1. The Oracle Socrates says that he is different from all other people inasmuch as, instead of making money and involving himself with political matters, he examines himself and others (36b–c). Why does he do this? Because it is his divine mission.
Asked who is the wisest man, the Delphic oracle gave the following response: no one is wiser than Socrates (21a). Socrates does not believe, however, that he is in possession of any special wisdom; on the contrary, all he knows is that he does not know (21d). So the oracle’s response puzzles him, and indeed seems to him scandalous: he knows that he knows nothing, and yet the oracle claims that no one is wiser than he is. What, then, did the oracle mean? Or had the oracle simply got it wrong?
After puzzling over this for some time (21b), Socrates decides to check the oracle’s response for himself and to show everyone either that others are wiser than he is (21c), or that the response is incontestable (22a). Socrates’ activity thus starts from the oracle, and the dominant opposition is not between Socrates and his fellow citizens, but between Socrates and the oracle. In fact with Socrates everything lies under the sign of the divine: the origin of his activity is divine; his way of living is a ‘service to the god’ (23b, see also 30a); and he himself is, he says, a divine gift to the city (30e). Is this presumptuousness? Socrates himself denies it (34e); but in that case how are we to take his gesture of putting his whole life under the sign of the divine?
It is beyond our power to know what Socrates really believed about the divine. [To truly understand what Socrates says in the Apology, it is essential, I think, to understand the fields of relation between Socrates and the divine on the one hand, and between Socrates and his fellow citizens on the other. However, these fields of relation are now hard for us to grasp, as we no longer have the Greek understanding of the divine, or of relations in the interior of a city; and modern exegesis, instead of illuminating things, has tended rather to obscure them.]
However we know that the presence of the divine in someone’s existence confers on that person a certain seriousness. Now this is precisely what Socrates wanted to emphasize: in saying that his whole life lay under the sign of the divine, he wanted to tell his fellow citizens that his activity was undertaken in a serious register and he was therefore to be taken seriously. The presence of the divine in Socrates’ life is the guarantee of the seriousness of his whole activity.
His fellow citizens, however, did not take him seriously. No matter how much he told them that all he knew was that he did not know, they did not believe him, and condemned him to death. In fact for more than 2000 years we have all been doing exactly what those who condemned him to death did: we have not taken him seriously, but have thought that he is pretending, that he is being ‘ironic’. We have not had the courage, just once, to take him seriously and to immerse ourselves in what for him is the meaning of his existence.
2. The Investigation a) Introduction: The Phenomenological Basis of the Investigation Our life lies under the sign of the possible; for we, as people, can be in many ways.
We are in fact, to use Heidegger’s expression, a potentiality-for-being (Seinkönnen) (See Heidegger 1962, 182 ff). I can busy myself with philosophy, or I can dedicate myself to music, or I can waste my life. And I can—depending on the circumstances, of course—choose one or other of the possibilities that lie before me. I can also, of course, not choose; that is to say, I can let myself be carried along and be what life pushes me to be. But I cannot exclude choice completely. I choose; I am continually choosing; I choose to do one thing and not to do another. I choose to look up or to look down; I choose to turn my head. However let us return to the situation in which I can choose to be one or other of the possibilities that lie before me.
This choice is based on knowledge. I choose to be a philosopher and not a pianist on the basis of the knowledge I have about myself, about music, and about philosophy.
So knowledge is something that determines my existence. I know I do not have an ear for music, a good voice, or a sense of rhythm, so I do not apply to the Music Academy. I know, on the other hand, that I enjoy reading philosophy, that I am somewhat gifted with the mental power to work with philosophical arguments, and that I would like to stay in a quiet place and meditate on the great philosophical problems; so, on the basis of this knowledge about myself, I enrol in the Faculty of Philosophy. It may be that this knowledge on the basis of which I choose philosophy rather than music is well founded. But it is equally possible that it is not well founded, and that I do not actually have the right qualities for philosophy. In this case, if I choose to busy myself with philosophy, my ambitions are vain, and if I am honest, I will have to recognize at some point that I have not chosen well. And I have not chosen well, because in fact I did not know how to choose.
It is hard truly to know what your gifts are and what exactly you should choose to be. But how can you know what it is to have a fulfilled human life, in order to be able to choose it? I would like to live beautifully and truly, and to be fulfilled as a person, but what exactly does it mean to live beautifully and truly and to be fulf i lled as a person? I have to know what all these things mean in order to choose such a life.
2. The Investigation But how can you know all these things? How can you knowingly choose the most beautiful and the truest life? Socrates’ answer is: we cannot know. Man is a choice of his life; choice is based on knowledge; and knowledge of what it means to have a beautiful, true, and fulfilled life is something we cannot have. All we can know is this very fact, i.e. that we cannot have such knowledge. ‘I know that I do not know’: that is all we can say in this situation. I know that I do not know what a fulfilled human life is, so neither can I choose such a life. What, then, should we do, according to Socrates?
Socrates, we know from his contemporaries, spent his whole life in discussions about what we might term the elements of a fulfilled life: courage, virtue, justice, beauty, wisdom. This is what he chose: to discuss with those around him about what exactly a fulfilled human life might be. And he chose this because there is nothing else to be done. All we can do is keep discussing, and endlessly discussing what exactly a fulfilled life might be is the only way of not losing sight of the fact that we do not really know what such a life might be. All we can do is persist in our questions about what a fulfilled life is. All we can do is philosophize. So Socrates embodies a situation: the situation in which we find ourselves as people.
