Agnes Callard on Socrates, Taylor Swift & Love Triangles
Agnes Callard is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. She specializes in Ancient Philosophy and Ethics, with interests in love, desire, and aspiration. Her newest book, Open Socrates, was released in 2025.
Emily: Could you start by giving us a brief rundown on your views on ethics of love?
Agnes Callard: I don't have a systematic theory of love that pulls together all the various things I've said in various places. But, in my book, I have a chapter on love, and I can say what I say there and then we can talk about other things besides that. That's the closest to a systematic theory, and that's really Socrates' theory. What I say is that romantic love is subject to two constraints. Namely, you want to find someone who's good, who you have reason to be with, who has good properties, good qualities, you enjoy spending time with, etc. Let's call that the rationality requirement, because you want to have reason to be with them. And then it's also subject to the attachment constraint, which is that you don't want to lose them. You want them to be the sort of person who will stick with you. And what I say is that these two constraints pull against each other. That is, if I really just cared about finding the best person, then as soon as I found someone better, I would immediately dump the person I was with, right? Because what I cared about was the rationale—just finding someone who's good—and if someone's better then better is better than good. Whereas, if I only cared about attachment, then I would stay with the worst, most abusive person, because what I care about is that we stay together.
I think the problem of love is the problem of navigating those constraints. And the very general terms of the solution that I think we culturally have tended to adopt, by and large, with lots of exceptions, is: Start with the rationality constraint and then move on to the attachment constraints. So basically, when people are dating, all they care about is finding someone who's good. That might change a little bit if you're dating later in life, right? Attachment considerations might bleed, actually, into even the dating stage. But then, at some point you're supposed to get married or, in some way, commit to the person, and now you're attached. Now you're supposed to stick with them. Maybe not no matter what, but in the face of a lot of possible reasons to trade up, let's say. So, that's the sort of standard solution, which I think has a lot of problems. Those problems can just be seen in all the pages of advice columns and romance magazines. Namely, people have a hard time finding who is good—that is a very hard time with the dating stage. And then the attachment stage tends to grow kind of dead and unexciting. What I say in my book is that Socrates diagnoses this as: We have the wrong object of love. That is, we think the object of love should be another person. But actually, the object of love should be a kind of ideal, and you are moving yourself toward that ideal, or approximating that ideal, with the help of another person. So what you really love is the ideal. And the thing about the ideal is that you can be fully rationally attached to it. Because it’s perfect, it meets the rationality requirement, you’re never going to substitute it. But you can also hold onto it. And the other person is almost the arena in which you can pursue this higher ideal.
That analysis of what we really want has some weird results. A lot of the things we might think of as being very important to romance for Socrates are not going to be central. Things like sex, marriage, child-raising, mutual support and dependence. And something we might not think of as essential to romance—namely, philosophical conversation—is going to be really important to Socratic romance. That’s roughly the theory I give in the book.
Allison: That’s interesting. You talk there about how ultimately on the Socratic view, the goal is to love or have knowledge of this ideal form. But it seems, at least on the surface level of this view, we might risk treating those we love, especially romantically, as a means to that end. I wonder if this is a problem for Socrates or your view of this work.
Agnes Callard: I think Socrates just thinks you should treat them as a means to the end. That’s the correct way to treat them, and we screw up our romantic relationships because we treat our romantic partners as the ideal.
An example I give in the book is: You had a friend, and they were banging on the doors of a restaurant. You go to them and say “This restaurant is closed,” and they say “No, I have to get in.” Then you’re like “But there are all these other restaurants on this block that are open,” and they say “No, I can only go to this one.” You say “Well, is the food so great at this restaurant?” And they say, “No, it’s terrible, I hate it.”
