Episode 55 - Does Socrates Really Know Only That He Knows Nothing?

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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 v