Thought: It Takes Two
Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life by Agnes Callard (W. W. Norton & Company, 2025)
Reviewed by Lydia Kuerth
“There’s a question you are avoiding. Even now, as you read this sentence, you’re avoiding it... ‘Why am I doing any of this?’” (1) This is how philosopher Agnes Callard begins Open Socrates, startling readers out of their routines to ask the prime existential question. Such questions, Callard believes, are important for everyone.
Open Socrates stands on the premise that philosophy is a desirable way of life. Callard maintains that philosophy is the art of thinking, a fundamentally human activity that guides how we live. Answering deep questions—What is love? How should I live? What does it mean to face death?—is necessary to human beings, yet Callard notes that we spend much of our lives distracting ourselves from inquiry. Instead, we allow untested assumptions to form the bedrock of our beliefs, leaving us vulnerable to seismic shocks when our answers are tested, and subjecting us to regular tremors that Callard calls “wavering”—vacillating between various answers, uncertain of what is true, unsure of what to do.
Callard defines her goal as the reintroduction of “Socratic ethics as a novel and distinctive ethical system” (18). She aims to clear away misguided perceptions of Socrates as ironic, arrogant, or unhelpful. In her eyes, Socratic dialogue—the centerpiece of Socratic ethics—constitutes real thinking and provides ethical grounding. When you treat another person as a fellow intellectual agent seeking knowledge, that person automatically has respect as a human being valuable in and entitled to the pursuit of truth.
Reading Callard’s book can be uncomfortable and intellectually challenging, but the wrestle is worthwhile. As a Hungarian-American author, philosopher, and associate professor at the University of Hungary, as well as the podcast host of Minds Almost Meeting, Agnes Callard is both cognitively engaging and accessible to the lay reader. She has published such books as On Anger, The Case Against Travel, and Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming. Open Socrates is an excellent introduction to her work. The book is well-organized, systematically tackling misconceptions and elucidating Socratic principles from confusion into clarity. Callard draws on Socratic dialogues to invite readers into the paradoxical, perplexing simplicity of the Socratic method, prizing dialogue as the process of thinking toward truth.
Callard calls life's great questions “untimely.” Since ideas form motives for living, humans struggle to inquire after truth alone for fear of discrediting the ideas on which they have founded their lives. Nobody can properly investigate the big questions while holding an answer, yet everyone holds answers. This dilemma leads to what Callard terms the “Tolstoy problem,” inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s Confessions. Beset by existential questions, Tolstoy plunged into despair, warning readers that they had better not think too deeply about life if they value their sanity. Callard thinks otherwise. In fact, she declares, “The inquiry into untimely questions is the search for a life that doesn’t need to be shielded from reflection, a life you live by understanding it” (50). Tolstoy jumped to despair, but Callard asserts that if we seek, we shall find—so long as we inquire with others.
Once we inquire, we shall soon recognize our subservience to “savage commands,” basic carnal and social assumptions embedded into us as our default answers. None of these commands can adequately answer life’s great questions; each command contradicts itself, as when the body dictates that you should enjoy pleasure in the form of a Big Mac but warns you to avoid the pain of the consequent heartburn. Callard argues that all major ethical systems aim to balance the pursuit of these savage commands, but Socratic ethics is different: it questions the savage commands, recognizing that they will never be stable foundations for any moral life. Instead, Socratic ethics is founded on inquiry, for “Socratics... believe that arguing about how one should live is real life” (128), and “Virtue is identical to, which is to say, nothing other than, knowledge” (248).
