Socratic Ignorance as Ascesis

As I prepare for a seminar on the Protagoras and Laches this summer, I find myself reading and thinking about Socrates’ “ignorance.” Very often I come across someone who characterizes this ignorance as “feigned” or outright disingenuous, as if Socrates actually does know the answers to the questions he foists upon his interlocutors. He’s just being an ass as he intellectually torments his interlocutors to expose their ignorance. I don’t think that Socrates’ ignorance, as given to us by Plato, is disingenuous. I think it is honest ignorance in the sense that he doesn’t know the answers to the questions he asks. In fact, I think that Plato’s moral vision requires that Socrates’ ignorance be honest.

I want to use this meditation to work out why I think that is the case. In the process, I hope to make a connection between Socratic ignorance and ascesis. My belief that I would like to investigate and test in this meditation is that Socratic ignorance can be put to use as a technique of ascesis, by which I mean something like how Foucault defined it in his later years: “it’s the work that one performs on oneself in order to transform oneself …” (“Friendship as a Way of Life,” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, 137). Ascesis thus requires thought reflecting on our own experiences so as to transform ourselves (and our further experiences) into something other than how they are prescribed by the norms in which we live: “In this sense, thought is understood as the very form of action — action insofar as it implies the play of true and false, the acceptance or refusal of rules, the relationship to oneself and others” (“Preface to the History of Sexuality Volume 2,” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth 201).

Though Foucault here wasn’t referencing Socrates, I can imagine no better way to describe Plato’s portrayal of him. Our actions come from what we believe to be true and false goods; in order to discover the basis for those beliefs, we must accept the rules of the elenchus, which always occurs in a relationship with others and how we behave with them. The result, as Nicias famously put it in the Laches, is a transformation of oneself that makes one question one’s “present manner of life and the life he has lived hitherto” (187D). Exploring ignorance as a deliberate practice of ascesis is the purpose of this meditation.

To get this meditation underway, a good starting point is looking at the opposition between knowledge and ignorance. This opposition is at the heart of Meno’s paradox, but the Protagoras, to me, reads like something of a prelude to the Meno. Both are concerned with the teachability of excellence (arete), and both end with a discussion of “belief” versus “knowledge.” The Meno goes into more detail by drawing distinctions between true belief and false belief, but the Protagoras sets up the Meno by introducing “false opinions” as one of its final concepts. The key passage comes after Socrates gets Protagoras to admit that people never do bad things willingly. They do bad things because they are mistaken about what is truly good and what is truly bad. They think that they are pursuing the good when they are actually doing the opposite.

This argument is critical to Plato because it asserts that human action is always driven by intention, which itself is driven by a belief about what is good and what is bad. The belief can be mistaken — you don’t know what the truly good things are — but nonetheless you intend what you do. In this sense, Plato’s use of true and false beliefs has a similar function to the argument about learning-as-recollection in the Meno. Both concepts (beliefs and recollection) allow Plato’s Socrates to move away from a knowledge-ignorance binary where ignorance is somehow a pure and complete inability to know anything and knowledge is a fully transparent understanding of Reality. In fact, Socrates’ refutation of Meno’s paradox takes on the untenability of this binary directly. When Meno asks, “And in what way, Socrates, will you seek out that about what you don’t know at all what it is?” Socrates answers:

Do you see how eristic is this argument you are spinning, that it isn’t possible for a human being to seek out either what he knows or what he doesn’t know? For that which he knows he wouldn’t seek out — he knows it, and such a person has no need of a search — nor what he doesn’t know, for he doesn’t even know what he will seek out. (80e)

Plato’s insistence is the ethical value of the need to search and not the truth-value of what he is about to demonstrate. He reiterates this explicitly at the end of the recollection section (86b-c). What makes the search possible, however, is that neither ignorance nor knowledge can be pure. On the pure ignorance side of the paradox, there has to be some sense or feeling to inquire into in the first place. In the Meno, this sense is provided by the concept of recollection. On the pure knowledge side of the paradox, there has to be some lack of confidence (some self-doubt, if you like) in what one knows so that it can be subject to ongoing examination. When dealing with this side of the paradox, Plato introduces the concepts of belief and opinion. What we believe — about excellence and its teachability — ends up being the thing that we inquire into.

