A place where knowledge is ours for the taking.

Open Socrates by Agnes Callard

Sitting in his prison cell, hours before his death, Socrates doubted himself. Had he been wrong to give his life to philosophy?

This is not the usual emphasis given to Socrates’ final hours, but Agnes Callard, in her new book Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, draws attention to a small but fascinating detail about Socrates’ last days. He had started writing poetry.

For years, Socrates had argued against the poets. They were ignorant, and worse, they didn’t know they were ignorant. Unlike philosophy, poetry was not a way to find true knowledge. It was an impediment to knowledge. For years, too, Socrates had refused to write anything down.

Now he wrote verses. Just before he died, the great philosopher had an uncharacteristically dark night of the soul.

It is admirably typical of Callard to notice and to care about these details. She is a lovingly close reader of the Socratic dialogues, a dedicated explorer of their meanings. This attentiveness not merely to propositions, but to personal details, makes her an enjoyable philosopher.

Noticing this little biographical detail opens up a whole line of inquiry for Callard about how philosophy can prepare us to die. Contrasting the poetry of Larkin and Keats, she distinguishes between Fear of Missing Out and Fear of Never Arriving.

This is the difference between worrying that you may not experience some pleasure of living and worrying that you will not achieve some goal of accomplishment. FOMO means you might miss the party; FONA means you might not get your work done.

Do we worry about death simply because we won’t be here to enjoy life, or because it will come before we have done our work?

The Fear of Not Arriving stifles us. It stuns us into inactivity. It is the anti-philosophy. What Socrates exhorts us to do instead is to quest—, to quest for knowledge. As he says in the Meno,

We will be better men, braver and less idle, if we believe that one must search for the things one does not know, rather than if we believe that it is not possible to find out what we do not know and that we must not look for it.

This is what scared Socrates in his cell, Callard surmises, not the Fear Of Missing Out, but the doubts that he would be able to continue his work of inquiry. The poet can dispel their fears by writing great poems.

The philosopher cannot so easily work away the overhanging night. The philosopher faces the perpetual uncertainty of inquiry.

The peculiar mode of Socratic inquiry is to ask what Callard calls untimely questions. These are questions we cannot answer disinterestedly. Faced with the question “what is a good person” or “what is a good parent”, we are unable to stop being people or parents. We are already living our answers, and we cannot put those aside as we talk about the subject. We are compromised.

This matters because our lives are based around such ideas. We act towards what we think is good. We spend our lives making choices about what matters. To be confronted with hard philosophical questions about what matters is therefore an untimely—and potentially unnerving—interruption to living.

Callard herself has been such an interruption for many people. Like Socrates, the confluence of the biographical and the philosophical is what makes her work so interesting.

And so challenging.

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In 2023, Agnes Callard’s marriage went viral. She lives with both her husband (an Aristotle professor) and her ex-husband (a Descartes professor). A New Yorker profile of this situation led to a mass of outrage online. At an event at UnHerd for the launch of Open Socrates last week, many of the interviewer’s questions were about these living arrangements.

As you might expect at UnHerd, these questions were more interested in the culture wars. In a reverse alchemy, philosophy was degraded into politics. But Callard kept responding like a philosopher. That is what makes this discussion so interesting.

What was so challenging and unnerving to people about Callard’s life is that it cannot be moralised. This is not because unconventional living arrangements are now conventional, but because her life is moral:—that is, it is philosophical.

The outrage directed at Callard was surely because she is doing what everyone claims to want. She is living by her own philosophy. But she is doing what fewer are interested in—, the hard work of constant inquiry to make sure that her philosophy is not only clear, but correct.

Worst of all for the haters, she is straightforwardly content with the way she lives. Not necessarily with all the daily details (how would we know?) but with the fact that she lives philosophically.

She does not philosophise at the university and live “normally” outside it. She is always working to spell away that distinction, and in doing so publicly has become a gadfly. No wonder she has been the cause of outrage.

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This tension, between seeing Callard’s life in “normal” terms versus philosophical terms, was present in every paragraph of that New Yorker article. And it is now the basis of Open Socrates. Several of the book’s ideas are discussed in the profile.

Reading Open Socrates is not going to give anyone an easy way to respond to the personal aspects of Callard’s life. She is almost absent from this book (though she is very present, quite movingly, in the chapter about death, which I have now read twice). We are used to Callard making philosophy out of her life. In this book she has gone the other way. As with J.S. Mill and Harriet Taylor the drama of the life has become compelling philosophy.

The question so many philosophers fail to answer is how their systems are actually to be lived. High ideals often make lousy life plans. Hence the oddity that many, if not most, philosophers live much less philosophically outside of the university than they aspire to do in their work.

Galen Strawson once claimed that studying philosophy for many years changed you in ways similar to meditation. Some philosophers, especially perhaps the Benthamites, change particular dimensions of their lives very strictly. Ethicists are no more ethical than the rest of us. As Leonato says in Much Ado, “there was never yet philosopher/ That could endure the toothache patiently.”

It is hard to sustain the idea that philosophy changes philosophers as much as it should.

Yet that was the original idea! In his review of Grote’s history of ancient Greece, Mill wrote that Plato had stood above Athenian society, looking down on it, and demanding nothing less than a total renovation of the mind. The great philosopher was a standing rebuke to the conventions of his age, and ought to become so again, thought Mill. He wanted a new Plato for his times.¹ (In many ways, of course, Mill was the Plato of his times.)

