Your Own Intellectual Jesus

On Agnes Callard's ‘Open Socrates’

Giorgio de Chirico, The Prodigal Son, 1922, Tempera on canvas

“When we are no longer willing to die for the truth, there will be no truth anymore,” conservative German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk observed gloomily during a conversation with Slovenian philosopher-provocateur Slavoj Žižek in 2023, suggesting we might be living through the end of an era inaugurated by Socrates, “the first martyr for the European concept of truth.” Agnes Callard’s new book Open Socrates, which claims to make the case for a philosophical life, could not be more timely. It is more than an accessible introduction to the origins of Western philosophy, with some prompts for self-reflection. It can perhaps be best described as a work of apologetics, with Socrates cast as an intellectual Jesus. I do not mean this dismissively: If Callard’s proselytizing does not quite reach the level of G. K. Chesterton’s, it’s easily on par with that of C. S. Lewis.

Callard was born in 1976 to a Jewish family in Budapest, where she lived until age 5, before moving to America. Her doctoral advisor was Samuel Scheffler, whose advisor had been Thomas Nagel, who in turn had studied under John Rawls. Small world, philosophy. Callard would like to expand it. She insists that by imitating Socrates, we can solve what she calls the “Tolstoy problem” — it appears that half of philosophy consists of coming up with catchy concepts. Despite his immense artistic achievements, Tolstoy writes in his book A Confession that the more he considered questions on the meaning of life, the more despondent he became. Better not to ask these questions, he concludes, and to put one’s faith in God. Not so fast, Callard argues. The problem, she tells us, isn’t philosophy — the problem is that Tolstoy was a bad philosopher.

Callard calls the kinds of questions that Tolstoy warned us to avoid “untimely questions,” which “are marked by the fact that we need answers to them before we are prepared to ask them.” As a result, we waver between the default answers provided by “the savage commands of one’s body, or one’s group.” She describes utilitarianism as an attempt to tame the commands of the body, Kantianism as a response to those of the group, and Aristotelianism as a search for a harmony between the two. In their stead, Callard proposes “Socratic intellectualism,” a method of inquiry rather than a set of prefigured doctrines. Its ethos is captured by the motto “refute or be refuted.” All this refutation, she promises, can stabilize our answers. We can stop wavering.

One might wonder why, in the more than two millennia that people have been reading Plato’s Socratic dialogues, this method never seems to stick. Callard admits that this is due to a “strong and deep aversion to intellectualism,” which she attributes to our need to already know and to avoid the anxiety that comes with truly open-ended inquiry. Unless you happen to have a strong and deep aversion to intellectualism, you are likely to enjoy Callard’s explanation of the Socratic method through a discussion of three philosophical paradoxes. Callard quotes generously from Plato’s works and seamlessly weaves philosophical commentary with personal anecdotes. Her use of metaphor is precise: “Learning philosophy is less like filling a void and more like untying a knot. Philosophy begins not in ignorance, not in wonder, but in error.”

The impatient reader might be tempted to rush to the final section of the book, which promises to deliver “Socratic Answers” in the domains of politics, love, and death. The answer in each case, it seems, is to intellectualize our everyday concerns away. Callard favorably contrasts Socrates’ approach with the reductionist explanations offered by science, such as the claim that thoughts are “really nothing but” electric signals: “The Socratizing move seeks out the coherent reality behind the incoherent imitation of the reality that shows up in our everyday lives, and it often reveals that what was going on in everyday life was something very different from what it had appeared to be, for example: war is really a form of conversation.”

When Socrates says that knowledge is identical to virtue, he is claiming that rational inquiry into the truth is the highest end of human life, and that everything else is but a pale or perverted imitation of that end. Callard describes “politicization” as “the displacement of a disagreement from the context of argumentation into a zero-sum context where if one party wins, the other loses.” Callard is not simply asking us to be more reasonable in our political demands. Her claim is that if we were all properly oriented towards the truth, we would no longer be concerned with whether we win or lose an argument. But this presupposes a Zen-like detachment from political outcomes which is hard to expect from people whose real lives are affected by these arguments. “Elections have consequences,”as President Barack Obama once said. And reason is not the only way to win an argument — a gun to the head can be pretty persuasive.