Plato’s entire answer to Meno’s paradox hinges upon the problem of “confidence.” On the pure ignorance side of the paradox, we need enough confidence to know that we can move forward with an inquiry, and this is the philosophical problem that “recollection” is marshaled to solve: “So if the truth about the beings [i.e., reality] is always present for us in the soul …, with respect to what you now happen not to know — and this is what you don’t remember — you should be confident in attempting to inquire into it and recollect it” (Meno, 86b, Robert Bartlett’s translation; emphasis added). However, one can’t directly inquire into “recollection.” Rather, we inquire by “recollecting.” Recollection is thus a concept designed to instill confidence in the search because it allows us to assume that our inquiries can possibly bear fruit. Yes, it is a very weak argument — among Plato’s weakest — but it is also one of his most famous. Plato’s main point for introducing it — through a religious myth — is, therefore, not to assert the truth of recollection but to restore confidence in inquiry.

What, then, is one inquiring into? If not recollection itself, what is the object of our inquiry? The answer is and must be “our beliefs and opinions” (doxa). Our opinions are the psychological phenomena in which “recollection” shows up in the soul. As such, opinions are merely shadowy reflections of what our souls once knew before we became embodied human beings. Opinions thus function as both the promise and difficulty of attaining knowledge. They do have a connection to recollection as a tie-back to the fully transparent knowledge that was once present in our eternal souls. But that tie-back is weak at best and must be tied back down as we’ll see when we investigate the “tie down” metaphor that Plato uses near the end of the Meno.

If the concept of recollection gives us the confidence to start an inquiry — the confidence that it will bear fruit — it helps only a little with the other side of Meno’s paradox. On the pure knowledge side of the paradox, we are assumed to have total confidence in our knowledge and therefore feel no need to inquire into what we think we know. This is an equally dangerous moral hazard for Plato as a nihilistic belief in pure ignorance. Recollection thus has to be impure in some way so that we can introduce a productive lack of confidence in what we think we know. The potential for our recollections to be mistakes is what the concepts of belief and opinion (doxa) are designed to introduce. I emphasize “potential” because recollections have to retain some thread back to the Truth in order for them to be the basis for confidently undertaking an inquiry. The elenchus will be a matter of reinforcing the thread through dialog with others.

To summarize the problem of confidence in Meno’s paradox: believing in “recollection” as the origin of knowledge in our souls gives us the confidence to start, but it also is a check on our total confidence in what we think we know for certain because recollection is not a fully transparent rendering of what our souls once knew. Recollection thus shows up in our souls as opinion, and the relative confidence we have in our opinions is central to how we “take care of our souls” (to use Socrates’ recurrent phrase). Put metaphorically, confidence is the Scylla and Charybdis that we must negotiate as we undertake any inquiry. On the one hand, we need just enough confidence to start; on the other, we should have enough humility about our beliefs that we always remain willing to have them questioned and perhaps to revise them when better arguments come along.

This leads to a third way to think about Socratic ignorance as a practice of ascesis: aporia must become a form of confidence, not fear. To negotiate the passage between Scylla and Charybdis requires a very high degree of confidence. Throughout the dialogs, Socrates will assert this type of confidence as the “courage” required to undertake the elenchus. Nicias’ pleasure in the experience of aporia is the ultimate statement of the courage required to engage in Socratic elenchus — “I take pleasure in the man’s company, Lysimachus, and don’t regard it as at all a bad thing to have it brought to our attention that we have done or are doing wrong” (Laches, 188A).

Here I can start to see how Socrates’ ignorance becomes a practice of ascesis. Socratic ignorance is an intentionally adopted disposition toward our beliefs so that they are not mistaken for pure and transparent knowledge. Ignorance of the Socratic variety is a form of distancing oneself — a “stepping back” — from what one believes to be true in order to evaluate the basis for one’s morally significant actions. Ignorance encourages us not to lean into our beliefs but to take up a skeptical and ironic disposition to them so that we can evaluate and modify them. Because our beliefs drive the intentions that drive our actions, to examine our beliefs is to examine ourselves. It is also much more than that. Our beliefs are not merely our own. They come to us from the cultural milieu in which we are brought up. Thus to examine our beliefs is to examine the value systems of the communities we inhabit and how those beliefs have come to reside in us. To take up a disposition of ignorance to these values and beliefs is not to seek a pure outside. It is to grapple with them by embracing their contradictions and inconsistencies so as to think and act different. Ignorance as ascesis becomes a way to create a bit of freedom and liberty within the here and now, and to perhaps envision new ways of living with oneself and others.

