The philosopher Agnes Callard is one of the most genuinely curious thinkers I have ever met. Whether she’s writing about unrequited love, parenting, politics in the classroom, or the moral failures of people who like to travel, I get a thrill hearing her examine ordinary life from unexpected angles. And I love to disagree with her, which I often do.
Callard teaches at the University of Chicago and is the author of several books, including, most recently Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, which came out last year. She joined me to talk about perhaps the oldest form of the interview, the Socratic dialogue, and what we might learn about asking questions and seeking the truth from Socrates and other gadflies.
Merve Emre: Agnes, when we were organizing this speaker series, you and I talked about different manifestations of the interview, and you proposed the Socratic dialogue as an interesting example. Over the course of our emails, we started referring to it as “the philosopher’s interview.” Do you think that is justifiable? What would one have to believe about the interview as a genre to posit the Socratic dialogue as an example of it?
Agnes Callard: It would be a kind of interview where what the person reveals about themselves is not what they intended to reveal, which may be true of many interviews, but in the Socratic dialogue it’s true in an intense and concentrated way. There’s a self-evidently adversarial tone, because Socrates is not simply trying to figure out what kind of person his interlocutors are, he’s trying to figure out whether they really know what they claim to know. In the Socratic interview, everybody ends up being the same. You might think if you interviewed many people, you would learn about different ways to be, but when Socrates interviews people, they’re all ignorant. From an interview point of view, you could see that as a failure in getting to know someone.
When you speak with people as part of your conversation series at the University of Chicago, do you think of yourself as participating in the tradition of the Socratic interview? Or are you trying to do something different?
I would love to do the thing that Socrates does, but I can’t. That has a lot of different facets: one is the presence of skill or ability on my end; another is that it’s not socially acceptable.
What skill do you lack, and why would it not be acceptable?
There’s an expectation that when you invite an esteemed person to your campus, you’re not trying to show your students that they’re ignorant. What I am doing is more like what I do when reading Socrates. One of the joys of the history of philosophy is that all of us are stuck in our own heads, and we have a set of ideas and views. You look at the world from your point of view. But being yourself day after day gets dull after a while. When you get to know these authors from different periods of history and different social worlds, if they are systematic enough, they have a set of thoughts that fit together into a point of view that you can inhabit. So, for example, you can be Descartes. When I interview you, I’m trying to teach my students what it’s like to think the way you think. I am presenting a mind that has its own mode of operation, and if we get to know it well enough, and if it is internally consistent enough, then we can become liberated from our minds.
What happens when that mind, whose internal workings you are trying to extrapolate for your students, turns out to be, in your estimation, wrong or ignorant? Does the Socratic impulse to teach the person how they might recalibrate the workings of their mind kick in?
When you’re inhabiting the person, you’re not allowed to step outside. I am channeling the author that I’m teaching and defending their views, but it’s the job of the students to attack those views. So, in effect, they are Socrates against everybody. Sometimes I come to points where it’s hard to see how to make it work, but in philosophy, you can’t say, “I am now wrong,” because as soon as you say that you’ve moved to some other view. You have to hold on to the wrong view. When you’re being the person, there’s no escape from seeing their point of view as the truth, just as when you’re yourself, there’s no escape from seeing your own point of view as the truth.
If, in the Socratic interview, the point is to unearth a single truth from whomever one encounters, the opposite of that is the interview that allows people, including the person being interviewed, to more fully inhabit the truth from their perspective. Is that right?
There’s a way in which there’s always just one truth. It might appear to you differently depending on whose mind you’re inhabiting, but there’s just one. There are modes of interviewing that are excited about the prospect of human heterogeneity, by contrast with modes of interviewing that view it as detritus we have to clear away.
When I asked you to pick the Socratic dialogue you thought would be most amenable as an interview, you picked The Apology. Could you give a little summary of the text and tell me why you thought this was the best example of the Socratic interview?
The Apology is Plato’s version of the speech of self-defense Socrates gives when he is tried by the city of Athens for corrupting the youth and not believing in the gods. In the end, he is found guilty and put to death. It is Socrates’ most extended accounting of himself. The Apology is his answer to the question “Who am I?,” and he does it in an interesting way: by telling a kind of myth of himself, like a superhero origin story. He’s explaining how he got to be who he is. We’re getting to know Socrates in particular; that’s why it seemed like an interview.
