Open Socrates - Agnes Callard
I found Open Socrates compelling, and deeply frustrating. Callard sets herself up to advance a neo-Socratic ethics, and a way to live more philosophically, more truly, in the mode of Socrates.
Callard argues that we have used the Socratic method as a “sauce” stirred into other conversations and poured over other—more substantive—areas of philosophy. This is wrong, according to Callard. The Athenians didn’t sentence Socrates to death for nothing. He lived life through dangerous example: constantly questioning the world around him and engaging in undiluted inquiry. This, to Callard, is thinking. And it is what she thinks we all should emulate in both philosophy and life.
Callard uses Socrates to detail a ‘hard line intellectualist’ philosophical way of living. Inquiry, she argues, is a two person endeavour—we are incapable of doing it alone. It is the act of engaging in an open conversation with someone you trust, who will push you to question each one of your assumptions and will engage with you for that reason. That is, not to prove they are right but to push you to be right. Callard argues persuasively that thinking is not something we do privately, but something we do publicly with other people.
Open Socrates makes a kind of diagnosis of how we avoid real inquiry. Avoid thinking. There are ‘untimely questions’: What is love? Who am I? Why am I doing any of this? The kind of questions that can lead to existential horror and, so, most people avoid asking them. There are ‘savage commands’: areas of morality and ethics built around bodily and social want. Our ties to other people might, for instance, lead us to pursue vengeance without really understanding why and how we have brought ourselves to the point that we can deeply hurt other people. If we follow our savage commands and avoid the untimely questions we lead a deeply inconsistent (and to Callard, an unethical) life. Only by stopping, philosophising and thinking (with someone else!) can we answer these questions and force ourselves to act in ways that are consistent and ethical.
I find this compelling, and I worry Callard might be right. In Callard’s description of inquiry I found myself thinking about all the ways I fall short of engaging in this kind of conversation, and the magic and clarity I feel with people I can philosophise this way with. And, yet, Callard pushes this a little far. About half way through the book Callard suggests she is not describing Socratic ethics as valid, just as Socratic. This doesn’t really wash. Callard’s belief in the project and in this way of living is inscribed on almost every page of Open Socrates. This book is an act of persuasion, not mere description.
It’s Callard’s believe in her prescription that runs her into the ground, at times. The final 100 pages of Open Socrates are devoted to Callard’s ‘Socratising’ of love, politics, and death. Callard’s commitment to the Socratic ideal drags these pages down. Love becomes the shared act of inquiry between two people. Death becomes something that can only be prepared for through this inquiry. These chapters are beautiful, and moving. Callard strikes me as someone who has a deeply resonant experience of love, and a profound and tragic understanding of death. But I was struck by the feeling that Callard is really describing her ideal of love, and her process of grieving. Callard accurately—I think—tells us that the idea of loving a person ‘for themselves’ is a fiction, or at least a dangerous game. If you love someone for themselves, then you are always open to loving someone more: someone prettier, more intelligent, less chaotic. True love, to Callard, is shared philosophy and the act of engaging in it. Maybe. Or it might be more accurate to describe love as really residing in the relationship between two people. The thing they build outside of each other. For Callard, this seems to be inquiry. I’m not sure that we can meaningfully say that holds for love completely. Love is too individual.
But it’s the chapters on politics where Open Socrates really falls down for me, and they crystallised some of the other subtle reservations I had when making my way through the book. Callard has a convincing attack on how Athenian and contemporary democratic politics is conducted. Certain topics become politicised and then fought over. But fighting is not arguing. Fighting is the attempt not to see the world more clearly, or come to a better policy solution, but aiming to win at the expense of your opponent. Politics as a symbolic battleground that does not lead to clearer, cleaner, thinking.
We then turn to what Socratising can do for our politics. It can unveiling things as political (or social) fictions, and Callard illustrates this by talking about the ‘liberal triad’: freedom of speech, egalitarianism, and the fight for social justice. I’m not sure why Callard chose to focus on these issues but it feels like something between attention grabbing literary relevancy and an act of light trolling. And Callard isn’t convincing in her Socratising of each of these points. Callard suggests that true equality is the act of treating one another with respect, that is, accepting that another person has a claim to truth and taking that seriously. Callard suggests that this will satisfy our deep human need to be both on equal footing with other people, and to feel elevated or superior ourselves. The act of philosophising makes us all more elevated, and it gives us the freedom to really speak. This metaphor works on a surface level, but Callard has very little to say about real world equality, its violations and any political solutions to inequality that may have a Socratic basis. I agree that we would all be more equal if we were able to treat each other in the way Callard describes. But the politics of equality are the reasons why people don’t treat each other that way, and often treat each other in substantially worse ways. It feels like a dodge from Callard, and the chapter would have been much more effective if she had chosen less zeitgeisty examples to illustrate her take on Socratic politics.