Socrates makes the alliance between belief and ignorance explict immediately after the pleasure=good/pain=bad argument in the Protagoras. At this transition point, the dialog is designed as a kind of handoff from a focus on ignorance to a focus on false belief:

“If then,” I said, “the pleasant is good, no one who either knows or supposes that other things are better than those that he is doing, things that are also possible, then does these [inferior] things, when it is possible to do the better. And this ‘being overcome by oneself’ is nothing other than ignorance, and overpowering oneself is nothing other than wisdom.” This was the opinion of all. “So what then? Do you mean by ignorance the following sort of thing: having false opinion and stating falsehoods concerning matters of great importance?” This too was the opinion of all. (Protagoras, 358b-c, emphasis added)

Ignorance is not a complete mental void such that one could not even start the inquiry as Meno’s paradox suggests. Human action is not purely robotic and automatic. To be clear, pleasure is not the motivator for Plato’s Socrates. We are not robotic hedonists as one might be tempted to read from this part of the Protagoras. Something motivates action, and the ultimate motivator is our beliefs — what we believe to be the best things for ourselves. These beliefs, of course, can be mistaken. One can draw a straight line from this passage to the more extensive true/false belief argument of the Meno. One can also draw a line directly to Stoicism’s practice of lekta — the ability to verbalize one’s feelings and motivations so that they can be questioned, evaluated, and corrected. From this point forward, morally important human action is assumed to be driven by beliefs that motivate intentions. This is essentially the moral psychology we live with today.

To summarize and restate for myself: these beliefs are the targets of the Socratic elenchus. By targeting the beliefs, Plato’s Socrates is not merely going after the individual interlocutor who holds the beliefs. He is targeting Athenian values as a whole. The strongest evidence for this is that the interlocutors that Plato selects for Socrates are not wholly made up characters. They are recognizable figures (often Sophists) in Athenian society. Take Protagoras, for example. His stature in the narrative is driven mainly by his reputation — he gets his social standing from Athenians’ beliefs about his value to their society. The fact that he is not actually an Athenian only serves to emphasize this point as Atheneians are rallying around his rare visit to their city. Hippocrates is one of these enthusiastic Athenians and wakes Socrates because he is anxious and eager to go to Protagoras solely based on his reputation. When Socrates asks what Hippocrates wants to learn, he can’t answer coherently. So when Socrates is interrogating Protagoras, he is taking on not only the false beliefs of this particular Sophist, he is also confronting the values and beliefs of Athenian society that would hold such a person in high esteem. Not only does Protagoras represent Athenian values, so does Hippocrates. In the process, we find not only flawed citizens, but we find a whole society unwilling to deliberately and authentically question the values it lives by. They were just accepting them unreflectively with a false confidence, and this is what Plato wants to call into question.

A moment ago, I wrote that beliefs are the target of the Socratic elenchus, but this must be modified a bit. The beliefs themselves are definitively the target of the questioning, but the desired outcome is an undoing of the false confidence we have in them. This is a crucial point to understanding Socratic ignorance as a technique of ascesis. There is a double move at play here. First, Plato is arguing that our actions are ultimately driven by our beliefs. That is the purpose of the pleasure=good/pain=bad section of the Protagoras and one of the main purposes of the Meno: we always do what we intend and our intentions are motivated by our beliefs. This is the first move in being able to undo false confidence — beliefs and opinions must be understood as the source of our actions.

The second move is to argue that our beliefs can be mistaken. This is inevitable. Not all of our beliefs can be aligned with knowledge of the Truth. Human beings don’t work this way. Our souls aren’t that powerful. If this is inevitable, then we aren’t necessarily responsible for having false beliefs. We are, however, responsible for placing a false confidence in those beliefs without being willing to examine, test and modify them. This false confidence is the ultimate target of the elenchus, not the definitive answers to the questions Socrates poses. We never arrive at answers to “what is virtue,” “what is courage,” “are they teachable.” Plato had no intention of answering those questions in the dialogs. In other words, Plato’s Socrates is not seeking the actual answers to the questions he poses. He is seeking the reform of Athenian society by trying to get its citizens to question the confidence they have in their values. For Plato, any society that would democratically condemn someone like Socrates must be deeply flawed at the level of the values its citizens live by. To undo this confidence requires Socratic ignorance as a practice of ascesis — the ability to set aside our false confidence so as to step back and evaluate the beliefs that drive our actions. Is Plato asking the same question of fourth-century BCE Athens that Foucault asked of the late-twentieth century Western world: “Can that be our problem today? We’ve rid ourselves of asceticism” (137)?

