What is Wisdom? Socrates and the Known Unknowns
He was not pretty and he was not well bred. Socrates was a plebeian, of common stock, which set him at a disadvantage in the aristocratic world of ancient Greece. He was a muscular, thick-set man, with a snub nose and heavy brow. He had served, at some point, in the hoplite infantry, but whatever physical presence he possessed was diminished by his self-depreciating sense of humor and unmanly instinct for philosophical discussion. Socrates made a practice of wandering barefoot about the marketplace, chatting to the people that he met. When he was alone, he’d stand for hours lost in thought. People thought he was strange. He was polite, for the most part. But he didn’t fit in.
Socrates didn’t charge a fee for his services, unlike the Sophists, the professional thinkers of the time. Unlike the philosophers who came after him, he established no school or institute. Socrates wrote nothing and he claimed he had nothing to teach. Yet Socrates, more than any other ancient philosopher, is responsible for creating philosophy as we know it today.
Socrates’ career began when the oracle at Delphi claimed that he was the wisest man alive. Once word of this got around, Socrates had a reputation to deal with. Everyone wanted to know about the Athenian philosopher. But Socrates was as stumped by the oracle’s judgment as everyone else. How could he possibly be the wisest man in the world? In terms of track record, he was a philosophical novice. Socrates had no writings, no celebrated teachings — nothing but his state of confusion, which he happily shared about. As Socrates saw it, he really knew nothing at all.
Socrates made a radical decision. He wouldn’t just accept the oracle’s judgement. He would be as skeptical about it as he was towards everything else in life. Not quietly skeptical either. Socrates made it his life’s mission to question the oracle’s judgement and put it to the test. He embarked on a public crusade. He set out to interview the greatest people in Athens to see what wisdom they possessed. Socrates figured that if he could find someone in Athens who was demonstrably wiser than himself, he’d have proved the oracle wrong. Years later, at his trial, Socrates recalled how he got started:
After puzzling about [the oracle’s judgement] for some time, I set myself at last with considerable reluctance to check the truth of it in the following way. I went to interview a man with a high reputation for wisdom because I felt that here if anywhere I should succeed in disproving the oracle and pointing out to my divine authority: ‘You said that I was the wisest of men, but here is a man who is wiser than I.
Well, I gave a thorough examination to this person — I need not mention his name, but it was one of our politicians … — and I formed the impression that although in many people’s opinion, and especially in his own, he appeared to be wise, in fact he was not. However, when I began to show him that he only thought he was wise and was really not so, my efforts were resented both by him and by many of the other people present. I reflected as I walked away: ‘Well, I am certainly wiser than this man. It is only too likely that neither of us has any knowledge to boast of; but he thinks that he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am quite conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems that I am wiser than he is to this small extent — that I do not think that I know what I do not know. (Apology 50)
This insight determined Socrates’ unique approach to philosophy. The politician that Socrates had spoken to believed that he was wise, and he knew enough to have earned a reputation for wisdom. Yet Socrates found, in conversation with the man, that he consistently overestimated the extent of his knowledge and wisdom. The politician pretended to know things that he really knew nothing about. Socrates walked away from the conversation feeling perplexed. In many respects, this politician was his intellectual superior, in that he had a grasp of various issues that went over Socrates’ head. But the man had the foolish habit of assuming that this knowledge gave him privileged insight into all sorts of issues that lay beyond this subject domain. It was as though he thought his status and achievement had made him into some kind of super-being with absolute knowledge and powers.
This is not a mark of wisdom. In fact, it is the opposite. Socrates decided that he was wiser than this politician in one crucial respect — not because he knew more than the man but because he was conscious of the fact that there were many things that he did not know, and he was prepared to admit it.
