Socrates’ Lesson
by Héctor Martínez
We have been told stories about a guy, named Socrates, who lived during the 5th century B.C. We know nothing about him, except what has been told to us by others (Plato, Aristophanes and Xenophon). But from himself, nothing. Socrates, man of small stature, protruding belly, bulging eyes and exaggeratedly snub nose, may never have existed. He could be an invented character that we have taken for real. After all, we have done the same with Greek thought and culture: we have taken them more seriously than they themselves did to the point of turning them into idealizations, paradoxically into myth against myth. Ancient Greece, with Socrates at its head, has been modelled throughout history as the enormous myth of reason, of knowledge, of wisdom. And on this myth as an argument of authority we have built our Western societies. But the Greece that we have invented, that we have idealized, never existed.
We consider Socrates to be a “philosopher”, and under this term we understand “one who pursues wisdom”. However, it has been believed that “one who pursues wisdom” achieves his goal, that is, he achieves wisdom. We seldom think that “one who pursues wisdom” does so precisely because he does not possess wisdom. In other words, the only certainty we have is that the philosopher is always, at first, a no wiser. One always pursues and desires what one does not possess and long for.
Socrates’ way of pursuing wisdom was no special method. What does one who does not know something do? If one does not know something, he will ask the one who knows in order to attain that which he does not have and which he desires. And if one asks authentically, in the very act of asking he is acknowledging that he does not know, his situation of ignorance. Today, for example, when we do not know how to do something, we watch video tutorials or type in a browser the key words to obtain information about what we want to know. It is our modern way of asking questions because nowadays knowledge is not only in the possession of individuals, but it is deployed and deposited at everyone’s disposal. It is funny to see that there are people who literally type in the browser a question, their question, the question that they have asked themselves and with which they have recognized their ignorance of something that, at that moment, was of interest to them. Often in their web searches they start typing: What is the meaning of…, What is…, How to do…? It is a contemporary substitute for the philosophical question.
Now, when we ask a question in a browser we unleash a cataract of answers and we browse through them, trying to choose the one that best fits our question. Many answers are copy-pasted of each other; in some answers we are able to recognize that the person who gave the answer had no idea what he was talking about (although we started from a situation of ignorance). Some will give us insufficient answers and others will be too long, and the object of our question will be blurred. This also happened to Socrates. When he asked those who were supposed to know, he also got many answers that he analysed, and this generated more questions. And the result of this process was always aporia.
There is a big difference between Socrates and us. We delight in the enormous universe of answers. We believe that the essence of a question is to have an answer, one or many answers. We shift our attention from the pressing question to the saving answer. We want to free ourselves from the question that has arisen within us. The question seems to us to be the detection of an error, the revelation of a problem that must be solved ASAP. We click on every link that appears as an answer on the search results page until we are satisfied with one of them. We discard everything that does not seem to be an answer. However, Socrates discards it as if he already knows that no answer will be satisfactory, as if he intuits that every answer constitutes a new problem and a new question, until the contradiction in the thread of the conversation manifests itself — saving the distances, it would be something similar to opening a thread on Twitter (although, it never closes by arriving at the aporia) — . Socrates’ attitude is not that of “one who pursues wisdom”. What he continually demonstrates is that, besides him, no one knows; that he can ask questions and not find an answer; that every attempt to answer leads to aporia and nothing satisfies the question asked at the beginning. Without answers, the question stands. And this can only mean one thing: we cannot take it for granted that there are answers, nor that the basis of the question is to obtain them. On the contrary, it opens up the possibility that there is nothing to know and on which to base our lives.
We often take something for an answer to a question without being sure that it really is an answer to that question. We assume it is the answer we needed, just because we needed an answer. The question is not important to us, it bothers us. For Socrates, however, what is crucial is everything that is deposited in the very act of questioning, and what bothers him are the answers that seek loopholes. He is not worried about always arriving at a dead end (allow me the pun).
Philosophy, in spite of Socrates, strove to find the answers to the questions, it strove to “understand” and what this means: to give meaning to everything. Every question must be answered, and if it lacks an answer, then it is not a question. Over the centuries, philosophy has been filled with affirmations and refutations, and emptied of questions. In the twentieth century, philosophers have no longer asked anything if they did not have the answer ready beforehand. Philosophers write books where they offer solutions and explanations to questions they feign to ask themselves. For the philosophy of our times, the question can only be rhetorical, and only in the sense that it is obvious that it has an answer. In other words, philosophers have pursued the shadow of a non-existent ghost.
We have not sufficiently noticed that for Socrates there was never an answer because in his questioning he never sought it and never needed it. Everything pivoted around the origin and effect of the question. Would it change anything in life if we discovered now that the answers never answered the questions, that there were never answers but only questions? Would we cease to be able to live in a meaningless world, despite having lived for centuries in the same meaningless world believing it had meaning? What happens by discovering that we lived believing we were wise without really being so? And what if we can’t even be so because there is nothing to be wise about? To be or to be wise, that is the question.
