What happens when a dedicated life of the mind confronts the messiness of earthly desires? The University of Chicago philosophy professor Agnes Callard, who in some moods believes herself to be channelling Socrates, was forced to ask herself that question one afternoon in 2011 when she was discussing with a graduate student a particular thorny problem in Greek thought, the abstract question of why one means something singularly different from two. In the course of unpacking this problem, another related dilemma arose, however: this was the insistent fact that the pair of them – student and teacher – had, in the course of their discussions over that term, fallen suddenly and hopelessly in love, a less abstract kind of coupling.
They agreed nothing could happen, but the next day, on a plane journey to visit her parents in New York, Callard, then 35, decided she could be no kind of Socratic disciple, if she could not, in this charged instant, be entirely true to her ideals. The “inner experience of love” she felt for her student, Arnold, 27, she thought, was of a different, higher quality to that she felt for her husband, Ben, though their marriage to that point had been contented and fulfilling, and they had two young sons. She resolved on that flight that the honest thing to do must be to end her marriage, and when she returned to Ben she did what her philosophical hero would have done – she engaged in deep dialogue with him about this problem. Husband and wife talked for a whole day about the different kinds of love (Ben was also a philosopher). “I had never felt so close to him,” Callard recalled. And the following day they decided they must get divorced.
That confrontation and its fallout for Callard and the two men in her life was set out in a profile of the philosopher by Rachel Aviv in the New Yorker magazine in 2023, one of the most widely read and shared articles of that year – and almost the perfect New Yorker story with its mix of high seriousness and relationship carnage.
At the time that story was published, Callard was working to complete a book about the third man in her life, Socrates. The revelations in the New Yorker article, when set out in print, prompted her to add a chapter about “Socratising” our ideas about love – that is to say, being constantly alive to their complications, always prepared to examine and discuss them, and to be resolute about the consequences of that quest for honesty.
Callard’s – brilliant, compulsive – book Open Socrates and what it might mean to live according to his ideals of “hard-line intellectualism” is now published. A week or two ago, Callard was sitting opposite me in a basement dining room of a London hotel trying to explain not only the nuances of that philosophy – but also its effect on her life. One in which she is now married to her graduate student, Arnold, but also living platonically with her ex-husband, Ben, a kind of ideal philosophical throuple.
My own grasp of Greek philosophy doesn’t extend much beyond the first verse of the Monty Python drinking song, but one idea I like to think I’ve half-gleaned from Aristotle is that though you cannot choose the life fate gives you, you can, crucially, decide whether to interpret it as a tragedy or as a (sometimes bleak) comedy. Doesn’t Socrates tend to fall, I offer (betraying my millennia of ignorance) into the first – philosopher’s – trap, of always looking for truth and reason where none may exist?
Ah, Callard suggests, shaking her head. And she uses that misunderstanding as a starting point for a somewhat one-sided hour-long dialogue of our own. “It is true,” she says, “that you can view life as a comedy or a tragedy, but I really think that Socrates thought there’s a third possibility. That is, you can refute things. You can investigate them, never settle on an answer. There’s an inquisitive mode of living, in which you’re living your life at the same time as not assuming you know how to live it.”
That sounds familiar, I say.
Socrates, of course, was convicted and elected to die for his indefatigable “gadfly” questioning – for his “corruption of the youth” of Athens by introducing them to critical thinking, specifically, “failing to acknowledge the gods that the city acknowledges” and “introducing new deities” – those of doubt and reason. Callard is good in her book on the difficulties of this heroic refusal to accept received wisdom. “People will announce, ‘Question everything!’,” she writes, “without noticing they have just uttered not a question, but a command.” Although doubt, I suggest, might be a good deal more prevalent these days than in ancient Athens (not least among Observer interviewers), does she think that we are generally built to live in constant conversational uncertainty – isn’t it a bit exhausting?
“In the last part of the book,” she says, “what I basically argue, is yes, we are absolutely built to do that. And my evidence for it is to look at the parts of life where we have the most problems: romance, death, politics.”
What exactly is her evidence?
“What I try to do is show that our problems come from trying to manage what must be an essentially inquisitive activity, uninquisitively.”
Because we try to seize on half-baked certainties rather than proper questions?
“Yes. We’re screwing up because we’re not doing the thing we’re built to do.”
In response to my somewhat confused expression, she reaches for an example.
“Look at the kind of behaviour we accept as routine in the context of love and romance, and put it in the context of, say, food,” she says. One common idea of love “would be like seeing somebody standing outside a restaurant, and banging on the door, and you’d be like, ‘Oh, that restaurant’s closed.’ And you’d point out that there are these other restaurants that are open. And he’s like, ‘No, I have to go to this one.’ You’d say, ‘Why? Is the food really good?’ And he’s like, ‘No, I hate the food here.’ That’s just what we do when we’re texting the person who broke up with us. ‘He’s a jerk, but I need to have him.’ We don’t hear how insane that sounds because we’ve gotten used to it. Socrates would say there’s a better way. You’re built to do something else.”
In Callard’s book, if I’m reading it right, the trigger for that better way lies in the presence of insistent “untimely thoughts”, intimations of death or meaninglessness, that should force us into that Socratic life of restless and playful dialogue with others. The example she gives as a failure in this regard – she is nothing if not intellectually ambitious – is Leo Tolstoy, specifically after he had just written Anna Karenina, was 50 years old, living on his vast estate, lauded by all society, but had fallen into grave despair. His undoing was a simple question, an untimely thought, that bounced around his head and would not go away: “What will come from my whole life?”
