Agnes Callard on philosophy, complaint, and anger

BTG issue no. 15

Dear Friends,

If you are in the midst of preparing your philosophy syllabus for the coming term, you may wish to check out an essay by Agnes Callard, published in the Boston Review.  Agnes Callard is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.  She specializes in Ancient Philosophy and Ethics and is the author of Aspiration: The Agency of Becoming (2018) and of essays in public philosophy.

Written for a broad audience, “Against Persuasion” (BR, July 26, 2021) is an incisive piece that offers a fresh perspective on Socratic dialogue.  In this essay, I find it particularly instructive – and I expect that students of philosophy would, too – when Callard gives her own contemporary example of what Socratic questioning would look like today:

Let me sketch a little dialogue you might have with Socrates.

Socrates: What is courage?

You: Courage is being willing to take big risks without knowing how it’s going to work out.

Socrates: Such as risking your life?

You: Yes.

Socrates: Is courage good?

You: Yes.

Socrates: Do you want it for yourself and your children?

You: Yes.

Socrates:  Do you want your children to go around risking their lives?

You: No. Maybe I should’ve said courage is taking prudent risks, where you know what you are doing.

Socrates: Like an expert investor who knows how to risk money to make lots more?

You: No, that isn’t courageous….

At this point, your pathways are blocked. You cannot say courage is ignorant risk-taking, and you cannot say courage is prudent risk-taking. You do not have a way forward. You are in what Socrates’s interlocutors called aporia, a state of confusion in which there is nowhere for you to go.

Agnes Callard from University of Chicago News

Going beyond the usual understanding of Socratic irony as a possibly disingenuous disavowal of knowledge and beyond the cynical response of disengaging oneself from the commitment to seek knowledge, Callard shows how Socrates’s art of questioning is a way of mapping out one’s ignorance.  She writes:

The right response to noticing one’s own ignorance is to try to escape it by acquiring someone else’s knowledge. But the only way to do that is to explain to them why you aren’t yet able to accept this or that claim of theirs as knowledge—and that is what mapping one’s ignorance amounts to. Socrates stages an exhibition of this method for Meno by demonstrating how much geometrical progress he can make with a young slave boy by doing nothing but asking questions that expose the boy’s false assumptions. It is when he refutes others’ claims to knowledge that Socrates’s own ignorance takes shape, for him, as something he can know. What appears as a sea of darkness when approached introspectively turns out to be navigable when brought into contact with the knowledge claims of another.

This Socratic model of inquiry – dialogical and collaborative – is just what is played out in this new philosophy podcast, What is X? For more ideas on how to approach the topic of defining philosophy in your classes, you may also wish to listen to its first episode, which features Agnes Callard in conversation with Justin E.H. Smith about the question, “What is philosophy?” 

The conversation is a fascinating one. Callard gives a provocative definition of philosophy by suggesting that philosophy is an inquiry rooted in complaint.  She puts it this way: “Complaining is the thin edge of the philosophical wedge. […] Suffering and unhappiness raises a question for a person.  It’s almost [the case] that the natural form of the experience [of suffering] is a question.”

In the course of examining this proposition, the discussion between Callard and Smith ends up covering various topics such as philosophy as mastery of argumentation (a purely formal conception of philosophy), philosophy as therapeutic, wonder, curiosity and the changing attitudes around it, the divide between natural philosophy and ethics.

Towards the end of the podcast, they return to the initial definition, and Callard dwells a bit more on the topic of how complaint transitions to philosophizing—how there is an unrecognized interrogative form in the complaint that is covered over when the complaint is translated into protest or expressed as venting. 

These ideas are discussed more fully in Callard’s essay “Why am I Being Hurt?” (The Point, June 28, 2021). Retrieving and developing Simone Weil’s insight about complaint in her writings on affliction, Callard argues against a Nietzschean denigration of the complaint as “a mechanism by which sufferers abuse those people to whom they have moral or emotional ties” and shows how her reinterpretation of complaint might be applied in the socio-political sphere to understand the various—and on the face of it—contradictory expressions of complaint in the calls to justice for the murder of George Floyd.

In the What is philosophy? podcast, Callard mentions that she is currently working on the topic of emotions.  In that connection, I would also like to draw your attention to a provocation she makes in another essay, this time about anger.   In “The Philosophy of Anger” (Boston Review, April 22, 2020, in which forum other authors respond to Callard) she calls into question the assumption that it is possible to purify anger from its morally corrupting aspect. 

Arguing for a sense in which anger is rational—and rational in a moral sense—Callard proposes that on one hand, morality cannot be had without anger, but on the other, anger cannot but be immoral. 

While we do not want to let our anger get away from us and drive us to its logical, eternally vengeful conclusion, if we quash it with too heavy a hand, we lose self-respect and, more generally, our moral footing. Inhibiting any and all anger in the face of genuine wrongdoing is acquiescing in evil. So, we are regularly faced with the complicated question of how much anger to permit ourselves under a given set of circumstances.

But notice that, if the arguments I have offered here are correct, this question is equivalent to asking: How much immorality should we permit ourselves? The realistic project of inhibiting anger must be distinguished from the idle fantasy of purifying it.

She concludes her argument with the claim that “we can’t be good in a bad world.”

I am not sure I am convinced by her argument, but I do think that she does a fine and audacious job of bringing to light an aporia about anger that we are often too quick to cover over. Agnes Callard brings us to a very uncomfortable precipice where we, philosophy teachers—who, despite our protestations, are probably used to asking only questions we know the answers to—are made to ask: what now?

Appreciating the aporia of anger forces me to truly confront the issue in a deeper way.  It invites me to think about my own experiences more deeply and to listen more genuinely to what others have to say about the matter.  

In the podcast, around the point where the interlocutors were discussing the discontinuity between the pre-Socratics (the philosophers of nature) and Socrates (the philosopher of the polis), Callard says that for her, “There’s no book of nature.  I just have other people and that’s all I have.”

It seems that Callard has a knack of drawing people into conversation. Reading her makes me think, here is a philosopher who is truly Socratic—and a Socrates who would not fall prey to the charge that she only critiques her opponents without risking her own answers.

Reading her, one gets a sense of philosophy as something risky, something truly alive.

Jean P. Tan

Ateneo de Manila University