Ascesis as a transformation of values therefore must start with a willful and confident embrace of ignorance as a technique that seeks a bit of distance between ourselves and the beliefs we have. This must be, however, a special kind of ignorance. This ignorance can’t be a wholesale cynicalism, such that one doesn’t believe in anything. This is a path that leads us to anti-vaxers and “alternative facts” and nihilism. At the heart of this right-wing skepticism is a false confidence — a certainty that what one feels to be true is True. Stephen Colbert famously calls this “truthiness.” This false confidence is susceptible to manipulation as it encourages us to lean into our feelings as the source of truth — all the while stoking those feelings and filling them up with beliefs. There is a vicious circle to this. Our media sources seek to build a growing audience that can be monetized as advertising dollars. Reasonable discourse is an ineffective way to do this. Stoking emotional reactions is far more effective. Has it become harder to save for the future and pass on a better life to your kids? It must be all those immigrants. Lean into it; don’t step back from it and evaluate it. It feels better to be angry, especially if that anger is fueled by our chosen media sources that validate our anger as a sign that we are “in the know” and others are ignorant. The left is “woke” and the right is MAGA. Both are audience-building strategies based on “rid[ding] ourselves of asceticism” and building a false confidence in our beliefs.

We need to learn how to step back from those feelings, not lean into them. Ignorance has to become a willful questioning of the basis of the values one lives by coupled with a fierce determination to investigate and search out new ways of living, even if the definitive answers are illusive, or even impossible. To channel Richard Rorty for a moment, ignorance has to become an ironic disposition to the beliefs one holds while retaining the curiosity and desire to correct, modify and improve them.

Plato’s Socrates is a pragmatist. His ignorance cannot be a nihilist’s disposition to all beliefs. It must hover in the space between both sides of Meno’s paradox — neither absolute knowledge (this would be dogmatic false confidence) nor complete emptiness of thought where “alternative facts” find fertile ground. This in-between space is where ascesis and moral improvement happen. To be effective, there must be certainties and rules — the elenchus is not an emptiness where anything goes. The certainties are rare, but they are vitally important to Plato’s view of the Socratic elenchus. They tend to revolve around the willful embrace of Socratic ignorance as the desire to investigate the values one lives by and to create the opportunity for rethinking them collectively. These are the certainties on which his Socratic dialogs insists. With them, ignorance becomes a positive force and not an absence or a void as one side of Meno’s paradox would have it. (I mean here a force as Deleuze envisioned Nietzsche’s will to power: it doesn’t exist on its own. It is called into being by its confrontation and mixing with other forces. A force in a vacuum is not a force — it can’t even come into being, and if did, it would dissipate.)

To end this meditation, I want to look at three of those moments of certainty that are relevant to this inquiry. These are crucially important to understanding the ascetic value of deliberate ignorance. Without some certainties and rules, the positive force of ascetic ignorance cannot exist for Plato. The first one comes after Socrates’ demonstration with the slave boy that knowledge (at least geometry) is recollection. At this point in the dialog (86b), Socrates reiterates Meno’s paradox that initiated the demonstration and says that he’s not at all certain that what he has demonstrated about recollection is True, but he is certain that it is lazy and morally hazardous to embrace ignorance as a dead end. We must assume that we can know what arete is because the search itself is what is morally valuable:

MENO: In my opinion what you say is well spoken, Socrates — I don’t quite know how.

SOCRATES: In mine too, Meno. As for the other points, at least, I wouldn’t insist very much on behalf of the argument; but that by supposing one ought to inquire into things he doesn’t know, we would be better and more manly and less lazy than if we should suppose either that it’s impossible to discover those things that we don’t know or that we ought not inquire into them — about this I certainly would do battle, if I could, in both speech and deed. (86b-c, emphasis in Robert Bartlett’s translation)

Socrates is here backing off any certainty about learning as recollection. Other ways of explaining why the slave boy was able to solve the geometrical problems are possible — not the least of which is that many of Socrates’ questions are actually instruction posed rhetorically as questions. Also, the boy knows math: 2x2=4, 4x4=16. All of his correct answers are based off of this prior knowledge, and we are under no obligation to think that knowing one’s multiplication tables is god-given recollection.