While there is a question for every answer, there is not an answer for every question. There are questions without an answer, i.e. questions that continue to stand on their feet despite all the answers they have received. The place for these questions is philosophy. Of course philosophy has given a good many answers to philosophical questions, like ‘What is the world?’ But the answers of philosophy do not displace philosophical questions: in philosophy, the questions outlive the answers. The sphere of questions without answers is neglected nowadays. In fact it has been deliberately set aside. Nowadays questions to which there is no answer are considered to be unscientific questions. And since nowadays everything revolves around science, the sphere par excellence of philosophy cannot but be pushed to one side.
But these questions without answers exist, even if we are not aware of them.
Socrates was the first European thinker to draw attention to this situation in which we find ourselves: we are the choice of our lives, but the knowledge on whose basis we might be able to choose the best life is something we cannot have, and thus all that remains to be done is to persist in asking questions about the best life, i.e. to stay, discussing with each other, in the sphere of questions without answers. This situation in which we are caught is the phenomenological basis of Socrates’ examination. No one else, either before or after Socrates, has ever embodied in his own life this situation in which we are caught. No one but Socrates has ever embodied in his own life the very essence of philosophy.
b) Knowing—Not Knowing Let us return now to the oracle. Wishing to check the oracle’s response, Socrates begins to examine his fellow citizens. Who are under examination? All those who think they know something: politicians, poets, and craftsmen. The list, according to Socrates, is complete (21e); and that is how we should look at the problem too, for these three occupations, in reality three types of pseudo-knowledge, are those that, in Socrates’ vision, delimit the space of ‘thinking you know what you do not know’.
Let us take them in turn. First the politicians: the more knowledgeable they claim to be, the less they turn out to know. The further you go along their way, the more distant you get from the truth (21c–d).2 Then the poets: other people can always talk better about their poems than they can; the poets are ‘enthusiasts’, they have an inborn talent, and are divinely inspired, but otherwise they are irresponsible (22b– d). They do not really understand the things they speak of, and cannot be held responsible. They are not themselves. You cannot say that someone knows something if that person is not himself. They do not know what they speak about, for someone else speaks through them, someone who visits them from above (see also Ion, 535e–536a). Finally the craftsmen: unlike the politicians, these actually know something—their crafts. But like the poets, they also think they know τὰ μέγιστα, the ‘most important matters’, i.e. those concerning good and evil (Apology 22d; see also Gorgias 472c and Alcibiades I, 131b). On the basis of what they actually do know, they come to think that they know how things are in any field; thus the person who knows how to do his job falls into the sin of ‘I think I know’. But it is precisely because of what you know that you end up failing to understand τἆλλα, the ‘other’ things (Apology 22d).
Any branch of knowledge has as its object an ontic field: the botanical, the zoological, etc. Socrates is saying, basically, that when you start to know one of these ontic fields, you start to think that you know them all. Socrates does not contest the fact that the craftsmen have knowledge connected with their crafts; all he is saying is that a craftsman’s knowledge makes him think that he also knows what is outside his craft. For the more often you know how to do something, the more you start to think that you know what you do not know; you know, let us say, mathematics, and then you start thinking that you can also make pronouncements on matters of democracy. Understanding something thus leads to a loss of measure, and this loss of measure ‘overshadow[s] the wisdom they ha[ve]’ (22e). Knowing something involves a risk: if you choose a particular branch of knowledge, you enter a closed space, and the road towards true knowledge, that which has as its object the ‘most important pursuits’, is blocked for you. Not only does the knowledge of a particular field not open up your pathway towards knowledge of the whole, it actually blocks that pathway.3 In the Apology (and to a certain extent also in the other Socratic dialogues), everything works on three levels, each of which is determined by a duality: ‘knowing—not knowing’, ‘life—death’, and ‘good—evil’. For Socrates, we might say, the human condition is inscribed in the space of these three dualities; to be human, in his view, means staying within these three dualities: between life and death, between knowing and not knowing, and between good and evil. According to Socrates, then, man exists in this space of ‘between’.
Let me make a parenthesis. It is in the question that ‘between’, μέσον, shows itself. I ask questions when I find myself between two things; and the question comes from the μέσον character of the human being. My question does not come from my not knowing, but from my consciousness of the fact that I know that I do not know. The question thus arises from this situation of the human being in the space between ‘knowing’ and ‘not knowing’ (see also Symposium 203e), and it reflects, for Socrates, our very condition as humans. In all the Socratic dialogues, the mortal sin is to think you know what you do not know. The moment you start to think you know, you transgress your human condition and start to err; for this reason, the ultimate answer, for Socrates, is the question.
But let us return to those three dualities. At first glance, Socrates’ examination seems to be directed only at the first of them: ‘knowing—not knowing’. However this duality is inseparable from the other two, and this is essential for our understanding of Socrates. So we must pause to consider the other two dualities too: 'life—death’ and ‘good—evil’.
c) Life—Death With Socrates, in a sense, things remain in the negative: his δαίμων only tells him what not to do; his only claim is ‘I know that I do not know’; the oracle decrees that ‘no one is wiser than Socrates’; his trial is an unjust one; by the time he makes his defence, he knows very well that he will be condemned to death; and he dies knowing that he is being sacrificed to save a city that has no chance of being saved.
The negative is generally regarded as not being good; thus it provokes an unease, a desire to escape into the positive. In the history of philosophy, the problem of the negative is omnipresent. It appears in Parmenides, in Heraclitus, in Xenophanes, in Plato and Aristotle, in Descartes and Kant, in Spinoza, in Kierkegaard, in Nietzsche, and in Heidegger. However most of the time we find a transformation of the negative into the positive. Descartes’s doubt, for example, is a negative that becomes positive in what follows—in cogito ergo sum. So let us consider whether there is any positive counterpart to Socrates’ negativity.
