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April 8, 2025
Agnes Callard and the politics of public philosophy.
In her new guide, Callard makes the case that we should always all stay extra philosophically however the place does politics slot in?
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Illustration by Liam Eisenberg.
This text seems within the Might 2025 challenge.
Agnes Callard’s Open Socrates is like many works of philosophy: It’s addressed to a sure form of skeptic. Most philosophical works are addressed to skeptics, however they are typically philosophical skeptics—the metaphysician who doesn’t discover arguments for the existence of the exterior world convincing, the thinker of information who isn’t fairly positive our hunches rely as “information,” the ethical thinker who hears speak of “normativity” and might’t shake the psychological picture of a cop barking orders in the end backed by violence slightly than deep ethical reality. These skeptics are, at backside, in on it: They’re moved and movable by philosophical argument, or so we think about.
Callard’s guide is addressed to a unique form of skeptic: the one skeptical of the philosophical life. As she writes within the introduction, even educational philosophers typically separate the remainder of their very own lives from their philosophical inquiry and provides anodyne and cold justifications, corresponding to the event of “vital considering abilities,” when pressed concerning the self-discipline’s worth. This evasion quantities to the conviction for many people that we’re already mental sufficient about how we stay our lives and that we shouldn’t “overdo it” in terms of residing reflectively. Callard desires to make the case for taking a unique path, for the examined life: a lifetime of braveness and curiosity that’s modeled, she argues, after Socrates and his method to relentless questioning and open-ended philosophical conversations.
On the entire, I discover myself conflicted concerning the case that Callard makes for the examined life. As a thinker who aspires to one thing I’d readily describe as residing philosophically, I’m greater than sympathetic to the guide’s total challenge. In an period when each AI chatbots and garden-variety plagiarism threaten to exchange studying and instruction, a guide advising individuals to get snug with considering for themselves is a genuinely well timed contribution, particularly for individuals who are much less fixated on philosophy—even on the off probability that ChatGPT or DeepSeek will present an acceptable abstract of Open Socrates’ contents. However Callard doesn’t merely intention to persuade us that we should always stay philosophically on the whole. She insists that we embrace the Socratic mannequin for doing so: that we confront even probably the most intimate features of our days, corresponding to our romantic lives and our eventual deaths, with the identical unsparing examination that Socrates subjected his dialog companions to.
On this approach, Open Socrates largely delivers on its first promise: It evokes us to stay extra philosophically; it pushes us to consider the best way to stay a life outlined by precise rules that we reflectively endorse and never merely probably the most expedient rationalizations that happen to us in any given scenario. However Callard undermines this useful level by describing the examined life and the concepts it would produce strictly by way of conversational roles, underemphasizing the social roles and political hierarchies that decide who we’re and permit us to have open-ended philosophical conversations within the first place.
Callard begins Open Socrates not with Socrates himself however with a motive we would want him: what she calls the Tolstoy Drawback. Every single day, we’re confronted with a selection: both to consider and justify all the pieces that we do or to easily abandon all of that considering and go about our lives. Typically, Callard argues, we accept a false sense of urgency—“I ‘should’ go to the shop, I ‘need to’ get to work”—to get ourselves transferring, as a result of we concern that if we requested a number of too many “why” questions, we would not discover any solutions. Socrates provided a unique approach out of this quandary by insisting that as a substitute of abandoning justifications altogether, we spend extra time considering and speaking about them—testing propositions, questioning prior assumptions, and dealing towards a brand new set of rules.
The Tolstoy Drawback, Callard continues, is known as after the well-known Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. A person of noble heritage and considerate rigor, Tolstoy didn’t have a lot pressing or obligatory work to do with the intention to make a residing, and so he had a variety of time to spend serious about such “premature questions” as why he ought to take care of his property, or search to guard his present wealth, or try to extend his literary fame, or do any of the opposite issues that till then had made up his life. But regardless of devoting appreciable thought to those questions, he was typically unable to provide you with solutions. The ensuing melancholy made Tolstoy suicidal. What he determined to do about this, nevertheless, Callard views as a type of give up: He concluded that some questions are merely unanswerable—actually, that they aren’t even price asking. And so he gave up his quest, stopped vacillating between actions, and simply began to stay.