You would think: Ok, there’s something wrong with this person. They’re broken in some way, they need help, they need counseling. But when someone makes the corresponding set of claims about a romantic partner—like, they’ve finally broken up with this person who they said was horrible for them. It was a toxic relationship, they’re finally out of it, and now it’s late at night and they’re thinking of texting them again and you’re like “Don’t text them!” You know, they hate this person, and there’s all these other potential people. If you saw your friend doing all those things, you wouldn't necessarily say “You need mental health services, there’s something wrong with you, you’re broken.” You’d be like, “Yeah, this is how it goes. That’s what happens when people are in romantic breakups. This is how it works.”
So we're understanding something that we shouldn't be understanding so easily, Socrates thinks. He thinks what's going on here is that you've idealized your romantic partner in a certain way. You have treated them as though they were somehow the stand in for the ideal, instead of doing it properly, which is reading them instrumentally. Now you might say, okay, but aren't there all kinds of problems with treating people instrumentally? And I think this is one thing Socrates tries to show: No, you might treat people better. You might actually behave more ethically, more respectfully, and more beneficially towards people, towards your romantic partners, if you treated them instrumentally in the service of ideal, rather than confusing them with the ideal. So for instance, the place where this discussion shows up is in the end of the Symposium where Alcibiades is basically complaining. He's like: I tried to seduce Socrates, I tried to get him to love me, but all he ever does is look at other boys. And: Be careful, don't get involved with Socrates, because it's going to be a misery of jealousy. From Socrates’s point of view, he was like: But Alcibiades, what I said to you was: Let's live our lives together, and let's decide things together. What was the problem with that? And it's clear in the story that it's Alcibiades who's repeatedly running away from Socrates, but then being unable to resist and coming back—he's doing the restaurant behavior, right? And Socrates is like, look, I'm here for you, and we can live our lives together if you want to. So Socrates is the instrumentalizer, and Alcibiades is doing the standard kind of love that is infected with jealousy and with worries about substitution. I think what Plato is trying to show us is that a lot of our desire to be seen as an ideal by another human being might be a mistake, because that's not what we are. We're just not that great.
Emily: I’m curious if you can talk a little bit about how trust fits into all this. It sounds like reason is very important in all of this, but when we trust someone we suspend this need for reason. We don't need to appeal to evidence, we expect that they’re going to continue to love us and we’ll continue to love them.
Agnes Callard: I think the way Socrates would understand trust is that it would be something like a commitment to the philosophical process, or to the interaction understood as having a certain character, right? So, like, I'm not going to walk away from our conversation. I'm not going to walk away from our relationship, which in effect, is an extended conversation. And I think there's a version of trust where it's like, let's try to spell it out: I want you to still love me no matter what. I want you to still love me even if I'm abusive to you? Well, no, maybe I shouldn't require that. What about even if our lives take us in separate directions, such that you would genuinely be happier living apart from me or living away from me? I want you to make yourself unhappy to stay with me? No, I don't want that. And so, in effect, I think Socrates would say: Let's spell out what exactly it is that we want to trust people to do. Because I think there is a role for trust in Socratic interactions, and I think it's like: Trust means never letting go of the hope that we could still learn something together. And that's what Socrates says, up to the last seconds of his life when he is engaging in a philosophical conversation with his friends and saying: Look, let's really figure out whether the soul is immortal or not. He's like: I think it is, I'm about to die, so it would be an awkward time to find out that it isn't, but let's do it, let's keep going. He says to his friends: Don't be nice to me; I'm likely to be committed to this whole immortality thing given my current situation, but push back as hard as you can, because even under these difficult circumstances, we can still be committed to pursuing the truth. So I think that's the kind of trust that Socrates is interested in.
Allison: It’s interesting. You talk in terms of the possibility of still learning from each other. And, I’m wondering if you could say more about how the kind of love between two people might change over time, such that that possibility either remains present, can become absent, can grow stronger or weaker.
