07-07-2025
Why we should keep fewer thoughts to ourselves — and other things I've learned from Agnes Callard - ABC Religion & Ethics
Few would challenge the notion that, in order to properly think a question through, we need at least some time alone with our thoughts . Some might even claim we can't think for ourselves unless we are thinking by ourselves. But a new book by a public philosopher, based on the wisdom of an ancient philosopher, reminds us that inviting others to 'intrude' into our 'private mental world' and think with us, makes sense.
In her book Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life , Agnes Callard describes thinking as 'the road from ignorance about the most important things to knowledge about them'. By travelling with another — asking questions and testing answers, refuting and being refuted, using two heads instead of one — we have more hope, not less, of getting at the truth.
Callard's 'love affair' with Socrates began in high school. It led her to not only study ancient Greek history in college, but to learn ancient Greek as well. The notion that inquiry is 'a social process', and an interlocutor a vital tool, struck her as having relevance beyond the academic realm. And so, at the age of 21, having decided Chicago's equivalent of the Athenian agora was the steps of its Art Institute, she went there and started asking people if they'd like to have a philosophical conversation.
To Callard's surprise, most said 'yes'. She'd follow up with a question such as: 'What is art?', 'What is courage?' or 'What is the meaning of life?'
The Art Institute of Chicago on 9 July 2022. (Photo By Raymond Boyd / Getty Images)
But where, in the Socratic dialogues, people answered with quick, confident answers that Socrates refuted in a manner that paved the way for an extended inquiry, Callard says her dialogues 'never really got off the ground':
The people I talked to seemed put off by my approach, confused about my intentions, and, in truth, somewhat afraid of me. They felt trapped, and I felt not at all like Socrates.
Looking back, she notes that deep conversations about the meaning of life and how we should live require a level of vulnerability, self-exposure and trust that doesn't lend itself to conversation with a stranger whose motives are unclear. If such a stranger 'claimed that they would immediately adopt your way of living, if only you explained it to them, you might think they were only acting, or pretending, or somehow making fun of you, or being ironic', Callard writes.
Some of Socrates's own interlocutors 'felt sure that he was always preserving an ironic distance from them', she notes, holding 'the life of his mind apart from theirs'. But in Callard's view, the philosopher's most 'radical feature' wasn't 'godlike hidden wisdom' but his willingness to 'put all his cards on the table', make himself vulnerable and treat others as sources of knowledge.
If she's right, there's no such thing as Socratic irony — save the fact that 'the man who hid his thoughts from others less than perhaps anyone in the whole history of the world should have come to be credited with the concept'.
Knowing what you don't know
Confucius asserted that knowing what you know, and what you don't , is 'true' knowledge. Socrates spoke about how ignorant he was of what he didn't know. Nowadays, pie-charts that divide knowledge into what we 'know we know', 'know we don't know', 'don't know we don't know' and even 'don't know we know' remind us how little we can be sure of, how much remains uncertain, how high the bar Confucius set must be.
'We are all of us irrational, divided, opaque and oblique creatures', physician Karen Hitchcock wrote in her 2015 Quarterly Essay Dear Life :
We communicate in a multitude of ways: with our eyes and hands and bodies and heart rate, as well as with words we may or may not mean. We may ask for — think we want — the opposite of what we wish for. We change our minds.
What's more, Hitchcock says, this is 'what it is to be human'.
Whatever we know, we know it as people bound by time and space, experience, education and intellect, to name but a few of our many limits. We're influenced by our upbringing, our surroundings, our emotions, our relationships, our bodies — we can't escape our subjectivity. As theologian Michael Jensen puts it, 'we know as knowers who are ourselves a part of what we know':
We cannot transcend the things we seek to know. The historian is herself an historical being; the biologist is part of a biological system. The psychologist has his neuroses, too. Anything we seek to know, we know from within.
Physicist Carlo Rovelli says we can never have total certainty — and don't need it: 'Between full ignorance and total certainty there is a vast intermediate space where we conduct our lives.'
Jensen likewise notes that the fact we know so partially doesn't mean history makes no sense, or the world contains no meaning, or that we can't know anything. Truth and falsehood, right and wrong, aren't always easy to discern, but they're not relative. And Rovelli says that while we can't have 'total' certainty, we can strive to gather more reliable knowledge over time; we can be genuinely open to the questioning of our beliefs, the most reliable of which should 'survive' questioning. 'This is the core teaching of scientific thinking', he writes. But not only scientific thinking.
A social quest for better answers
'There are parts of my body whose invisibility follows from how I usually position myself in order to look out at the world', Callard notes. We can contort ourselves to bring some of those parts into view, she says, but we can't ever eliminate all our blind spots all at once.
We can consider the possibility we are wrong, we can even realise we were wrong; we can replace less 'stable' answers with more stable ones — the 'lever' is available:
The problem is that the set of occasions when people most need to pull it — when they are wrong about something fundamentally important, something that approaches the heart of how they live their lives — are also the occasions when the lever seems stuck.
She goes so far as to suggest most searches 'aim to arrive neither at what I know, nor at what I don't know, but at a way to keep doing what I was doing before I ran into a problem'. This is why she conceives of thinking as 'a social quest'. Not only is it a social quest, it's a quest for better answers to 'the sorts of questions that show up for us already answered'.
