Open Socrates by Agnes Callard review – a design for life

I beseech you,” wrote Oliver Cromwell, in his letter to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland, “in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.” Cromwell’s pungent entreaty is often cited in conversations about the importance of self‑enquiry and the perils of overconfidence. It’s an odd but telling choice, given that he was asking others to question their assumptions, while leaving his own unexamined. He had just purged parliament, overseen the execution of Charles I, and was in Scotland leading an army in a pre-emptive strike. Naturally, he wanted the Scottish forces massing for battle to think again. The obvious retort is: “No. You.”

This is one of several thorny problems philosopher Agnes Callard tackles in Open Socrates, an exploration of Socrates’ “substantive ethics of enquiry”; an approach to knowledge that, she argues, can’t merely be tossed into our usual repertoire of rhetorical flourishes, but rather detonates the bedrock on which we claim to stand: “People will announce, ‘Question everything!’ without noticing they have just uttered not a question, but a command.” The Socratic method is an approach with “colossal ambitions” and not just some antiquated curio we might repurpose to get an edge in business meetings. In fact, its power is so great that we must wield it with great care.

A less serious author would have devoted a great deal of time to establishing how their subject’s ideas might grant us practical advantages when dealing with the minutiae of everyday life. There’s something rather bracing and brilliant about how rapidly Callard sweeps all that off the table, confronting us with the terrible existential torment that hit Tolstoy at 50, right at the peak of his material success. He was revered as a writer, financially prosperous, he had his health and family, yet he claimed that one question brought him “to the point of suicide”. It was: “What will come from my whole life?”

Callard calls this the “Tolstoy Problem”. It belongs to a whole category of “untimely questions”: issues of huge gravity we can spend our whole lives avoiding. They’re not merely hard to answer, but hard to ask. As Tolstoy’s case shows, they can be actively dangerous, especially if the work is left half-done – as if you had started rewiring your house only to leave bare cables trailing over the floor. Callard shrewdly argues that Tolstoy’s error wasn’t in raising such intimidating questions, but in responding too hastily: there is a “simultaneity of question and answer”, where he at once concludes his problems defy meaningful enquiry.

The thrust of the book is that, in the figure of Socrates, we can find a way through that Tolstoy couldn’t. Unlike Cromwell, who believed in critical reflection for thee but not for me, Socrates walked the walk – famously right up to his execution on spurious charges of “corrupting the youth”. Callard largely sidesteps the matter of how accurately writers such as Plato and Xenophon represent what Socrates actually said (given he left no directly authored texts), or how we might resolve apparent contradictions between accounts. Rather than fret over historicity, Callard engages with Socratic ideas, while emphasising that we should not interpret Plato’s dialogues, in which Socrates engages in philosophical discussions with various interlocutors, as actual transcripts. This is not to say that Socrates the human is dismissed: we’re told he was “famously ugly – bug-eyed, snub-nosed, and goatish”, and that his attitude to hygiene was, at best, lax. In a culture where appearance mattered, he stood out.

Callard tells us that Socrates was criticised for being repetitive – something he deftly reframed as consistency, scolding his inconstant opponent: “you never say the same things about the same subjects” – and, in this, she proves a rather too literal adherent to the fragrant Athenian. Where one of Socrates’ arguments might be usefully illuminated by a single contemporary example, Callard frequently spends several pages walking us through every possible permutation. Thus, when highlighting Socrates’ talent for exposing intellectual hypocrisy – what Callard calls “wavering” – she cites Bertrand Russell’s famous illustration of weaselly “emotional conjugation”: “I have reconsidered the matter, you have changed your mind, he has gone back on his words.”

This is as pithy a summation of the point as one could ask for, but Callard then continues for a further two pages, listing other examples of ways one might spin the same behaviour. Similarly, she frequently presents us with a punchy, flavourful extract, showcasing Socrates or another philosopher or author, then immediately follows up by summarising what we’ve just read and spelling out what we’re meant to conclude. Callard will often bid us “recall” or “remember” and then re-explain something she said just a few pages ago.

It’s a shame because, while the content and language are refreshingly free from jargon and by no means heavy or obscure, the cumulative effect of this repetition and rhetorical connective tissue (the same lengthy passage by Tolstoy is repeated, in full, twice) means that many genuinely interesting, useful insights are buried among the clutter.

One such is the fascinating discussion of Moore’s paradox, which points out that one could – conceivably – say: “I believe that honey spoils, but it doesn’t, in fact, spoil,” a sentence that might be true and logically consistent, yet is absurd. Why should this matter? Well, it illustrates curious blind spots in our self-knowledge; hence the importance of Socratic questioning by someone else, to draw out our assumptions and help us recognise the errors in our thinking. Callard cites the German playwright Heinrich von Kleist’s habit of explaining mathematical problems to his non-mathematician sister in his effort to better understand them. The modern equivalent is programmers explaining code to a small toy on their desk, a practice known as “rubber-ducking”.

For Callard, Socrates represents both a “midwife” and a “gadfly”, in that someone adopting his techniques helps us bring new and better understanding into the world while being, frankly, annoying. They bite and sting, defying our evasions, crawling through the tiniest cracks in our armour, not allowing us to get away with the false comfort of easy answers.

When Socrates finally contemplates death, and – in his most famous act – drinks hemlock, we are confronted with the true extent of what it means to face questions honestly and clear-sightedly. Callard points to accounts which claim that, in his final days, he began composing poetry, having previously refused to write down his ideas while dismissing poets as “dangerously ignorant”. What should we make of this apparent change of heart? Perhaps, Callard suggests, “sitting alone in his cell, waiting to die … he was less than fully sure of himself … and felt terrified by his inability to justify himself.”

This poignant and human snapshot represents the book at its best: urging us to pause as we read accounts of Socrates and notice what might be going on, how we might feel under similar circumstances and the magnitude of the task at hand. Socrates offers neither miracle cures nor lifestyle hacks: the road to “epistemological humility”, Callard argues, is long and bumpy. But, in “always exhorting people to move forward”, he invests that journey with meaning and dignity. Crucially, it’s a journey we embark on together.