The untimely, already-answered question that haunts Open Socrates is the obvious one: What if all this philosophizing is for naught? It is hardly surprising that a professional philosopher would write a book extolling the virtues of a philosophical life. Callard decided at age 21 that she wanted to be Socrates, and she has successfully imitated him ever since. But is she really in a position to evaluate whether this path is right for everyone? In one of the book’s most poignant anecdotes, Socrates himself seems to waver in the final hours of his life when he uncharacteristically tries his hand at writing poetry. He quickly realizes the futility of the exercise. Even if philosophy turns out to be just one art among many, offering but one image of the truth, he has already devoted his life to it. So, he spends his final moments doing what he likes doing best: having an argument. In a similar fashion, Callard writes about dealing with her unexpectedly profound grief at the death of a fellow philosopher by creating a new philosophical concept.

The stubbornness of Socrates’ intellectualism is especially apparent in his insistence that “the proper activity for lovers to engage in is philosophy.” We are told to admire Socrates’ refusal to sully the purity of intellectual love with its carnal manifestations, even in light of Alcibiades’ complaint in the Symposium that Socrates’ rejection left him feeling “deeply humiliated.” Socrates comes across as either callous or completely oblivious to social cues, and perhaps the whole of Western philosophy can be termed “conversations on the spectrum.” His aloofness extends to his own family: “When it comes to the fate of his children after he dies, Socrates seems to be concerned primarily that they have opportunities to be refuted.”

Since people differ in their ability to engage in abstract thinking, an equation of virtue with knowledge can easily give way to a form of intellectual supremacy, which holds that a certain class of intellectual has a right to rule over everyone else, as in Plato’s Republic. In her 1978 book Beast and Man, British philosopher Mary Midgley argued that the outsized importance philosophers since Socrates have placed on reason — as opposed to the many other aspects of our nature that we share with other animals — has not only been used as a justification for the mistreatment of those other animals, but has also made it impossible for us to gain an accurate understanding of ourselves. Philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, a lifelong friend of Midgley, makes a similar argument in her essay “The Idea of Perfection,” first delivered as a lecture in 1962. She accuses Western moral philosophy of failing to reckon with “the fact that an unexamined life can be virtuous and the fact that love is a central concept in morals,” and insists that “it must be possible to do justice to both Socrates and the virtuous peasant.” For Murdoch, as for Midgley, the proper object of love is the messy individual — not some rational ideal. Human beings are more than truth-seeking algorithms.

In arguing that rational argumentation can solve the Tolstoy problem, Callard downplays the supernatural aspects of Socrates’ worldview. She acknowledges his beliefs in reincarnation and the immortality of the soul but considers these inessential to his central arguments, claiming that with a few extra steps, one can reach the same conclusions without such beliefs. Also notably absent is Socrates’ daimonion, a divine inner voice that he believed prevented him from making the wrong decisions. Perhaps such an inner refuter can be cultivated simply by having enough rational arguments with others, but spiritual traditions East and West have emphasized the need for inner work — some form of prayer or mediation to learn to distinguish the quiet voice of conscience amid the clamor of ideas in our heads. There is a time to refute, and there is a time to be silent.

Open Socrates offered me live intellectual company, but it left me unconverted. No one can deny that Socrates had a major impact on Western thought, and consequently on the course of human history. But I’m not sure I want, or should want, to be Socrates. Maybe I identify more with Alcibiades. Or with Aristophanes. After all, we can’t all be Socrates — that wouldn’t make for much of a dialogue.

Mary Jane Eyre writes about Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, and gay stuff at The Extremely Difficult Realisation. He lives in London.