Where Socrates’ knowledge is concerned, negativity is ultimately transformed into something positive, for it is what proves him to be wise (while the positive of the ‘knowers’ is transformed into something negative when their claims to knowledge are exposed as illusion). But it is not only his not knowing that finally leads to something positive.
At the beginning of the Apology, Socrates asks the judges not to believe his accusers, who have said that he is ‘an accomplished speaker’ (φαίνωμαι δεινός λέγειν, 17b). Socrates’ λόγος proves to be λόγος δεινός in the literal sense of ‘dangerous speech’, for it leads to death. But death too is transformed into something positive in the end.
Seen from within life, death is a negation of life; it is thus, at first glance, something negative. However the fact that I know I will die makes me turn to consider my life, asking myself the question: what is the meaning of my own life?4 What does this mean? It means, in the first place, that life is inscribed on the level of ‘knowing’.
Life, in other words, is the object of a sort of knowledge; and this knowledge allows me to answer the question: what is the meaning of my own life? This knowledge that helps me to determine the meaning of my life has as its object, according to Socrates, good and evil.
d) Good—Evil There are several types of truth. Some are personal: for example, I have dislocated my foot. Others are impersonal, but can become personal: for example, I read that garlic is good for the heart and I start eating garlic. However there are also impersonal truths that remain impersonal; for example: the atomic weight of hydrogen is 1. This is a truth that may perhaps interest me, but that cannot become personal.
Now this sort of thing should not strike us as normal. On the contrary, it is astonishing that it should be so, for all that does not concern my subjectivity is strange. The knowledge of things that do not concern me did not, however, emerge of its own accord. It appeared in time, and is a historical ‘achievement’.
The problem of good and evil is, to speak in Hegelian terms, eine subjektive Objektivität. It is both personal and impersonal. And, for Socrates, it is on this both personal and impersonal level that the problem of knowing good and evil arises.
The virtue of a thing is its essence. The virtue of a thing appears when it functions in keeping with its essence. But not with Socrates. He does not yet ontologize good. And he is the only philosopher not to do so. Ontological problems do not arise for Socrates. For him only one thing is important: to know what is good and what is evil in order to know what to do with your life. What is good and what is evil—that, according to Socrates, is all that should interest us. That and nothing more—not the cosmos, not the essence of things. So Socrates would have us say not: ‘That’s all I understand; beyond that I don’t know,’ but: ‘Mathematics, astronomy etc. don’t interest me; the idea of death makes me face the problem of the meaning of my life, and all that interests me is to know what is good and what is evil in order to know what to do with my life’ (even if, in this field of good and evil, our knowledge will only be a vague reflection of a divine wisdom, for we will always remain in the space of ‘between’).
However, bizarre as it might seem, the knowledge I have in this matter of good and evil is only diffuse. In fact, I only have a diffuse knowledge of all the most important things. ‘What then is time? I know well enough what it is,’ says Saint Augustine, ‘provided that nobody asks me’ (1961, 264).5 What is being? We all keep using the verb ‘to be’, but its meaning remains, as Heidegger would say, veiled in obscurity.6 We all have opinions about the most important things, about good and evil.
However where these things are concerned, the starting point is not ignorance, but a pseudo-knowledge, a diffuse knowledge, which is nevertheless functional, for we understand each other when we talk about them. This diffuse knowledge of good 5 and evil is the greatest obstacle that I face when I want to find out what is good and what is evil in order to know what to do with my life. This diffuse knowledge lies at the centre of Socrates’ investigation.
3. Excursus: The Socratic Method a) ‘I Do Not Know’ As the Origin of Any Method
Logically, the sentence ‘I know that I do not know’ seems nonsensical. Either I know or I do not know. If what I know is that I do not know, then the object of what I know is that I do not know; but ‘I do not know’ cannot be an object of knowledge—it is just a negation. What can be the meaning of ‘I know that I do not know’?
Has anyone ever thought about this? Of course, everyone knows: Socrates did, 2380 years ago. And apparently it even cost him his life.
In the Apology, the opposition is not between knowing something and not knowing anything, but between those who think they know and the one who knows he does not know. (We must beware here of the modern way of thinking through ‘consciousness’. It is not just that the former are not conscious that they do not know while Socrates is conscious; in fact the horizon is a much broader one.) Thus each interlocutor comes with something: those under examination come with their knowledge, and Socrates comes with ‘I know that I do not know.’ But what does ‘I know that I do not know’ mean?
α) The Object of ‘I Do Not Know’ Ignorance usually has an object. I do not know Chinese philosophy, I do not know the capital of Somalia, I do not know the year Petru Cercel died. Ignorance is thus objectified. However it is not determined only by its object, but also by what I know.
For what I do not know is a multitude of things in a multitude of areas; the things I do not know seem to me like those regions marked hic sunt leones on the old maps of Africa. Ignorance is not, then, the absence of knowledge, but just the field of not knowing that is opened and determined by any knowing. In other words, in ‘I know what I do not know’, ‘I do not know’ appears within an ‘I know’; thus, the division of ‘I know—I do not know’ is an exhaustive division within a broader sense of ‘I know’, which determines its own specific ‘I know’ and ‘I do not know’. Knowledge and ignorance thus seem to be enclosed within the horizon of a broader understand-ing of knowledge.
Any ‘I know’ implies an object that is known; we always know something.