The thinness of Callard’s political solutions make clear the other weaknesses of her argument. For instance, on page 254 she takes a paragraph length swerve into the politics of pronouns:
the dispute about gender is not conducted as a dispute about gender. Instead, it is transposed onto a variety of battlegrounds, from pronouns to bathrooms to inclusion criteria for women’s sports.
Okay, so? Why and by whom is this dispute being transposed? What is the political project that can be identified by the fact that a dispute about gender is suddenly, splashily, destructively, being conducted over bathrooms and sports particularly. For an otherwise intellectually ambitious book, this paragraph in particular was lazy and ill thought out.
And, then, there is the self-admitted intellectualism that gets in the way of Callard’s argument throughout. Callard opens the book talking about the danger of living ‘fifteen minutes at a time’. The danger of having unexamined commitments and things you have to do. Her examples include work, study, family, political activism and community involvement.
Between the things you need to do and the things you like to do, your days are packed with activity. If you keep tacking one fifteen-minute period onto another, eventually it adds up to a life.
Of course, we should stop to think about our lives and our choices. But it’s not clear to me that spending your life engaged in Socratic inquiry is substantively better, more thoughtful or more good for your life than it would be to live through a series of fifteen minute chunks of political activism, or community involvement. Indeed, political activism and community involvement could come under the types of command that Callard suggests give us unthinking answers—the kinship command, she calls it. But if an impulse towards kinship leads to unexamined answers, is there not also a command driving Callard, in her commitment to two-person dialogue and Socratic inquiry? That the commitment is to one singular person, and to oneself via the need to think doesn’t make it any less uncritical at times. In fact, by putting so much emphasis on the process of this kind of inquiry Callard does herself a disservice. I don’t think Callard does the work to convince the reader that Socratic inquiry is better, more truthful, or more thoughtful, than the knowledge generation and thinking groups of political activists can do together. And the latter will often be more socially impactful.
And people do live their lives in fifteen minute chunks, unavoidably so. Work, family, community are not simple obligations. They are important: developing and maintaining ties, creating something meaningful, improving the world around you add up to a life well lived and, in an ideal case, suitably thought through. Ring your parents! Focus on your career! Cook your partner dinner! Callard is right that we all need more time to stop and inquire together, to engage in honest communication that sharpens our thinking. But this cannot be the way we all live, all of the time. And in her enthusiasm for Socrates and Socratic reasoning Callard comes close to suggesting it could and should be this way. Again, I think this is coming from how Callard would like to live her life, but Open Socrates could do with more reckoning of the limitations of this kind of lifestyle, and who it might apply to. If she were to really grapple with what ‘intellectualism’ means in this context (all the ways in which it is a social and literary concept) then I think this book would feel deeper, and more reasoned. Callard avoids the ‘philosopher king’ problem identified by Plato—to live philosophically one needs the conditions to avoid obligations. Fundamentally to have the time to do so. So few of us have that resource.
Open Socrates does not have much to say about the limited opportunities in our lives for real Socratic dialogue. Thinking, to Callard, rests on being open to refutation and on the generosity of an interlocutor to engage in a philosophical journey. This kind of conversation is rewarding among friends and colleagues, but surely it would have the most personal and political impact when undertaken between strangers or those with radically different politics. ‘What is justice?’ can be fruitfully mined by two likeminded academics in Socratic conversation; ‘what is justice?’ would be more powerfully examined by two people who come with different backstories, different baggage and different politics. How many people can extend the generosity needed to even start this Socratic thinking to those with whom they know they disagree? And, to use Callard’s gender example, how can you begin to have a Socratic conversation with someone who believes that your experience of the world amounts to sin when you yourself feel that sin as a fundamental part of you. Callard missed an opportunity to detail how you might have these conversations, and the book would have been stronger if Callard was able to address the politics behind our society’s inability to engage with each other. Callard scates past several layers of problem to get to Socratic dialogue as a solution.
This was an intellectually compelling piece of work, and I will be taking Callard’s broad thesis with me. In a sense, I shouldn’t complain too much. I have, again and again, been frustrated with modern academic philosophy’s inability to ask real questions about real lives. For all my frustrations with Open Socrates it is a work that takes these questions—and philosophy’s potential to answer them—seriously. The prose is sparky, vibrant and jargon-free. Given the ground Callard covers, that is an achievement in itself. But for all her ambitious work in Open Socrates I left wishing that Callard had been a bit braver and broader in her discussion.