“We live inside a bubble of caution and wariness,” writes Agnes Callard in the introduction to her new book, “Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life.” Callard, who is an associate professor of philosophy at The University of Chicago, says this is because many of us believe we are already “intellectual and critical and thoughtful enough.” Callard’s book encourages us to do the contrary: to live deeper lives filled with inquiry and exploration. The author of three books, Callard has dedicated her latest to Socrates who, despite being poor and leaving behind no written works, went on to become one of the most important thinkers in history. In this adapted excerpt, Callard explains that even in today’s age of rapid technology, the Athenian philosopher can teach us important lessons about how to live well, and how to confront the three biggest challenges we tend to fail at most: love, politics, and death.
Who was Socrates? Everyone has heard his name, and most people are aware of the basics: He lived thousands of years ago in Athens, Greece, and is somehow the father of Western philosophy, though exactly how is a mystery.
Socrates left no writing behind, but we know many biographical details about him from other sources. We know, for example, that he was an Athenian citizen born around 469 BCE; that his father was a stonecutter, his mother a midwife; that he was married, and had children; that he rarely left Athens; that he fought in the Peloponnesian War; and that in 399 BCE, he was charged by the city of Athens with impiety and corrupting the youth, put on trial, found guilty, and executed by poison. He was famous for interrogative conversations—with leading Athenians, with visiting dignitaries, and with promising youth—in which he regularly exposed his interlocutors’ pretensions to wisdom. He was also famously ugly—bug-eyed, snub-nosed, and goatish—in a city where personal beauty was as highly prized as wealth or fame.
Socrates was not only ugly, but also poor, and he often remarked on his lack of intellectual gifts. He confessed to having a bad memory, and denied any facility with speechmaking, those being the two essential markers of intelligence in Athens. In a society that prized manliness and male-coded attributes, Socrates described his life project in feminine terms, saying that he was a kind of “midwife” to ideas, and cited a woman—Diotima—as his teacher. Beauty, wealth, eloquence, and a decidedly manly self-presentation may have been prerequisites for conventional success as an Athenian citizen, and yet—in his time and even now, Socrates represented a new model for human excellence.
Socrates was a particular, historical individual; but he was and is more than that. Plato reports that during Socrates’s lifetime his contemporaries were already imitating him, to the point of copying his habit of walking barefoot. Then as now, Socrates presented himself as a person one can become, someone imitable enough to have his persona replicated in so many dialogues and plays.
