One knows that one doesn’t know. One doesn’t mistake one’s faith for knowledge. [Certainly I don’t know well, what I know, but at least I totally don’t know what I don’t know. (I quote from memory NGD)]
Where, then, does the question come from? What is its place of origin? It is clear that it does not come from absolute knowledge. When God asks Adam ‘Where are you?’ his question is purely rhetorical. Nor can it come from an absolute lack of knowledge, for if you do not know that you do not know, you do not even want to know. The source of the question is the knowledge of negativity: you know that you do not know, you know what ‘to know’ means and you know that you do not know what you are asking. And so I come to the second part of my talk.
The Role of the Socratic Question
Wishing to know what exactly the oracle meant in stating that he, Socrates, was the wisest man in Athens, Socrates begins an inquiry. He asks; he does not state anything because he does not know anything. And what exactly does he ask about? Τὰ μέγιστα, the most important things, the things that count most in our lives, the things that ‘weigh’, the problems whose solution determines the way we live our lives.
Socrates asks the people who claim to know the answers, and has a revelation of general pseudo-science, of the illusion of knowledge—in Greek, δοξοσοφία, ‘illusory knowledge’. The questions Socrates asks begin with a denunciation of the inconsistency of the answers received and of the contradictions into which those who give them fall. The question thus makes visible their basically ridiculous position: they do not know that they do not know. Look, I am asking you, and where you thought you knew, you do not know. Of course I do not know either, but I have no illusion that I do know. I, Socrates, do not live in the night of illusion. The ridiculous state of those who ‘do not know that they do not know’, which is revealed by the question, is a veritable vice: πονηρία in Greek. Their situation is serious: for Socrates, it is a massive failing. Not to know yourself is a vice, while to know yourself is a virtue (ἀρετή).
However in revealing the wide discrepancy between the illusion of knowledge and the reality of lack of knowledge, the question opens up the possibility of a cleansing of the mind and thus has a paideic, educational function. It gives the mind an open field, cleansed of the illusion of knowledge; it brings about the elimination, the expulsion of illusion: ἐκβολὴ τῆς δόξης.
The word translated as ‘elimination’ or ‘expulsion’, ἐκβολή, has a technical sense, and refers to a cathartic ritual of medical origin: purificatio mentis is a purgative method extended to the mind, a treatment for mental constipation. This can be clearly seen in the following passage from the Sophist, 230b–d:
The people who are being examined see this, get angry at themselves, and become calmer toward others. They lose their inflated and rigid beliefs about themselves that way, and no loss is pleasanter to hear or has a more lasting effect on them. Doctors who work on the body think it can’t benefit from any food that’s offered to it until what’s interfering with it from inside is removed. The people who cleanse the soul, my young friend, likewise think the soul, too, won’t get any advantage from any learning that’s offered to it until someone shames it by refuting it, removes the opinions that interfere with learning, and exhibits it cleansed, believing that it knows only those things that it does know, and nothing more.
This ἔλεγχος, this ‘refutation’, which can only be obtained by submission to an interrogative treatment, is, at the level of the mind, ‘the principal and most important kind of cleansing’. The mind that has not gone through this test—be it that of the king of Persia—remains ἀκάθαρτον (‘uncleansed’, ‘dirty’) and ἀπαίδευτον (‘uneducated’) (230e). The mind that has not known this refutation, that has not been shaken, that has not been shown its own ignorance, has evaded the paideic process. Those who make speeches—like the Sophists—and hear only themselves, who refuse to enter the intersubjective space of refutation based on the question, will remain ‘sick,’ i.e. ‘uneducated.’ But how exactly does refutation follow from questioning? By putting together the affirmations you make as you reply to questions. It is only then that your contradictions are revealed and it becomes clear that your knowledge is an illusion. The worst thing is to try and bluff your way through, to refuse to let your contradictions be revealed. Of course, when I talk of putting someone’s affirmations together, I do not mean the affirmations that someone makes in a particular field, but the totality of the affirmations that make up someone’s life. It is a matter of the fatal incoherence of a life, of the fact that the life of each one of us is an incoherent discourse.
That is why Socrates believes that we need καθαίροντες, ‘purifiers’ or ‘practitioners of the purgative method’:
They 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 subjects in relation to the same things and in the same respects. (Sophist, 230b)
So what has the question now become? No more and no less than something that points directly to the human condition: in disillusioning us, it shows us that in the great, important problems we are on unsure ground. To be between knowing and not knowing is the human condition that makes the question possible. And the question, in its turn, points us to the same condition.
However, I repeat: not every question, but only one that goes down to the origin of the problem, that aims at a global knowledge, a question on which our entire lives depend: what is good and what is evil, what is right and what is wrong? This sort of question, which assumes a super-human knowledge, inevitably leads into the zone of unknowing.
Such a question places one in an interval. We are ‘interval beings’ precisely because we ask questions of this kind. And in this case, the status of the question derives from the human condition itself, which is one of interval: between knowing and unknowing, between good and evil, between life and death.
We might think that this way of thinking is merely historical, that it is limited to the figure of Socrates, and is of no more concern to us. However the same problem faces us today. The man of science, the technician in a broad sense, lives in the same ambiguity in which Socrates’ partners in dialogue lived. He is at once expert and ignorant. The knowledge that he has about a certain field goes hand in hand with his lack of knowledge about the rest, and likewise with his tendency to extrapolate from what he knows beyond what is permissible. From this point of view, we are no further on today: in the ‘great problems’, we are just as prone to get lost as in the time of Socrates.
Why does this happen? Why has the ‘advance of knowledge’ not placed us in a more favourable situation than 2500 years ago? For the simple reason that technology has never had any way of tackling the problem of good and evil; indeed it is likely to obscure it. For in knowing something, it thinks it knows everything. The purely technical way of looking at things makes impossible the framework in which the question of good and evil is raised. Science and technology give you the rules by which something works, but they do not tell you when, in the way it is used, evil appears in place of good. Good and evil depend on how exactly you use something, and science and technology are incapable of teaching you anything like that. For the price of specialization in one field is lamentable ignorance of other things.
The question that led to the essential condition of ‘knowing that I do not know’ set European thinking on solid ground. The essential thing is that I should have no illusions. Any method must have its origin here: starting from the fact that he knows that he does not know, man builds something, goes back to zero and fi nds his way forward. This is what Socrates originated. And where the mind refuses to be exposed and does not build on initial ignorance, there appears dogmatism.
Maybe it is best to say that I take it on faith that I know very little so as to preserve the truth. 