However ‘I know’ also implies a horizon to be known, which, within the limits of knowability, we call the ‘world’; this horizon determines the known (the object that is known) as part of a whole. Any knowledge is thus inscribed within the world conceived as knowable; in other words the object known is inscribed as a part within a knowable world. However the whole is different from the part: the knowable is not an object known, but a possibility of knowing. So the world is what I know I do not know, but can know.
What, then, does ‘I do not know’ refer to when Socrates says: ‘I know that I do not know’? Is it something in particular? Or all the things I do not know? (Which would not be possible, since I do not even know what they are.) No. Socrates’ ‘I do not know’ refers to the world, i.e. to all that I do not know, but can know. In the famous sentence ‘I know that I do not know’, the ‘I know’ has an object, ‘I do not know’, which in turn has as its object the world.
‘I do not know’ is not a logical conclusion to an analysis of known things, but a way of situating oneself in something all-embracing, which is the only way of opening up the possibility of such an analysis. This fundamental ‘I do not know’ opens up the horizon of knowledge, precisely because, in its privative character, it makes possible an authentic ‘I know’. Confronted with everything (and that is what we are talking about here), the answer ‘I know’—given by the politician, the poet and the craftsman—is inadequate. The only answer that is appropriate in the face of everything is ‘I do not know’, and this ‘I do not know’ is the basis of the horizon of the knowable.
β) ‘I Do Not Know’ As a Basis for ‘I Know’
Those who know have acquired their knowledge in the natural course of events. They have seen, they have heard, they have thought, and now they know and speak of what they know. And that is how people have known since the world began. I know because I have seen, or because I have heard from others, or because I have thought, or a combination of all of these. So there is no hiatus between the knower as a person and the known object qua known. The known is constituted in a natural way, even if it differs from person to person, according to the gifts and circumstances of each.
However Socrates comes along with ‘I know that I do not know’. It is not a matter of his not knowing such and such a thing, but of his fundamentally not knowing.
So he comes along with an ‘I do not know’ that shakes the brickwork of the known and that cannot be resisted by any natural known. Against the ‘natural’ wisdom of the known, he sets an ‘unnatural’ non-knowledge that creates a hiatus between the knower and the known and thus breaks their natural connection. ‘I do not know’ begins to undo ‘I know’.
The person who thought he knew stops first at the gulf created between the knower and the known by ‘I do not know’; then he feels a sort of paralysis, like the effect of the torpedo fish (to which Socrates is compared in Meno 80a and c). In the end, ‘I do not know’ completely dismantles ‘I know’, making the road back impossible, and at the same time preventing any return to the ‘natural’ process of knowing. The knower is thus introduced into a new field of relations towards ‘I know’, namely that of ‘I know that I do not know’. ‘I do not know’ is never a negative;
rather it is a privative, but it belongs to an ‘unnatural’ zone other than that of the natural ‘I know’. It is no longer possible to reach the latter zone ‘naturally’, i.e. simply to have access to the known. Rather a way must be found that includes within itself a turning back over the relation ‘I know—I do not know’ and that is capable of guaranteeing the known.
This way, which springs from the space of a fundamental ‘I do not know’—the creator of a hiatus between the knower and the known—was named by the ancient Greeks μέθοδος, a word that originally meant ‘road’ or ‘way’, and that became a technical term, with the sense of ‘method’, only in the time of Plato.8 The method thus appears in the horizon of ‘I know that I do not know’; it is not a way of avoiding errors, but a way of building.9
Every method has its origin here: knowing that he does not know, man builds something and makes a road.10 In stating that he knew that he did not know, Socrates was instituting, and knew he was instituting, something epoch-making. His strength lies in the courage with which he remained in the zone of ‘I do not know’, the zone that he tried to clarify, and with which he came to identify himself. His greatness cannot be measured, for no one, either before or since, has had such strength and courage. What he achieved was the most significant grounding of Western spirituality. It is for this reason that he is a foundation of the Western spirit. From Socrates onwards, throughout Western culture, any knowledge would be based on a method; even love is conceived by Saint Augustine as a method of knowing. Ever since Socrates, Western knowledge has no longer found the known, but has obtained it; for it always starts from a negative ‘I know’, i.e. from ‘I know that I do not know’. The foundation of Western culture is this fundamental ‘I do not know,’ which opens the dynamic horizon of a methodical mathesis universalis.
b) The Socratic Method
Let us now return to Socrates’ investigation. Its starting point, ‘I know that I do not know’, opens the horizon in which the problem of method appears. But what is the pathway opened by Socrates? In other words, what does his method consist of?
Generally known as maieutics, the Socratic method has three essential determinations: (α) its form is dialogical; (β) the principal on which it is based is that of non-contradiction; and (γ) its aim is the cleansing of the soul. Let us consider each of these in turn.
α) Socratic Dialogue
The whole drama of Socrates takes place within the horizon of speech: first of all, the oracle’s response, the response that made Socrates undertake the examination of his fellow citizens, is a saying, a λόγος; then, Socrates is accused of saying certain things, and the court that condemns him to death is also a place of speaking; and finally, Socrates’ investigation takes place by way of questions and answers, i.e. through dialogue, and so through λόγος. This dialogue is not a competition (‘who is cleverer?’), but a confrontation that seeks to show (cf. ἀποφανών, 21c) who represents human wisdom. Socrates tries to reply to this question by engaging in dialogue with his fellows. Why, then, does Socrates engage in dialogue? Why does he not think on his own, as Descartes would do 2000 years later?