Callard offers an alternative demand, an alternative ethos. Not the looking down of Plato, but the equal dialogue of Socrates.

Mill’s Plato embodies one idea of the canon. In Harold Bloom’s phrase: the image of the canon is of the individual at thought. Callard, interpreting Socrates, says there is no such thing. Individuals do not think. Thinking is done with another person. Thinking is dialogue. The renovation of the mind must be found in discussion.

Like Callard, I am not a Platonist, but a Socratist. (Oh! the luxury of mediocrity! to think that I can pick between genius!) That is, I care for the method of Socrates above the ideas of Plato. Of course, we read Plato to know the Forms, the Cave, the Ship, the ascent towards an ideal of beauty away from the particulars of the individual attraction, and so on.

But what we truly learn is how to philosophise. And for Callard, that is how to live. She writes:

…there is a thought you are avoiding your whole life, namely, the thought that your life may be unjustified, and when you confront it, your life unravels.

We can only face this, she claims, with another person.

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I had such an intense experience reading this book. Perhaps that is because Socrates was such a viewquake for me when I was young. I found his arguments in the Meno absurd then, as I do now, but who can read the Apology when they are young without feeling the deepest offence on behalf of Socrates?

But I think the intensity really came from Callard’s thinking.²

The authentic inquiry for knowledge remains one of our highest ideals, and the scarcity of this behaviour is often lamented in modern society. We will never come to practise this way of thinking while we are obsessed with the now, with the political, with the culture wars. We must become concerned with FONA not FOMO.

Alas, I am not holding out much hope that there will be a bestselling book called “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck About Anything Other Than The True and the Good”.

But there is surely an audience waiting for Callard.

The idea that there is no “conflict of interest” between two people in a discussion—that it is just as good for you to be refuted as to refute—is not an easy one for many to practise. But Callard argues persuasively that true conversation is an inquiry to the truth, so we should be pleased to find ourselves wrong.

The idea that philosophy aims to elevate the world is unintuitive—we love “nothing but” explanations. Opera is nothing but posturing. Education is nothing but signalling. We are awash with theorists: everything is power; all desire is a desire for being; everything is sex. We admire these ideas so much.

But Callard argues that Socratic dialogue goes the other way. We should look for the ways in which things can be elevated, not denigrated. In literary terms, this is a call for the romance temperament against the tragic temperament, comedy above irony, anastrophe above catastrophe.

What is most exciting, and where I think Callard is right, is her idea that the Socratic method can be a fourth ethical system. We have virtue ethics (cultivate your temperament to become a good person), deontology (follow the rules, even when it’s hard), and utilitarianism (outcomes matter most, the ends can justify the means). Now Callard offers this alternative.

This new ethical system says that we don’t know how to be good, but we can know through inquiry (the particular sort of inquiry described above). “Arguing about how one should live is real life… inquiry is the best thing one can do with one’s life, given that one does not know how to lead it.”

If you want to be a good person, you need to have intellectual conversations. You need to find a Socratic companion who will challenge you with those untimely questions you are walking around assuming the answer to.

Where I depart from Callard is in thinking this is exclusively, or dominantly, true. In an essay for UnHerd, Callard distinguishes between the philosophical life and the essayistic life.

The difference between a philosophical life and an essayistic one is that the former aims at knowledge, while the latter aims at novelty. The characteristic positive response to an essay is: “I hadn’t thought about it that way before”; the essayist’s chief enemy is boredom.

I think it is more true to say that the philosophical and essayistic life aim at different truths. Essayists are concerned with the close truths of daily life, but they often write and think philosophically. Are Montaigne, Addison, and Johnson merely interested in surprise? Perhaps the modern journalistic essay is guilty of Callard’s charge, but the long history of the essay is closer to a form of philosophy, an intellectual conversation conducted on paper.

William James once wrote that all philosophy is temperament. That’s not exclusively true either, but it’s more true than most of us want it to be. As (authentically inquiring) essayists and philosophers, we can work towards realising when we are being temperamental and when philosophical. Isn’t this what Shakespeare and the novelists were about? Isn’t this Tolstoy’s concern?

We are not going to discover that one of the ethical systems is right and the others wrong. The world is too incorrigibly plural for that. We need an integrated view. Callard’s Socratic methods are an important part of how we can achieve that.

What we all need is someone like her sadly deceased friend Steve.

He made the nothing and nowhere dreamworld of the “life of the mind” into what felt like a real place you could actually be in. It’s not that you suddenly had all the answers, or any of the answers, really, but with Steve you felt you could find them—he filled you with energy and courage and seriousness, with the spirit of “We are in a place designed to be explored, a place where knowledge is ours for the taking.”

Reading Open Socrates is one good way to have your own Steve. Not in person, but in the theatre of your mind. It might prompt you to conduct some of your conversations differently. Let it do so.

1

“He judged them from the superior elevation of a great moral and social reformer: from that height he looked down contemptuously enough, not on them alone, but on statesmen, orators, artists—on the whole practical life of the period, and all its institutions, popular, oligarchical, or despotic; demanding a reconstitution of society from its foundations, and a complete renovation of the human mind.”

2. (I was also fortunate enough to go to one talk and one dinner with her, so I had more access to the more truly Socratic version of this book, which is perhaps, on its own terms, the best, or maybe, only way to read it?)