In the course of the subsequent months, Socrates discovered the same thing wherever he went. ‘[T]he people with the greatest reputations were almost entirely deficient [in wisdom], while others who were supposed to be their inferiors were much better qualified in practical intelligence’ (Apology 51). Socrates soon gave up on the hope of finding a wise politician. He started talking to poets. Poets, in the ancient world, claimed to have a direct line to truth. They shared with oracles and soothsayers a deep understanding of the wisdom of tradition, and saw everything in light of the history of the gods, whose world had preceded the rule of humanity. Once again, however, Socrates found that the poets grossly overestimated their knowledge. When Socrates asked them to explain what their poetry meant, most had no idea. Socrates concluded that ‘it is not wisdom that enables [poets] to write their poetry, but a kind of instinct or inspiration, such as you find in seers and prophets who deliver all their sublime messages without knowing in the least what they mean’ (Apology 51). How could the poets be wise when they didn’t know the meaning of what they wrote? When it came down to it, they were as arrogant as the politicians, assuming they knew more than they really did.
Socrates was close to despair. He was sure that there must be someone in Athens wiser than himself. He started talking to the architects and artisans of the city. Surely, he reflected, the great artisans of Athens had insights that would put his own ignorance to shame? The artisans that Socrates spoke to were all experts in their fields. Yet, like the politicians and poets he’d interviewed, many artists and artisans assumed that their practical expertise made them experts on every topic. This error ‘more than outweighed their positive wisdom’ (Apology 52). It seemed that everyone in Athens was making the same mistake. People assumed that their talent and success was evidence of a personal genius. They carried themselves as if they possessed knowledge of all things. When pressed, however, most of them were incapable of demonstrating anything more than a detailed knowledge of their field.
Socrates had set out to find someone wiser than himself, in order to prove the oracle wrong in claiming that he was the wisest man alive. Yet, everywhere that he had looked, he had found arrogance and presumption — the pretence of wisdom, not the real thing. Even so, at the end of his quest, Socrates couldn’t believe that the wisdom that he possessed was anything much to get excited about. The fact that others liked to make a show of their wisdom and exaggerate it didn’t make him feel any wiser himself. Still, it got him thinking — what if wisdom were not a matter of knowledgeableness at all? What if being wise were not a matter of having knowledge, but of being aware of the limits of one’s knowledge, that is, knowing just how much one does not know? What if the wisest person on earth was not necessarily a font of knowledge, but someone who had the courage to admit that he knew very little or nothing?
This thought spun Socrates’ head around. Perhaps the oracle had been right after all? Socrates would never know the truth of the matter. But he knew that, whatever the oracle meant, he had found the kind of wisdom that he wanted to pursue. Let the politicians and poets parade themselves about as if they really knew the truth of things. Socrates would pursue a different ideal. Just as one friend desires the company of another, yet never assumes that they own their companion, Socrates would be a friend (philein from philia, the term for brotherly love) of wisdom (sophon), not its master or king. Socrates would be a philosopher. As a philosopher, he would seek out the company of wisdom, but he would never assume that he possessed it.
Socrates’ concept of wisdom set intellectual culture on a new footing. Prior to Socrates, philosophers had approached the world in the same way as poets, composing lyrical accounts of the creation of the cosmos and everything within it. They had assumed, like the people that Socrates interviewed on the streets of Athens, that their sphere of insight gave them total knowledge of the principles of things, and that their task as thinkers was to provide the conceptual frameworks that would facilitate an understanding of the cosmos.
Socrates took a different approach. It was quite simple: he proposed that we put our ideas to the test. Socrates’ method was to critically address the things we think we know, treating each of our beliefs skeptically until we have identified those that stand up to careful scrutiny. Only then can we claim that we know what we know. It may turn out in the end that we don’t know much at all. But this should only challenge us to keep on learning and exploring.
The important thing is that we don’t succumb to the temptation to accept ideas that we can’t justify, as enchanting as they may seem. Unjustified ideas don’t count as truth. At best, they amount to an ingenious fiction.
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This post is an extract from a series published on Philosophy for Change.
