I.
SOCRATES AND ARISTOPHANES
(621) ΠΡ. ουχι μαχοθνται περι σου, θαρρει, μη δεισης.
ΒΛ. ουχι μαχοθνται; (622) περι του;
ΠΡ. περι του ξυγκαταδαρθειν. κου σοι τοιουτον υπαρξει.
(623) ΒΛ. το μεν υμετερον γνωμην τιν´εχει. προβεβουλευται γαρ, οπως αν
μηδεμαις η τρυπημα κενον. το δε των ανδρων τι ποιησει;
φευξονται γαρ τους αιςχιους, επι τους δε καλους βαδιουνται.
(626) ΠΡ. αλλα φθλαξουσ᾽ οι φαυλοτεροι τους καλλιους απιοντας
απο του δειπνου και τηρησους᾽επι τοισιν δημοσιοισιν
[οι φαυλοτεροι]. κουκ εξεσται παρα τοισι καλοις καταδαρθειν
(629) ταισι γυναιξι πριν αν τοις αισχροις και τοις μικροις χαρισωνται.
—Ἀριστοφάνης "Ἐκκλησιάζουσαι"
Praxagora: All women and men will be common and free,
No marriage or other restraint there will be.
Blepyrus: But if all should aspire to the favors of one,
To the girl that is fairest, what then will be done?
Praxagora: By the side of the beauty, so stately and grand,
The dwarf, the deformed, and the ugly will stand;
And before you're entitled the beauty to woo,
Your court you must pay to the hag and the shrew.
—Aristophanes "Assemblywomen" (609-629)
Benjamin Bickley Rogers translation, 1924
Book Ε of Plato's Republic concerns the management of women and children. In it, Socrates states that allowing women into his elite class of educated lawmakers, generals and scholars, his "guardians", is γελοιος (452a), that is, it is risible. With her recent book, University of Chicago philosophy professor Agnes Callard may have made his point. Here, Socrates gives a provocative account of his "law concerning acquiring and providing for women and children" (453d). Women, he says, despite being weaker than men, should be included in his educated aristocratic class because since the men of this class are the best-bred, then their wives must be too.
The laws that govern Socrates' ideal class follow the ideal genetics of its members. To keep them disinterested in the affairs of the lower slave class, they ought not to own anything or to touch gold. Wives will be shared among them for the best selective breeding but the bravest soldiers will have first choice of the women. The cowards will be reduced to the slave class of craftsman and farmers. They are all to learn music and work out together naked in harmonious communism, protected by the noble lies from the philosopher king master rulers. Inner-filial marriage is permissible with permission from the oracle but any inbred children will need to be killed. Food will be provided. Alluding to Hesiod, Socrates likens his politico-genetic classes to metals: gold, silver, iron, bronze. It is important for him that the "golden race" and the silver employers and assistants do not mix with the iron and bronze craftsman, farmers and slaves. n.b. In this section regarding the fairer sex in Book Ε, Plato manages to compare those hostages to fortune to dogs not on one but on three separate occasions at 451d, 459a, and 469e. This might all sound a little strange but don't worry, Socrates is pursuing justice as such. Let him cook.
Plato admired Aristophanes. He was raised on the works of the great satirist and both authors dealt with the extant religio-ethical and political disputes of the 5th century BC. Athens had been defeated in Sicily and Aegospotami. The academy was overrun by skeptic and relativist sophists. With a tyrannical oligarchy at the helm—the leader of whom was Plato's own cousin, former pupil, and defected Spartan sympathizer, Critias—the city had become so dysfunctional as to be ridiculed, by Aristophanes, in its comparison to a communist gynecocracy, tyrannized by women, neutered of all thumos. Aristophanes' comedies concerned the following: Νεφέλαι, where a fictional portrayal of Socrates teaches a student to argue for reparations in the form of beating his parents; Λυσιστράτη, where a troop of lecherous "pagkatapugon" wives usurp the Acropolis in an attempted sex strike; Θεσμοφοριάζουσαι, where a writer is cancelled for hate speech by mob of hysterical women; Ἐκκλησιάζουσαι, where the Athenian ladies usurp the impotent political assembly. You get the idea. Plato's account in Book Ε alludes to these Aristophanic satires.
II.