Agnes Callard: Yeah. So I think that there are, first of all, many different kinds of love, and the kind of love that I'm talking about in the chapter of my book that I'm drawing on and talking to you is really specifically romantic love. Part of what animates romantic love is that it has a kind of aspirational character. It aims at some kind of ideal, some kind of ideal of perfection. That's why there's so many poems about it, and that's why it has such a vivid emotional resonance. I was just amazed, listening to a bunch of pop songs on my phone on the plane, and I was like, every one of these songs is about romance. It's just astounding that they're all about the same thing. Like, you could make songs about so many different things, right? And, of course, there are songs that are not about romance, but it's gonna be like 90 percent or something that are about romance, and that's really striking. So that's the topic, and that’s only one kind of love, I think, and the claims I'm making here only apply to that. So that's one way in which there are different kinds of love. But, it might even be within romance, maybe there's the evolution of the romance, right? So, actually, I'm not sure whether your question was about different species of love that could even morph into and out of one another, or whether it was about different flavors of romantic love specifically?
Allison: Maybe it’s just: We have two people. They’re romantically in love to begin with. How does that change over time? Does it become one of those other flavors of love? Does that romantic love change in nature in some substantial way?
Agnes Callard: I think what I'm seeing as the paradigm in our culture, is it's supposed to change. It's supposed to be dynamic. So basically, there's a dating stage that's governed by the rationality constraint, and then a marriage stage that's governed by the attachment constraint. And those are going to be two different relationships that you have under those two constraints. So, in the first stage, there's going to be a lot of asking yourself whether this person is right for you, whether there's better people for you than this person. Do they really want you? Do they really like you? A lot of the relationship is animated by that question, and also by the getting to know you process, and the getting yourself known process, that is, wanting to present yourself in a good way to the other person. So that's stage one. And then stage two, when there's attachment, is not very animated by any of those questions. There may be occasional questions about, like, might they leave me or something that would maybe linger very far in the background, but they're not gonna get foreground. So I would just say that that's, obviously gonna be everyone, but that's a standard story of how love in our world works.
And you can ask yourself: Okay, but what is supposed to happen in the attachment period? It's actually easier to say what is supposed to happen in the dating period than what is supposed to happen in the attachment period. Because the dating period, okay, you're engaged in dating, right? But what are people supposed to do together once they're married? Like, how are they supposed to relate? Suppose two people have been married for a while, so they’re really solidly married. And let's say there are no worries about the marriage breaking up or anything like that. I think maybe our central answer is like: Well, they'd better find something to occupy themselves with. So maybe have some children, have some careers, fix up a house—distract yourselves from this marriage thing, because it's not clear that's got any more legs left in it, or something like that. That's a kind of cynical story about it. But I think that there really is a question: What is there on the inside of marriage? The best work of art I know on this topic is Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, which I recommend to all the readers. I'm hoping someday to teach it in a class. It's a movie in like six episodes looking at the married life of a couple and sort of asking: What is on the inside of the marriage? And it's a kind of devastating and in some ways negative story. Apparently, Swedish divorce rates rose after this movie came out, because everyone was like: Oh my god, is this what marriage is? I have not researched whether that's real, I think it's on Wikipedia, so don't give that 100 percent. But anyway, that's the text I would recommend on that question.
Emily: I'm wondering what your thoughts are on affairs and love triangles and the sort of love that animates that.
