What is philosophy’s potential for bearing on public life today? This question requires some subdivision. What genres of philosophy might have such potential? What happens when an academic field of inquiry, with its necessary commitment to reflexivity and critique, seeks to bear on something with other elements and coordinates, elements that may include power and violence and coordinates that may include rhetorical triumph? Might philosophy’s bearing on public life pertain less to practical advice or solutions than to reconsiderations of familiar problems, the introduction of vertiginous new perspectives, or the querying of worldviews and commonsense assumptions? And public life: does this refer broadly to life outside the academy—culture, public controversies, and discussions? Or is public life meant to be a synonym for politics, for arrangements of power, formulations of law and legality, of fair distributions and other elements of justice, of the legitimacy of wars, policing, detention, incarceration, and other practices of organized violence, of who ought to decide things and how?

Let us leave these questions open while briefly considering what the question, “What is philosophy’s potential for bearing on public life?” ought perhaps to exclude. We probably ought to avoid the business of “applied political philosophy,” which often is neither especially philosophical nor contains realistic political applications. This has partly to do with the gap between the philosophical and political mediums—philosophy seeks for enduring truths, while politics is a contingent and power-saturated realm where truth is at best a player, in all senses of the word. This does not make normative political philosophy useless, but normative ideals do not solve the problem of enacting political values in mediums that are at once historically specific and rife with power. So, how can we be useful?

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In this brief intervention, I want to address these questions through the model of public political philosophizing proffered by Socrates in Ancient Athens.

As Socrates himself makes clear in the Apology and Crito, he formulated his vocation as that of making Athenian citizens better by making them more thoughtful. He pursued this work through conversations with citizens in public but not explicitly political spaces—mostly the agora and parks in and around Athens. These were public spaces different from those dedicated to the formal assembly of citizens, such as the Pynx, where Athenians argued about policy, or that were symbols of Athenian power, such as the Acropolis. Socratic dialogues were not aimed at directly influencing decision-making and took place where any citizen might listen in or even participate.Footnote ¹

The dialogue form was essential to the Socratic practice of public philosophy. It entailed conversational exploration, at a philosophical level, of a political problematic—especially the meaning and nature of justice understood as both the premier virtue of a republic and its citizens. Socrates strove to pique his interlocutors’ curiosity through conversation and did so through open display of his own curiosity. He contrasted his work with the Sophists, who lectured their students from what they posited as more certain knowledge.Footnote ² Indeed, wisdom was what Socrates claimed not to have and he formulated this absence as animating his own interest in philosophical conversation. His reputation for brilliance, he insisted, emanated precisely from not having answers, only the capacity to inquire into problems, probe arguments, and discern their flaws. “I neither know nor think that I know” was his explanation for why the Oracle at Delphi proclaimed him the wisest man in Athens.Footnote ³ But he could ask good questions, judge the quality of the answers, advance ever more deeply into the problem at hand, and discover new problems beneath or adjacent to those from which the conversation set out.

For Socrates, in addition to facilitating intellectual openness and commitment to thinking together, the dialogue form was essential to philosophy’s public value.Footnote ⁴

Socrates knew this philosophical-pedagogical practice could be immensely irritating to its subjects, and more importantly, threatening to the regime. He famously referred to himself as “that gadfly [biting fly] which God has given the state.” He insisted that this work, and not the formal political charges brought against him, was the cause of his being sentenced to death by his beloved Athens.

But why should the task of improving Athenian citizens be so politically subversive? For Socrates, philosophical knowledge was not something one merely acquires; rather, it transforms its subjects. In the Republic, Socrates refers to philosophical education as “a turning of the soul” or “turning around toward the Good.”Footnote ⁵ In particular, inquiry into justice and its importance in organizing the everyday life of citizens and states has the power to transform citizens at the level of thinking, feeling, and conduct. A transformed citizenship in turn could transform the polity, including by opposing its current form and certainly its corrupted condition. This is what made Socrates’ work potentially subversive of the status quo, even revolutionary.

Put another way, Socrates’ effort to “improve souls” was undertaken not only for the benefit of the individual, which would limit it to an ethical task, but for the well-being of the whole. This is what rendered his philosophical dialogues political, though they often involved only one or two interlocuters, were sometimes arcane in nature, and took place outside the sphere where policy was made.Footnote ⁶ Socrates treated political culture as built from the ground up—the ground was citizens trained to think. Political culture can be corrupted at other levels—through institutions or actions—but only made and remade in the souls of the citizens. Socrates undertook a particular kind of political education, one rooted in critique, curiosity, reflexivity, dialogue, and persuasion. These same qualities, I would suggest, are at the heart of democracy and are what philosophers can bring to public life today.

Socratic inquiry into the nature of justice, truth, laws, obedience, and much else was critical in a special sense. Socrates’ interlocutors generally started out responding to his questions with one or another account of Athenian common sense, whether the idea that bribery was legitimate if it saved lives of loved ones (Crito in Crito) or that justice is whatever the dominant declare it to be (Thrasymachus in The Republic). Socrates aimed at taking these ideas apart, yet his dialogical moves were always alert to the particular capacities and inclinations of his interlocutors—who they were, what they cared about, what they were capable of considering. The aim was to “move” his interlocutors both in a spiritual-emotional sense and in the sense of moving them away from existing attachments and ideas. Being so moved is how one departs from the current context and gets closer to wisdom and citizen virtue.