I want to read the very beginning of The Apology:
How you, oh Athenians, have been affected by my accusers, I cannot tell, but I know that they almost made me forget who I was, so persuasively did they speak, and yet they have hardly uttered a word of truth. But of the many falsehoods told by them, there was one which quite amazed me. I mean, when they said that you should be upon your guard and not allow yourselves to be deceived by the force of my eloquence. To say this when they were certain to be detected as soon as I opened my lips and proved myself to be anything but a great speaker did indeed appear to me most shameless, unless by the force of eloquence they mean the force of truth. For if such is their meaning, I admit that I am eloquent.
Socrates seems to say that he has heard the accusations of his “evil fame” so many times that he risks believing in his accusers: “their persuasive words almost made me forget who I was.” It suggests that one reason to embark on the interview is because you have forgotten who you were amid the detritus of human utterance. The point of interviewing yourself, and perhaps of interviewing others, is to remember who you are when rumors of your “evil fame” begin to circulate. How does that strike you as a motivation? Is he speaking tongue in cheek, or is there earnestness in that opening?
I think it’s earnest, but there’s a real move being made there. When he says, I was almost carried away, Socrates is saying “rhetoric has an effect on me.” So next, he must counteract that, explaining, They said I was an accomplished speaker. One imagines two possibilities springing from this statement: one is that when Socrates speaks, he is obviously not an accomplished speaker, and his accusers are wrong, but then, Socrates has been an accomplished speaker in that he was able to prove his accusers wrong. Now, let’s say that he is incredibly witty and clever, and he overwhelms the audience. Now, he’s proved the court right by winning over the audience. So, if they’re wrong, they’re right, and if they’re right, they’re wrong. He’s in a tangle. Socrates identifies this, saying, Unless they call an accomplished speaker the man who speaks the truth. The way out of this rhetorical mess is just to go with the truth. Socrates reorganizes the conversation on his turf. He’s saying that to play on their rhetorical turf is to land yourself in contradiction.
I understand what you’re saying about the way this all gets reframed, but I don’t know that that answers my question. If you are someone who has suffered from evil fame, then is the Socratic interview a genre that lets you remember who it is that you were?
That is very much how Socrates uses The Apology. He uses it to clear up this misrepresentation of himself from Aristophanes. He creates a set of accusations that he’s then going to respond to, so he is using this opportunity to clear his name. Now, the question is: Is he clearing his name in his own mind as well? I don’t think we can say Socrates had become confused about his own nature, but in social reality, the way that people represent you is part of what you are, so, in that sense, the rescuing of your name is the rescuing of yourself. When defending oneself, one is able to make their own representation of themselves. The Apology is Socrates’ reclamation of his own story.
Part of the superhero origin story is that Chaerephon, a friend of Socrates’, goes to the oracle and asks who the wisest man is, and the oracle says Socrates. So Socrates goes on a mission to figure out how this could be the case by interviewing the wisest people he knows. He begins with the politicians, then moves on to the poets, and ends with the artisans. In these interviews, he has a realization about the kind of wisdom that he has. This epiphany is one Socrates often has in the dialogues, including with the first politician he speaks to. He says, “For he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know.” Later in The Apology, he describes his wisdom as “a position between knowledge and ignorance.” What kind of a position is that for the interviewer or the questioner to assume?
It is very hard for the interviewee to put forward “I don’t know anything,” because I’ve got to answer your questions. Characteristically, that’s not Socrates’ role. He is usually the one asking the questions, but in this dialogue, he is answering for himself. There’s a sense in which the interviewee cannot say, “I am ignorant,” so instead, Socrates says he has a certain kind of human wisdom. The Apology is the only place I know where Socrates ascribes wisdom to himself. That wisdom is of the situation, saying, Let me explain what’s been going on. I can tell you who I really am, I can tell you what I’m really being accused of. I understand all this very well. That’s not an ignorant mode. There’s a wrinkle in that he claims, I don’t claim to know things I don’t know, which is not a humble confession.
I see The Apology not as a humble or ignorant text, but a self-glorifying one. The Chaerephon oracle story places him in conversation with Oedipus: Socrates gets some information from an oracle that he finds incredible, he can’t believe that it’s the truth, so he decides he has to resist the oracle and spends the rest of his life doing it. The Oedipus story concludes that you can’t fight the oracle, human beings are playthings of the gods, life is tragic, and you should give up now because you have no knowledge. The Socratic version of that story has a very different moral, which is that you can live a happy life and live well by not assuming that you understand the oracle and what it means. You can fight it by trying to investigate and decipher its riddle, even if you’re ignorant, and you don’t blow up your life. The Apology is Socrates saying, I’m ignorant, and I lived a pretty good life. It’s kind of a boast.
