Socratic ignorance and the critique of sophistic knowledge In the
Apology, Plato reconstructs, in his own way, the speech which
Socrates gave before his judges in the trial in which he was
condemned to death. Plato tells how Chaerephon, one of Socrates’
[p. 25] friends, had asked the Delphic oracle if there was anyone
wiser (sophos) than Socrates. The oracle had replied that no one was
wiser than Socrates. Socrates wondered what the oracle could
possibly have meant, and began a long search among politicians,
poets, and artisans — people who, according to the Greek tradition
discussed in the previous chapter, possessed wisdom or know-how —
in order to find someone wiser than he. He noticed that all these
people thought they knew everything, whereas in fact they knew
nothing. Socrates then concluded that if in fact he was the wisest
person, it was because he did not think he knew that which he did
not know. What the oracle meant, therefore, was that the wisest
human being was “he who knows that he is worth nothing as far as
knowledge is concerned.” This is precisely the Platonic definition
of the philosopher in the dialogue entitled the Symposium: the
philosopher knows nothing, but he is conscious of his
ignorance.
Socrates’ task — entrusted to him, says the
Apology, by the Delphic oracle (in other words, the god Apollo) —
was therefore to make other people recognize their lack of knowledge
and of wisdom. In order to accomplish this mission, Socrates himself
adopted the attitude of someone who knew nothing — an attitude of
naiveté. This is the well-known Socratic irony: the feigned
ignorance and candid air with which, for instance, he asked
questions in order to find out whether someone was wiser than he. In
the words of a character from the Republic: “That’s certainly
Socrates’ old familiar irony! I knew it. I predicted to every one
present, Socrates, that you’d do anything but reply if someone
asked you a question.”
This is why Socrates is always the
questioner in his discussions. As Aristotle remarked, “He admits
that he knows nothing.” According to Cicero, “Socrates used to
denigrate himself, and concede more than was necessary to the
interlocutors he wanted to refute. Thus, thinking one thing and
saying another, he took pleasure [p. 26] in that dissimulation which
the Greeks call ‘irony’.” In fact, however, such an attitude
is not a form of artifice or intentional dissimulation. Rather, it
is a kind of humour which refuses to take oneself or other people
entirely seriously; for everything human, and even everything
philosophical, is highly uncertain, and we have no right to be proud
of it. Socrates’ mission, then, was to make people aware of their
lack of knowledge.
This was a revolution in the concept of
knowledge. To be sure, Socrates could and willingly did address
himself to the common people, who had only conventional knowledge
and acted only under the influence of prejudices without any basis
in reflection, in order to show them that their so-called knowledge
had nofoundation. Above all, however, Socrates addressed himself to
those who had been persuaded by their education that they possessed
Knowledge. Prior to Socrates, there had been two types of such
people. On the one hand, there had been the aristocrats of
knowledge, or masters of wisdom and truth, such as Parmenides,
Empedocles, and Heraclitus, who opposed their theories to the
ignorance of the mob. On the other hand, there had been the
democrats of knowledge, who claimed to be able to sell their
knowledge to all comers; these were, of course, the Sophists. For
Socrates, knowledge was not an ensemble of propositions and formulas
which could be written, communicated, or sold readymade. This is
apparent at the beginning of the Symposium. Socrates arrives late
because he has been outside meditating, standing motionless and
“applying his mind to itself.” When he enters the room, Agathon,
who is the host, asks him tocome sit next to him, so that “by
contact with you ... I may profit from this windfall of wisdom which
you have just stumbled across.” “How nice it would be,”
replies Socrates, “if wisdom were the kind of thing that could
flow from what is more full into what is more empty.” This means
that knowledge is not a prefabricated object, or a finished content
[p. 27] which can be directly transmitted by writing or by just
discourse.
When Socrates claims that he knows only one thing
— namely, that he does not know anything — he is repudiating the
traditional concept of knowledge. His philosophical method consists
not in transmitting knowledge (which would mean responding to his
disciples’ questions) but in questioning his disciples, for he
himself has nothing to say to them or teach them, so far as the
theoretical content of knowledge is concerned. Socratic irony
consists in pretending that one wants to learn something from one’s
interlocutor, in order to bring him to the point of discovering that
he knows nothing of the area in which he claims to be wise.
