‘We’re not doing the thing we’re built to do’: Agnes Callard, the philosopher living life according to Socrates

Why did the professor get divorced, remarry, but allow her former husband to remain in the house? In her brilliant new book, Open Socrates, she makes the case for an intellectually honest life

What happens when a dedicated life of the mind confronts the messiness of earthly desires? The University of Chicago philosophy professor Agnes Callard, who in some moods believes herself to be channelling Socrates, was forced to ask herself that question one afternoon in 2011 when she was discussing with a graduate student a particular thorny problem in Greek thought, the abstract question of why one means something singularly different from two. In the course of unpacking this problem, another related dilemma arose, however: this was the insistent fact that the pair of them – student and teacher – had, in the course of their discussions over that term, fallen suddenly and hopelessly in love, a less abstract kind of coupling.

They agreed nothing could happen, but the next day, on a plane journey to visit her parents in New York, Callard, then 35, decided she could be no kind of Socratic disciple, if she could not, in this charged instant, be entirely true to her ideals. The “inner experience of love” she felt for her student, Arnold, 27, she thought, was of a different, higher quality to that she felt for her husband, Ben, though their marriage to that point had been contented and fulfilling, and they had two young sons. She resolved on that flight that the honest thing to do must be to end her marriage, and when she returned to Ben she did what her philosophical hero would have done – she engaged in deep dialogue with him about this problem. Husband and wife talked for a whole day about the different kinds of love (Ben was also a philosopher). “I had never felt so close to him,” Callard recalled. And the following day they decided they must get divorced.

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