Agnes Callard: Yeah. I think that there's something interesting about the way that the concept of marriage is almost held together by the negative space of the absence of some kind of betrayal. So something is defined as an act of betrayal, and then the marriage is partly unified by: We're not doing that act of betrayal. And then in many marriages, that act of betrayal happens, right? And then that's worked through as you know: Do they forgive each other? I had this line that I said once—though my husband thinks he came up with it, and I often steal things that people say and think I said them, so he's probably right—marriage is a preparation for divorce. What I meant by that is: Every marriage could come up against a circumstance where you can't stay married anymore, where it's impossible to stay married anymore. There's no marriage where the world can't throw something up against you such that you couldn't stay married anymore. The whole marriage is training for that. It's like: How would you deal with it? How would you work through it? Could you do it amicably? Could you do it respectfully? But maybe we should also say, for similar reasons, something like marriage is a preparation for betrayal in terms of affairs, right? It's like, well, if one of us were to have an affair, how would we deal with it? You can say: Oh, we would never. But it's like, well, never? I mean, the world can throw up some pretty big challenges for you, right? And so I almost feel like that's one way to think about betrayal, as something—at least from the affair side, I’ll get to love triangles afterwards—but as something where there's like a question about the marriage that you don't know the answer to until that happens. And I've never been involved in an affair, like, no one's ever cheated on me, I’ve never cheated on anyone else. So this is making me realize that this is a piece of information that I just don't have, right? Like, I don't know what would happen in my marriage, right? It's almost like you can't know it until, and so that's probably the draw of an affair, right? It’s like the ultimate test.
After Scenes from a Marriage, the next thing I would recommend is a TV show called Couples Therapy—it's running now, it's a season I think with a woman called Orna. It's like actual therapy. People are just agreeing to be filmed in therapy. And you might think: Oh, they'd be, acting. They're not, when you watch it it's very obvious that they've forgotten that the cameras are there. They know the cameras are there, but the cameras are hidden. And it makes you realize how much “not real life” the rest of TV is because it’s unbelievably real. It's really great. And some of the couples are dealing with affairs, and they’re trying to find out if their marriage is the kind of marriage that could go through it or not. So that's very interesting to watch.
Okay, love triangles. There’s an essay I wrote a while ago that I don’t remember that well. I wrote it for The Point Magazine. It's about jealousy, and that there's a way in which your partner loves you in some specific way—in a romantic way, but a specific romantic way. If he loved someone else, he would love them differently than the way that he loves you. And I think you always want that other love, the love that he would have given someone else. You have a hunger or lust for that love, the love for someone else. And I think that's part of the appeal of love triangles, is getting to witness that love, which is the only love you ever really wanted, the love you couldn't get, the love that's for another. Socrates would say about all this: This is the kind of crazy mess you get into when you need to have, in some sense, all of your partner’s love, because you idealize them in this pathological way. If you saw it properly, and you saw that you and this person are striving for this ideal, and you want as much help from them as you can possibly get in pursuit of that ideal, you would not have this kind of twisted form.
Allison: Maybe on a slightly lighter but still interconnected note, you've talked a lot about some of the media that shows love in very vivid detail, whether it's movies, TV. I’m curious, what's your favorite love and or break-up song and why?
Agnes Callard: Okay, I've so many that I'm going to be annoyed at myself later because the right things won't come into my head. But there's a Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris song called Love Hurts that when I am romantically down in the dumps, that's what I listen to. I Am a Rock by Simon and Garfunkel is a kind of anti-love song. I have to pick a Taylor Swift song. Ok, I’ll pick Red. It’s probably my favorite Taylor Swift song, so I might be picking it for that reason rather than it being the best love song, but it does have some really good lines about love. Ok, yeah, Red is a good choice because it has a great line: “Forgetting you is like trying to know someone I’ve never met.” People are telling her: Just forget him, this is over, you’re banging on the door of the closed restaurant. And she’s like: That advice is the same as telling me, there’s someone you’ve never met, know them. Obviously you can’t do that, and she’s saying it’s the same impossibility with forgetting them. That’s a good enough line that I’ll pick Red.
Emily: I’m thinking of stories like Call Me By Your Name about hopeless romance. What do you think of those?