OPEN SOCRATES
Callard, unfortunately for us, lives in the 21st century AD. An associate professor at the University of Chicago, she is best known in academic philosophical circles for her lack of personal and sexual boundaries in her professional life e.g. for sleeping with her student while married with children and for the cringe-worthy attention-seeking of insisting—like some kind of academic Kanye West—that the details of her narcissistic psychopathological vortex be publicized. This public farce has made her a source of disgust and ridicule both in and outside the academy. Reading Callard is what one imagines it's like to read a very smart and precocious twelve-year-old boy. If one plans on turning to the audiobook version of "Open Socrates" to relieve this pain think again, as her voice sounds like one too while also distinctly having Nick Cage's fake sophisticated affectation from "Vampires Kiss". The central argument of the book, she claims, is that Socratic ethics shouldn’t be adopted as a style to be "layered on top of what we do anyway". Instead Callard suggests the Socratic method is a "performative" "thinking-as-a-social-interaction" where there are no private thoughts, behaviors, or social boundaries and all ethical interaction is reducible to "persuade or be persuaded". The specific titular conclusion to Open Socrates, however, is found in chapter ten.
As a likely entirely unintentional allusion to University of Chicago luminary Leo Strauss' reading of Machiavelli, Callard's titular chapter, Love, is also her longest. Though, as you may have anticipated, no Classical Natural Right ethics will be found in these pages. On the contrary, one will find a callow and effete perspective typical of the k-through-associate-prof. misandrist female establishment who have colonized the APA and philosophy departments, making them intolerant places of threatening authoritarian faux-consensus where academic discrimination is an open secret. Without suffering the aggravation of reading her other book too, one has to assume this myopia is only compounded by her refusal of travel; Just as her public polyamory is a facile imitation of Russell, we can safely assume Callard’s xenophobia is a bastard imitation of Kant. Sadly and unsurprisingly, Callard, not being a man, does not have the historical or metaphysical perspicacity of these titans. If anything, her marriage situation resembles that of Ayn Rand.
Chapter ten reads like something one might see on r/polyamory. In it, Callard takes the tone of an omniscient arbiter—a dictator of everything regarding relationships. She describes monogamous love as an "unachievable ideal", arguing instead for what she calls "inquisitive love" or "Socratic polyamory". Her main point is that Platonic ethics regarding love in Symposium justify polyamorous "open" relationships. However, there is an additional unstated conclusion that they also justify the particular matriarchal fiefdom of the author. Callard gets us there through two ideas she claims to derive from the dialogue: "Rational Appreciation" and "Attached Stability". For Callard, on the one hand, Socrates' speech (201d) characterizes RA and Greek eros. On the other hand, Aristophanes speech (214e) characterizes AS and Greek philia. She declares, “romantic love [e.g. RA] today is conventionally located inside of relationships springing from sexual attraction and armored in shared domestic life [e.g. AS]”. One can extrapolate here that, in polyamory kink discourse, RA and eros are the top or bull—for Callard her young student—and AS and philia are the bottom or cuck—her husband. Callard's metaethical framework for her polyamory "merges" and "fuses" a "dynamic compromise" between RA and AS, resulting in an "aspirational ascent" into polyamory and "open" relationships.
In case you are not physically ill yet, read on. Callard says that this conception of love explicitly necessitates the following: 1) partner dissatisfaction, 2) polyamorous sexual non-exclusivity and passionate breakups, 3) no sex, 4) no “working together to stay alive... [or to] transmit humanity into the future via children”, 5) no romantic poetry, stories, or music.
III.
AGAPE AND EROS
The question of love is an ethico-aesthetic one. It is axiological—it supervenes on a substantive epistemology or ontology. Historically, it derives laws surrounding procreation e.g., what to do with women and children, marriage, and as part of a wider-scope political philosophy of social contracts, duties, rights, justice, freedom and the like. Because of loves domain over procreation, it is a deeply foundational philosophical and theological topic. Referencing Plato's Republic in 1987's Closing of the American Mind (130), University of Chicago luminary Alan Bloom correctly points out that it is conceptions of love and marriage that incentivize desired societal filial outcomes. When it comes to love, the stakes are high. Examples are a transcendent eros, selfless philia of friendship, an indiscriminate agape from God (Hebrew ahaba), Medieval humanist courtly love or a Rousseauian romantic amour.
