Finding Happiness: What is the Key?

OPEN SOCRATES: The Case for a Philosophical Life, by Agnes Callard

Who knows? Maybe you've decided to cut back on alcohol and up your fitness routine this year. Perhaps you'd like to be more considerate of others and treat them with greater kindness and gentleness.

In "Open Socrates," Agnes Callard argues that, contrary to popular belief, self-improvement is more of an issue of ideas than of willpower. It's not that we lack determination and know what "the good" is, but we don't act on it; rather, it's that we haven't really considered what "the good" is. She states, "First and foremost, intellectual work" is involved in the struggle to be an ethical, good, and virtuous person.

Callard, a philosopher from the University of Chicago, knows that "more intellectualism!" isn't exactly a winning argument, which is perhaps why she reserves the term "hard-line intellectualist" for reference number 129. As she passionately argues for a mind-centered lifestyle, even a cynical reader is likely to be swept away by her zeal. She has high hopes for her book, which she calls a "neo-Socratic ethics," which she hopes will be well-received by her fellow philosophers. She also hopes that it will provide laypeople with an approachable introduction to the ways in which "living a truly philosophical life" can "make people freer and more equal; more romantic; and more courageous."

“Open Socrates” reminds us of ...

This is a novel that is delightful, intellectual and occasionally frustrating. The irritation is completely appropriate: Socrates, whom Callard fondly called a “wet blanket,” was known for questioning his interlocutors to the point of aggravation, pushing them to think deeper about whether what they had just said was what they genuinely meant. “I realized, to my sorrow and alarm, that I was getting unpopular,” Socrates ruefully remembered, after having alienated a number of influential politicians in Athens and before being sentenced to death. Callard was so intrigued by Socratic philosophy as a college student that she wanted to “be Socrates” and went out to hound people at an art museum with enormous questions about the purpose of life. “They felt trapped,” she recalls now, “and I felt not at all like Socrates.”

Socrates died in 399 B.C., and it’s not as if there’s a shortage of writing about him or his thinking. But Callard adds that Socrates has too frequently been “diluted”: regarded like a “sauce” that may enhance one’s critical thinking instead of as the main event, whose ethics, if correctly understood, were nothing short of radical. He dubbed himself a “gadfly” and also a “midwife” — exposing his interlocutors’ falsehoods but also helping them bring truthful thoughts into being. The actions of destruction and creation were related, maybe even one and the same. Refutation was never to be done for its own sake; only by helping to take the scales from people’s eyes could they see the world anew.

Following Socrates’ example is a lifetime pursuit. All too often, Callard adds, we react impulsively to “savage commands”: doing something because it is dictated to us in the moment by our body (to pursue pleasure and avoid pain) or by social relationships (to achieve pride and avoid disgrace). Such instructions make us “waver,” she argues, and contradict ourselves: “They might give us a loud, clear answer as to what we ought to do, but the answers don’t last.”

The concept of time comes up a lot in “Open Socrates.” There is, most obviously, the problem of our finite time on Earth, and Callard believes with Socrates that philosophy is preparation for death. Thinking more carefully on what we know and what we don’t pushes us beyond our regular (unthinking) routine of “getting through the next 15 minutes.” She opens her book with the example of Tolstoy, in his “Confession,” describing how his 50-year-old self suddenly wasn’t sure what any of it — love, children, worldly achievement — was for.

Callard’s name may be known to those who have read a profile of her in The New Yorker. She left her first marriage, to another philosopher, to marry a graduate student, also a philosopher. She talks as if love is an ecstatically cerebral endeavor, at least when it’s going well. In “Open Socrates,” she outlines how we might get so caught up in our own thoughts that we don’t let evidence from the outside in; another person can reveal to us our own blind spots, nudging us just so in order to see what we were missing. Socratic inquiry, with its emphasis on discussion, displays thought as a shared process: “In the presence of others, something becomes possible that isn’t possible when you are alone.”

I find this thought inspirational, even if I’m not as certain as Callard that “our most fundamental wish” is to be treated “as an intellectual thing.” She places so much trust in the power of thought that she says it can lead us out of the most intractable dilemmas: “What appears to be a difficulty with life” is “in fact a difficulty in our thinking about life.”

But she also concedes that “thinking about life” isn’t necessarily guaranteed to give the information one needs. Socrates used to say that he knew nothing other than the reality of his own stupidity. Despite some of her bigger assertions, Callard allows us to think alongside her. “Open Socrates” invites us to recognize how little we know, and to start thinking.