Alexander Stern at The Hedgehog Review:
In a column for The Point magazine, Agnes Callard, a philosopher and professor at the University of Chicago, comes out against advice. She makes her case using an anecdote involving the novelist Margaret Atwood. Asked about her advice for a group of aspiring writers, Atwood is stumped and ends up offering little more than bromides encouraging them to write every day and try not to be inhibited. Callard excuses Atwood’s banality, blaming it on the fundamental incoherence of the thing she was asked to produce.
Advice, for Callard, occupies nebulous terrain between what she terms “instructions” and “coaching.” “You give someone instructions,” she writes, “as to how to achieve a goal that is itself instrumental to some…further goal,” whereas “coaching…effects in someone a transformative orientation towards something of intrinsic value: an athletic or intellectual or even social triumph.” The problem with advice, according to Callard, is that it tries to reduce and condense the time-intensive, personal work of coaching into instructions:
The young person is not approaching Atwood for instructions on how to operate Microsoft Word, nor is she making the unreasonable demand that Atwood become her writing coach. She wants the kind of value she would get from the second, but she wants it given to her in the manner of the first. But there is no there there.
Atwood, Callard writes, might tell a story about her own development as an author, but those particulars would not amount to anything like universal wisdom a young writer could integrate into her own life.
More here.
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