That even the great novelist was almost destroyed by that thought, offers what Callard calls the “Tolstoy problem”: that rather than living lives of denial, we must instead not flinch from looking into the abyss of uncertainty. Socrates, she argues, shows that liberty lies in commitments to the questions themselves, to following them where they lead, without the hope of what Jeremy Clarkson might call final answers.
In an earlier life when she was a student, I’m reminded, Callard went through a phase of going up to strangers in the public square, as Socrates would do, and trying to engage with them on the tough questions in their lives. It was not an unqualified success.
She came to the US aged five, after her Jewish parents, a doctor and a lawyer, had found a way to escape Soviet Hungary. Her parents were committed atheists but she was sent to Orthodox schools because she could get scholarships “on account of my grandparents being Holocaust survivors”. She would argue constantly with the rabbis about the existence of God (“they were extremely patient” she says).
When did she first come across Socrates, I wonder.
“I was in high school, on the debate team,” she says. “On a summer course they mentioned there’s this thing called philosophy that you can put into your debate speeches, and you’ll win more.” At 13, she went to Barnes & Noble and bought one book from every major philosopher. Immanuel Kant was her first crush, but Socrates “famously ugly – bug-eyed, snub-nosed, and goatish” – took over.
“I was into math and physics at school, because there were clear right answers,” she says. “With other subjects, I felt like the teacher was just making up the rules. But with this world of philosophy it seemed like you could have that same attitude as the math, physics attitude, but it could be about the difficult stuff that shows up in your life.”
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Callard had an autism diagnosis in her late 30s, which she welcomed because it explained some of her past experience, though she is still examining the value of it. “It seemed to organise a whole bunch of ways in which I’ve just been weird,” she says, with a smile. “You know, like: you’re very literal; you read really fast; you alienate the parents of all the kids you’ve ever been friends with, because you seem like a freak; you get obsessions with patterns etc. For a moment [the diagnosis] feels like understanding, and then it also just kind of feels like, well, it’s just a bunch of stuff clumped together.”
Her ex-husband, Ben, who has become something of a reluctant sympathy figure in rarefied corners of social media since the New Yorker profile came out, describes Callard as “the least complacent person he has ever met”.
I take our conversation back to love, that original “untimely thought”, and wonder if she thinks of that earlier dramatic turning point in her life differently in retrospect.
“There are moments that pop up in life where I am reminded that the Socratic path is the only way forward,” she says. “And I definitely think falling in love was one such moment. Maybe less directly in relation to the person I fell in love with than in relation to my ex-husband. I felt we were suddenly in a position where there was nothing to guide us. There was no way for us to move forward except to have a conversation in which we each just tried to say what’s true.”
If there is one lesson from her book, it is the faith that truths emerge socially, from hard conversations like that, not from internal thought?
“Yes. There was no mould for how to manage that situation. But it was like magic. A lot of people, when they hear that story, that’s the part they find the most incredible, the fact that my not yet ex-husband and I were just able to have a conversation about this, where we were like, what’s the best for us? When we got divorced, you know, it didn’t even occur to me that it would ever be possible for us to live in the same house, for instance, but that happened.” Her ex-husband, she says, is probably the person she speaks to the most, usually about philosophy, and often on the phone from separate rooms.
Photograph: Artefact/Alamy
And what about Arnold, her current husband, should she have trusted that first flood of emotion?
“Did I somehow feel sure that things would work out with Arnold? I think I did, but I think that was a bit of an illusory feeling. But I feel confident that whatever happens with Arnold at any point, we’re going to be able to work it through.”
If the tables had been turned, I wonder, and if Ben had fallen philosophically head over heels, would she have reacted in the same way?
“I don’t know. I feel like a lot of what I now know about the situation, I learned from going through it.”
Callard is 49 now. I wonder if she is still aspirational for the same kind of things as she was at 35?
“My experience of my life is a lot like when my son, my oldest, was three or four,” she says. “I remember asking his nursery school teacher about his development. This was at UC Berkeley, I was a grad student, and they did all kinds of research on the kids. The teacher showed me a picture of movements of the child in the classroom over the course of a day. And his movement was like crazy zigzags all over the place. ‘That is what his day looked like in the fall,’ she said. And then she showed me a picture from the spring. And it was all calm and organised. And that’s a bit what my life feels like to me.”
I mention something to her I’d read the other day, that the opposite of success isn’t failure, it’s boredom and loneliness. It sounds like, I say, if she’s learned one thing from these experiences it is that we are at our best as social animals…
“That’s interesting,” she says. “Philosophy, I think, is a leisure activity. Indeed, it’s the leisure activity, but it’s not a relaxing one, or one that you can do on your own. It’s like sometimes we might watch Netflix or whatever, but we also sometimes need to read a classic novel. In a way, a minimal claim of my book is that you should extend that same generosity to your conversational life. You want to have these hard conversations, because they are some of the best things in life.”
At this point in our dialogue, Pen, from Callard’s publisher, pops her head around the door to say I have time for one more question before Agnes has to leave.
Socrates, I’m thinking, wouldn’t have liked the sound of that at all.
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Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply