Philosopher Agnes Callard Has Some Questions About Questions

Episode Transcript
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AGNES CALLARD (00:00):
The way you live your life when you don't know how to live it is to live it inquisitively. And there is a way, I think, to do the confrontation with death inquisitively, romance inquisitively, and then politics. These are what I see as humanity's biggest problem areas, love, death, and politics. So I try to explain how you engage in those domains inquisitively.

WILLIAM BAUDE (00:01):
Yeah, and there are chapters on love, death, and politics, each in the book. This is an astonishingly arrogant book in some ways, in a good way. [Laughter]

Totally, I accept that.
[Theme music plays]
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ALISA ROSENTHAL (00:05):
Hey all, thanks for checking out Chicago Humanities Tapes, the audio extension of the live Chicago Humanities Spring and Fall Festivals. I’m your host and producer Alisa Rosenthal, here to help you get closer to getting the answers to all of life’s biggest questions via the brightest minds the world has to offer.
Now, we’ll get the answers to life’s biggest questions eventually, according to philosopher Agnes Callard – not within our lifetimes or anything, but she thinks it’ll probably maybe another 10,000 years of humanity. So how do we live our lives now knowing we will never know the answers to life’s biggest questions like, is there a God? What makes a good parent? Should I have gone into academia?

Her and University of Chicago constitutional law professor William Baude think the answer is in the Socratic method – asking questions without the goal of persuasion, being ok without getting answers, and, of course true to Socrates, living a life examined. You can learn more about this in her new book Open Socrates (00:07):
The Case for a Philosophical Life which I’ve linked to in the show notes. And hey if you’re travel distance to Chicago, we have lots of great events still coming up live in our Spring 2025 Festival. Head to chicagohumanities.org for more information.

Content warning (00:08):
this episode does include mentions of suicide. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat 988 lifeline.org.
This is Agnes Callard and Baude at the Athenaeum Center for Thought & Culture at the Chicago Humanities Spring Festival in April 2025.
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Thank you all for coming. Thank you, Agnes, especially. I've been an admirer of Agnes' work since we were junior faculty at the University of Chicago together, and I've read and watched just about all of it. So I'm especially excited to get a chance to talk to her about this. So maybe we can start just by asking you, what is the book about?

So I was telling Will that, you know, I've done a bunch of these events. I summarize it differently every time. I never quite know what's gonna come out of my mouth, so let's see how I summarize this time. The book is about the fact that we are, all of us, kind of haunted by a set of questions that we don't ever really fully dare to ask about whether we're living our lives in the way that we should. And, I start with a sort of story of somebody whose life was almost destroyed when he tried to say, I'm not gonna be haunted anymore, I'm gonna actually just try to ask those questions. And it drove him towards suicide. And this guy, who was haunted in this way, was not like some kind of loser. It was Tolstoy, one of the most impressive, successful, exceptional human beings who ever lived who came to the conclusion that his life wasn't worth living because he couldn't answer these questions. And then I introduced another person, okay, came a little earlier than Tolstoy, Socrates, who my book is about, who had the same kind of encounter as Tolstoi did with these questions, that is, he was convinced they were super important and that he wasn't gonna let them haunt him anymore, but he was gonna face them directly. But then it went a totally different way. It went well, instead of badly. He thought, you know, spending his life inquiring into these questions was the best possible way that he could live. And so part of what the book is about is like what would explain this big difference between these two reactions? Tolstoy being, the book by the way, the Tolstoy book is called Confession, in which Tolstoy describes this experience. Happened when he was around 50. He had already written Anna Karenina and War and Peace. And he was thinking that his life had no purpose, right? Okay, so Tolstoy had this sort of suicidal response and Socrates had this, it's really the opposite of suicidal, he says in the Apology that if Athens puts me to death and I go down to Hades, do you know what I'm gonna do in Hades? Down there, I'm going to keep just doing this, questioning people, and it's gonna be great because I'll get to interrogate Odysseus and Sisyphus, right, so he's like, this is awesome, this is a great way to live. So like why are there these two different reactions and what can be said to flesh out the Socratic reaction is what the book is about.

All right, and so when you say questions, I know you mean something big by that, right? So I teach in a law school. In a law, we teach using something we call the Socratic method, which consists of asking the students questions. And the people who are the most famous and most skilled at it, I had a late colleague who once famously taught class literally only using questions. He never made a single declarative statement over the course of the hour and manages to elicit out of the students all the points that he wants them to see about the case. Right. So but you say in the book, this thing people do in law school where they teach classes by asking questions, that's not the real Socratic method. That's not sufficient to be the Socrastic method. So why not?

Yeah, when I want to be really mean about that sort of thing, I call it ventriloquism. Because it's like, well, there's stuff you want them to say, but you don't want it to come out of your mouth, you want it come out their mouth, right? So I think that the difference is that in the Socratic method, when you are asking a question, you don't know the answer, and you don't know what people are going to say. And and you are going to use their answer to, you're going to like challenge their answer and kind of go deeper into it through a specific process, whereby the Q&A is going to get repeated a bunch of times over a single topic. And at the end, you are gonna get somewhere new. So if you sort of start with, I know exactly where I want to go, by the way, a lot of people do read Socrates this way, as though he did know where he wants to go. I'm trying to argue that that's not the case. But the idea is that there's like a territory you want to explore with someone and question and answer is a way to explore it. So it's a way for both of you to sort of come to something new together.

So what makes something a good question then?

I think what makes something a good question, it's relative to the person you're asking it to, and it is something where they can't help feel like they have to have an answer to it. Like, they're not gonna just be like, I don't know. So that's at least one, that's one criterion. That's maybe unnecessary, it's far from sufficient. The other thing from a Socratic point of view that if we're doing the specific kind of inquiry, I'm talking about in my book, it's that the reason why they feel they have to have an answer is that in some way their whole life is lived on the basis of that answer, right? So if you're like, what makes a good parent, okay? We're both parents. I'm sure some of you are parents. If you're a parent, you can't just be like, I don't know, I have no idea. I don't know what makes better or worse, right.

Who cares?

Who cares. It's like not possible, right? Because you're really invested in your own parenting to the point where you're like, look, you need to help the child flourish. Whatever, you'll have something. You'll feel like you better have something to say. So it's that the person to whom it's directed feels like they have something to say because a lot of the way they live their life is grounded on that answer.

And you call these also, I think, untimely questions, right? So why are they untimely?

So normally, the way that it goes with question and answer is that order that I just said, question then answer, that's the right order. It's not supposed to go the other way, answer then question, but these kind of questions that are sort of the bedrock of Socratic inquiry, we always think we have the answers before the question ever shows up, how many times, have you asked yourself what makes a good parent before? Like there's gonna be some people in this room who've never posed that question to themselves, even if they're parents. So it looks like you start with the answer, and then at some point, you stumble on the question.

Right, and so if I ask, is it a good use of your life to be an academic, to spend your time writing books and thinking about ideas, it's a little late. We've answered the question.

Exactly, exactly, and the only people, I think, who ever hit that question are people who've already, they've already experienced a lot of sunk costs of being an academic already. They might be a grad school, they're probably actually faculty, they might be full professors, and they're suddenly hit, like Tolstoy was with the question, should I be an academic, should I a novelist?

So I have a question about the importance of these and actually it has a parenting tie-in. So right before I came here, I was explaining to my four-year-old daughter why I had to leave and it was a weekend, which I don't normally do. And so she knows I must mean it's important. She said, okay, so what's so important? And I said, I was gonna go ask somebody some questions. And she said, Okay, are the questions important? I said yes. And she says, What are they about? I said the questions are about questions. And she's said, It's important to ask questions about questions? And I say yes. And she say no, Dada. Questions are not important. Important things are death and life. Not questions. So what should I have said to her? [Laughter]

So. Well, part of my book's about death. I have a whole chapter on death, I agree. And I think that, I think she's basically right. Here's how I would put what she was saying. She's saying, what's important are answers. That is, answers like, that tell you how to live your life, or maybe that tell you how to avoid death, or what I would say, because we're not gonna avoid it. It's coming for all of us. How to deal with the fact that we are going to die. So the questions are just the road to the answers. So they're, on my picture, only instrumentally important, but it turns out that's the instrument we have to use.

So, are we sure that we have to use it? I guess, because then we start with like, maybe I feel like I already know the answer to whether I'm a good parent or whether I should be doing this with my life or what to do about death.

No, okay, very good, so like, in effect, I kinda just contradicted myself, right, because I said you got the answers before you had the questions, so you actually didn't need the questions in order to have the answers. You just got a bunch of answers for free. You're all pretty sure that you know how to live your life, that you knew, somehow you knew you were supposed to come here, right? Well, because you had like a long, elaborate inquiry, no, it just seemed like a good idea, you did it. So we can go through our lives and never inquire into anything, and we'll still have a bunch answers, and part of what my book does is look into why that's the case. How did we magically get a bunch of answers to all the important questions of life without ever raising them? And I have, sorry about that, but I wanted to get directly to your question, which is, okay, supposing we already have answers, why do we care about asking the question? Why are we asking questions to which we already had the answers? The problem is that they might not be the right answers because we got them in a way that does not secure there being the right answers. So that's the first thing, that is we have answers. We don't necessarily have the right the answers. The second part is, even if they're the right answers, we don't have them in the way that you have an answer at the end of a completed inquiry. So if I were to tell you

So to get there, we have to have the right kind of conversation, right? The right kind of, and you describe it as sort of persuade or be persuaded. So what is that? Why is it important?

So I think that in order to make progress on an inquiry, you have to inquire sort of freely. You can't be like, well, only certain kinds of answers are allowed and only certain responses are allowed. And I already know that I'm right when I start because you're not gonna get anywhere new. And in general, I think often our model of speech, of communication is a persuasion model. So I'm trying to make you think something. That's what persuasion is, which it's unilateral cognitive determination. It means I succeed if you end up thinking what I think and I fail if you don't end up thinking what think or if you ended up convincing me, that's also a failure case, right? I only succeed in the case where I determine what you think. That's what persuasion is. And Socrates didn't believe in persuasion. He thought that's a bad goal to have because what if you're wrong then you shouldn't be persuading anyone. Your goal should be persuade or be persuaded. So when you have an inquiry with someone, right, Will's asking me questions, I'm answering them. Like maybe I'm gonna convince him that I'm right, or maybe his question is gonna reveal that my answer was insufficient, as it did just a few minutes ago, right, where I was like, oh, you need to get answers, and then he was pointing out, well, we do have the answers already, that's like, you kind of just said that, right? He did politely, but, right. And then I have to then kind of reorient and say, okay, wait a minute, you've persuaded me, and now I'm going to switch what I want to persuade you of, right so, inquiry. In order to be open, in order to be free, has to be bilateral rather than unilateral.

Do we know, I guess do we know that we always have to have one of those sort of end up with persuading or being persuaded? Like are there, is it possible there are times it's okay for us to disagree when the right answer for me is different from the right for you?

I think if the right answer for you is different from the right answer for me, we don't disagree.

Ok.

We can both agree that that's the right answer for and this is the right answer for me.

Okay, but what if it's about like whether something is true like we disagree about a moral proposition.

Yeah.

Is that something where we just we have to agree or can we say we agree to disagree?

So I think there's a lot of different ways to use the words have to, right? If have to means we will inevitably come to agree, the answer is we do not have to agree. That is, we can walk away from the conversation with different views. If the question is, is that totally okay? Is that fine? Is it just completely fine for people to walk away from a moral inquiry with different views? No. It means that they didn't complete the inquiry. Life is such that we don't always get to complete our inquiries. And so in a way, we go into a conversation knowing it's actually like reasonably likely that we will have to go home before we complete the inquiry. It's not that we have to, but it's also not, it's like sad. It's sad that we don't get to complete our inquiries, but that's the kind of sadness that you better get used to if you're ever gonna start inquiries inside a life that has other constraints on it.

Because it seems like this also means that these kinds of inquiries are gonna be often sort of impolite. You know, so you think of like topics like, you mentioned death or religion, right? Where, you know, we could talk for a while about like, why I'm not a Christian and why somebody else is, and probably we're not gonna reach the point of persuade to be persuaded, right. It's probably not gonna end in conversion in one direction or another. And then we're sort of the normal norm. At that point we say, okay, well, we agree to disagree, it's a big country, it's nice that we can go on about our way. But you're saying sort of that's a little bit of a tragic failure.

Yeah, so I have sort of two responses there. So like one thing is, I do think that tolerance of a certain kind is built into our, and here I mean American, like political ethos, right? So the idea that we're, we live in a country where people have a lot of different views, they have a lotta different views about things that are quite important, like religion, and we can all sort of get along even though we disagree about important things. And there's a way in which the fundamental conceit in my book is to say, that's not quite right. It's not quite right to think in that way. It's not quite right to be as tolerant as we are. But that's to say what we should be intolerant because basically the problem is that we might be the ones who are wrong, right? So somebody's wrong, but it could be you. It's to reconceive tolerance as a kind of patience. That is, it's like, you know, we haven't, like, the question, is there a God? Okay, some people in the room, this room believe in God. Some people in this room don't believe in God. And we're still working that one out. We haven't figured it out yet. And, you know, there's, well, will we ever? I mean, certainly not if we don't try, I think. And so I do think there's a kind of, maybe one of the dangers of tolerance is a defeatist rhetoric. That says, oh, it's fine if everybody disagrees, this is all good, we can agree to disagree right at the very beginning of the conversation and we don't even have the conversation. I do think we have to be aiming at agreement if we're gonna have a motive to talk to each other. But I also think, yeah, we have to be a aiming in a very long-term way. I mean, Socrates was 2,500 years ago. I think for these questions, you know, I think we've made some progress over the past 2,500 years, but I think that we need at least another 10,000 for [laughter] some of the, which it's not that long, like in evolutionary terms, it's not that much time. But, you know, these are not, these are not things we're gonna figure out really fast, and so we are gonna have to be tolerant for quite some time, I think, that would be one way to put it.

And you have to this not just to debate questions about the universe, right, but also very personal questions, like.

Mmhmm.

What is love and how will I know when it's good?

Yeah!

I don't have 10,000 years to figure out the answer to that.

Oh right, so none of us have 10,000 years to figure out any of these questions. We're gonna die before the humanity achieves knowledge of these answers. And I see that as like a really big problem of human life. So my final chapter of my book is kind of about this, that it's about death, but it's also about the fact that death is going to come before we have knowledge. How do you live with that? How do live with the fact that you're gonna have to live your whole life inquisitively? That is, you know, there are inquiries that we have where it's like, okay, I'll inquire for a while and then I'll get the knowledge and then it'll be done. And like, that's not in the cards for us. Like maybe our distant descendants, but not us. Because these questions are really hard. And so we can make progress and we can, you know, help, like, here's a way to think about it. Socrates, okay? 2500 years ago. There was nothing in the air at that time to the effect that human beings have rights. That's something, that's progress that we made. Humanity, that was huge for us, right? It's one of the biggest kind of progress that we made, how did it happen? It's a long story. I don't think Socrates played no part in it. I think Christianity was kind of a big move, but then the enlightenment, you know, so we get these points, right, there are nodes I would pick out, okay. You know, I would pull out Augustine, I'd pull out Kant or something like that. They're important nodes. There are a lot more nodes than them. These are just my favorite people. But the point is that, you know, Socrates had to kind of live and die engaging some questions to which human rights was some of the answers and he didn't see that, he didn' get it because he was too early. And we have that, we've made progress, but even with respect, what human rights are there? Why make something a human right? We're not done, even there. It's still an emerging skill for us. So I think that that's right. So like questions about what is the meaning of love? So one of my chapters in my book is about romantic love. Like what is romance? Why is it important to us? And what I try to do is sort of tell you, how do you live out your romantic life, given that you're not gonna know the answer to that question. And the answer I give is, inquisitively. That is the way that you do, the way you live your life when you don't know how to live it is to live it inquisitively. And there is a way, I think, to do the confrontation with death inquisitively, romance inquisitively, and then politics. That's the third area that I see. I think this is what I see as humanity's biggest problem areas, love, death, and politics. So I try to explain how you live how you engage in those domains inquisitively.

Yeah, and there are chapters on love, death, and politics, each in the book. This is an astonishingly arrogant book in some ways, in a good way. [Laughter]

Totally, I accept that.

And I guess there is something about now, as you sort of describe what you're asking of us, right? So here we were minding our own business. We were living our lives 15 minutes at a time, not asking the purpose of life. You tell us, that's actually not good enough. We've got to ask much bigger questions about why we're even doing what we're doing. Then you tell us oh, by the way, even if you devote your whole life to asking these questions I've asked you about, you won't make that much progress. Your life will be a drop in the bucket of our total humanity's progress towards that. At that point, am I not entitled to say, well in that case, I'm gonna keep doing what I was doing. I don't know if I'm going to make any contribution to the meaning of life or whether there's a God, but I can do the laundry.

The question is, why do you want to do the laundry?

At least I'll succeed at that? How's that.

But like, you could succeed. If you succeed at a bad thing, it's not success.

That's true.

Don't you need to know that doing the laundry is valuable in order to know when you've completed it, you've succeeded at something?

Uh, maybe. Good. Although, I don't know whether the big questions are valuable either, moving those in the wrong direction too. So I might say, at least I'll take something where I seem to be, you know, of immediate benefit and care to the people around me, which strikes me intuitive as valuable. Like, I can cook dinner, I could do the laundry, I'm moving the ball forward a little bit at a time. And somehow that'll help humanity along the way, it's a little brick, but isn't it something?

I mean, when you say intuitively, what you mean is, there's some answers I have that I feel those answers very strongly.

Yeah.

But to feel them very strongly and to know that they're correct are two different things. Intuitively means you're gonna have to rest those answers out of my clenched fist, or so that's what intuitively is. It doesn't mean you know it's right, it doesn't means it's true, doesn't it mean it's correct, it doesn't mean you've ever thought about it, doesn't you have any reason to think it's good. And so part of what I try to do in the book is explain actually why you have a bunch of intuitive judgments about what's good in your life. And I have two different categories of what are the places where you got these answers? Remember, you have these answers automatically. You have like just judgments about how you should live your life that you got without ever asking the question. So you're like, where did I get them? And what I say is there are two sources. One is your body. So like appetitive desires

Ok good. All right, now we try another level. Okay, it's not totally intuitive. It's not that I've never thought about these things before. I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. I read Plato back then. I thought about the meaning of life. I took an introduction to ethics. I reached some preliminary views about these questions of what I should do with my life. Now, I will admit, I haven't spent a lot of time re-interrogating them since I formed these views. I've just started, you know, I've developed a plan and I'm moving forward. And you come along saying, I should stop what I'm doing all the time, and reconsider whether I'm going in the right direction. And sometimes you have to do that, but if you do that too much, you'll never get anywhere.

Yeah, good. So, my book is not actually a book that tells you what you're supposed to do. And the reason why it can't be that is I don't actually know what you should do. I don't even know you. So, I don't know how much you should be interrupting your lives to engage in philosophical conversation because I don's know how your life goes. And so, I mean, I think it is a very natural reading that what my book is telling people, it's natural. I've learned, that is, that I wrote it in a way that leads to this slightly misleading impression that what I'm telling you to do is drop everything and fill the rest of your life with philosophy. What I'm really doing is if there's a voice that haunts you, if there is a question that's kind of bugging you, and that I'm making that voice a little louder. So when you read this book, it's like this

But even so, there are times I have this disquieting voice that's like, are you sure you're doing the right thing? And there are time I indulge it, and there are a times I say, it's untimely, I don't have time to worry about this right now. And it's true, I don't. Like If I were to ask these questions now, I would be potentially upsetting my life, or throwing off my commitments or changing things. And you're sort of encouraging me to do that, right?