The oracle only said that ‘no one is wiser than Socrates’. This use of the comparative suggests that the meaning hidden in the oracle’s response is to be sought in the zone of the inter-personal, in confrontation with others, and not in comparing ‘how much each knows’. Right from the start we are sent among people, and it is there, among people, that Socrates’ examination takes place.
His examination is generally about ta τὰ μέγιστα, about the ‘most important matters’, i.e. those concerning good and evil (22d). However these things are common property. In Protagoras 323c it is put this way: ‘it is madness not to pretend to justice, since one must have some trace of it or not be human’ (see also 327a: ‘virtue [is] something in which no one can be a layman if there is to be a city’). The place of morality, of the most important things, is thus the community; therefore the judgement of what is good and what is evil is something that concerns all of us; and Socrates’ investigation, which is aimed at determining what is good and what is evil, is set from the very beginning in the interpersonal space.11
But for Socrates this interpersonal space exists only inasmuch as people communicate among themselves by speaking, i.e. through dialogue.12 So Socrates does not engage in dialogue just out of eccentricity, but in order for the investigation to take place, from the very beginning, in the interpersonal space, whose locus is dialogue. However this is not the only reason why he engages in dialogue.
Let us consider how many ways one can engage in dialogue. In my view, these are four in number. Dialogue can take place: (i) between two who know, (ii) between two who do not know, (iii) between one who knows and one who does not know, or (iv) between one who does not know and one who thinks he knows. This last is Socratic dialogue. Let us see now what happens in this sort of dialogue.
Let us suppose that A is an interlocutor of Socrates, and that he is discussing with Socrates one of these ‘important things’; let us call it X.13 When A says something about X, to Socrates all he is doing is affirming something that he, A, thinks he knows about X, without really knowing. Which means that what A says is considered by Socrates to be false from the very start. So for Socrates the starting point is a natural falsehood, represented by the opinion of the other. And yet for Socrates the presence of the other is indispensable if we are to find the truth? Why is this so?
At the beginning of his Discours de la méthode, Descartes says: ‘la puissance de bien juger et distinguer le vrai d’avec le faux, qui est proprement ce qu’on nomme le bon sens ou la raison, est naturellement égale en tous les hommes.’ That is to say:
‘the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false—which is what we properly call ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’—is naturally equal in all men.’ And this ‘good sense’ or ‘reason’, Descartes says, is ‘la chose du monde la mieux parta-gée’, ‘the best distributed thing in the world’ (Descartes 1985, 111).
For Descartes, the capacity of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false is same in all of us. Which implies that in order to distinguish the true from the false I do not need anyone else: my own reason—if it follows certain rules (see Regulae ad directionem ingenii)—is sufficient for me. So I have no need for dialogue with another.
Why is it not the same for Socrates? Consider what he says to Polos, in the Gorgias:
For my part, if I don’t produce you as a single witness to agree with what I’m saying, then I suppose I’ve achieved nothing worth mentioning concerning the things we’ve been discussing. And I suppose you haven’t either, if I don’t testify on your side, though I’m just one person, and you disregard all these other people. (472b–c; see also 453c) And here is what he says to Callicles, also in the Gorgias: ‘I know well that if you concur with what my soul believes, then that is the very truth’ (486e). And again:
‘So, our mutual agreement will really lay hold of truth in the end’ (487e).
So why does Socrates need another person in order to distinguish the true from the false? Because for him something was true only if a consensus could be reached about that thing on the basis of facts recognized interpersonally as evident; i.e. only if A and B together recognize that something is true is that thing true. (And consensus can only be reached starting from things that are evident and incontestable.) So Socrates needs another person because for him the only guarantee of truth is the consensus that you can reach with another. And being in need of this consensus with another, he engages in dialogue and does not think on his own. (Of course consensus has no value if it is the consensus of lunatics; it has value only if those who reach it let themselves be guided by reason and set aside their prejudices.) In the dialogues in which he engages, Socrates starts from subjectivity, from A and B, from two people who want to separate the true from the false in a certain problem. This intersubjective space between A and B is set against the space of the community, that space in which there is an illusion of knowledge (‘I think I know’).
Thus Socrates behaves ‘idiomatically’ (cf. ἰδιωτεύειν, Apology, 32a), i.e. he opposes general commonality with the one thing that can be set against it and that can expose the illusion of knowledge that is present in general commonality, i.e. intersubjective commonality.
β) The Principle of Socratic Maieutics: Non-Contradiction
In the Socratic dialogue, Socrates asks, and the others reply and contradict themselves, i.e. give contrary opinions about the same thing. Maieutics is thus a method whose principle is non-contradiction: you put someone’s statements together and, once put together, they can be seen to be contradictory and thus false (while statements that can be connected without contradiction seem much closer to the truth, cf. Gorgias, 508e).14
But why do I come to contradict myself? At the base of contradiction lies a wandering (πλάνη), a sort of ‘sometimes I say this and sometimes that’. The opposite of this wandering is consistency, die Folgerichtigkeit: instead of wandering, I go in a straight line.
So contradiction is, for Socrates, a sure indication of falsehood, while non-contradiction and consensus are probably indicators of truth. To us, this position seems strange. But it ceases to be strange if we take into consideration the fact that Socrates’ investigation concerns the ‘most important’ things, i.e. things that can only be determined through logos. In the Statesman, Plato makes explicit an idea that appears implicitly in almost all the Socratic dialogues:
Conversely for those things that are greatest [τὰ μέγιστα] and most valuable, there is no image at all which has been worked in plain view for the use of mankind, the showing of which will enable the person who wants to satisfy the mind of an inquirer to satisfy it adequately, just by fitting it to one of the senses. That is why one must practice at being able to give and receive an account of each thing; for the things that are without body [τὰ ἀσώματα], which are finest and greatest, are shown clearly only by verbal means15 [λόγος], and by nothing else […] (285e–286a) In the space of immaterial things, then, we have only λόγος; and here, in this space, concordance between statements and reality ceases to be a criterion of truth; here we have only two probable indicators of truth: consensus and non-contradiction.
