The fight between liberal and illiberal politics is in part about whether intellectuals are good guys or bad guys. As far back as the eighteenth century, learned people, skilled in intellectual combat, argued that people would be better off if people were more like them. As the historian Dena Goodman says of the philosophes of the French Enlightenment, they hoped to “shape the reading public in their own image.” A “desire to change the world to conform to the Republic of Letters” inspired their efforts. Government by consent of a vigilant and informed public and contemporary exhortations to “follow the science” are fruits of the attempt to make the world more susceptible to the influence of intellect.
But even in the eighteenth century, an indictment, memorably articulated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, was entered against the intellectual class: they changed the world to suit themselves. Heedless of how their skepticism loosened or dissolved the traditions and ties that gave most lives meaning, they gained reputation and sinecures for themselves at the expense of ordinary people. Illiberal populist attacks on the university, advanced by today’s intellectuals-against-intellectualism, echo this indictment.
Agnes Callard, a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago, seems to be a natural ally of liberals in their struggle to defeat dangerous illiberal ideas. In Open Socrates, she adopts a “hard-line intellectualist” approach to the patron saint of philosophy, whom she offers as a “model for human excellence” to a wide audience she frequently addresses directly as “you.” She presents Socrates the way she thinks Socrates presented himself, as a person “anyone [can] become,” an “avatar,” even a “mascot” for those bent on “infusing every corner of life with the demand to become more intellectual.” If liberals conceive the struggle for justice as, in part, a struggle against anti-intellectualism then Callard, one might think, is with them.
Think again. When Callard deals directly with politics in her “case for a philosophical life,” she confounds expectations. She tells would-be fighters against injustice that “you cannot fight injustice.” Indeed, no idea can be defeated through force, elections, or intellectual warfighting. Moreover, she believes that what she calls the “liberalism triad” of “freedom of speech, egalitarianism, and the fight for social justice” will be regarded by “enlightened future people” as “political fictions.” Callard invites liberals and illiberals alike to look away from the illusions of our petty politics to true politics, which consists in the practice of Socratic dialectics. But our politics are not simply petty.
For Callard, no idea can be defeated through force, elections, or intellectual warfighting.
Socratic Intellectualism
To understand Callard’s surprising position, one must understand the “Socratic intellectualism” she defends. First, Socratic intellectualism addresses what Callard calls “untimely questions,” questions to which we receive answers before we even ask them. “What is the point of my life?” is such a question. Before we can pose it, Callard argues, we are issued “savage commands” by our bodies (protect me!) or by our tribes (help us and harm our enemies!) We need such commands before we can reflect on them, because human life involves acting: “action is for the sake of some goal,” and “a goal is an idea about what matters.” But the commands we receive often contradict each other, leaving us wavering, for example, between serving our state or saving our skins, or between serving our nation and serving our family, or between pursuing pleasure and preserving our health.
Such wavering can distress us because “some part of [us] desperately wants to live a life that makes sense.” But we are incapable, without help, of achieving genuine critical distance from the assumptions on which our whole lives rely. “Each person,” liberal or illiberal, professor or package handler, “routinely fails to confront the most important questions about their lives.”
Socratic intellect-ualism claims that the only way to resolve the problem of wavering, apart from drowning our desire for a life that makes sense with buckets of dis-traction, is to seek a conception of the good that withstands scrutiny.
Second, Socratic intellectualism claims that the only way to resolve the problem of wavering, apart from drowning our desire for a life that makes sense with buckets of distraction, is to seek a conception of the good that withstands scrutiny. If we knew what the good was, we wouldn’t waver. Simply, Socratic intellectualism takes it “that we don’t know, that if we knew we would act on our knowledge, and that philosophy—the pursuit of such knowledge—is the only sure road to becoming a better person.” Callard adds that because we are so incapable of questioning the assumptions of which we are constantly making use, philosophy depends on “intellectual conversations.” In such conversations, the participants, each as happy to refute as to be refuted, test ideas about the good life, not with a view to defeating an opponent, or preventing harm, or winning applause, or furthering material interests, or communicating passions, but to persuading or being persuaded by another’s intellect.