Present Situation
For Callard, this was a cop-out, as a result of Tolstoy had arrived at one thing profound after which backed away from it: the belief that to stay an examined life is neither easy nor straightforward, and that there aren’t any fast solutions. Callard likens a life lived the Tolstoy option to residing quarter-hour at a time: We transfer from room to room, scenario to scenario, doing no matter appears proper on the time, unburdened and ungoverned by any deep rules or commitments and even an try to search out some. The precept or rule we adopted within the final quarter-hour might exist in stress with and even completely contradict the one we apply within the subsequent quarter-hour. This represents a form of incoherence and even, maybe, a self-betrayal that Callard calls “wavering.” A wavering life, knowledgeable by positions held flippantly and transiently, doesn’t add as much as a coherent life lived on objective—the form of life that Socrates lived.
So what’s so particular about Socrates’ approach of going about life? For Callard, the way in which to flee the melancholy that comes from struggling to reply the query of motion and which means in on a regular basis life is to embrace the problem it poses, to do what Socrates did: view the wrestle—view the very act of philosophy itself—as a form of dialog.
Maybe for precisely this motive, the works of Plato, which offer us with probably the most compelling portrait of Socrates in motion, had been written as dialogues—mirroring the dedication of the historic Socrates to philosophical dialog as the right method to philosophy, versus the atomized considering of the person within the proverbial armchair. However irrespective of the explanation for Plato’s chosen kind, this Socratic technique is discovered in all places within the dialogues.
Callard acts as our information by way of these texts, together with the Protagoras and the Meno, providing shut readings wherein she presents us with a set of novel interpretations of Socrates’ persona and character and what his well-known technique entailed. Callard argues that above all else, Socrates was a “gadfly,” however not merely as a result of he was enamored with argument; as a substitute, it was as a result of he had a definite view of philosophical progress.
Within the dialogues, philosophical dialog includes a type of role-play, with one individual performing because the “concept builder,” who tries to ascertain the reality of some concept, and the opposite performing because the “refuter,” who tries to tear the thought down. This resolves an obvious paradox between the dueling commitments of excellent inquiry: searching for out reality (and thus being considerably assured that you simply’ve discovered it) and avoiding falsehood (and thus being skeptical that you simply’re in possession of the reality in any case).
Understood this fashion, the Socratic technique divides labor between individuals by assigning them totally different roles. If that is essential to make significant mental progress, it might clarify each why dialog is necessary for philosophy and why it’s so central to the examined life.
Callard’s successes within the early components of Open Socrates are additionally emblematic of the guide’s shortcomings within the later ones. She is rightfully attuned to the significance of philosophical dialog. Her dialogue of “wavering” is genuinely illuminating in a approach that makes an actual mental contribution to ongoing philosophical discussions about these sneaky biases in private ethical judgment. Whereas different philosophers would possibly clarify the actions that folks take, even when these actions betray the rules they declare to have, as a “weak spot of will,” Callard calls into query whether or not individuals stay their lives in a approach that’s suitable with having rules within the first place—whether or not searching for coherence throughout time seems to be only one doable option to stay.
However Callard’s give attention to philosophical dialog can at occasions turn into a method of evasion—a method of avoiding a number of the premature questions regarding the examined life that she may not need to reply. The very first line of Open Socrates admonishes the reader, “There’s a query you might be avoiding.” For Callard, that query is: Why are you residing this fashion? However this solely factors to a bunch of questions that Callard herself avoids. Why an individual lives the way in which they do just isn’t defined solely by the rules they’ve or the conversations wherein they developed them, but in addition—and maybe mainly—by the world wherein they discover themselves.