Of course, Socrates wasn’t always kind and gentle with his interlocutors. He could be a ferocious and relentless debater. He could corner and frustrate his subjects. But every Socratic dialogue is an undoing of Athenian common sense. Even when it seemed Socrates was driving hard in a particular direction with an interlocutor, the point was not a new doctrine, a new truth, but getting his friends to see and examine faults in existing ones. Socratic cross-examination was a practice of exposing and sometimes devasting the beliefs justifying existing practices. And Socrates understood being willing to undergo this as itself a virtue, the virtue of “the examined life,” or an intellectual bearing toward existence. This undergoing linked not merely thinking but critique to virtue—“critique is virtue” Foucault would declare two millennia later—and to risk.Footnote ⁷

Critique entails risk because it demands surrendering attachments to existing beliefs, putting them into question. For Socrates, this surrender is no small thing. He understood humans and their communities as not merely having beliefs, but, as we would say today, constituted by them. Successful critique thus involves not only changing our minds but certain ways of being. Critique in the Socratic mode is also a kind of defamiliarizing process. It risks the self that is both undertaking and undergoing it, and risks the settled conventions of the political culture that makes, organizes, and governs us.

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All well and good. But what can a philosopher wandering Ancient Athens, pestering its elites for conversation, possibly teach us about doing public philosophy in twenty-first century nation states? How can a practice designed for a small, homogenous, face-to-face and largely oral community be brought to bear on orders that are large, hyper-mediated, commercialized, financialized, heterogenous, and sectoralized? Where, in the latter, might there be space for dialogical inquiry into the nature of justice and other aspects of public life?

Obviously we cannot literally imitate Socratic practice in the public sphere today. Yet, we might frame some of our public writing and speaking with Socratic practice in mind. This means starting with common sense views and opening up assumptions within them. It means thoughtfully querying conventional attachments and convictions, and appreciating the relation of embodied and even characterological attachments to diverse beliefs, as Socrates did, rather than imagining that everything can be reduced to one kind of reasoning or logic. It means treating ordinary citizens as the heart of the republic and treating ordinary political discourse as its bloodstream. It means approaching immediate policy disputes and trending events as occasions for deep reflections on justice, belonging, freedom, equality, law, power, earthly regenesis, and obligations to the future. It means deploying our powers of philosophic questioning to cultivate curiosity and build powers of critique among the people. It means inviting all to think about the collective Good—the values that ought to organize and orient a polity today. Especially when many are sinking into nihilism and fatalism, this is no small thing.

This invocation of Socratic commitments and principles for public philosophy is not about “bridging the divide” but about the essential work of getting citizens to think—to think anew, to think differently, to think hard about what world we live in and the one we want to live in. Thinking of this kind is exactly the inverse of AI, which summarizes and reduces, and reifies existing knowledge and practices as truth. It is what the vocationalization of higher education, where return on investment pressed curriculums toward job training, also discards. It is what the overwhelming nature of calamitous events mitigate against; it is what shortened attention spans, ideas compressed into bytes and tweets, and the sheer speed of contemporary life marginalize or bury.

Intellectual reflection of this kind takes time, and is distinct from political engagement. The boundaries here are crucial: deep reflection cannot happen in the midst of political skirmishes, and bids for hegemony or triumph—the stock in trade of politics—work against careful and imaginative critical dialogue. So the making of thoughtful citizens, while consummately important for building political culture, happens apart from the sphere of direct political engagement or decision making…as Socrates knew. We can help build or rebuild democratic political culture with it, but it is not quite the same as direct political influence or even policy debate.

The task of getting individuals to think more deeply, more carefully, and more critically, is of course, what political philosophers aim to do in their quotidian work as teachers. Philosophers who are good teachers know how to suspend their own views and keep questions open. They know how to hold back the impulse to find quick answers and how to trouble simple ones. They know how to bracket premature concern with what is to be done in favor of staying with a reflective or deconstructive process that the rush toward solutions can foreclose. They know how to deepen a problem, turn it sideways, and dismantle clichés and common sense. Above all, they are alert to the very risks of thinking, risks that students undergo when they start to let go of settled convictions and open themselves to new ideas. Good teachers know how to incite such risk, cultivate the transformations it generates, and reassure the frightened that thinking in this way is worth the candle.

Still, a question hovers over these kinds of practices in our time. Is such an approach appropriate to teaching, and to writing and speaking in civic spaces, amidst a global authoritarian upsurge—one endangering democracy, vulnerable populations, and earthly habitats for all life? Does it address the urgencies and needs of the moment? It will seem counter-intuitive to some, when analyzing and responding to authoritarianism or creeping fascism seems more important. This work of analyzing and responding to these conditions is indeed crucial and also relatively widespread today across a range of venues and mediums. The invitation to become more independently thoughtful citizens is rarer and what political philosophers may be uniquely suited to offer, both in university spaces and outside them. It can fuel intelligent resistance, especially because it is a direct opposite to what right-wing regimes are attempting to foster in their subject populations. More importantly, perhaps, it is seed corn for alternative futures that move beyond resistance. And it is a hopeful practice, since it interpellates a still-democratic citizenry, or anticipates a future one, even in democracy-extinguishing times.