So even Socrates, there were times when he was like, okay, I gotta go to war. Or at the end of the Phaedo, I got to go die. He has to go dying in the Phaedo. They're in the middle of the conversation. He's like, I'm sorry, guys, I've got to die. So it's not always possible. But so I think you're right in a way that I'm encouraging it. Let me explain the sense in which I'm encourage it. It's really, it really goes back to the contrast between Tolstoy and Socrates. So I think a lot of why we don't pursue these inquiries is we tell ourselves

All right, so if I'm gonna do this, I'm going to start questioning some of the big things in life, what are the ingredients for good questioning? Like do I need a philosopher? Do I need you to be the one on the other end of the questions? Can I find questioners elsewhere in my life?

I'm gonna tell you an embarrassing fact which is that I'm like a lot better at answering questions than at asking them. I've learned this actually by doing events. So like philosophers, we actually just get way more practice in answering questions than asking them and often when we ask them it's like in the Q and A of a talk and like we make like a long speech basically that's like somewhere in there we try to stick a question mark to make the excuse for our speech, right? So it's actually, it's like, asking questions is really hard. So if you ever find someone who's good at asking questions, there are such people, just like cling to that person. That's like a gold mine. I know such people and I do cling to them. But I think that, I do think that like, at a sort of, there's just a more fine grain way in which what I'm sort of hoping is that reading my book, which contains a lot of quotes from Plato, right, so a lot examples of what these conversations look like, that that's gonna create a little pattern in your head and you'll be able to look out for them. You'll be like, oh, this is an occasion and it's a bit hard for me to give you a formula. You know, I mean, maybe one thing I'll just say in terms of like, there's a little bit of a formula in the book that may be worth saying, which is that the way these inquiries go is that there's one person whose job it is to ask the questions, like Will is asking questions, right, from like most of this conversation he's been asking questions. And then that person, that person has to be skeptical and he has to be kind of unwilling to accept the things that I, the answerer, am gonna say. And I, the answerer, I have to have an answer. Like, when Will asks me a question, I can't just be like, I don't know. That's, I'm breaking the rules, but what if I don't know? Well, come up with something and be prepared to defend it. That's how this works. Do your best. That is, the answerer and the questioner are functioning under different rules. The questioner has to try to have some truth, just try to say some true thing, and the questioner has to avoid accepting anything false. And those are not the same rule, they're not the the same principle. And there's a part of the book where I go into explaining why. So in effect, what you're trying to do is find yourself in that scenario. Engineer the scenario where you are either the person whose job it is to avoid having a falsehood, or the person whose job it to have truth.

And how do you find people to do that?

I can't say I don't know, see, like that's, I just, I just prevented myself from saying that. I think.

Should I go on the internet?

I found such a person on the internet. In fact, I have a podcast with an economist named Robin Hansen and I didn't know him at all. He once DM'd me on Twitter and said, I think we might have interesting conversations. Do you want to Zoom? And then we started to have a podcast and he's just very good at relentlessly pursuing an inquiry and we don't agree on anything in a lot of ways. We often don't like each other but we have this one thing in common, okay, which is he's relentlessly inquisitive. He's not interested in really anything else about me or in my life or I think in our third conversation, he said something like at the very beginning, we turn on Zoom and he's like, do you wanna do small talk or can we just get to, you know, and I'm like, we're gonna be friends forever. So like there I found him by accident because he reached out to me on Twitter. That's not a methodology. I guess I think the most practicable thing for people who are over 20, which means you're at the age where it's really hard to make new friends, that's one of the most shocking things about life for me, like growing older. I did not realize when I was in my 20s and 30s that I was kind of exiting the period where I'd be able to make new friends. That's a little bit of an overstatement, but it's not that much of an understatement. Anyway, so you know, if you're not young, you're gonna be making that many new friends. So that means you're just gonna have to make do with the ones you've already got. And so you're going to have to find what are the inquisitive, where does the inquisitive forte of the person who was already willing to talk to you? So it might be your kid. Kids love doing inquiry. They do not, in my experience, it's not true that kids ask tons of questions. That is, they ask some questions. What they're really great at is answers. Kids love answering questions. They'll ask anything, like why is the moon round? Why is the ground dirty? Why do dogs bark? Try asking a kid almost any question and they will adopt that role of have some truth out of reflex. So I think you can inquire with kids actually pretty well. But I think if you find what is the topic on which the person who's willing to talk to you is gonna venture opinions very boldly, that's gonna be the topic on which you have an inquiry.