This use of dialog as an avoidance mechanism turns into most evident in Callard’s two chapters on politics. Within the first, on justice and liberty, she begins with a curious story a few mistake on her naturalization papers to turn into a US citizen: Her gender was listed as male. Callard isn’t positive how this error occurred however speculates that it is perhaps associated to the truth that her and her dad and mom’ native language, Hungarian, doesn’t have gendered pronouns. However both approach her father refused to right her papers as a result of he wouldn’t threat briefly giving up the unique authorized paperwork that had established her as a US citizen.
For Callard, this amusing story of a bureaucratic mistake results in a extra severe set of questions. The purpose of her story, we’re instructed, is to not present us the arbitrary methods wherein our immigration system shapes individuals’s lives. Neither is it to display the variations amongst linguistic buildings, or the social significance of gender, or how all or any of these items bear on the idea of freedom and the questions of justice and equality. As an alternative, Callard’s story—composed of 1 half clerical error and one half parental threat aversion—serves as a stark distinction to the “politicized” approach that pronouns are considered at present. As an alternative of getting open-ended conversations about them, Socratic explorations of the best way to apportion respect, the actual fact of 1’s acceptance or rejection of different individuals’s pronouns defines one’s place in a symbolic contest that supplants the philosophical arguments concerning the underlying dispute with a contest for esteem between two dueling sides on a contentious social challenge—and that, she argues, stands in the way in which of freedom. Callard just isn’t incorrect that “politicizing” disputes about issues of symbolic, communicative significance can get in the way in which of extra direct philosophizing concerning the legal guidelines, rights, and morals that we are literally disagreeing about. However it must also be identified that what’s at stake in these contests about “justice” and “liberty” can also be freedom—whether or not trans and nonbinary individuals should be included in our codes and legal guidelines of mutual respect, whether or not they can obtain healthcare, and even whether or not they need to exist. These points, whether or not they’re being debated straight or not directly, should not simply politicized disputes over summary issues of language and identification: They’re additionally disputes over materials life and over who can and can’t be free to regulate their physique.
In her second chapter on politics, this one solely on equality, an analogous set of arguments is made. Callard acknowledges that the equality that exists at present is “not the true factor,” however the evaluation of what the true factor is perhaps, a minimum of in Callard’s guide, is scant, to say the least. We’re handled to a piece on “Egalitarianism within the Iliad,” wherein she explains that the dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles over whether or not to ship 1000’s of troopers to their deaths in a battle over the possession of some significantly stunning ladies is just a little bit just like the factor we’re doing after we give out equal slices of birthday cake—at backside, a showdown about whether or not every of those males would acknowledge the opposite as an equal. However we additionally by no means get a lot in the way in which of dialogue about how our social roles, wealth distributions, or rights of journey and relocation would possibly have to be adjusted to suit “substantive equality” (to not point out the problem it would pose for substantive equality that a few of us are having a party and a few of us are the cake).
To the extent that they’re mentioned in any respect, equality, justice, and liberty are as a substitute framed as conversational achievements. Callard insists that the “correct residence of equality and respect” is “the world of the dialog,” a particular “inside world” throughout the bigger world that she insists is “elevated above on a regular basis cares,” even above “bodily survival.” However whether or not and with whom one can arrive at this lofty station relies upon in apparent methods on the make-up of the “outer world”—the truth that Agamemnon and Achilles had been each the Aristocracy might not have settled the matter of how they spoke to one another, but it surely does clarify why they had been those within the room allowed to talk within the first place. A correct appreciation for real philosophical engagement could also be the perfect response to an uneven enjoying subject, however Callard offers us no motive to consider that this alone is the trail to leveling it.