You’re reminding me of a previous guest, Sheila Heti, who described the interview as a practice of consulting oracles. She stopped wanting to do interviews when she could no longer imagine her subjects as oracular speakers, becoming more interested in the prophecies issued from her own mind as opposed to from the mouths of others. That’s when she started interviewing AI chatbots instead of people. I just want to hear your reaction to that. I’m not quite sure how to put your understanding, from a set of ancient texts, of consulting the oracle as a way to not blow up your life alongside Sheila’s very contemporary sense that the oracles have nothing left to say, so there’s no point in even asking.
There’s an important detail I left out, which is that Oedipus goes to the oracle and asks, Who are my mother and father? And the oracle responds, You’re going to kill your father and marry your mother. He doesn’t notice that he didn’t get an answer to his question, so he runs away from home thinking he’ll avoid his fate. When Chaerephon comes back to Socrates and tells him that the oracle said there was no one wiser than him, Socrates still thinks, I am not wise. That is the Harry Potter moment that we’ve all been waiting for our whole lives, when some divine source tells you that even though it might not appear that way, you’re secretly a lot wiser than everyone around you. The degree to which the human soul longs for that experience makes it almost unbelievable that when faced with such a declaration, Socrates thinks that the oracle must be wrong. The difference between Socrates and Oedipus lies in whether they have decoded what the oracle has said. The question, “Are there oracles?” is really a question about us, what decoding we are prepared to do, and what things we feel we can take at face value. The speech of AIs seems to require remarkably little decoding.
In some ways, it’s the opposite of what Socrates says about interrogating the poets, who he says “are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them.” Anyone who’s done an author event with a poet knows how true this is. Socrates goes on to say that even the good artisans fall into the same error as the poets, because “they were good workmen, they thought that they also knew all sorts of high matters, and this defect in them overshadowed their wisdom.” Part of the practice of the interview, as he’s conducting them to understand the distinctiveness of his own wisdom, seems to be to differentiate between things like genius and inspiration and the high matters, which require understanding—as opposed to simply producing—beautiful things. Is that a fair way of describing the way he’s using the interview to understand his own distinctiveness?
I taught a class last quarter on literary modernism, and we read Hermann Broch, and in one of his novels there is a discussion about the relationship between the aesthetic and the ethical that made a big impression on me. It postulates that it’s important to us to see the work of art, in some substantial way, as a thing that the artist made. We really want to see art as the externalization of something in the artist. Here, Socrates is challenging that. He’s essentially saying a work of art is an accident. He argues that some people are empty vessels who accidentally produce amazing things sometimes. It’s a serious diss to artists. The way he knows is that, if there were anything intentional in there, they would be able to say something about where the art came from. If you ask them about it, what comes out of their mouths is garbage, that is evidence for the disconnect between the aesthetic and the ethical.
Part of the question running through The Apology is the public-versus-private dimension of the Socratic interview. I’m curious to hear you speak a little bit about the relationship of privacy versus publicity to the aims of the Socratic interview.
When Socrates says, I have not lived a public life, what he means is he didn’t try to steer the city in the assembly. But in many ways, these conversations were public, and that’s exactly what he’s on trial for. People liked Socrates humiliating some famous guy. A big part of what these people objected to is that they were being shown up publicly. Think of The Symposium. It’s private in a way, but the whole beginning of the dialogue is how the story got around. There’s something odd about the public-private distinction when applied to Socrates. To the extent that he was magnetic and unavoidable and entrancing, that’s part of what made him threatening.
He must walk this fine line between privacy and publicity, so that he’s being instructive but not punitive, because part of the charge that he brings against his accusers is, If you really thought I was corrupting the youth, you’d understand that I was doing it inadvertently, and if you knew I was doing it inadvertently, then you would know that it would be wrong to put me on trial. You would have approached me and admonished me privately.
That’s right. He thinks he’s admonishing people privately. He’s not admonishing them in the assembly or in the courts. He’s admonishing them in their homes, or in the home of someone they’re staying with, or outside the steps to the courthouse. In that sense, it’s private, but it is not.
What is at stake in setting up the terms on which one has the conversation in front of the semipublic, semiprivate audience, as opposed to doing it truly privately?