But let us return to Socratic dialogue. When you are under an illusion, you wander and contradict yourself. Why? Because you come to think that you know when in fact you do not know. According to Socrates, this is the worst thing that can happen to someone. And the aim of maieutics is to cure it.
γ) The aim of Maieutics: Cleansing
In the Sophist, one of the late dialogues, the leader of the discussion is not Socrates.
Plato probably felt that he could no longer put his own thoughts into the mouth of Socrates, and so he resorted to a fictitious person, known as the Visitor from Elea. Socrates is also present, it is true, but he only takes a small part in the discussion.
However the Sophist contains one of Plato’s finest eulogies of Socrates. Did he feel guilty about transforming Socrates into a quasi-passive auditor? Did he recall, in the evening of his life, how he had spent the years of his youth close to Socrates and feel the need to show his reverence? We cannot know.
The theme of the Sophist is the essence of the Sophist; but this theme splits repeatedly and the discussion touches on a great many things. At 226b it comes round to the art of ‘discrimination,’ which is divided as follows: one branch separates like from like, while another, named ‘cleansing’, separates what is worse from what is better (226d).16 Cleansing, in its turn, is divided between the cleansing of living beings and that of those without life, and the cleansing of living beings is divided between the cleansing of the body and that of the soul (226e–227a). The ‘cleansing’ of the soul is the removal of what is bad in it (227d), and it is of two kinds (since there can be two kinds of badness in the soul): one kind cleanses the soul of wickedness (analogous to bodily sickness, which can be cured by medicine); and the other cleanses the soul of ignorance (analogous to ugliness, which can be ‘cured’ by gymnastics).
Lack of knowledge (ἄγνοια, 228d; 229a, c) is a deformation of the soul (αἶσχος, 228a, e), and within it we may distinguish ignorance (ἀμαθία) and (so to speak) lack of skill. We can overcome lack of skill by learning. I do not know how to do something, but I can learn; it is just a matter of finding the right way to learn. In the case of ignorance, however, things are not so simple; here it does not help to teach knowledge, as ἀμαθία consists of ‘not knowing, but thinking that you know’ (229c). In this case, the remedy is not simply the transmission of knowledge; the remedy here is a process involving education (παιδεία, 229d), and it consists in asking the person who thinks he knows questions and showing him that his answers contradict each other, thus revealing his ignorance.
They [the educators] cross-examine someone when he thinks he’s saying something though he’s saying nothing. Then, since his opinions will vary inconsistently, these people will easily scrutinize them. They collect his opinions together during the discussion, put them side by side, and show that they conflict with each other at the same time on the same sub-jects in relation to the same things and in the same respects. The people who are being examined […] lose their inflated and rigid beliefs about themselves that way […] (230b–c)
Plato does not name Socrates here; however it is clear that the procedure referred to, which cleanses the soul of the greatest evil, is Socratic maieutics. This is the ‘most important kind of cleansing’: we are to consider that anyone who has not been through this process, ‘even the king of Persia, if he remains unrefuted, is uncleansed in the most important respect’ (230d). He remains deformed (like the Sophists) and uneducated; whoever you are, however great you are, if you have not undergone this cleansing, you have done nothing. For if you are not first cleansed of the belief that you know what you do not know, you cannot receive additional teaching, just as ‘the body […] can’t benefit from any food that’s offered to it until what’s interfering with it from inside is removed’ (230c–d).
The problem of non-being, of μὴ ὄν, was there before Socrates and returned with Plato. However we do not find it in Socrates. Why not? Because for Socrates truth is not opposed to falsehood, but to imposture.
He was not seeking to catch his interlocutor out with logic, but to make him understand that to claim that you know without actually knowing is an ugliness of the soul. Thinking that you know, without actually knowing, was, for Socrates, a sin, a stain on your soul, an evil. So he was not interested in error in the sense of inexactness (for example, saying that it rained yesterday when actually it did not), but as the illusion of knowledge.
4. The Results of the Investigation
Let us now look at what results Socrates’ examination produced. According to what he says in the Apology, four things emerged from his examination. Firstly, all those he investigated thought they knew something that they did not actually know; thus in the first place, it emerged that their knowledge was pseudo-knowledge (22e).
Then, it emerged that true wisdom belongs only to the gods (23a), and that Socrates’s wisdom was true human wisdom, which is of no value in comparison with divine wisdom (23b); and finally, that he had been taken by the oracle only as a example (παράδειγμα) of the human (23a). The oracle, says Socrates, probably meant:
that human wisdom is worth little or nothing, and […] when he says this man Socrates, he is using my name as an example [παράδειγμα], as if he said: ‘This man among you, mortals, is wisest who, like Socrates, understands that this wisdom is worthless.’ (23a–b) ‘Knowing that you do not know’ thus represents true human wisdom (ἀνθρώπινη σοφία, 20d); its paradigm is Socrates, and it is to be distinguished from two other sorts of wisdom: from the wisdom of those who think they know what they do not know (which Socrates does not know how to name, cf. 20d–e), and from divine wisdom (23a).17
These three sorts of wisdom are matched by three sorts of λόγος, of discourse: the divine λόγος of the oracle, Socratic λόγος, and the λόγος of the ‘knowers’. The divine λόγος seems to say something illogical, something aporetic. Why?