Socrates’ certainty at 86c is an ethical certainty, not an epistemological one: we must work through our ignorance about what we don’t know because it is good for us (“more manly and less lazy”) authentically and deliberately to do so, though we may never arrive at the definitive answer. Ethics drives epistemology, and we become better for the inquiry. In fact, in the middle of the geometrical demonstration, Socrates insists that recollection is a form of searching — searching one’s soul for the answers that have always been there (81d). Plato cares more about the ethical effects of the search than the epistomological Truth of his demonstration.

If I look more closely at this episode, I find that its actual narrative structure is driven by the slave boy learning to embrace aporia (perplexity) as a form of ascesis. It’s easy and tempting to read this episode, as so many have done, as an epistemological statement on the nature of knowledge as somehow innate in the human being. But to read this way is to ignore how the narrative proceeds and thus ignore some key moments where Plato asserts the higher ethical importance of the transformation of the boy’s attitude toward his own beliefs. Near the end of the demonstration we find that what Plato has really been after is teaching the slave boy the value of “perplexity” in relation to the confidence he places in the little bit of knowledge he’s gained along the journey:

Are you considering again, Meno, to what point he has already proceeded in his recollecting? To begin with he didn’t know what the line of the eight-square-foot figure is — just as he still doesn’t know —but then he supposed that he did know and confidently answered it as though he did and didn’t believe that he was perplexed. But now he believes that he is perplexed, and just as he doesn’t know in fact, so he doesn’t even suppose that he knows. (84a-b; emphasis in Bartlett’s translation)

The ultimate value of the demonstration is not that the slave boy learned geometry. Nor is the value in showing that what he learned he recollected from his soul. The value is in learning a productive perplexity in relation to his newly found but misplaced confidence. To recap, Socrates has led the boy to understanding that a square with sides of 2 feet has an area of 4 feet (2x2=4). When he asked the boy to double the length of the sides to 4 feet, the boy assumed the area would be double. The point for Plato is not that the boy was wrong. His point is that the boy was confident and wrong at the same time: “he supposed that he did know and confidently answered it as though he did” (see also 82e where the same language it used). The emphasis in Bartlett’s translation is on the translated word “supposed,” which recurs throughout this section. The narrative flow of the recollection demonstration is thus to get the boy from a false confidence in his little bit of knowledge to a “perplexity” such that “he doesn’t even suppose that he knows.” Plato is clear that the boy is in a “better condition” (84b-c) for having embraced perplexity as a disposition to his confidence.

Plato can’t end here. The boy’s perplexity cannot be a dead end, and Plato goes on at some length (84b-d) to align perplexity with curiosity as the real value of what the boy learned. Aporia without the desire to continue the inquiry is a morally dangerous dead-end. Plato’s necessary next move is to position perplexity as a starting point for inquiry:

SOCRATES: So do you think that he would have attempted to inquire into or learn that which he supposed he knew but didn’t, before he fell into perplexity by having come to believe that he didn’t know, and before he felt a longing to know? (84c; emphasis added)

To interpret this slightly awkward passage: one must start from “a longing to know” that also assumes that one doesn’t already know the right answer. Without this disposition to knowledge, then one will be stuck either in a perplexity that is a futile dead-end or in a complete self-confidence that sees no need to inquire. The danger of Meno’s paradox turns out to be not just the moral hazard of not knowing how to begin, but the more important hazard of false confidence. If one “supposes” that he confidently knows something but is wrong, he will not inquire into the truth of the matter. This is equally dangerous as the other, purely ignorant side of the paradox where our inability to know how to start leaves us inert in the quest to find the answers to important questions.

Plato is working hard from about 84a to 86b to make perplexity (aporia) the starting point for knowledge. Recollection recedes into the background as it has fulfilled its function in the argument — how we can get started pursing knowledge in the first place. As recollection recedes, Plato leans more on “opinion” as the term that drives the narrative:

SOCRATES: In one who doesn’t know, then, about whatever it may be that he doesn’t know, there are present true opinions about those things that he doesn’t know?

MENO: It appears so.

