The Free Press
“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.
Unlike Tolstoy, or Plato, or Xenophon, or Aristophanes, Socrates did not write great books. And yet he was responsible for one truly great creation: the character of Socrates. Socrates made himself into someone that other people could be. He fashioned his very person into a kind of avatar or mascot for anyone who ventures to ask the sorts of questions that disrupt the course of a life.
Our earliest major source for Socrates is Aristophanes’s Clouds, a comic play that mocks Socrates and his practice of refutation. Our other main sources are works by Xenophon and Plato. These texts are called “Socratic dialogues,” and they present Socrates talking to a great variety of people on a great variety of topics—love, death, politics, punishment, household management, the interpretation of poetry, the proper use of oratorical skills, and much more. Both Plato and Xenophon were close associates of Socrates, so when they portrayed him, they were able to draw on their memory of what they had witnessed, participated in, or heard reports of; but in neither case should their dialogues be understood as transcripts of actual conversations.
Though Socrates was eventually put to death for his philosophizing, it is amazing how long he was permitted to spend doing exactly that. He reached the ripe old age of 70.
In the centuries that followed Socrates’s death, when philosophical schools were proliferating, they differed sharply in their conceptions of what a philosopher should be, yet many treated Socrates as a paradigm. To this day, Plato’s Socratic dialogues remain the standard text used in college courses to introduce students to the very idea of philosophy.
His Trial
In 399 BCE, three men (Meletus, Anytus, and Lycon) accused Socrates of impiety and corruption of youths. Socrates, they argued, taught young people to question authority and religion, and he made powerful people seem foolish.
When his one-day trial began, Socrates told the jury a story that exemplified his beliefs. Socrates talked about the time his friend Chaerephon took a trip to the oracle at Delphi. The oracle, which was thought to communicate the will of Apollo, was the supreme religious authority for people throughout the Greek world. Chaerephon asked the oracle whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates, and its answer was “no.” Upon hearing this, according to Plato’s Apology, Socrates was shocked:
When I heard of this reply I asked myself: “Whatever does the god mean? What is his riddle? I am very conscious that I am not wise at all; what then does he mean by saying that I am the wisest? For surely he does not lie; it is not legitimate for him to do so.”
If you are a normal person, you would bathe in the glow of the oracle’s answer, treating it as the confirmation you had been waiting for your whole life: I’m a secret genius! Socrates, by contrast, insisted that he knows perfectly well that his wisdom is in no way extraordinary, and eventually found a way of understanding the oracle’s pronouncement as confirmation of that view:
What is probable, gentlemen, is that in fact the god is wise and that his oracular response meant that human wisdom is worth little or nothing, and that when he says this man, Socrates, he is using my name as an example, as if he said: “This man among you, mortals, is wisest who, like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is worthless.”
According to Socrates’s interpretation of the oracle, the message was that no human being is possessed of any kind of extraordinary wisdom. When the god used the name “Socrates,” he was referring not to the concrete individual who was the son of Sophroniscus and Phaenarete, but to a kind of person, namely anyone who understands the fact that no human being is wise. If you understand this, that is enough to make you “a Socrates.”
During the trial, in Plato’s representation of it, Socrates went beyond simply defending himself against the official charges to argue that not even his accusers really believed that he was guilty of impiety or corrupting youth. Then why were they trying to put him to death? Socrates’s answer was: fear of being asked “Why?” He told the jury members who voted against him that they did so in vain. He told them they voted to kill him “in the belief that you would avoid giving an account of your life.” But imitators would rush forward to take his place, so that in the end “there will be more people to test you.” He claimed that “if you kill the sort of man I say I am, you will not harm me more than yourselves.”
His Death
Socrates died as he lived, philosophizing. Before the city of Athens compelled him to drink hemlock, he awaited execution in a prison cell, where his friend Crito came to visit him. Crito offered to bribe the guards so as to help Socrates escape prison and death, but Socrates persuaded him that escaping would be wrong.
The topic of Plato’s Phaedo, the dialogue featuring Socrates’s death, is whether there is life after death—Socrates had, up until this moment, tended to believe that there was, but decided that this was the opportune moment to subject that belief to sharp critique. He asked his friends, all of them devastated by the unbearable prospect of his death, to remain calm, refrain from crying, and inquire alongside him. Socrates looked death straight in the eye, and had a conversation with his friends about it.
The Phaedo is a rigorous philosophical dialogue, presenting a series of increasingly complex arguments for the immortality of the soul, as well as objections to those arguments. It is also unmistakably a death scene: Plato describes how Socrates’s closest friends gathered mournfully around him in his jail cell to keep him company during his final hours, how he drank the hemlock, how they watched its numbing effects work their way up from his feet, to his legs, to his belly, knowing that “when the cold reached his heart, he would be gone.” And then it did, and he was.
Just before drinking the hemlock, Socrates said to Crito: “To express oneself badly is not only faulty as far as the language goes, but does some harm to the soul.”
His Teachings
There were three areas of human life where Socrates thought our ignorance loomed largest: politics, love, and death. Two and a half millennia later, these remain humanity’s problem areas. Even as the explosion of scientific and technological knowledge has created massive improvements in many areas of our lives, we remain at sea when it comes to managing politics, handling love affairs, and confronting our mortality. Socratic ethics involves living a truly philosophical life, and it tells you that the way you should conduct yourself in each of these three domains is: inquisitively.
Socrates discovered that the way to be good when you don’t know how to be good is by learning. Instead of implementing a principle—such as “Achieve the greatest good for the greatest number!” or “Obey the categorical imperative!”—you should ask questions instead. Socrates argued that the greatest gift another person can give you is to show you why you are wrong, and the only sure way to treat another person with respect is to answer their questions or question their answers.
He believed that all of the trouble we have leading our lives, all of our dissatisfactions, all of our failures, all of our moral imperfections, all of the injustices we commit, large and small, stem from one source: ignorance. Socrates’s claim that “I know that I know nothing” isn’t an empty gesture of skepticism, but rather a plan for life. It tells you that the key to success, whether you are navigating difficulties in your marriage, your terror at the prospect of death, or the politicized minefield of social media, is to have the right kinds of conversations. Such a life promises to make people freer, more equal, more romantic, and ultimately more courageous.
Adapted from Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life by Agnes Callard. Copyright © 2025 by Agnes Callard. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
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