Let’s return to Callard’s argument that you can’t fight injustice, bearing in mind that her treatments of the other two elements of the “liberal triad,” which I cannot get into here, have a similar structure. Callard thinks that “when you fight with someone, you are pretending to argue with them.” To justify that strange claim, she observes that living politically means “living together under a shared idea of how to do so.” The “fundamental problem of politics” is that “we sometimes have trouble living together because we have different ideas about how best to do so.” The only way for any of those ideas to be vindicated, Socratic intellectualism suggests, is through testing in intellectual conversation. An idea cannot be vindicated by majority vote or by winning a war against holders of the opposite view. No, it has to come through discussion, which involves inquiring and testing, not a mere power struggle.
Political fighting, then, is pretend arguing in the sense that politics aims at free consensus concerning how best to live together, a consensus that can be achieved only by intellectual conversation. But politics, as one might hear from both those who think that property is theft and those who think taxation is theft, is instead the disregard of opinions held by some, in favor of the opinions held by others. There is no hope for consensus. It involves power, not philosophy. If for Clausewitz war is politics by other means, for Callard, philosophy is the only real politics.
According to Callard, Socratic testing of opinions is the real politics, and “when people think that they are fighting injustice, they are instead imitating refutation.”
This is what Callard calls a “Socratizing move,” which “takes the form ‘A’ is the real ‘B.’” In this case, Socratic testing of opinions is the real politics, and “when people think that they are fighting injustice, they are instead imitating refutation.” This error—of mistaking winning a battle for defeating an idea—feeds a multitude of pathologies. These include the passionately held view that “inflicting harms on people” will harm “the ideas that are your real enemies,” and the view, solid for fights but not for inquiries, that you can uphold an idea against those who deny it “by saying things that are even more false than what they say.” I agree with Callard that these are pathologies. I agree with her that it is a great good, even during a fight for the soul of a nation, to understand that our deepest needs cannot be met by politics, or that nations don’t have souls. And I agree with Callard that even when we are most certain that we are the good guys, we remain ignorant, narrow-minded, and less capable than one could wish of giving a truthful and consistent account of our judgments and actions. None of this can be dismissed merely because we think we are in crisis. When we dismiss Socratism because it is not firmly arrayed on our side, we imitate the illiberal spirit of Athens, to whom Socrates was suspect partly because he inquired into subversive ideas, even as Athens fought a war that threatened its empire and very existence.
Looking Down?
Yet Callard doesn’t give politics its due. Imagine her informing nineteenth-century political abolitionists that they are mistaken to think that one can fight an idea by fighting people. They could acknowledge that people often make that mistake but deny that they’re making it. By fighting slavery, they don’t literally mean fighting the idea of slavery, which they know, because they’re not fools, won’t disappear after an election, court case, or war. Rather, by fighting slavery they mean fighting to prevent the idea that slavery is just from manifesting itself as actual slavery. Moreover, those who think that all men are created equal wish not only to be confident that their idea can withstand rational scrutiny but also to ensure that they can live in accordance with it, even if they have not refuted the idea of a natural slavery to the satisfaction of people who hold it. They could agree that it would be best to persuade slaveholders to let their slaves go but argue that, if persuasion fails, fighting is a regrettable moral and practical necessity. Put another way, though, arguments over ideas matter largely because of how these ideas are manifest in the world—in people and the choices they make.
In the end, Callard doesn’t give politics its due.
To that objection, Callard asks us to think of releasing “a gas that had no effect other than to cause everyone to forget [a] noxious idea.” That action, Callard claims, “would not carry the same passion and glory of inflicting harm on the holders of ideas” because “the passion and glory come from the conceit that harms to people represent harms to ideas.” But it is easy to imagine her interlocutors’ protests to the contrary and their insistence that brotherly persuasion had been attempted, fervently, by anti-political abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, without success. Sensible people acknowledge that it is very hard to distinguish between sinner and sin, or ideas and the people who hold them, but that is different from thinking it impossible. To a Lincoln who, with victory all but determined, urged the North to act “with malice toward none with charity for all” and “with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right,” Callard seems to reply, “Oh, come off it!”
But you don’t have to be a Christian or a philosopher to understand that a given political battle (or even civil war) might be an unfortunate necessity, rather than an opportunity to win or stick it to the bad guys. For Callard, though, such a supposition is always delusional. The moment we depart the philosophical plane, bad faith sneaks in.