The debate Callard is joining is based on a response to a well-known contribution to the genre, the 1930's Agape and Eros by Swedish theologian Anders Nygren, a Lutheran Restorationist arguing for a pre-Augustinian "primitive Christian Agape". Roughly 800 years after Plato, in the 4th century AD, St. Augustine interpreted both scripture and Plato (via the Neoplatonists), as unifying eros and agape (with agape considered a near-synonym of the Greek philia). Nygren sought to change that. In turn, UC Berkeley Plato scholar Gregory Vlastos wrote another famous paper in 1973 in response to Nygren, The Individual as Object of Love in Plato. This is where, with barely a walk-on part, Callard's book enters the frame and it brings with it a problem common to most contemporary institutional philosophy—it is insufferably rote and derivative. Callard parrots Vlastos’ ideas with no mention and, it seems, no knowledge of any of these historical antecedents and their larger implications. One gathers this might be because her project is itself very narrow—merely to validate her own particular icky situation.
The structure of Callard's core philosophical argument is so close Vlastos' as to suggest plagiarism or, at best, bore to tears anyone with any prior knowledge on the topic. In his paper Vlastos identifies "the Socratic component in the theory of eros expounded [by Socrates] in Symposium" and the utility-love of Socrates' early dialogue, Lysis, as defining the theory of philia. The only differences with Callard's argument from Vlastos', then, are 1) the fact that Callard reads philia from Aristophanes' speech rather than Vlastos reading it from Lysis and, 2) while Vlastos has done all of the heavy lifting and rigorous textual analysis for her, which has provided him with original exegetical conclusions, Callard, fifty-two years later, simply tacks polyamory onto the end of all his hard work. Rather than doing any noticeable scholarship, her account instead appeals to her first-person digression at the end of chapter ten where she opaquely declares to us, apparently bragging, how much Plato she has read and how much Greek she knows. Contrary to her polyamorous conclusions, for Vlastos, and anyone else closely reading the source material for that matter, Socrates' egoistic utility-love serves as an instantiation of an ideal love. He would ultimately orient love toward a transcendent eidos of a cosmological first love (προτον φιλον) at the top of his scala amoris, none of which suggests either Callard's performative rhetoric or "Socratic polyamory". Frankly, the metaphysics resemble those in the Tanakh, Neoplatonists and Augustine.
Callard's lack of depth is not the only thing that lays bare her rationalizations: Aristotle, Laertius, Athenaeus and Arizoenus all gave accounts of Socrates' marriage(s) and children. Further, another respondent to Nygren following Vlastos, Pope Benedict XVI, in his 2005 Deus Caritas Est points out that conceptions of love that lead to communist polyamory (such as Callard's) are, conceptually and historically, the basis for fertility cults. But Callard specifies no sex and no "children in the future", making hers a possibly unintentionally unique species of anti-natalist infertility cult. Open Socrates crashes out again—it can't even get a proper heretical fertility cult going.
IV.
CONCLUSION
The above-referenced 2023 New Yorker article points to Callard's Twitter where she enthusiastically claims, "If you're a real philosopher, you don't need privacy, because you're a living embodiment of your theory at every moment..." One might wonder then, if that statement is true, is nothing ad hominem or is everything ad hominem? One begins to get the impression that as long as she can maintain her incessant inane prattle, that she alone may grant herself ethical impunity.
So, what does the yammering of a dizzy yenta and her creepy diary have to do with Plato? Very little, if anything. Whatever type of erotic communism Callard is dictating here is not a Socratic one—perhaps it is an inversion. This book tries very hard and fails embarrassingly to move anywhere beyond a Nietzschean kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir of its authors own rationalizations (BGE 6). The philosophical core is casuistic and derivative. Those who are considering this topic would do much better in steering far clear of this screed. Instead consider reading Lysis, Symposium or Phaedrus slowly and carefully for yourself. If you don't know where to start, read the Jowett introductions. Wasting your time with Callard and her wacky tome would be, as Socrates says to Alcibiades in Symposium, like Glaucus in the Iliad, trading "χρύσεα χαλκείων" ("gold for bronze"), that is, a truly stupid irony.
