The Apology and Socratic Non-Wisdom

David Zhang

Rhetoric 103A

Jerilyn Sambrooke

Socratic Non-Wisdom

Plato’s The Apology describes the paradoxical notion of Socratic wisdom - that he who is wise knows himself not to be wise. When the Oracle at Delphi declares Socrates to be the wisest in Athens, Socrates immediately sets out to try and refute this claim by producing one wiser than he. What he finds after interacting with poets, artisans, and statesmen is that the Oracle actually illustrates a meta-wisdom, the notion that all wisdom in men is nothing. It is this argument that Socrates presents as a refutation to the accusations of corrupting youth and atheism. He tries to show his accusers, the sophistical ‘ones who know’, as operating on the pretense of knowledge.

The passage begins with his encounter with the politicians. After some discussion, he comes to the conclusion that the politician he chose to examine ”‘was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and wiser still by himself.” Socrates tries to point this out to his interlocutor and is met with contempt, a contempt which perpetuates itself across his later encounters with the poets and the artisans. Each time, Socrates discovers a sort of arrogant presumption of wisdom. And each time, his open disdain for such presumptions and manner towards those who espouse such presumptions creates more and more animosity.

For Socrates, this wholly unjustified contempt is the real source of the charges leveled against him. In reality, there is no corruption going on - what has really happened is that his constant questioning has hurt the pride of Athens’ many prominent statesmen, poets and craftsmen. This offense, according to him, is a misunderstanding. He does not “imagine that he himself possesses the wisdom he finds wanting in others”. In fact, the very thing that makes him wise is his acknowledgement of his lack of this wisdom - that only “the Gods are wise”, and that he is just an illustration for the only wisdom men can possess: an admission to the fact that they can possess no wisdom.

Socrates describes the divine mission assigned to him thus: to prove the meta wisdom of non-wisdom in any who presume themselves wise. While this makes him no friends, he does so out of obedience to the divine Oracle, a devotion that stands as a refutation to his atheism, as well as out of a personal duty to promote virtue in the Athenian citizenry. As such, the offended “young men of richer classes” who seek to imitate him eventually stumble upon this truth and are unable to swallow it - instead of being angry with their own supposed shortcomings (which are not really shortcomings at all, but a true wisdom), they direct their anger towards Socrates and create all sorts of “ready-made” accusations about philosophers in general. These accusations are precisely the ones put forward in the trial: that philosophers teach atheistic ideals that “make the worse appear the better cause”. Meletus and gang, according to Socrates, are just hiding behind empty slander in order to escape a deeper truth that is fundamentally incongruous with the Sophistical disposition of “one who knows”, a prevailing ideal within Athenian society.

In the end, Socrates makes a larger point about rhetoric and its detrimental effect upon Athenian society. Rhetoric and sophistry presupposes the erroneous notion that men can be wise and that they should share their wisdom. The very fact that Meletus even finds Socrates so threatening and needs to go to such lengths to condemn him is, for Socrates, solid proof  enough for his argument that Meletus and the others with him are actually insecure about their own lack of wisdom. This insecurity, in of itself is borne out of the expectation that wisdom is an additive thing to be possessed, along with the other virtues. In reality, it is a subtractive expropriation, something that those who claim to “know” find fundamentally troubling. For what is “to know” if “to know” is “to know nothing?” It goes along with Socrates’ larger profession as a gadfly, that which provokes but does nothing to prescribe. Without the comfort of a substantive knowledge, everything is void and nothing is certain.