The questions that matter most in life are often the most difficult to think about, she explains. The answers have a bearing not only on how we should live, but how, in any given moment — including the moment in which we ask the question — we are living.
It's easy to have my thinking challenged when the question is trivial and the stakes are low, or to change my ethical position when it suits me. It's harder when the answer might demand that I start thinking — living — differently. It was easy for me, before I had savings and an income, to define 'the rich' as anyone with an income and some savings who could feed their family and pay their bills. It was easy, then, to hold that the rich should give the bulk of their earnings to the poor. Now, it is tempting to define 'rich' differently, or to hold that the 'rich' should give away only a 'significant proportion', not 'the bulk' of what they earn — or to simply set such thinking to one side.
Callard — who devotes two chapters to politics (one to justice and one to liberty), one to equality, one to love and one to death — says the most interesting and elusive questions in life are the 'load bearing' ones: 'the ones whose answers we must give at every moment of our lives, for their whole duration'.
What does it mean to commit to a relationship for life? Is it 'cheating' to 'write' essays using prompts? How should a parent raise a child? If we are already married, or already using AI to write essays, or already raising a child, there's a sense in which we're already living an answer.
If we wait for the right time to step back and examine questions 'marked by the fact we need answers to them before we are prepared to ask them', we might never really think them through:
The human need to know how to live subjects us to its desperate logic: Because I must know it, it must be the case that I do know . The passionate confidence with which people are inclined to proclaim their ethical beliefs — often with little ability to defend those beliefs — stems not from flightiness but from a seriousness about the project of living their one and only life. Could it really be true that we will have to go through our whole lives, from birth to death, without ever knowing whether we are doing it right? The answer is yes.
To live well, and to think well, to answer 'untimely questions' well, we need all the help we can get. And while we will inevitably answer another person from our own subjectivity, and another person will inevitably answer us from theirs — their perspective, and challenges, and refutations, might show us truth, or alert us to falsehood, that we wouldn't otherwise see.
The moment we are wrong, we were wrong
Accepting we are wrong is rare, indeed. According to Moore's paradox, no sooner have we done it and we're claiming to be right again. 'If you find yourself recollecting something you were wrong about in the past, what you are effectively doing is thinking about how right you are now', Callard explains.
Then there's Meno's paradox, which asks how we can search for what we don't yet know. Alone, Callard writes, we 'fall prey' to the epistemic dilemma. 'But if you and I both have the same question yet different answers, a path opens up: we can test our answers against each other.'
There might be levers that we cannot move alone, which with another person's help, begin to shift. And while, in a debate, the person who's refuted is the 'loser', in a Socratic dialogue, the person who's refuted can count the 'loss' as gain. If the ideal was achieved — which, depending on the minds, the motives, the mood, the culture, on any number of variables, won't always be the case — knowledge was too.
The experience of being refuted isn't, Callard says, the same as changing one's mind, or suspending judgement. We can change our minds by simply forgetting or giving up an old view and coming to adopt a new stance, or a neutral one, in its place. To be refuted involves feeling ignorant, confused and perplexed — it's a distinct experience.
To use the Socratic method of asking and answering, persuading and being persuaded, to inquire into important questions, requires a readiness to process, entertain or accommodate 'any and all kinds of thought' with an open mind that moves toward what's true and away from what is false.
We might be tempted to gloss over the moment we realise we are wrong to the moment we can say we were once mistaken but now we're not. Yet Callard says that in a philosophical context (and, I would think, in other contexts) it is 'polite' to 'mark the transition'. We can do this with a pause, or by saying 'Okay' or 'I see now', or we can do it with a sentence that, while just two words — 'You're right' or 'I'm wrong' — marks a turning point.
Living lives 'oriented toward knowledge'
Only by admitting ignorance, or at least by being willing to, can we expect to grow less ignorant. Socrates claimed, and Callard agrees, that our inability to 'lead lives based on knowledge — because we lack it' isn't a reason to give up on acquiring it. We can still seek to live lives 'oriented toward' both thinking and knowledge.
And, by being humble when we're right, and apologising when we're wrong, by being gracious and generous when we ask and when we answer, by letting one another make mistakes and try again, we might just foster the conditions that make the kind of thinking together that Callard envisions more likely.
Callard is aware that in writing a book about how 'thinking is not something a person can do by herself' alone, she isn't exactly practising what she preaches. But the fact she is drawing on other people's thinking, enlisting other people's 'help', throughout the book — along with anecdotes and acknowledgements that suggest a pattern of engaging with interlocutors, whether friends or partners, colleagues or students, in her daily life — convinced me that if I invited her to think with me, she would.
Based on her experience with strangers on the steps of the Art Institute steps, thinking with another might be easier said than done. We are 'inclined toward misunderstanding'; it is difficult to trust a stranger and be vulnerable. But in existing relationships, or other contexts where each party trusts the other person is engaging in good faith — not knowing who will refute who, or how; or what answers, if any, they will find — it could yet 'work'.
The answers we come to accept with the help of another mind might be less convenient and more difficult than the ones we'd arrive at alone, but there's a decent chance they'll be closer to the truth. If thinking is a road, it's not one we should travel alone.
Emma Wilkins is a Tasmanian journalist and freelance writer whose work has appeared in newspapers, magazines and literary journals in Australia and beyond.