Agnes Callard: I think most stories about romance are about hopeless romance, actually. I think they go together for the reason that if you have one requirement, you can’t have the other one. But also like for reasons that Taylor Swift explores in her songs, which is that there is this sense that the romantic couple has to be in a bubble, that the outside world cannot participate in, and that the outside world is in some way intrinsically hostile to the romance, so like Romeo and Juliet scenario. I’ll recommend something of my own. I have a paper coming out in a volume long philosophy of Taylor Swift that's about Taylor Swift’s philosophy. I can't remember the title piece anymore, but my name is on it, so you can find it. I talk about this feature of being against the world. So that feeds into the hope line, right? Because, in effect, the relationship constitutes itself as hopeless in being a romantic relationship: “they'll never understand us,” “they'll always be against us.” There's a kind of secret in the love that the outside world can't share. So, the challenge would be to find a non-hopeless romance story, right? The novel I'm reading right now is called The Good Soldier, and it doesn't sound like it's a romance novel, but it is. It's not about soldiers. I mean, there is a soldier in it, but it's about these two couples and their messed up romances. So it definitely is a story of hopeless romance. I mean, I haven’t finished it, but I'm pretty sure there's not going to be some amazing resolution in the last quarter of the novel. So I think that we actually like stories of hopeless romance. We sort of consume them very avidly. And maybe it's like it gives me a lot of what I want out of romance, but I don't have to experience the suffering. So maybe in some way, we sort of just think romance is hopeless. At some pretty deep level, we think the story—the thing we've constructed, like the dating and then marriage—that's kind of a bit of a lie, and the truth is more like the hopeless, and we allow ourselves to consume that truth in fiction, in songs, even though for real life we have to sort of conduct this edifice of: It's fine.
Emily: Maybe on a broader note: We're obviously talking about love and things that are very applicable to our everyday life. I'm wondering how you think academic philosophy relates to public discourse.
Agnes Callard: I mean, sometimes it doesn't at all. Most of it doesn't even slightly, so just the same way that academic x for almost any x, most of it doesn't relate to public discourse. I think there is in the public a pretty big hunger for philosophy. I just finished a book that was published recently, and I'm getting emails from people all over the country, all over the world, but mostly from the US. A 94 year old woman wrote me a letter—a paper letter, okay?—because she read my book and was excited about it. She lives in upstate Michigan. I think it's not so much a problem that academic philosophy is not relevant to the broader world. It's that there should be some philosophy, regardless of what's done by academics. And maybe it would make the most sense if that were some subset of academics that were contributing to public discourse. But you know, the way academia works just guarantees that most of it won't be relevant.
Allison: Earlier, you talked a bit about how romantic relationships often constitute themselves in opposition to the outside world. Obviously, you've been very open about your romantic relationships in the past. I wonder, is it a sort of conscious decision to go against that trend of keeping romance silent, off in a solely personal sphere, this something else entirely. Why do you choose to be public?
Agnes Callard: So I think that there are sort of two things that come together there. One is sort of the oppositional nature of romance to the outside world and the desire to keep the romance private. And there's a broader privacy thing, that most people want to keep many things private, not just their romances, at least probably in relation to the broader public, right? I think it's right that I'm just less by nature private than most people are. So that's going to be part of the answer for me. If a conversation could go somewhere interesting, I'm inclined to go there and let the rest of the chips fall where they will. I think I have a lot to learn about romance, a lot to learn about my own romances, right? So I don't want to throw away any opportunities that I might have to learn. I feel lucky that people like you want to ask me questions. It's not like I would have all these thoughts—I’ve never really thought that hard about love triangles, you know, and I was trying to pull that together on the spot, I had the occasion to do it. Maybe it's that a lot of people tell themselves: Well, I think about my life, I don't need to take some interview, I'll think about this on my own. I think, first of all for me, I'll just not think about it. I'll just go through my whole life having passed up all these opportunities, replacing the thinking with not thinking, and that would be terrible. So in general, unless I have a great reason, where that reason is some promise I made to somebody, I'm not going to pass up an opportunity to learn something and to have a conversation. And it's not just the conversation we’re having right now. People ask me questions later. The reason you're asking these questions is you guys saw stuff where I didn't say no to other questions, right?
So I think if, in general, you’re approaching conversations as a broad learning strategy, then the default is going to be do it, unless you think there's some pretty specific, pretty concrete way in which it harms.