Agnes Callard: what does taking Socrates for a sceptic conceal?

There is one sentence about Socrates that everybody knows: “All I know is that I know nothing.”

Agnes Callard, of the University of Chicago, thinks that sentence is the largest single obstacle to understanding him.

Callard, the author of Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, summed up her thesis in a recent conversation with Merve Emre:

“We do not want to lose Socratic intellectualism. It is an ethical theory worth thinking about, and the sceptical image of Socrates has kept it in shadow.”

The conversation appeared in the season of Emre's podcast series The Critic and Her Publics given over to the art of the interview.

What is wrong with the sceptical Socrates#

The common portrait runs like this. Socrates asserts nothing and only asks; he exposes the contradictions of whoever he is talking to and never states a view of his own. On this reading the Socratic method is a technique of demolition — a procedure that silences everyone else and says nothing itself.

Callard argues that this runs against the texts.

In the dialogues Socrates defends perfectly definite theses. Virtue is knowledge. Nobody does wrong knowingly. It is worse to commit an injustice than to suffer one. The health of the soul matters more than the health of the body.

These are not a sceptic's sentences. They are the sentences of the position known as intellectualism: the source of moral failure is not a weak will but mistaken knowledge.

Why the distinction matters#

Callard's emphasis has a practical consequence.

For anyone who reads Socrates as a sceptic, philosophy is the art of demolishing claims. The aim is to show how groundlessly the other party has been thinking.

For anyone who reads him as an intellectualist, philosophy is a search. One asks questions not in order to demolish but in order to notice what one does not know and to start looking for it.

The difference tells in our present culture of argument, too. The sceptical model suits the takedown reflex of social media all too well. The intellectualist model asks for patience.

The book's real thesis#

Open Socrates begins from what Callard calls Socrates's discovery:

We do not know how to ask ourselves the most important questions.

On the small questions we pass for experts — which job to take, where to move, what to eat. On the large ones — how to love, how to face death, how to take part in politics — we have no method at all. We either postpone such questions or close them off with ready-made answers.

The Socratic method, on Callard's account, is an instrument designed for exactly that gap.

And here is the crucial point: the method does not work on one's own. Questioning yourself would mean finding your own blind spots, which is impossible by definition. That is why Socrates is always talking to somebody.

Philosophy, on Callard's reading, is not an individual exercise in thought but an activity that takes two.

A contested figure#

Callard occupies an unusual position in contemporary philosophy. Academically she is a specialist in ancient philosophy, working on Plato and Aristotle; with Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming she made a contribution to the philosophy of action.

She is also a public figure. She writes for the New Yorker and The Point, and the essays in which she turns her private life into philosophical material provoke argument.

The double position draws criticism as well. Some colleagues hold that public visibility erodes academic seriousness. Callard's answer is Socratic: the philosopher's business was always to talk in the marketplace.

This argument comes from the same line as our files this week on Michel Onfray and Alain de Botton — though Callard's position differs from both: she does not leave the academy, she speaks publicly from within it.

The argument continues#

Discussion of the book has gone on since it appeared. Eric Schliesser, starting from Adam Smith, has written a series of pieces on the relation between Socrates, inquiry and equality.

The question Callard leaves at the end of the conversation is this: if a person needs someone else in order to ask his most important questions, is thinking alone really possible?

In Turkish#

Callard's books have not yet been translated into Turkish.