SIEV: Being Like Socrates / I Know That I Know Nothing (and I’m content)

What do you know? If you’re a normal, well-adjusted human being, I’m sure you think you know a good number of things. What you learned in school, what you learned at work, what seems so obvious to you on a daily basis. The sky is blue. Rain is wet. Puppies are adorable.

There’s a great mystery that comes from asking too many questions. Children do this all the time. Adults by and large lose their sense of wonder in the process of growing up, but children will ask “why” until you can’t give an answer. “Why do fish live in the water?” “because they have gills, which let them breathe water”. “Oh. Why do fish have gills?” “Um, because fish adapted gills over looooong long periods of time to survive”. “Oh. Why did fish adapt?” “*sigh* because life adapts to survive.” “Aaaaahh. *pause* Why does life survive?” “Because that’s what life does. It exists, so it survives.” “Oh. Why does life exist?”

And at this point, you really can’t give an answer to that little nuisance.

The Oracle at Delphi in ancient Greece once proclaimed Socrates to be the wisest of men.

By most accounts, Socrates was a radical nuisance to dogmatic citizens of Athens, where Socrates lived. Socrates would ask questions that trapped people into arguing for the opposite of what they intended to.

We don’t know the extent to which stories of Socrates are true, as we don’t have any writings from him directly. We know that Socrates was sentenced to death in court by way of drinking poisonous hemlock. The details of the trial of Socrates are laid out in Plato’s dialogue, “The Apology”. Again, the truth of the matter may never be known to us, but we can use Plato as a guide to reach insights into deeper wisdom.

The Apology of Socrates is named very on-the-nose, as Socrates did not apologize for the charges laid against him by the citizens of Athens. Among the charges were denying the existence of gods, and corruption of the youth of Athens. Socrates refuted these claims. The only thing Socrates admitted guilt for was a relentless inquisitive mindset and a no-holds-barred style of examination which he subjected the people of Athens to. Socrates would ask questions over and over and over, to the point that the people he debated with would agree to absurd and contradictory conclusions from their starting point.

The method of questioning Socrates developed came from one simple and profound realization: “I know that I know nothing”.

It’s a paradoxical statement in a way, because by claiming that you know nothing, you’re actually claiming that you know something: namely, that you know nothing.

But stepping back from the strict interpretation, Socrates only means that he is aware of his own ignorance. Our ignorance is astounding. Today, our best physical models are guesses, our philosophical frameworks for those physics are not complete. We could be wrong about everything, and we don’t even know it. Over 2,000 years ago, Socrates thought the same thing. He could be wrong about everything, and he didn’t presume to know otherwise. He was only human, and actual wisdom and true knowledge he thought was the territory of gods alone. The Temple of Apollo at Delphi had the following enscribed on its entrance: “Know thyself”. Socrates did just that. At his trial, he said these famous words: “The unexamined life is not worth living”.

And before his trial, he lived out the truth of those words by seeking wisdom from his fellows. With clarity of his position in the world, Socrates examined and led others to examine themselves. In all cases, the wisdom of men great and small came to be nothing at all. No teacher, politician, craftsman or so-called wise man withstood the test.

And all groups Socrates questioned were of the opinion that their view afforded them some hidden truth. Artists and poets didn’t have secret wisdom, only what Socrates called “natural inspiration”. Socrates even went so far as to say that the poets are themselves the worst possible analysts of their own poetry. I tend to agree, though I would go one step further and say that everyone is the worst possible analyst of poetry. We don’t even know what art is, or at least we can’t agree on it. Why would we assume ourselves to be right about anything?

Instead, assuming your own ignorance is a way of being in the world that I think would greatly benefit our compassion and understanding of each other. I’m not saying self-assuredness in one’s craft is bad. I know that people can develop potentially life-saving skills, and I’m incredibly grateful for those whose studies help keep society moving. But no one ever knows everything. There’s always something new to learn whether you’re Einstein or Beethoven.

And be mindful of the fact that many, many people live or have lived with a completely different worldview than yourself. And that the things you take for granted may be the greatest of mysteries to others.

I once had a conversation at a bar with a complete stranger, who claimed that humans are much smarter, more intelligent, more rational now than ever before in our thousands of years of history. I disagree with that basic premise. It’s true we’ve made enormous, maybe incomprehensible advances, techologically, scientifically. But do you really think Leonardo da Vinci’s consciousness wasn’t in some ways exactly like your own? Da Vinci as a human was born into a crazy, nonsensical world, and given the tools of his time to work out the mystery of the universe. Rationality in the Renaissance worked just as well as it does now. And for his part da Vinci dreamed up some crazy feats of engineering, including apparently a flying machine with flapping wings?

It’s not that we’re smarter than da Vinci. We can’t fault his reasoning when he didn’t have the Wright brothers or Wikipedia to use as references. Our baseline of knowledge is just simply higher. We are standing as Isaac Newton proclaimed “On the shoulders of giants”.

Another of Socrates’ arguments was that humans never do harmful things intentionally. It’s one of the more controversial arguments to come from Socrates, but I think it can apply to thinking about rationality as well.

The argument goes like this: we, meaning I, never act in a way that is out of order with fundamental rationality. We believe that such-and-such an action will produce such-and-such a consequence, and we always follow the approach that we think will produce our desired outcomes. And, we never have the desire to do anything that produces harm to ourselves. Therefore, if someone produces something harmful in their life, to themselves or to others, it is a case of either a misguided belief or misguided desire.

The conclusion of this argument does not sit well with everyone. How could concentration camp guards in Nazi Germany be considered anything but pure, unadulterated evil? How could one claim Hitler to have had nothing more than a misguided belief or desire?

I won’t claim Socrates to be right on this point. But ask yourself, have you ever acted in a way that didn’t move you in the direction you thought would take you to your goal? If you think you have, then Socrates would tell you that you’re mistaken about what your goal is. If your actual goal is harmful, there must yet be something driving you to it that outweighs the harm. And if it’s actually more harmful than beneficial, then it is ignorance of the true harm that keeps you moving towards that goal.

Which is why Socrates proclaimed “The unexamined life is not worth living”. He thought ignorance to be the cause of suffering.

If your actions are hurting another, think about the goals you’re striving for. The actual goals, there’s no need to deceive yourself with pleasantries. Are your goals to intentionally hurt another? Likely not. And even if they are, that harm is only ignorance on your part. If you truly knew the pain you caused, you wouldn’t do it. We’re trapped in these bodies of ours, with only our own subjective conscious experience. But if we were capable of experiencing the world as the people we’ve harmed, there would be no goal left in our mind to harm others. We would be those others. In any case, ignorance is still our problem. Consciousness is the most perplexing mystery in the universe as far as I can tell, and it should be no surprise that we are utterly ignorant of its inner workings.

The best we can do is as Jesus said, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”.

Would you want someone as a companion who is utterly blind to any point of view beside their own? Is it fun to be in the company of people who never question their own assumptions? Who you will never be able to engage in debate with, because they assume they’re right about everything?

If not, then please try not to be that person in your own relationships. I know it’s hard, impossible even, but try as best you can to get inside the minds of the people you engage with. If they’ve been dead for 2000 years, and you’d like to avoid intellectual snobbery, don’t imagine yourself as smarter than they were. They stubbed their toes, they had eyelashes fall in their eyes. And they had lives, and minds, and pain and sorrow and happiness and reason.

And they were human. As much as we are today.

I’m Tony Remis. This has been Tony Talks Back.