Since Socrates is proclaimed to be the wisest, and he does not know anything, it follows that the one who does not know anything is the wisest. Thus the oracle would appear to be eulogizing ignorance. However Socrates says that the oracle cannot utter a lie, for that would not be legitimate (21b). What the oracle says must therefore have a hidden meaning. The oracle speaks and at the same time hides what it says in what it says.
Socrates, in his turn, speaks and at the same time hides what he is saying. His λόγος declares that he does not know anything, but in the end he can be seen to embody the highest human wisdom (cf. σοφώτατος, 23b). The falsity of the last λόγος, that of the ‘knower’, is exposed as it unfolds itself.
The oracle states something unbelievable, but which proves in the end to be true; the ‘knower’ states that he knows, but is proved in the end to have been mistaken. In the middle, between the oracle and the ‘knower’, lies the Socratic ‘I do not know’—the fundamental reality of humankind, the intermediary space between appearance and the absolute, in which the roots of science as method first appear.
There is something else that results from Socrates’ examination: the confrontation between Socrates and the city, or—if we take Socrates as a paradigm of wisdom—the confrontation between philosophy and the city.
5. The Confrontation
According to Socrates, life is to be taken as a whole (see Protagoras 361d, where Socrates tells Protagoras that, in taking Prometheus as an example, he is taking care of his ‘life as a whole’). According to the way Socrates sees things, the moment I decide about this whole that is my life is the moment I start truly to be. This effort to decide about my life as a whole is an ¢gèn. This is what Socrates says in the Gorgias:
So I disregard the things held in honor by the majority of people, and by practicing truth I really try, to the best of my ability, to be and to live as a very good man, and when I die, to die like that. And I call on all other people as well, as far as I can—and you especially I call on in response to your call—to this way of life, this ἀγών, that I hold to be worth all the other ἀγώνες in this life. (526e)
I propose to leave ἀγών untranslated. Originally it mean ‘public square’, the place where, among other things, contests were held. Then it came to mean ‘contest’ and ‘struggle’. All these senses are present in the Gorgias text: there is, in Socrates’ message, a call to the public square, and to contest, and to struggle. This is the ἀγών that lies before us all, and that calls us to take our life as a whole.18 For Socrates, ‘what you are’ is connected to ‘what you think’. From his point of view, none of your thoughts are irrelevant to what you are. Socrates’ work is there-fore his life (not just in the biographical sense, of course), his ἀγών. You cannot understand how he thought unless you know how he lived; and here it is not just a matter of concordance, but of the fact that his life is his philosophy.
The life of Socrates was based on his belief in all that had been revealed to him: firstly, that death makes you face the problem of the meaning of life; secondly, that the meaning of life is a question of knowing what is good and what is evil, and that in this zone of knowing what is good and what is evil, man himself is the question; and finally, that one must take one’s life as a whole and try to find out together with others what good and evil really are, even if one does not have much chance of success.
Socrates did one thing all his life: he philosophized; i.e. he tried, as he thought fitting, to find out, together with others, what good and evil really are. In his philosophizing, Socrates came to embody the paradigm of human wisdom, of philosophy, and to reveal the greatest evil by which man can be affected—thinking that you know what you do not know. This evil of the soul is not just any evil. It is generic and natural; it is constituted en masse, and is the very foundation of public opinion, of all that concerns öffentliche Meinung. It represents the city itself. It is the das Man, anyone and everyone in their impersonality, that Heidegger speaks of in Being and Time (see § 27).
Socratic cleansing, therefore, has as its aim the lifting of others out of the zone of public opinion. This lifting out of the zone of public opinion follows a particular path. Socrates’ dialogues take place after a great event or before one; at such moments, time is suspended and tongues are loosened. In the beginning there is a wandering, πλάνη, and then you are carried, by questions, towards contradictory statements. First you are taken out of your everyday life; then you wander and get disoriented. The level on which Socrates works is not just that of logic, but above all that of action on his partner in discussion. Socrates is not seeking to catch you out, but to make you understand that the knowledge you claim is pseudo-knowledge, and thus to lift you out of the zone of public opinion (hence the outcome of the dialogues does not actually matter). This lifting out of the zone of public opinion is felt, however, at least at fi rst, as something bad.
In a way, everyday life lives itself; it is das sich selbst lebende Leben. It is like a mechanism whose wheels turn of their own accord, without much contribution on my part. It is precisely this way in which my life flows on of its own accord that is threatened by the disorientation into which Socrates throws me. It makes me doubt all that I know about good and evil, and this is something dangerous for me. To take me out of the daily flow and to make me face the problem of the meaning of my life seems like an attack directed against me.
Socrates philosophized all his life. He is thus different from us, who in our lives are caught up in many things. It is this monomania of his, which made him refuse to be installed in a well-ordered Weltanschauung, that led to is death. This obsessive preoccupation with philosophy is thus directed against us, who do not want to step outside our daily lives. Socrates twists all the things that we thought we believed and knew, and extracts them from the setting in which they had their place in our daily lives. Any thought that overturns all the things that we believed and knew is philosophy, and it is dangerous, because it threatens the flow of our daily lives. The confrontation between Socrates and the city of Athens is the paradigm of the confrontation between philosophy and public opinion.19
But it is not only philosophy that threatens our daily lives. Socrates replies to his accusers that he has never said and never will say anything but the truth (17b). But then, if we believe him, this means that the truth is considered by his accusers to be dangerous. So when is the truth dangerous? When it reveals what is inauthentic about humanity, about the city, and about knowledge. And if we take Socrates seriously when he says that he is in the service of the divine, this means that it is not only philosophy and the truth that endanger our everyday lives, but also the divine. Socrates is in the service of the divine, and against the life of each of us; he is the only philosopher who overturned things and went the whole way. But even though he went the whole way, he did not succeed in cleansing the city.