The first, and perhaps most startling, insight of the Socratic method is that thinking is not a solo activity. It takes two: partners in dialogue. Callard explains, “Speaking to the soul of a person—which entails letting them talk back to you—allows you to share something with them that you don’t have” (148). Through dialogue, “we can construct thoughts with other people” (149). Only by thinking together can aspiring philosophers circumvent another Socratic problem: the “gadfly-midwife” paradox. This paradox points out that the acquisition of knowledge consists of two parts: seeking truth and avoiding error. How can Socrates simultaneously refute as the gadfly, tearing down his partners’ answers, and birth true ideas as the midwife of knowledge? Callard acknowledges that those who view seeking truth and avoiding error as opposite enterprises usually get stuck on one of the two prongs, either becoming too cynical to recognize truth or too credulous to reject falsehood.
A Socratic dialogue, however, corrects both blind spots. One person takes up the positive role of truth-seeking by posing answers, while the other adopts the negative role of error-avoidance by providing refutation. Both participants can therefore gain knowledge that one thinker could not obtain alone. Of course, participating in a Socratic dialogue requires the participants to realize that truth-seeking argument is not a zero-sum game, or an argument in which one person wins and the other loses. Callard is firm on this point: Socratic dialogue is not a debate. Partners require intellectual humility to take each other’s words seriously and to point out flaws wherever they see them. The reward of this difficult dialogue, knowledge, only comes via correction: “Thinking happens during the uncomfortable times when you permit others to intrude into your private mental world, to correct you” (174).
How ought we to live according to Socratic ethics? In its final section, Open Socrates explores Socrates’s views on three key subjects: politics, love, and death. To a non-philosopher, Socrates’s answers may initially seem incredible. He (as explained by Callard) tends to reduce all other subjects to philosophy; so, according to Socrates, politics, love, and preparation for death are all (when done well) nothing other than the pursuit of knowledge. Attempting to de-philosophize these subjects by relegating them to less thoughtful arenas—such as a heated political debate, a battlefield, or a lovers’ bed—is to misuse them. Socrates’s reduction of all important topics to philosophy may raise readers’ eyebrows, but his thinking makes more sense when Callard explains each point in depth.
In politics, for instance, the primary question is how people can live well together, and dialogue is the Socratic answer. Callard points out, “Politics is the set of solutions that we develop to those difficulties in shared living that spring specifically from differences in our ideas about how best to do so” (272). Politics goes wrong when it stops seeking truth and starts seeking a winner, turning questions into competitions. War, debates, and fighting all constitute “politicized arguing” (262), mistaken attempts to defeat an opponent instead of confronting an opponent’s ideas. Callard proposes that Socratic ethics would mend political rifts by recognizing everyone’s right to the truth and inviting everyone to seek it together, calling for a vote from one person alone: one’s partner in conversation.
Ultimately, Callard believes that humans are at their core intellectual beings, saying, “Praise for intelligence or intellectual ability touches us so deeply because it speaks to our most fundamental wish: to be treated not as a physical thing, not as a social thing, but as an intellectual thing” (295). Confronting untimely questions is difficult but worthwhile, and it ought to be done with a partner. If Tolstoy had a Socrates, Callard thinks that Socrates might have solved the “Tolstoy problem.” Throughout the book, Callard quotes from a plethora of philosophers, ranging from Aristotle to Descartes to Adam Smith to William James, but Socrates is the lens through which she sees philosophy.
As Callard recognizes, every person must come to terms with universal realities such as love, death, and politics; if we do not inquire rigorously and honestly, we will only imbibe the default assumptions that leave our answers in shaky splinters when challenges arise. Listening to others and exchanging ideas via dialogue is vital to our intellectual and ethical flourishing, as much now as it was in Socrates’s age.
How, then, can we inquire and refute without coming across as arrogant? How can we weather together the emotional instability threatened by untimely questions? Perhaps if we each had a discussion partner like Socrates, we would be more reasonable, more disposed to listen, and more eager to pay attention to each other as fellow truth-seekers. Now is the time to heed Callard's call and open a Socratic dialogue.
Lydia Kuerth is a writer from South Florida, an editor of Living Waters Review, and a local lizard enthusiast who discovers stories growing between the roots of banyan trees. When not burrowing into books, she enjoys contemplating literature and observing the adventures of insects.
