In the acknowledgements at the end of her new book, Open Socrates, the philosopher Agnes Callard writes: “Socrates compares writing down one’s ideas to planting seeds in barren soil from which nothing can grow: pointless.”
“Socrates says in a couple of places in late dialogues: thinking is like having a conversation with yourself,” Callard told me when we met at her hotel in London’s Marylebone. “Fundamentally there’s conversation, and then thinking is an imitation of that. And we can get some way through that imitation.” Writing, too, is an (ultimately inadequate) imitation of conversation.
It is idiosyncratic to acknowledge, at the very end of a book, that you believe it to be such a limited medium. But Callard is an idiosyncratic thinker. She began her answer to my first question – about why she chose to be a public philosopher – with the caveat that “whenever you explain yourself, you’re just giving a theory among many theories”. She described history as her “Achilles’ heel” because it “is not in the right order, it’s just in the order that things happened” – perhaps the logical order to most. Yet she is frustrated that “it’s not in the order of importance or in the logical order of ideas”.
Callard is an idiosyncratic dresser, too: the day of our interview she wore a technicolour jumpsuit, trippily striped boots, oversized cobalt-framed glasses, and a beaded bracelet that spelled out “Socrates”. We met in an unexceptional meeting room in the basement of her hotel, but had we spoken at her office at the University of Chicago, we would have been surrounded by colour, her preferred interior aesthetic seemingly being the elimination of all that is plain and white.
Open Socrates is Callard’s second book, but she is perhaps better known for her popular essays on topics such as parenting, infidelity and why travel is a very poor means of self-discovery, and for being the subject of a 2023 New Yorker profile. In it, the philosopher allowed a considerable level of access to her private life, detailing how she fell in love with, married and had a baby with one of her students, divorcing her first husband and the father of her two eldest children in the process. Eventually, they all moved in together, and Callard and her second husband opened up their marriage.
When I asked why she had agreed to do the profile, Callard posed a secondary question: “Why didn’t I, when [the journalist, Rachel Aviv] came to questions about my personal life, say: ‘I won’t answer those things?’ One part of the answer is the questions were interesting, so I was interested to hear what I was going to say. I think that I am probably less inclined to shield my personal life from my interlocutors: if that’s what they want to talk about then there’s probably something interesting there, something worth investigating.”
This approach to inquiry is at the heart of the Socratic method. We tend to consider thought a private, insular activity, but, Callard writes, Socrates found that “the key to getting unstuck” is to relocate thought “from its usual home inside one person’s head into the shared space of the conversation that passes between two people”. Together, we can answer questions that we could never examine on our own. To Socrates, there was no shame in being wrong, because being wrong leads to the discovery of what is right. “What kind of person am I?” he asks in Plato’s Gorgias. “One of those who would be pleased to be refuted if I say anything untrue, and who would be pleased to refute anyone who says anything untrue.”
“One part of my willingness to answer Rachel’s questions [for the New Yorker],” Callard told me, “is that if you think as I think, that you really can’t think by yourself, then whenever anyone asks you a question, that’s an opportunity… Socrates gets that: he gets that we can’t really think by ourselves, and that we’re thrown on other people of intellectual necessity.”
Agnes Callard was born in 1976 in Budapest, Hungary, where she lived until the age of five, after which the family moved to Rome and then New York. Her mother was a haematologist; her father studied law in Hungary but in America worked as a carpet salesman. Callard considers her love for school “an early manifestation of my love for philosophy”; she once had a German teacher who called her frage frau, “question lady”, because she asked so many. Callard was diagnosed with autism in her thirties, but has not yet fully discerned what contribution the condition might have made to her philosophy: “When you’re at the beginning of thinking about something, all you can produce for other people is clichés, and so I feel like when I try to talk about it… I’m not contributing much.”
She completed her PhD in philosophy at Berkeley, California, and is now an associate professor at the University of Chicago, where she leads the undergraduate programme. It was this, she theorises, that began her interest in public philosophy, as it led her to consider how the department could appeal to students for whom it was not their major. Callard refuted my suggestion that public philosophy is inherently controversial because it requires the philosopher to openly pose contentious questions, on the grounds that “almost all speech right now is inherently controversial, and so it might not be that peculiar to philosophy”.
In Open Socrates, Callard identifies the “political fictions” of our age as being the “liberalism triad” of freedom of speech, egalitarianism, and the fight for social justice. It is not that these are not genuine ideals to be aimed for, but that the systems we have designed to achieve them are insufficient. Callard considers free speech to be that which is truly inquisitive, and none of the structures by which we distribute and enshrine it – such as the First Amendment – truly render it free. Free speech is “an intellectual ideal, and we’ve misconceived it as being a political ideal, about like restrictions we place on one another”. Our work towards equality is flawed because “we’ve failed to reconcile our love of equality with our love of status”.
The fight against injustice is more enlightened than it once was: today, we understand that killing a person – a Russian soldier, for instance – does not kill the idea (such as Ukraine isn’t a sovereign country) we are really taking aim at. “That’s a big human achievement, because through a lot of human history, people were, like: fighting wars is how you, like, fight for ideas.” But Callard believes that when, “instead of killing someone, what you’re doing is humiliating your political opponent or denying them a platform, that’s the same thing. It’s just a little bit of a gentler stab, but you haven’t achieved anything idea-wise in lowering the status of your opponents.”