All of those issues level to the primary motive why we would not need to undertake a Socratic method to the examined life: that to really stay a philosophical life requires inspecting social buildings nicely past how they present up in dialog. To actually have a philosophical dialog requires, in any case, the correct surroundings. One can’t be too hungry or too drained; one wants the time and vitality to inquire on a good enjoying subject and an inexpensive expectation that one will discover keen companions to converse with on phrases of mutual respect—precisely the form of expectation-managed approach of recognizing another person’s pronouns and different codes of symbolic respect. Freedom, even within the “inside world” of dialog, should be understood not solely negatively but in addition positively: To actually be free to converse, one should not merely refuse the methods of avoidance that had been out there to Tolstoy however make use of the social sources that had been out there to Socrates—his standing as a free man, a vibrant mental tradition, and social relationships with mates and comrades. These issues had been made out there to him not by advantage or by motive however by the circumstances he loved in Athens. These details level to a set of questions that Callard studiously avoids in Open Socrates.
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Curiously sufficient, this avoidance technique additionally calls into query the guide’s bigger interpretive ambitions. One may think about a protection of Callard that insists that every one this discuss systemic injustice and the structural boundaries to philosophical dialog is merely a “woke” Twenty first-century revisionism that will get in the way in which of a severe engagement with the traditional texts that Callard discusses right here as a scholar of historic philosophy.
However such a view comes into battle with what we all know concerning the historic determine she bases her views on. As Callard herself illustrates in a chapter titled “Savage Instructions,” Socrates understood the legal guidelines and norms of his individuals as options slightly than instructions and subsequently believed that every particular person needed to make a set of private choices about the best way to stay their life. Neither Socrates’ resolution to not carefully object to combating for Athens within the Peloponnesian Battle, nor his refusal to flee his demise sentence after being discovered responsible of “corrupting the youth,” had been performances of obligation to motive or to establishments; they had been as a substitute performances of obligation towards his polis.
Socrates, ultimately, died exactly as a result of he didn’t share Callard’s view of both philosophy or the philosophical life. Confronted with the selection between execution and the pursuit of philosophical questions in exile from the individuals and tradition he cherished, Socrates selected demise over alienation from his polis. What he thought of the philosophical life to be, and what was required to stay it, concerned a dedication not simply to philosophical dialog but in addition to the complicated net of social relationships and duties beneath. Some of the highly effective and enduring classes of Socrates’ life is exactly this: that what one should do, even unto demise, is inextricably associated to questions of connection and solidarity.
We additionally needn’t confine ourselves to Socrates’ biographical particulars to problem Callard’s particular define for the examined life. We may merely avail ourselves of the plainest readings of the very Platonic dialogues that she engages with—dialogues that contain express positions concerning the ultimate distribution of products and sources, political energy, socialization into cultural attitudes and hierarchies, and the connection of every of those with the sorts of philosophical conversations which can be doable.
Plato’s Republic, the longest of the dialogues that characteristic Socrates, is devoted to precisely the questions that Callard avoids. The Republic is explicitly framed across the query “What’s justice?” and doesn’t confine itself, as Callard does, to stray observations about divvying up birthday cake. Slightly, the individuals on this dialogue argue about which of varied social buildings makes philosophical inquiry doable and for whom. They debate other ways of arranging society, place a number of of them in ranked order, and focus on the best way to sq. the philosophical life with the truth that they stay in circumstances which can be a lot lower than ultimate—circumstances that require the managerial intervention of politics.
There may be additionally the pesky undeniable fact that Socrates had his personal prescriptions too. He didn’t merely ask questions but in addition provided concrete solutions, and one wonders whether or not Callard is extra keen to debate anodyne abstractions about how philosophical conversations ought to go than the main points of Socrates’ precise solutions to some easy political questions. No matter intelligent interpretations one would possibly check out to clarify his reasoning, one can’t solely escape the truth that within the Republic, Socrates presents an obvious protection of authoritarian censorship and eugenics, whereas advancing arguments that explicitly painting aristocracy as preferable to democracy. For the Socrates of this dialogue, a minimum of, democratic equality is taken into account as an issue to be prevented slightly than a price to be prized, elevating one other set of questions on “Socratic equality” that Callard rigorously avoids.