That makes sense. So I'm also struck by this because we're having this conversation with a lot of questions in public in front of an audience. Does that change the conversation? Like are conversations better? Because we got a bunch of people here to keep us honest and that way you can't cheat and refuse to answer. Is it worse because you've gotta be talking to the audience same time you're talking to me? How do you think about that?

So it's interesting because the Socratic dialogs divide along this line. That is, some of the dialogs, it's just Socrates talking to one guy and there's no audience. And some of them, it's Socrates talking to a guy in front of a big audience. And there are differences in that often when it's in front an audience, there's like a, the other person gets self-conscious and they, they're worried about being shamed or humiliated in front of the audience, et cetera. So that dimension sort of comes to the fore. So that is it. But fundamentally, they're not that different. That is, Socrates is very recognizable in these conversations as conducting himself in sort of the same ways. So I guess I think it makes less of a difference the more of it you do. So I think I'm not very, I once did a podcast with somebody who told me that he found it very weird that we were talking before the podcast and then we did the podcast. And then he told me, normally he has a little conversation with the person before the podcast, and then they have a new persona that they adopt on the podcast. And he's like, you just were the same. It was like a conversation that just continued, and some of it was recorded and some it wasn't. But I think that that's kind of the way Socrates is. And I think if you just have a lot of these conversations, you start to become indifferent to the question of like who is watching. And I think, I think that this is because... philosophy is, it's like weirdly intimate, even though it's abstract, you're having kind of a kind of open-ended and judgment-free conversation of the kind you would normally only have with someone you're pretty close to, but you're doing it with like, you know, like, Will and I don't know each other very well, right, I don't know you guys. And because of that, that you're already subverting something about the doing something that you would normally do only in an intimate context with a stranger or it doesn't matter if there's some more strangers present too.

Do you think Socrates should have done things differently so he didn't get killed so early?

I think it's amazing how late he got killed. It was 70. He made it till 70 before they killed him. I think one of the most striking facts about Socrates is how long he kept doing his crazy thing before he got killed. So I would put that as a real success story that he got to 70, that he go to the point where, you know he was like a cultural icon in his own lifetime where people were writing plays about him in - this is not Plato now this is like Aristophanes. And I think that he does discuss, in two places, sort of stuff that he did to try to stay alive as long as he did, namely, stay out of politics. That is, he says, he was an Athenian, he was a Athenians citizen. By rights, he could have been one of those people who go into the assembly and he's like, hey fellow Athenians, here's what we should do. And he didn't do that. He's like if I did that, I would have been killed even earlier, like way earlier. So I do think that he tried to stay out of politics in order to stay alive longer. I think that after Socrates died, philosophy, which came into existence because of him, that is, in Athens, philosophy organized itself differently in order to avoid his fate, right? So you had someone like Plato, who was like, how about we don't go into the town square and do this thing with strangers? How about instead we have a little garden and we talk to just our friends about philosophy? And in the Hellenistic period, sort of after, Aristotle did the same thing, he had kind of a school. In the Hellenistic period you had the Stoics you had this Skeptics you have the Cynics you had the Epicureans and they were all little clubs of people who hung out and talked to each other instead of like going and kind of talking to whoever. And I think that was a like life extension regimen for philosophers, to talk to your own club to groups of people in your own club, and you know we could think of that as eventually kind of turning into the medieval university, a long while later, right, the idea that, like, well, maybe intellectuals need to, like get into a little ivory tower and just hang out because if, like the public sees us and sees who we are, they're gonna wanna kill us like Socrates. So I think there is that thought of, like well, I mean, maybe we needed Socrates to realize that. It's hard to blame Socrates for not realizing he shouldn't have the school such that he wouldn't get killed because he hadn't gotten killed yet. But I also think, you know, maybe at this particular moment in history, there's a feeling of like, well, maybe really also Socrates had something right in kind of being willing to go to the public square and like, there's lot of valuable stuff that you can do with your life where you'll be risking it. Like that's just, so if you're sort of bent on staying alive, you're gonna deprive yourself of maybe some important possibilities.

Yeah, I feel like I see this among our colleagues in academia still. You see plenty of people who, in the classroom, when the class is not being recorded, there are lots of questions they're willing to ask and pieties they're will to puncture and things they're going to say. And then you say, oh, you should write that up. And they say, ah, no, I wouldn't do that. You say, you should post that on the internet. Right, and they say oh, I would be canceled, I wouldn' want to do that, so I guess are they, is that just the life extension regimen? Are they just being aristotle instead of Socrates?

Yes, I think so. I also think like, you know, there's a question of, there's always a question of judgment there of like, what hill do you want to die on? And so it's hard to substitute one's own judgment for theirs, but I do think there ought to be some.

If I could ask one last question before we turn to the audience questions. What hill do you want to die on? If I tell you that 15 years from now you have died on a hill.