SOCRATES: And now, at any rate, these very opinions have just been stirred up in him, like a dream. And if someone will ask him these same things many times and in many ways, you know that he will end up having knowledge [episteme] about them no less precisely than anyone. (85c-d; emphasis added)

Again, the value of the demonstration is not that the boy learns geometry. Nor is the value in establishing recollection as the basis of learning. Recollection only functions in this argument as a way for Plato to get over the hurdle of the pure ignorance side of Meno’s paradox. But once he’s on the other side where he has to deal with false confidence, he needs another concept. This is particularly important when it comes to ethical questions like “what is arete” and “is it teachable.” In these questions, recollection never fully reveals the Truth as it might when one is learning to solve geometrical problems, which have an absolute precision and thus rise to the level of episteme (precise knowledge). The slave boy does, eventually, get the right answer. If this is the most famous version of the Socratic elenchus, it is atypical in that we do get a right answer at the end.

To summarize, then, Plato’s first certainty: the value of the recollection demonstration is primarily an ethical value and not an epistemological one. We misread Plato if we think that he is passing on to us his “true belief” that learning is recollection. Rather, he is passing on an ethical lesson that we need to search for truth, and the moral value of the search requires us to set aside our confidence in our own opinions and embrace a willful and deliberate perplexity about what we think we know. Recollection, therefore, is not the answer Plato is posing to Meno’s paradox. Rather, recollection functions as a way to move from pure ignorance to opinions as a starting point for the search. Recollection is merely a concept that Plato can use to assert that one should confidently undertake the elenchus because, in that process, one’s opinions can eventually become “true opinions.”

I promised to return to the “tie down” metaphor, and this is the second moment of Socrates’ certainty that I’d like to consider. It comes near the end of the Meno where Socrates has made the “tie down” argument to differentiate “true opinions” from knowledge:

SOCRATES: On account of these things in particular, knowledge is indeed more honored than correct opinion, and knowledge differs from correct opinion because of the tie.

MENO: By Zeus, Socrates, it’s likely to be some such thing.

SOCRATES: And yet I too speak as one who doesn’t know but is conjecturing. But that correct opinion is something different from knowledge, I’m really not of the opinion that I’m just conjecturing. Rather if in fact I would assert that I know anything — and I would assert it about few things — this, at least, is one thing that I would place among the things I know. (98a-b)

What exactly is Socrates insisting on here? What is he certain of? He’s insisting on the difference between opinion and knowledge. This metaphor of “tying down” is a very different way for Plato to characterize difference than we are used to. In other words, we don’t have a Neoplatonic move to define opinion and knowledge as separate Forms or Ideas. Rather, the move is to refer to the difference as a kind of activity — “tying down.” The action of tying down Daedalus’ statues creates the value in the statues: “To posses one of his creations that’s been untied isn’t worth a very high price — just like a fugitive slave — for it doesn’t stay put, but one that’s been tied down is worth much: the works are very beautiful” (97e). The statues are not valuable in and of themselves. Their value does not fully come from their relationship to Ideal Forms. Their value remains purely potential until humans go to work tying them down. Thus, they get their difference in value solely from human action — tying them down so that they don’t escape. Put succinctly, the same thing — a statue — can have different values based on what humans do with it. This is not very (neo)Platonic.

In what follows, Socrates immediately makes the connection between the metaphor and his argument about the moral value of the search for knowledge:

In reference to what, then, do I say these things? In reference to the true opinions. For the true opinions too, for so long as they stay put, are a noble thing and accomplish all manner of good things. Yet they aren’t willing to stay put for a long time but run away from the soul of a human being such that they aren’t worth much until someone ties them down by means of a calculation of cause” (97e-98a).

This latter phrase, “calculation of cause,” is Robert Bartlett’s translation of aitia, which he defines in an earlier note as having a range of meanings related to causing something to happen — “(moral) responsibility” or “(natural) cause” or “blame.” Thus aitia is where value is created between what one believes (opinion) and what one knows (wisdom). So, where we would expect (neoplatonically) for Plato to have Socrates talk about the Formal difference between opinion and knowledge, we get something very different — a discussion of their difference as the result of intentional, willful, and calculated human action (aitia). This action, this “tying down” of one’s opinions, is the investigation and search for the basis of one’s values, which is always an investigation into the values of the culture(s) one inhabits.