There are dialogues that are totally private, no one’s watching. But it’s made clear. Socrates says things like, I wouldn’t say this if anyone could hear what I’m saying to you.What is remarkable about the Socratic dialogues is how much in those conversations, even when there’s an audience, is a negotiation over what we’re doing by having this conversation. I think that’s interesting, because it’s not so true of us today. Renegotiation happens, but not, “Let’s have this conversation in a different way.” Socrates was introducing a new game, and teaching people the rules as they were playing. He must constantly show how people are doing it wrong, which isn’t just a matter of saying, “Your views are false,” it’s a matter of saying, “You don’t know what it is to answer a question.” The stuff that would be relegated behind the scenes is just part of the scene, because there’s nothing they could agree to; these people don’t know what he’s doing.
My favorite moment of renegotiation is at the beginning of The Symposium, when Agathon says, If you sit close enough to me, wisdom can pour from your mind into my mind, like water through cheese cloth. Socrates is like, No I’m good, we’re going to do this through a particular discursive mode, because you can’t pour wisdom from one person’s mind into another by mere proximity.
The moment after Socrates is convicted I find extremely moving. He says, Do not think of my conviction as evidence of the failure of my speech. He means that the deficiency that led to his conviction was not a deficiency of words. He goes on to say, “I had not the boldness or impudence or inclination to address you as you would have liked me to do, weeping and wailing and lamenting, which are things that you have been accustomed to hear from others, and which, as I maintain, are unworthy of me.” What is, for him, the role of passion in the Socratic interview?
Socrates is very self-aware and explicit about the fact that he is not doing what people would normally do in his situation: crying and bringing his family to cry. That is the biggest part of him conducting this interview on philosophical terms. It is related to what he says in Plato’s Gorgias, which is that oratory has no use, and that you should never use flattery for any purpose. He thinks that when you play on people’s emotions, it’s a form of flattery.
Say he were to come before the jury with tears shining down his face, saying, “Please save my life.” He would be relying on the jurors feeling good about themselves if they let him go. They could then have a conception of themselves as good and empathetic people, and he’d be feeding into that. Flattery is a way to force people to do what you want them to do, but not get them to notice, because the pleasure that they feel in the experience covers the use of force. Socrates thinks that’s bad, and you should never do it.
In thinking of these dialogues as interviews, are you trying to rehabilitate Socrates?
I am trying to push back against a conception of the purely negative Socrates. I wouldn’t call that rehabilitation, because a lot of people love that Socrates and some people find him really annoying. I’m sad that I didn’t wear the pants that I made for my book tour that have many of Socrates’ views on them, like “Everyone desires the good,” “It’s better to have injustice done to you than to do injustice,” “There’s no such thing as weakness of will,” “Virtue is knowledge,” etc. People ask, “Didn’t Socrates just not think anything, and wasn’t he just arguing?” The thought that Socrates just refutes people is wrong. But the interesting thing is that his midwifery amounted to extracting those views from the most reluctant mouths.
Where do you get the view that it’s better to have injustice done against you than to do injustice? You get it out of Polis. Where do you get the view that you should exercise self-restraint and not pursue pleasure excessively? You get it out of Callicles. Those are the people he had to refute to get it. He is delivering these idea-babies right from people, because there’s only one way for the conversation about virtue to go. There’s only one set of ways for it to make sense. Part of why I want to recover that is not just to rehabilitate Socrates, but because I think those views are compelling. We don’t want to lose Socratic intellectualism. It’s an ethical theory worth considering that gets obscured with the image of Socrates as a skeptic.
Is there anxiety about how his iconicity gets in the way of the work that he’s doing in the Socratic dialogues?
He seems worried about the icon of Socrates in The Apology. I wonder who’s worried about it, Socrates or Plato. You must ask yourself the question, “Why is Socrates famous?” If it’s 399 BCE, the answer isn’t Plato yet. It’s Aristophanes. It’s arguable that Socrates’ fame and the kind of persona that appears in the dialogues is due to Aristophanes. There’s a little competition between Plato and Aristophanes about who discovered Socrates. I read that into The Apology. It’s Plato saying, “That old one was totally wrong, but this new one that I’m giving you, this is Socrates.” But there are so many texts where Socrates will say things like, “I just don’t care what people think about me.” The thought that Socrates would care about how his icon is fashioned seems strange to me, but the thought that Plato would care is not strange.