That's an awesome question. I guess I don't want to die on any hill of like proving any point, because I don't think you can prove points by dying. You can only prove points if you inquiring into something and getting knowledge. But I think that... I think that if I would say something like, what is, let's say, the act where I do that act and because I do it, I end up dying, what act, and let's make it an intellectual act, it would be something like avoiding getting revenge. That is, if I die because I refuse to get revenge or something, that would be a good death. Questions?

AUDIENCE MEMBER 1 (01:15):
Great talk, thank you. What do you make of the argument that the founding fathers who were interested in Stoic philosophers like Cicero produced a better country as a result and gave us a better launch because of this practice?

I feel like you should answer this question, Will.

Uh... I like the argument, although I guess I'd say, you know, how much of the country today is related to the choice of the founding fathers is a thing that in constitutional law we debate a lot. I'm inclined to give them a lot of credit for setting up a system of government that people thought was basically impossible, which is a democracy in a place larger than Athens. But I think there were a lot of potential failure points along the way that can't really be credited either way to the Stoic philosophers, you have the survival of the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution and so on.

One thing I do in the book is I try to trace the relationship between Stoic philosophy and Socrates. And here's what I say about that. So in effect, this would be to say, well, but in resting their thoughts on the Stoic philosopher, they are just resting them on Socrates in a way. So I said that we have these automatic, we have these savage commands for what we should do, namely from our body and from our kinship group. And Socrates critiqued them. He said these commands contradict themselves. They're not good guides to life. And after Socrates, there were various philosophical schools that, because of his critiques, took up the project of rehabilitating the commands. The Epicureans were the people who were rehabilitating the bodily command. That is, they were saying, look, the pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain is not such a bad life if you employ a hedonic calculus, if you think about the future, and if you sort of add in the pleasures of friendship, et cetera. Then they were a group of people who are interested in taking up and systematizing the command of the group. That is, listening to the group of people you belong to is not so bad if you see that group of people not as just your family or your city, but see yourself as a citizen of the whole cosmos as a kind of rational being subject to the laws that govern rational nature. Those were the Stoics. So the Stoics in effect were brought into being by way of a Socratic critique.

Hi, Agnes, thanks for the talk. Would you say that there are any incorrect manners of inquiry?

Um, I think, um, so if you see yourself as a Socratic, then you are, you are a desperate person. That is, so the main thesis of my book is that thinking about these sorts of things, about these sort of questions is not something you can do by yourself. Thinking is a social activity, it requires another person. So that means like a lot of manners are gonna be ruled out, namely all of the manners that will induce your interlocutor to stop talking to you. And so it's like it's very much a whatever works approach, right? So Socrates, an interesting thing about the dialogs, at least interesting to me is, at the beginning, Socrates is sort of punctiliously polite and he's often kind of praising and admiring of his interlocutor. He says things like, oh, wise Protagoras, oh, Euthyphro, I'm so honored to be talking to you, et cetera, right, and he never says those things at the end. He's never like, this has been a great conversation, I've learned so much from you, Euthyphro. He's always like, this is very disappointing that you're walking away, and we were just getting started. I really thought I was gonna learn from you. They all end like that, they all end in this, right? It's sort of like, but they don't start that way, right, because that's not how a desperate person starts. A desperate person is like, hey, it's great to see you. So I think it's like whatever manners work to conduce to the inquiry.

Thank you for the talk, Agnes. I was thinking about where the self fits in into your story. I mean, I think one of the things I think about is even the questions we ask probably come, the questions that we do get interested in to acquire about come from something within ourselves, right? So for example, you know, I'm a researcher. I thought I was just curious, but actually I have this need to know because of something in my childhood or whatever, right. So then like, kind of how do you think about self-inquiry being a part of inquiry about these philosophical questions? Is it important and is it necessary that we really understand where our questions even come from within ourselves? And just, yeah, how does that all fit into the story?

So, in one use of the phrase self-inquiry, my book is claiming that it's impossible. That is, if self-enquiry is inquiry that you do by yourself, can't do that. If self-inquiry is inquiry whose object is yourself, that is learning about yourself, you can that. You just need other people to help you learn about yourself. I think that, but I think there's a lot of different ways that you could learn about yourself. So one way you could about yourself is to learn about the history of yourself. That is, where did it come from that I have certain questions? That might sometimes be important, but I think that it typically won't be, that is, because it's like, the question, where did a question come from? And the question, what is the answer to the question are usually just pretty separate from each other. So like it could be that you got interested in things because of contingent facts about your childhood, right? But now you're interested and now you wanna know the answers. And the pursuit of those answers, I think, is something very different from the inquiry into the question of why you were interested in the questions. Now, you can also ask, is this an important question? Rather than just barreling downwards into the answering the question, is this something I should be asking you about? It's like Will sort of raised that and I wanted to come back to it of like where I said, well, maybe doing the laundry is not important. And you're like, but how do I know this inquiry thing is not an important thing? I would say, well great question. That's actually one of the things that we can inquire into. A whole chapter of my book is sort of about like, is this kind of thing pointless or not? I think that's a good philosophical question. And you wanna know, well but what about that? Is that, we can ask that too. So I think this is like a it's kind of a fun fact about philosophy, that a question like what is math or what is history is not, those are not mathematical questions or historical questions, they are both philosophical questions. And the question what is philosophy is also a philosophical question. So we're the annoying people standing in the background, right, asking what is the thing. So I think that, you know, you could very well, pursue the inquiry into the question of whether the question that you're interested in is really worth devoting your life to. That makes a lot of sense to me. But even that seems to me to be independent of the question of the history of how you got interested in it.