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It will appear that our precise social circumstances—not simply those which can be instantly salient in any given dialog—decide whether or not and for whom justice, equality, freedom, and different central features of the philosophical life are attainable. And about these core features of the examined life, it’s Agnes Callard—not Plato or Socrates—who has nothing to say.
Whereas these factors concerning the supply materials pose issues for Callard’s argument about the best way to perceive Socrates and his technique, what’s extra placing is that this avoidance of relating private philosophical examination to questions of how one exists inside bigger social buildings undermines a number of the guide’s personal imperatives to stay philosophically—one thing that I, too, need increasingly individuals to do.
Callard initially frames her guide as a response to a selected depiction of the unexamined life: Confronted with the concern of existential questions, many individuals stay life in 15-minute intervals of issues that they busy themselves with. A few of these, Callard acknowledges, contain requirements of some variety: the kinds of actions one would possibly rightfully contemplate with some urgency, corresponding to “I have to go to the shop” and “I’ve to get to work.”
However the sense of urgency that applies to going out to purchase meals and different requirements, in addition to incomes the wages with which to afford them, just isn’t the manufactured urgency of an individual who hopes to keep away from philosophical questions concerning the which means of life, however slightly the real urgency that underpins any workable philosophy on how life should be lived: One should succeed at offering for one’s primary wants if one is to succeed at anything.
Extra to the purpose: The variations that emerge within the circumstances of labor bear pretty straight on how precise conversations go, as a few of Callard’s and my modern colleagues (or anybody who ever had a boss) may in all probability let you know. Once more, even Plato appears to have been considerably reflective about which individuals had been concerned in his dialogues as full individuals and which had been relegated to the position of facet characters (just like the slave who opens the dialogue within the Republic, or the one trotted out to show some extent about ignorance within the Meno), or as objects whose destiny can be determined by these whose conversations we’re concerned about (the ladies handled as struggle prizes or the boys handled as cannon fodder by way of the dialogue between Agamemnon and Achilles).
In relation to Tolstoy, one additionally has to marvel if this is identical Tolstoy many people know. Callard holds him up because the archetype of refusal to interact within the examined life. However is that this true? Rely Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy, the noble heir of a 4,000-acre property and the lord of over 300 serfs, was nicely conscious of the connection between the time he discovered on his fingers to ask “premature” questions and the labor of these 300 serfs to create such leisure time. This was a part of what made his quandary so profound, and it was additionally what drove him not solely to stasis however, finally, to political motion. He based a democratic faculty for peasant youngsters, agitated towards the personal landownership that had propped up the establishment of serfdom, and personally took up labor alongside his emancipated peasants.
Tolstoy noticed life and philosophy as intertwined and was fiercely vital of self-obsessed inquiry, together with “philosophy tailored to the present order” that sought solely to justify it. True science, Tolstoy contended, would attempt to reply the ground-level questions concerning the lives we stay: “how the related lifetime of man ought to and shouldn’t be constituted; the best way to deal with sexual relations, the best way to educate youngsters, the best way to use the land, the best way to domesticate it oneself with out oppressing different individuals, the best way to deal with foreigners, the best way to deal with animals, and far more.” We needn’t endorse Tolstoy’s solutions to those questions any greater than we’d like endorse Socrates’. However it’s troublesome to disclaim that Tolstoy was, actually, inspecting the precise materials and political buildings that made his life doable, together with but additionally past the conversations he had with the serfs on his property.
Within the time it takes to learn this guide, we’re instructed a lot about interpersonal love and equal respect in dialog, however little about picket traces and equal respect within the office. Perhaps, subsequent time, Callard may study that.
Olúfémi O. Táíwò
is an assistant professor of philosophy at Georgetown College and the writer of Reconsidering Reparations and Elite Seize.
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