Narrator: What if you had everything you ever wanted—fame, wealth, a loving family, and the respect of the entire world—and it all felt utterly meaningless? This was the terrifying reality for the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Around the age of fifty, despite his immense success, his life came to a halt. He was haunted by a simple, devastating question: "Why?" Why manage his estate? Why educate his children? Why be famous? The questions were unanswerable, and the despair they produced was so profound that suicide felt like a natural next step. Tolstoy’s crisis reveals a deep human fear: the fear of asking fundamental questions about our own lives. In her book, Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, philosopher Agnes Callard presents a powerful alternative to this "Tolstoyan terror." She argues that the ancient philosopher Socrates offers not just a method for critical thinking, but a substantive ethical system for living a life of continuous, courageous inquiry—a life where asking "Why?" is not a path to despair, but the very source of meaning.

Narrator: Most people avoid the deep, fundamental questions that haunted Tolstoy. We fill our lives with necessities and simple pleasures, operating on a set of unexamined assumptions about what matters. Callard calls the questions that challenge these assumptions "untimely questions" because they feel like they come too late; we are already living out their answers. The danger of this avoidance is powerfully illustrated by Tolstoy's existential crisis. Having achieved what most would consider a perfect life, he was plunged into despair when he finally confronted the "why" behind his existence. He had no framework for the inquiry, and the unanswerable void he discovered led to a complete motivational collapse. He concluded that the examined life was, for him, not worth living.

In stark contrast stands Socrates. When the Oracle at Delphi declared him the wisest man alive, Socrates was shocked, as he was acutely aware of his own ignorance. He embarked on a mission to understand the Oracle's riddle by questioning those reputed to be wise. He discovered that politicians, poets, and craftsmen all believed they knew much, but in fact knew very little. Socrates concluded that his own wisdom lay in a single, profound recognition: that he knew he knew nothing of importance. This realization did not lead him to despair, but became the foundation of his life's work. For Socrates, confronting ignorance was not a crisis but an opportunity—the starting point for a life dedicated to learning.

Narrator: Socrates’ method for confronting ignorance was not a solitary, internal monologue. Callard argues that true thinking is a social process, a collaborative quest for better answers. This is because we all suffer from what she calls "normative self-blindness." We are unable to critically evaluate our own most deeply held beliefs while we are holding them, much like an eye cannot see itself directly. This is the essence of Moore's paradox, which notes the absurdity of saying, "It is raining, but I do not believe it is raining." You cannot hold a belief and simultaneously see it as false.

Socratic dialogue provides the solution: it offers another person as a "normative mirror." This is powerfully demonstrated in Socrates' interactions with the ambitious young aristocrat Alcibiades. Alcibiades secretly harbored an immense desire to rule the world, yet he was blind to his own profound ignorance about justice, a quality essential for leadership. Through relentless questioning, Socrates forced Alcibiades to confront his own contradictions. He made Alcibiades admit that while he thought he understood justice, he in fact did not. In that moment of pained self-awareness, Alcibiades was able to see his own blind spot, something he could never have done alone. Socratic refutation, therefore, is not a destructive act of tearing someone down. It is a constructive, collaborative act of helping someone achieve self-knowledge by allowing them to see their own thoughts reflected in another.

Narrator: Callard argues that Socrates applies a unique technique, the "Socratizing move," to life's most important domains: politics, love, and death. This move redefines a conventional concept by revealing its true, higher, and more demanding philosophical essence. For Socrates, the real version of any activity is its most intellectually rigorous form.

In politics, for example, Socrates rejects "politicization"—the common practice of turning a disagreement about what is right into a zero-sum competition of interests. When he engages the orator Gorgias, Socrates insists that their goal must not be to win the argument, but to seek the truth together. He states that he would be more pleased to be refuted than to refute, because being delivered from a false belief is the greatest good. This transforms politics from a battle for power into a shared inquiry into justice.

Similarly, Socrates redefines love. In Plato's Symposium, Alcibiades recounts his failed attempts to seduce Socrates, offering his physical beauty in exchange for wisdom. Socrates rejects him, not out of coyness, but because Socratic love is not about possession or physical intimacy. It is an eroticized form of philosophical inquiry, a shared, non-exclusive pursuit of knowledge and "the Good." What Alcibiades perceived as ironic distance and rejection was actually Socrates' invitation to a deeper, more intimate form of connection: the collaborative quest for truth.

Narrator: Socrates famously claimed that philosophy is a "preparation for dying and death." Callard suggests this is not about overcoming the Fear Of Missing Out (FOMO) on life's pleasures, but about confronting a more profound dread: the Fear Of Never Arriving (FONA). This is the fear that one's life will end before its central task is complete, rendering it meaningless. This is the terror that gripped Tolstoy's character Ivan Ilyich, who on his deathbed realized his entire conventional life had been a fraud, leaving him utterly unprepared and alone.

Socrates' solution to FONA is the practice of philosophy itself, especially when it is social. The quest for knowledge is an open-ended project that inherently cannot be completed in a single lifetime. By engaging in collaborative inquiry, the project transcends the individual. Even Socrates, in his final days, showed a "chink in his armor" by taking up poetry, perhaps a sign of his own FONA, a fear that his philosophical mission was incomplete. Yet, his response was to turn to his friends and engage them in one last argument about the immortality of the soul. By making his life's work a shared one, he ensured that the inquiry would continue after his death. As the author movingly recounts from a philosophical conference held for a deceased colleague, shared inquiry allows us to mourn and continue the work simultaneously, transforming the paralysis of loss into a living, collaborative tribute.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Open Socrates is that Socratic ethics is not a sterile intellectual style but a demanding and substantive plan for life. It is a radical call to action, proposing that the way to be good when you do not know how is by learning, and that learning is a fundamentally social and continuous process. It is an ethics of inquiry.

Agnes Callard challenges us to see that the most profound human experiences—our political engagements, our deepest loves, and our confrontation with mortality—are not separate from our intellectual lives. Instead, they are the very arenas in which philosophical inquiry finds its highest expression. The book leaves us with a difficult and transformative question: Are we brave enough to embrace the Socratic ideal, to subject our most cherished and comfortable beliefs to the rigors of shared argument, even if it means turning our world upside down?