‘As a result of this investigation, men of Athens, I acquired much unpopularity, of a kind that is hard to deal with and is a heavy burden,’ he says in the Apology (23a).
By proving to his fellow citizens that they did not know what they thought they knew, Socrates aroused their hatred. He raised a question mark over the very foundations of public opinion, and public opinion defended itself and condemned him to death. When philosophy asks ‘what is good?’, it is approaching a sacred zone. And the city does not like to see sacred things put under discussion—even in order to clarify them. So there we have the life of Socrates. Is it worth following? Was he actually right?
6. Epilogue
In a letter to Herder (written in 1772), Goethe writes: ‘I studied Socrates in Plato and Xenophon, and then I became aware for the first time of my unworthiness [Unwürdigkeit]’ (Goethe 1962, 132). Socrates’ conception should make us feel our unworthiness, unsere Unwürdigkeit (in Greek, ἀνάξιος, a term used frequently by Plato in the Apology, when he refers to the low value of human knowledge). This blow struck against our being is characteristic of Plato’s dialogues. Do we actually become aware of our unworthiness when we are confronted with Socrates?
Life is the most fragile of things: you can cease to be at any moment. This is one commonplace. A second is this: this life is all we have—which means that it is very precious. And a third: each of us lives in a different way; so our life has a specific content. Now, in the context of the fragility of life, what is the meaning of this content? In other words, how should we live? What life should we choose? What is so valuable that it is decisive in the question of the value of life, and in that of ‘to live or to die’? All these were Socrates’ problems. Do we face these problems ourselves? Do we consider our life as a whole?
In Dostoyevsky’s The Devils, there is a disturbing passage about half knowledge.
Shatov, speaking to Stavrogin, says:
half-knowledge [is the] most terrible scourge of humanity, worse than pestilence, famine, or war, and quite unknown till our present century. Half-knowledge is a despot such as has never been known before. A despot that has its own priests and its slaves, a despot before whom everybody prostrates himself with love and superstitious dread, such as has been quite inconceivable till now, before whom science itself trembles and surrenders in a shameful way. (Dostoyevsky 1953, 257)20 20
Half-knowledge, for Dostoyevsky, is not a sort of less rigorous, less exact knowledge, but a phenomenon existing in its own right on a very large scale, and characteristic of the world in which he lived, and in which we too live. Of course there were half-knowing people in the time of the Greeks too. But it is only in our own time that half-knowledge has manifested itself on such a large scale, becoming a mass phenomenon, and only in our world that it has become, as Dostoevsky puts it, a despot. Half-knowledge is basically just a variation on thinking you know what you do not know. But is it for us, as it was for Dostoevsky, the greatest evil of our world, worse than pestilence, famine, or war? Do we believe, like Socrates, that the greatest evil that can afflict the soul is to think you know what you do not know? Do we see that the greatest trap for the spirit is precisely this—that everyone thinks they know? That everyone can explain what needs to be done?
We can busy ourselves with the Socratic problems by reading or writing books or articles about Socrates’ ethics. But Socrates himself did not write anything; he just talked with other people. His philosophy was an anti-cultural act, and we should perceive it as such. However it is difficult to do this, as the machinery of culture— which initially eliminates all the great creators, and then puts them in the limelight to ‘adore’ them—has transformed the philosophy of Socrates into a matter of culture; i.e. a matter that no longer concerns me.
Socrates wanted us to see our lives as a whole. If I do not see my life as a whole, then I wander, πλάνω, ich gehe hin und her, I drift hither and thither. But if I do see my life as a whole, then I should manage to prevent this whole from being contradictory. What does an uncontradictory life mean? In means, in the first place, a life without compromises. When do I make a compromise? When something of vital interest for me is threatened; for life is my most precious possession, and all that protects it is good. So the compromise protects my life, but takes away its coherence. And this is precisely the position that Socrates is attacking. For him, the most precious possession is not life itself, regardless of how it is lived, but the way you live it, i.e. its coherence. So who is right, Socrates or us?
If Socrates is right, then everything is irrelevant to us, apart from our lives. If he is right, we are not really living, and we are not paradigmatic, as he was. If he is right, then, as Callicles tells him in the Gorgias, ‘this human life of ours [will] be turned upside down’ (481c). If Socrates is right and what is really essential is to concern yourself with your own life, then each of us should try to find out what the matter is with ourselves, even if our chances of success are minimal—though the message of Socrates is not for everyone, in the way that the message of Jesus is.
Socrates was right then, and he is still right today. Nothing has changed where τὰ μέγστα, the most important things, are concerned. We deal with them today just as we dealt with them in his time. So 2400 years have gone by and we have stood still as far as the most important things are concerned. What city would admit this nowadays?
You can busy yourself all your life with philately or mathematical problems. But how dangerous and diff i cultit is to take seriously the attempt to find out what the matter is with yourself! And this is just what the philosopher, der liebe Niemand, old Mr Nobody, should be doing.
From: The World We Live In
by Alexandru Dragomir
Gabriel Liiceanu Catalin Partenie Editors Translated
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