What exactly are Daedalus’ statues a metaphor for? The answer has to be that they are metaphors for our opinions/beliefs. These are the things that must be tied down to be morally sound. Without the tying down, they can be true (aligned with morally correct behavior), but only incidentally. Opinion and knowledge are, like Daedalus’ statues, the same thing but also different based on how we treat them. The “tying down” that transforms opinion into knowledge does not change the nature of the thing being tied down. So, what is that quality that makes opinion and knowledge the same? Socrates makes the answer quite clear in what follows — the nature of opinion and knowledge is to be the source of human action: “Isn’t the following correct, that when true opinion guides, the task belonging to each action is completed no worse than when knowledge guides” (98b)? In this respect, as drivers of human action, knowledge and opinion are the same thing — they both “guide” (and therefore precede and cause) human action. They are different in that knowledge is opinion that is “tied down” through the work of the elenchus.

The tying down is not the arrival of definitive answers. If it were, then we’d have answers as the outcome of the dialogs. We don’t. Rather, we have people struggling to say what they think — to verbalize their opinions. Moral improvement begins when the interlocutor reaches an aporia with respect to not being able to clearly articulate the basis for their opinions. This brings me to the third moment of Plato’s certainty that I want to discuss. This is the certainty that the elenchus requires the participants to say what they think. The importance of speaking for oneself is key to the elenchus because beliefs are one’s own, though they originate from the society in which one lives. Articulating them in response to Socrates’ questions exposes one’s beliefs to further questioning and evaluation and thus makes “saying what you think” an important technique of ascesis. Turning your thoughts toward your opinions becomes a way of “thought working on thought” so as to possibly think and act differently — to imagine and enact new values and ways to live our lives. Parrhesia (“speaking frankly,” to use Foucault’s translation of that term) is thus a relationship one has to oneself and to the beliefs and opinions we inherent from the milieu in which we live. Speaking frankly is, in other words, the “stepping back” that is essential to ascesis while invigorating the will to move forward.

There are many places where I can cite Plato’s Socrates’ insistence on “saying what you think” as the table stakes for engaging in an elenchus. One of the best places to look is in the Phaedo where Socrates insists that “There is no greater evil one can suffer than hatred of reasonable discourse” (89d). What I find interesting about this particular instance of the evils of mislogia is that it is formulated as Socrates’ own practice of ascesis as his death is approaching. Socrates himself feels like “I am in danger at this moment of not having a philosophical attitude about this….” Midstream in his argument, Socrates is here taking his own step back to evaluate the way he is conducting himself as the leader of the elenchus.

What exactly is he correcting in himself when he says that he is in danger of “not having a philosophical attitude about this”? He is quite clear in his response. It is not that he is failing to say what he thinks. He is quite clearly doing that. Rather, the danger is that he’s become wedded to his own opinions and may be too confident in them. This is manifested as a failure of dialog such that the failure has to do with interlocutors trying to convince each other of what they suppose that they know. Socrates is thus attempting to step back from his own self-confidence in his opinions:

I am in danger at this moment of not having a philosophical attitude about this, but like those who are quite uneducated, I am eager to get the better of you in argument, for the uneducated, when they engage in argument about anything, give no thought to the truth about the subject of discussion but are only eager that those present will accept the position that they have set forth. (91a; emphasis added)

Though not stated as such, a knee-jerk self-confidence is the object of Socrates’ own ascesis in this passage. When we set out to convince others of what we believe we know, we have to adopt an unshakeable self-confidence as part of the game. The problem is not that you are failing to say what you think, but that you are unwilling to authentically hear what others have to say and adjust your beliefs to the better argument. The overriding concern of the uneducated (and the Sophists for that matter) is to win the argument at all costs — they “are only eager that those present will accept the position that they have set forth.” This is the “unsoundness” (90e) that Socrates asserts is the moral hazard of misologia.

To have authentic and effective conversations, one has to set aside one’s total confidence in one’s own beliefs so that one can actually hear the other speaking. The uneducated and the Sophists listen with an ear to victory, which means that they are not fully listening but are working out their rebuttal as the other speaks. This happens quite frequently in our modern media-driven milieu. We are trained to rebut arguments, not to authentically listen to them and internalize them. In our self-confidence in our beliefs, we seek to protect ourselves from the voice of the other. This, as is implied in this passage from the Phaedo, is not actually confidence. It is a profound lack of confidence that one can and should avoid the aporia of the elenchus. Socrates confidence comes from his deliberate and real ignorance, and this is what he is trying to recover at 91a. To be confident in one’s ability to enter into an important conversation without making it into a test of self-confident wills is the heart of Socratic ignorance as ascesis.