Having chosen from a multitude of possibilities, I am left with only one: I have limited myself to one

However from this it follows that there is a deeper link between our existence and knowing or science in this broadest sense: knowing understood not as a totality of data gradually accumulated in the brain, but as a sort of understanding without which I cannot exist. The fact that I orient myself by choosing, and get it into my head that I can and should be this and not that, means that the knowing that precedes my access to what is possible for me is a condition of my existence. That my existence is constructed as a function of this knowing, and that this knowing is a condition of existence. When I choose to enrol in the Faculty of Mathematics or the Music Academy, I do so by virtue of having processed certain data of my own. And if, as in Plato’s Alcibiades, it is a matter of knowing what I am going to become and what it means to choose one’s life, then all the more does the choice presuppose knowing what a good life is. And so my confrontation with what is possible for my life pre-supposes a ‘knowing of what is possible’: I cannot choose unless I already have such a ‘knowing’, which in fact ultimately becomes the condition of my existence.

But once it is made, the choice implies a Richtungslinie, a ‘direction’ on which I must go from now on, and which, by the simple fact of its existence, eliminates all other possibilities. Having chosen from a multitude of possibilities, I am left with only one: I have limited myself to one, setting aside all the others that lay in front of me before I chose.

What then is the solution? How can we escape from this terrible paradox of human existence? There is only one way: the solution is to ‘chew over’ the problem.

That is why Socrates engages in discussion, in dialogue. Without a break. All the time. A whole life spent in dialogue. I have to keep discussing what I have to do, namely how I can manage to choose the best life, without for a moment claiming for myself the position of ‘I know’ and of the truth. When we read the Socratic dialogues, this is what strikes us at every turn. ‘Yes, we are talking about courage,’ we hear Socrates say. ‘What exactly is courage in itself?’ But why do we have to know what courage is in itself? And the answer is always the same: ‘So that we can choose, so that we can know how to choose our life.’ This was not just a problem for Socrates; it was a problem for the Greeks in general, one of the great ongoing problems that would not leave them in peace. This was a problem worth ‘chewing over’ endlessly, and one which, for Socrates, pushed dialogue to the foreground.

This whole game of choosing, which presupposes knowing as a condition of existence, also implies the necessity of testing what you know. If I can demonstrate that I have an understanding of the possibilities, then I can be sure that my choice has a sound basis, and, implicitly, have a guarantee that, through the well-founded choice that I have made, I will exist optimally and maximally.

But can I demonstrate this? Can anyone claim to have a reliable understanding of his possibilities, and thus, implicitly, a knowing by which to choose his life?

Socrates replied that the only thing he knows in this connection is that he does not know. He has the knowledge of his lack of knowledge. The choice of our lives pre-supposes a knowing, but it is a knowing that we do not have, and nor, from a Socratic point of view, can we ever have it. We strive to choose the best life possible for ourselves, because otherwise we waste our lives and live by chance, hurled this way and that; but on the other hand, when I am asked about the fundamental reference points of my life—courage, love, friendship, beauty, piety etc.—, when I have to put to the test a science of life, the only answers I can give are evasive and insufficient.
In all these branches of knowing and understanding we are dunces. This is the dramatic nature of my human situation: I do not know anything, when in fact I have to know, because I have to choose my existence, since my existence itself is choice.

Alexandru Dragomir