard's infidelities and treasons to his family.
He paid for it in the end, though. I finally had to cut him out of my life entirely, and he pissed off my sister to the point where she did the same. He died alone one day, apparently staring narcissistically into his mirror once again. It may have been two weeks before anyone noticed, and we only found out because they found my sister's address and phone number in his things. End of the day, the only thing about that situation that bothered me at all was that he'd situated things such that his elderly dog (who he'd kept alive in misery far past the point where she should have been let to rest) spent those days or weeks with his body rotting next to her. I felt worse about that than his death, but it in complete consistency with how he led his life: Self-centered and narcissistic to the end. I had no feelings left for the man, and felt far more for the situation he'd left his poor dog in, whose only fault was her unquestioning love and faith in a human being who really deserved neither one.
The heroine of our piece here will be lucky if she ends similarly.
That’s puts a whole new spin on: “prepare for the worst, hope for the best”.
It’s more fatalist than philosophical, if you ask me.
The best part of marriage is being wanted- not necessarily needed.
Or both.
Isn’t that a tad insecure?
Takirks… :0(
This story truly "made my hair hurt" to quote an old Don Imus joke. I suppose the kindest thing I could say is that everyone involved was (I guess) honest and upfront about what was happening. No sneaking around, secret affairs, etc. But jeez, these people are SO deep into their own shit. Poor Ben. The children notwithstanding, if I was in his shoes, I'd have been out of there like a cool breeze.
Agnes strikes me as being "addicted to attention" to borrow a line from the recent Chris Rock special. When she and Arnold finally decided to have an open relationship I thought, Good! Maybe that will lead him to bust out of this toxic stew.
And here -- "...me trying to point out to him that he’s not as great as he thinks he is, so that he can see that he actually does still need me." Gawd. What kind of shrew actually says that?
@farmgirl,
In the end, you are judged by fate and circumstance. You've either lived for yourself, or you've lived for others. The first earns you what my father made for himself, and the second might leave some small legacy behind.
I don't have a lot of patience for people that live their lives the way that he did. Like the so-called "philosopher" of our original discussion point, you will be judged by all around you. When we found out about his death, I don't think I felt a damn thing. He'd already died in my heart decades earlier, and I felt rather more connection with the poor dog he left behind. Fellow victim of the narcissist, you see...
I have no idea how that poor little girl survived. The coroner assured us that she hadn't eaten any of the remains, although we couldn't find any food she might have survived on. She did, apparently, have water. When we did get her to a vet, the vet told us she should have been allowed to go years earlier, and we had to euthanize her the week after rescuing her. She'd had that many health issues, and apparently, the sick bastard had insisted on his vet keeping her alive, saying he couldn't stand the idea of her going first. That poor thing was in constant pain from her ailments. She'd given him at least ten years of love and canine devotion, and that was what he rewarded her with.
Sad thing is, all he would have had to have done for a reconciliation would have been for him to actually reach out to someone. I'd have had the courtesy to do that much, but... He never tried. Too deeply buried in his martyrdom complex, and I think he got rather more pleasure telling people about how poorly (which he manifestly deserved, believe me... Death threats were the least of what my sister had to put up with.) his children treated him in his dotage than he got out of actually having the courtesy to keep any of us still talking to him. He was that kind of person; he adored playing the martyred victim in all things. Lied to us for years about how the divorce had gone down, insisting that it was all my mother's irrational doing. Always insisted that we mustn't believe our mother, because all the bad things she told us about him weren't true.
Fact is, neither she nor my maternal grandmother ever once said a bad thing about him. Not one time that I can remember. It was always left for him to explain, and he blamed her for it all. I never trusted the man, as he always came off as a used-car salesman to me, even as a toddler. I never liked him, never respected him, but I did love him. Mostly because I was supposed to. What limited love I had left for the bastard died the day I went looking online for my mother's divorce decree where we'd been living, which she needed for something or another. Turns out, the rat bastard had married the "nice lady who took me in when your mother threw me out" literally days after the divorce finalized, and that lasted a few months until she figured things out and filed for her own divorce from him. Which we'd never, ever even known about. We knew about the other eight, but not her, and not so soon after, which answered a lot of questions about precisely why my long-suffering mother finally pulled the plug on things.
Bunch of sad-sack soap-opera BS that a decent human being doesn't inflict on people they're taken oath to love and cherish, ya know? I still feel horror at what his final dog went through, but literally nothing at all for him. He murdered that bond with deliberation, as well as malice aforethought.
I suspect that the children of this creature claiming to be a philosopher will no doubt have similar things to say, deeper into their lives.
Takirks- the :0( was for you &your pain.
Always.
@farmgirl,
I appreciate that. The pain? Not really present, any more. That went away somewhere in the 1990s, when I realized that I wasn't really a person in his eyes, merely a projection of his own outsized and diseased imagination. That realization hit hard, then... Years later? Not so much.
Like I said... I had more emotional connection with his dog, who I'd never met before, and felt more angst over what we had to do for her than I felt at his demise. Cleaning out his apartment was a bit of a chore, but there wasn't a hell of a lot of emotional impact from it. It was more like "Well, you died as you lived, buddy... Hope it was good for you."
I think what sets me off about the character the original post is about is that her conduct and worldview are exactly his: "I" is all that matters. Zero sense of connection, obligation, or duty to others. The American culture of today does a terrible job of talking about these things, indicating a deep moral vacancy. I don't think that my father ever heard an inner voice telling him that what he did was wrong, that he should not treat people as he did. It was all self-gratification, all the time, always justified by his martyrdom at the hands of others. And, he never heard a single voice from anywhere else questioning his actions or beliefs, not that he ever listened to. He had a few friends that saw something in him, and they raised the issue with him about what he was doing, but they were either abandoned by him as traitors or ignored. One said that discussing these things with him was like trying to discuss color with a blind person, one that wasn't even aware that there was such a thing as light or vision at all.
I really have no idea how the hell I wound up with such diametrically opposed views from his, but I had them even as a small child. Which may be one reason I never connected with him, and why I always was on edge around him. I am embarrassed to say that when he had finally succeeded in going too far, I felt nothing but a sense of relief that I'd never have to deal with him again, and that I'd more than done my duty by him. I was glad I'd never have to hear his voice, or put up with his games anymore.
Anyone ever curious about how not to conduct yourself with and around your children in a divorce, let me know. I can offer copious advice on how not to wind up dying alone and undiscovered for weeks on your bathroom floor.
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