Protest, too, can fail in its attempt to correct injustice. Callard thinks about protest as “a kind of complaint”, and “agree[s] with Simone Weil that the fundamental form of thought inside of a complaint is, ‘Why am I being hurt?’ But you could pose that in a couple of different ways. One way you could do it is… ‘I’ve decided ahead of time that there’s no good reason, and you’re my enemy. And what we’re going do is say this as loud as possible to cause you certain kinds of pain, so that we then get certain kinds of benefits.’ What you’ve done, if you see it that way, is you’ve sapped the protest of its potential philosophical import, because the only way to really ask why you’re being hurt is [to be] open to an answer.” In failing to see protest as a dialogue, rather than a one-sided attempt to air grievances, Callard believes, the possibility of progress is lost.
In Open Socrates Callard defines politicised speech as when a disagreement becomes not an attempt between two people to discover together what is right, but “a zero-sum context where if one party wins, the other loses”: an observer who is not invested in the argument might conclude that “the debaters are not really talking about what they claim they are talking about”. Does she think discourse can survive the culture wars?
The problem, Callard believes, is that often we’re having conversations in the wrong medium. She has been reading about sociolinguistics and “what happens mechanically in a conversation”. For instance, she points out that I respond to her in 0.2 seconds; “if you wait longer… that’s an awkward pause”. But this is less time than it takes for my brain to process the signal that comes at the end of a sentence, which means I am predicting when Callard will stop speaking. Humans are “incredibly sophisticated in how we manage conversational signals and how we navigate tensions inside of a conversation – like, you were having to navigate the tension: do I ask her about autism?”
But when we move conversations into writing, all that vital information is stripped away. “I think it’s a deep, deep problem about Twitter. If you want to know my current theory [about] why things go wrong, [it] is just we don’t understand each other; we’re literally not following what other people are saying. Because human beings are not that good at communicating using written text. We are, in every way, trained to communicate using spoken language… In written text… people immediately jump to bad motives and hostility.”
Still, Callard believes the culture wars can be positive in that they “manifest the fact that stuff matters to us and we want to engage with other people on topics that we care about.” Crucially, she thinks we need to “unearth the question that’s at the heart of a dispute and address it”.
The penultimate chapter of Open Socrates is about love. An earlier draft did not touch on the subject, but Callard was prompted by the response to the New Yorker profile to consider it more deeply. In the book, she portrays romantic love as an aspirational, intellectual pursuit: meeting a partner is not the end goal, but the beginning of a collaboration through which you prompt and encourage each other towards further discovery. The extent to which each couple pushes this aspiration is, Callard told me, so personal that it is impossible to say what exactly we should be aiming for. “The interesting thing about romance is: how big is the project? What kind of or how much perfection are you aspiring to with your partner? I think that is going to be particular to [each] relationship.”
That question – “How big is the size of the project?” – sometimes causes conflict within Callard’s marriage. She is Socratic; her second husband is Aristotelian. The difference is that “Socrates thinks: aspire forever, out to infinity – not really infinity, until knowledge, but it’s going to be more than one lifetime. Aristotle thinks: aspire until you’re around 35 or something, and then enough is enough; now it’s time to take the character that you have and… exercise it.” Callard often finds herself thinking “we need to be doing more aspiring; we shouldn’t be happy where we are. My husband’s more, like, the point of life is… to be happy, to exercise the knowledge and wisdom that you have, and to enjoy [it].” Though other, non-philosopher couples might not put it in such terms – Socratic vs Aristotelian – she believes the divide between wanting more and being content with what we have is common in relationships.
In Open Socrates, she mounts an argument that “Socratic love is radically non-exclusive”. Socrates does not differentiate between eros – romantic love – and philia – friendship love. “In that respect, Socrates isn’t so different from us. In this day and age, most people would say that they are friends with their spouse.” Socratic polyamory, she writes, “doesn’t distinguish between having many lovers, and having many friends.” The “proper activity” for lovers is not sex but philosophy. This seems a rather sexless idea of polyamory?
“In the Phaedrus, [Socrates] describes the best relationship as just philosophical, but [in] the second best one, there’s sex,” Callard said. He allows for “some amount of deference to the savage commands of our body”, but he believes that “sometimes the desire for sex is a manifestation of wanting something more, something that sex couldn’t possibly give you… I think that Socrates wants us to reflect on the oddity of our sexual practices and the kind of hopes we pin on sex, and the way it seems like larger than the activity itself.” But this “isn’t the same thing as saying you should never have sex”.
The study of Socrates is well-suited to public philosophy because it makes clear the stakes of philosophical thinking to the average life: “If I think about the problems I have in my own life, they don’t look like trolley problems,” she said, referring to the thought experiments that explore the ethical dilemma of whether to sacrifice one life to save many others. Instead, the “practical upshots” of Socrates are: “How do you conduct your romance? How do you think about your own death? How do you be political? These are real problems that show up for me all the time that I need help thinking through in a concrete way.”
What, for those who are not willing to open their relationship in the pursuit of a higher intellectual plane, is the practical application of Socrates’ beliefs about love? The answer brings us back to the quality of our conversations. “Most of what you’re going to do with your partner over the course of your life is talk to them,” said Agnes Callard. “And so, yes, pick someone you can have good sex with, but pick someone you can talk to… I think when we think things are going well, it’s because we’re talking well.”
[See also: How we misread The Great Gatsby]
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