Yet
this critique of knowledge, although it seems entirely negative, has
a double meaning. On the one hand, it presupposes that knowledge and
truth, as we have already seen, cannot be received ready-made, but
must be engendered by the individual himself. This is why Socrates
says in the Theaetetus that when he talks with other people, he
contents himself with the role of midwife. He himself knows
nothing and teaches nothing, but is content to ask questions; and it
is Socrates’ questions and interrogations which help his
interlocutors to give birth to “their” truth. Such an image
shows that knowledge is found within the soul itself and it is up to
the individual to discover it, once he has discovered, thanks to
Socrates, that his own knowledge was empty. From the point of view
of his own thought, Plato expressed this idea mythically, by saying
that all knowledge is the remembrance of a vision which the soul has
had in a previous existence. We thus have to learn how to
remember.
On the other hand, in Socrates the point of view is
wholly different. Socrates’ questions do not lead his interlocutor
to know something, or to wind up with conclusions which could be
formulated in the form of propositions on a given subject. Rather,
it [p. 28] is because the interlocutor discovers the vanity of his
knowledge that he will at the same time discover his truth. In other
words, by passing from knowledge to himself, he will begin to place
himself in question. In the Socratic dialogue, the real question is
less what is being talked about than who is doing the talking. This
is made explicit by Nicias, one of Plato’s characters:
Don’t
you know that whoever approached Socrates closely and begins a
dialogue with him, even if he begins by talking about something
entirely different, nevertheless finds himself forcibly carried
around in a circle by this discourse, until he gets to the point of
having to give an account of himself — as much with regard to the
way his is living now, as to the way he has lived his past
existence. When that point is reached, Socrates doesn’t let you
leave until he has submitted all that to the test of his control,
well and thoroughly...It is a pleasure for me to keep company with
him. I see no harm in being reminded that I have acted or am acting
in a way that is not good. He who does not run away from this will
necessarily be more prudent in the rest of his life.
Thus,
Socrates brought his interlocutors to examine and become aware of
themselves. “Like a gadfly,” Socrates harassed his interlocutors
with questions which placed them in question, and obliged them to
pay attention to themselves and to take care of themselves: “What?
Dear friend, you are an Athenian, citizen of a city greater and more
famous than any other for its science and its power, and you do not
blush at the fact that you give care to your fortune, in order to
increase it as much as possible, and to your reputation and your
honours; but when it comes to your thought, to your truth, to your
soul, which you ought to be improving, you have no care for it, and
you don’t think of it!” (Apology, 29d-e).
The point was
thus not so much to question the apparent knowledge we think we
have, as to question ourselves and the values which guide our own
lives. In the last analysis, Socrates’ interlocutor, [p. 29] after
carrying on a dialogue with him, no longer has any idea of why he
acts. He becomes aware of the contradictions in his discourse, and
of his own internal contradictions. He doubts himself; and, like
Socrates, he comes to know that he knows nothing. As he does this,
however, he assumes a distance with regard to himself. He splits
into two parts, one of which henceforth identifies itself with
Socrates, in the mutual accord which Socrates demands from his
interlocutor at each stage of the discussion. The interlocutor thus
acquires awareness and begins to question himself.
The real
problem is therefore not the problem of knowing this or that, but of
being in this or that way: “I have no concern at all for what most
people are concerned about: financial affairs, administration of
property, appointments to generalships, oratorical triumphs in
public, magistracies, coalitions, political other words, the god
Apollo) — was therefore to make other people recognize factions. I
did not take this path...but rather the one where I could do the
most good to each one of you in particular, by persuading you to be
less concerned with what you have than with what you are; so that
you may make yourselves as excellent and as rational as possible.”
Socrates practiced this call to being not only by means of his
interrogations and his irony, but above all by means of his way of
being; by his way of life, and by his very being.
src: Pierre
Hadot (2004), What is Ancient Philosophy?, translated by
Michael
Chase, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
