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 validate, or think is better than other possible comportments.

There could be other things as well that perhaps are connected to these two ways of approaching it. A person might just be a grifter and liking to throw things out there about Socrates and hoping to hoodwink people. Or you might actually be advocating for intellectual humility because you just want everybody else to feel epistemologically challenged by relation to you.

What I want to do is consider whether or not this is an adequate characterization of Socrates. And I’m going to say as a reader and teacher of Plato for many years, definitely not. And to think a bit about why it would be bad for you to hold that this really is what Socrates was presenting or exemplifying for us.

So let’s start with the Apology itself, where this essentially originates from. Socrates has a friend who goes to the Oracle at Delphi and asks the kind of smart-ass question: “Is there anybody wiser than Socrates?” And the Oracle says no. So Socrates wonders, “What the hell does this mean? I don’t feel myself to be particularly wise. And I live in a culture where there are other people who are being presented as wise and do seem to think that they’re wise. I think that perhaps they are. So let me go and try to prove the oracle wrong,” which is already a weird thing to do. If the god says X is the case, you’re gonna try to disprove that X is the case as your way of showing that X is the case. That’s a little strange to begin with, but let’s