There’s a rather curious and, if you think it through adequately, can’t possibly be the case idea that gets pushed out there about Socrates as a historical character, as a philosopher, and as the object of Plato’s Dialogues that runs basically like this: “I, Socrates, don’t know anything except for the fact that I don’t know.”
And there’s a lot of different formulations, some of which you can find sort of close to what Socrates actually says in Plato’s Apology, which has less to do with knowing and more to do with whether he actually possesses wisdom or not. And then you can find all sorts of wild, crazy reinterpretations where people will assert that Socrates was wise precisely because he knew that he didn’t know anything, or things along those lines.
When you see somebody put that out there, you can probably bet that one of several things is happening. The most common one, I think, unfortunately in our internet-saturated age, is that they pick this up basically as a meme, from somewhere in the original sense of Richard Dawkins’ memes, not just like a visual presentation that’s supposed to be funny or catch your attention or something like that. And they didn’t really stop to think about it. Or if they did, their thinking was quite superficial. They responded to it saying, “Oh man, that’s cool. That’s deep.” But it’s just the illusion of depth, and perhaps even of coolness as well.
But we can put that aside for a moment. What’s important about that is it’s a response where people circulate around things that are meaningful, but meaning kind of removed from the context that it emerged from and deformed in the process.
Another possibility is that the person is advocating for something like an ideal of intellectual humility, but doesn’t really have any sort of solid understanding of what that would look like. They love this quip or quote or idea about Socrates because to them it seems to represent the ideal of a person who is intellectually humble, who doesn’t make claims to knowing things that they don’t know.
But again, they haven’t really thought it through very well because if they did, they would see some inherent paradoxes and problems in such a strong position as claiming that you don’t know anything at all except that you don’t know things. Or going even further, putting that forward as an ideal that other human beings ought to strive for, or validate, or think is better than other possible comportments.
There could be other things as well that perhaps are connected to these two ways of approaching it. A person might just be a grifter and liking to throw things out there about Socrates and hoping to hoodwink people. Or you might actually be advocating for intellectual humility because you just want everybody else to feel epistemologically challenged by relation to you.
What I want to do is consider whether or not this is an adequate characterization of Socrates. And I’m going to say as a reader and teacher of Plato for many years, definitely not. And to think a bit about why it would be bad for you to hold that this really is what Socrates was presenting or exemplifying for us.
So let’s start with the Apology itself, where this essentially originates from. Socrates has a friend who goes to the Oracle at Delphi and asks the kind of smart-ass question: “Is there anybody wiser than Socrates?” And the Oracle says no. So Socrates wonders, “What the hell does this mean? I don’t feel myself to be particularly wise. And I live in a culture where there are other people who are being presented as wise and do seem to think that they’re wise. I think that perhaps they are. So let me go and try to prove the oracle wrong,” which is already a weird thing to do. If the god says X is the case, you’re gonna try to disprove that X is the case as your way of showing that X is the case. That’s a little strange to begin with, but let’s put that aside.
So a lot of you know this story. He goes around to the politicians. He goes around to the poets. He goes around to the craftspeople. And he finds that they are not wise, at least in the respects that they are presenting themselves as being so. So the politicians don’t really know how to run society or who should be in charge or how to properly value the goods that are distributed in society, whatever it is that we want. The poets say all sorts of interesting things, but ultimately don’t really know what they’re talking about and can’t even adequately explain their own craft.
The craftspeople, on the other hand, as we find out, they are wise or they do know something, namely the discipline that they work in. So plumbers know how to plumb. Medical doctors know something about the art of medicine. Shoemakers, to use one of Socrates’ favorite examples, really do understand leather and how to work it into shoes. The trouble with them is that they typically don’t stay in their proverbial lane and act as if, because they’re knowledgeable about one area, they’re knowledgeable about another area, or more broadly speaking, all sorts of areas.
And Socrates says, “I went around and asked these people and learned these things.” Couldn’t you at that point say, “Well, he does know something, namely that the politicians don’t have wisdom”? Yes, indeed, trivially so. So to claim that Socrates were to say, “I don’t know anything except that I don’t know,” that’s complete nonsense.
And even within the Apology itself, it seems to be undermined by the very implications of what Socrates himself is doing. He’s taking a lot of things for granted as things that he has at least some measure of knowledge of. Now you could respond and say, well, Socrates, or at least Plato, makes an important distinction between believing in something or opinion (doxa) and actual knowledge (episteme), or the various Greek words that we use to signify knowing, like oida. And yes, that’s true.
So we could say Socrates, perhaps in a lot of cases where he is saying, “Well, we can rely on this,” or “We’ve figured this sort of thing out,” or “We know something in a vague sense,” maybe that’s just right opinion, sort of like what’s talked about in the Meno, also discussed in places like the Republic. But does that actually get you to the point where Socrates doesn’t genuinely know anything?
Not when we start reading through the dialogues more carefully and widely. We in fact see in many of the dialogues, including in the dialogues that don’t culminate in some sort of resolution, Socrates will say along the line and get his interlocutors to agree, “We know that X is the case.” It just won’t be about the particular object of the text.
So, for example, in the Meno, we don’t know what the definition of virtue is, but we do know that if we can’t say what the definition of virtue is, if we don’t have an adequate concept of it, then we can’t really say anything about whether it can be taught or not because we don’t know what we’re talking about, do we? And that’s knowing something.
But we also do know some things, again, just to take the Meno as an example. We know that certain things are virtues. Socrates doesn’t tell Meno magnanimity isn’t a virtue, wisdom isn’t a virtue, courage isn’t a virtue, justice isn’t a virtue. We know that those actually fit into virtue in some way. We just don’t fully understand what the single essence that connects all of them together is.
And if you read the Meno closely, you will see that Socrates will get Meno to agree that there’s even a sort of, whether you want to call it prioritization or hierarchy among the virtues, so that good actions based on some of the virtues actually require that we have two other important virtues: justice and prudence or wisdom. And that definitely seems to be something that Socrates takes to be knowledge. He doesn’t tell you that, but if you’re reading attentively, you see that actually happening.
And when we turn to other dialogues, for example the Republic, we’re confronted with dozens of these sorts of claims about how things actually are that Socrates is making as somebody who presumably not only himself knows, but can lead his interlocutors and us, the readers, into knowing as well. He doesn’t say, “Yeah, this is just my best guess,” or “I kind of think it’s sort of this way.” It’s a lot more clear than that.
So granted that this is the case, why would somebody actually want to focus on this idea of Socrates as someone who only knows that he doesn’t know anything? I think that has much less to do with Socrates or Plato or even knowledge more generally, and much more to do with the psychological dynamics of the people who are making those sorts of claims.
I’m not going to go into any grand theory of that, but I will say that there’s something very attractive, seductively, temptationally attractive, to many people that this great icon of philosophy would be somebody who is so circumspect about the possibility of his own knowledge. And perhaps there’s a bit of hero worship or identification going on there as well, which... it’s a free country. If you want to do that, go right on ahead.
I happen to think that that’s not something that is very good for you as a thinker, as a person, as a human being who wants to study philosophy. But you go ahead and see how well it suits you and whether it constitutes something like a hindrance or obstacle or veil that gets in the way of you actually making progress in philosophy.
And see how other people take it when you bring that up. The people who you view as possessing good judgment, as being reasonably well-informed and well-read, reasonable people, do they like it when you recur to this image of Socrates, or do they view that as sort of a dead end to a conversation? That might actually be an important clue if you yourself are somebody who likes to bring that up. And I invite you to think about what your investment is, if you have any, in this trope about Socrates.