In fairness, Callard suggests that politics “involves a lot more than fighting” and therefore invites us to reflect on a healthy rather than pathological politics. Here, we might find semi-philosophers, reflective partisans, aware of the limits of politics even as they practice it. We might even suggest that liberalism, which officially shies away from dogmatic pronunciations about the best way of life, is less vulnerable to the typical pathologies than most. But Callard’s Socratism draws her to propose that true politics is philosophizing, rather than standing for election or marching for civil rights. That is how Socrates can claim to “practice the true politics,” even though he stayed out of Athenian politics as much as possible.
Democratic Philosophy?
I suspect that Callard is unwilling to argue merely for trying to make our extremely irrational politics somewhat less irrational because she wants to make a case for philosophy as more than an approach “layered on top of what we were doing anyways.” She isn’t necessarily trying to turn people off politics, but rather to turn them on, hard, to politics as philosophy—to show how Socratic intellectualism is embedded in politics properly conceived and persuade us to attend to that. If a philosophical life is the only coherent response to our profound ignorance, and if anyone can lead such a life, then the half-measure of more reflective citizenship or activism won’t do.
Yet Callard’s idea that anyone can lead a philosophical life, an idea buttressed by her assertion that “the space around Socrates becomes peopled by Socrateses,” should be weighed against a fact that Callard also recognizes, namely that Socrates encountered many people, including close associates, who were unable to learn from him. Callard’s main example is Alcibiades, who, though made aware of the errors of his ways by Socrates, nonetheless, as any reader of the dialogues that bear his name would know, kept making them, to the point of betraying Athens. Socrates’s associates, Plato’s dialogues show, included wrongdoers, scolds, and others who failed to learn from Socrates, or at least failed to learn the decisive things.
Indeed, because her understanding of Socrates is belied by some of what Plato has Socrates say, Callard is compelled to claim that even Plato failed to grasp Socratism. She finesses this problem by distinguishing, as many scholars do, between dialogues supposedly written earlier in Plato’s career, when more of the real Socrates came out, and those written later, in which Socrates became a mouthpiece for Plato’s ideas. As for Xenophon, who also knew and wrote about Socrates, his dialogues aren’t “interesting” enough to consider next to Plato’s. In other words, even if anyone can be a Socrates, in practice, nobody other than Socrates, and perhaps Callard, seems to be one.
Even if anyone can be a Socrates, in practice, nobody other than Socrates, and perhaps Callard, seems to be one.
Although Callard, like her Socrates, is democratic in seemingly saying what she thinks to anyone who will listen, she is too quick to discount that tradition according to which Socrates at times dissembled. For example, in one dialogue, Socrates encounters Euthyphro, an arrogant man who considers himself to be, as he thinks Socrates is, a knower persecuted by an unappreciative and ignorant people. Socrates professes to engage Euthyphro, who gives ample evidence from the outset that he is a fool, as his teacher. He then proceeds to move Euthyphro not closer to but farther from him, such that from an extremely unconventional definition of piety, which justifies Euthyphro’s prosecution of his own father for murder, Euthyphro arrives at an utterly conventional definition, according to which piety consists in prayer and sacrifice. If anything, Euthyphro is less well disposed toward philosophizing at the end than he is at the beginning. This is far from the sole example in Plato’s body of work of Socrates attempting something other than a conversion of his dialogue partner to Socratism.
In his treatment of Euthyphro, Plato’s Socrates either shows a genuine concern for Athens or refutes in advance the charge that he is a corrupter of the youth, or both. “See!” Plato seems to say, “here is Socrates encountering a genuine corrupter, a man who would justify turning against one’s own father and setting him straight!” Far from evidence of mere deviousness, this approach, which requires Socrates to dissemble, recognizes in practical terms what Callard seems to acknowledge only theoretically: that neither Athens nor any other polity can be altogether rational.
How a contemporary imitator of Socrates should be disposed toward liberal politics, which claims to be more rational—more deliberative, more subject to reasons, and so more just—than its rivals, is hard to know. Blaise Pascal said of Plato and Aristotle that if “they wrote on politics it was as if laying down rules for a lunatic asylum.” And if they pretended to take politics seriously, it was because they hoped to move the inmates toward moderation. Perhaps, as I have indicated, philosophers owe politics more deference than this. As for Callard, I fear that she doesn’t even pretend to take non-Socratized politics seriously enough to speak to, much less moderate, today’s liberals and antiliberals.
Jonathan Marks is a professor of politics at Ursinus College and author of Let’s Be Reasonable: A Conservative Case for Liberal Education.