Hi, idea of God. Not like people believe in God, people don't believe in God. And God as an idea, not as somebody watching over us in heaven or in sky. In 10,000 years from now, what do you think is gonna change in a human mind in reference to God as an idea?

So one thing we can do is we can look at the changes that happen, let's say between the world Socrates lived in and the world that we live in. So Socrates lived in a world where there were a lot of gods and people told a variety of stories about them and those stories had them sort of saddled with conventional human vices. And over time, not in all religions, but in most religions, we seem to have moved by way of a certain kind of like purifying or negative theology to the thought that something isn't allowed to be a god unless it exhibits a set of perfections. And in fact, being the only god is one of those perfections, that is if there were two of them, that would be an imperfection. I don't think we're fully settled on this particular claim, but it seems to be a movement. And in fact, I think Socrates is already gesturing at this move in a Platonic dialog called the Euthyphro, where Euthyphro is like, oh, remember how Zeus castrated his father, but then he had also castrated his father? And Socrates was like, I don't believe those stories. So he's already, he's like, I don't think that's what God would do, right? Or he takes someone like Spinoza, right, who was like, why would God choose one people? And why wouldn't God just choose everybody? Why wouldn't god spread the good around? Where in effect what you're getting is like a theology of what are the principles that determine who God would have to be if God could exist? You get some of that in Descartes as well. So this is I think the kind of reasoning that shapes the way in which we even see ourselves as permitted to think about God.

Well, I don't know if I can follow up with that. But back to the researcher who asked about questions about herself, which made me think about my father, who was a World War II, Depression era, blah blah blah. Who used to say stop contemplating your navel and just get out and do. I don't know if that's intuition like the laundry. But now to my question, is there a place for the question relative to Socrates about confirmation bias and how we've arrived to what you might call silo thinking, is our inquiry now directed at our people, our people we really want confirmation from? Or has that always existed?

Good, so yes, I think confirmation bias has always existed. I think that, or I mean, at least as far back as our texts go, as texts I've read, but I think actually your two questions are kind of related. So the first thing you said was like, well, look, don't we sometimes want to, like, you know, stop contemplating your navel and go out and do... there's a way in which Socrates is in agreement with that. So one question I've gotten, like people have written to me about this book, and here's like, they often write to me of a friend. I had a friend, and my friend, you know, got really into philosophy and started to read all these philosophy books and started do philosophy scribbles, you now, filling notebooks with ruminations and withdrawing from the world and got really depressed and his life went down the tubes all because of philosophy and you're telling us to do philosophy? Okay, so it's like a lot of these. I get this story told to me a lot times. And what I tell people who tell me this story is like, here's a version of that story that I've never heard. I had this friend and he got really into philosophy and he'd got all his friends and family into it too. And they started to just have philosophy conversations all the time or all their conversations that they would ordinarily have had about everyday things turned into this intellectual direction and they were very engaged and into the questions. And then he was got really, really depressed and wanted to kill himself. That's a story I've never heard. And so I think that like, there's a particular model of philosophy as contemplating your navel that I think is pretty entrenched. And I'm trying to push against in this book. I'm saying that's not what philosophy is. What philosophy is, is you have to go out and do something. But the thing you have to go and do is talk to people. And the reason to go out and to do it is confirmation bias. You can't check your own ideas. When you list all of your beliefs, imagine you listed them, and then you were gonna go and see which ones were right, you would just put a check mark next to every one. You'd be like, correct, correct. It's amazing, they're all correct. [Laughter] That's not some weird bias, that's what thinking is. To believe something is to believe that it's true. And so, if you are trying to assess your own beliefs for truth, you're going to assess them as true, and what you need are some honest interlocutors who can get perspective on you. If you're only ever willing to talk to people who agree with you, you would talk to nobody, because nobody agrees with you about everything. But if you're only ever willing to talk with people who agree with you what they agree with about then you are depriving yourself of the benefit of learning from the people around you.

Thank you.
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ALISA ROSENTHAL (01:29):
For more information on Agnes Callard and William Baude, head to the show notes or chicagohumanities.org. Chicago Humanities Tapes is produced by me, Alisa Rosenthal, with help from the staff at Chicago Humanities who are programming and producing the live events and making them sound great. If you like the podcast programming, the best way you can show your support is by subscribing to the podcast wherever you do your listening. We’ll be back in two weeks with another new episode for you. Thanks for listening, and as always, stay human.
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