Unknowing and Uncertainty

Years ago, as a college senior, I wrote a paper entitled “The Erotic Love of Wisdom” in which I discussed three speeches on the nature of love that appear in the first half of Plato’s Phaedrus. The paper was a sort of ad hoc examination of the spirituality that I thought lie behind the famous Socratic statement, “I know that I know nothing.” The paper was poorly received.

For twenty years I have wondered about that paper. I have rolled it back and forth in my mind vacillating between the thought that paper was too far ahead of its time for mere mortals to understand and the thought that I was just a young, dumb kid who really didn’t get philosophy and was lucky that they gave me the “C” and didn’t ride me out of school on a rail.

Recently I began rereading the Vedas. I was struck, in particular by those passages in the Upanishads that talk about a state of awareness known as “dreamless sleep”, to be awake, and aware, but that the mind is so calm, and disciplined that it is as if your mind were as still as someone in a state of dreamless sleep. I like to imagine this state of awareness. The image seems freeing. To be in a state of awareness like one in dreamless sleep means that the mind is not processing everything all the time. The sights, the sounds the sensations of the universe are all taken in the moment. The mind does not distinguish between them: the cry of the bird, the scent of lavender, and the feel of cold stone are all the same. They are experienced without words or thoughts to describe them: bird, lavender, or stone.

I think I still have some of that young, dumb kid inside of me, because I tend to gravitate towards the poetry. But is worth mentioning that I completely ignored the second half of Plato’s dialogue, Phaedrus, in which the author turns from the poetry of love and begins a dialectic examination on the nature of rhetoric, the rules of language, literally the art of persuasion. I read the Vedas and I see a world unfolding before me like Krishna revealing himself to Arjuna "an infinite number of faces, ornamented by heavenly jewels, displaying unending miracles, and countless weapons of his power". But there is another side to the dialogue. There are the rules of speech, and the art of doing it in just such a manner if you are going to be successful. It isn’t enough to be passionate; you also have to be disciplined.

This morning I found myself wondering if there wasn’t a correlation between the notion of dreamless sleep, and Socrates “I know that I don’t know.” Probably. The idea of wisdom in ignorance is far flung and appears in many places. You hear Socrates echoed in many western philosophers from Augustine to Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard described it as “learned ignorance.” It is prevalent in eastern schools of thought as well, and you can hear it in authors like Confucius, who writes, “To know is to know that to know is not to know.”

Socrates statement is an affirmation of inquiry. Socrates puts the question to himself what do I know, and by examination comes to the conclusion that he does not know, and that this is the grounds for the one thing that he can definitively say, namely that he knows nothing. From this process, Socrates derives a process, dialectic, that he can then apply to all other forms of knowledge, particularly of Ethics, and demonstrate that other also know nothing.

The Socratic Methodology has been passed down to us through the generations in the form of mathematics and science. The methodologies are the same. A good scientist proposes a thesis, conducts experimentation and draws conclusions, and the voice of Socrates can still be heard in Scientists like Heisenberg, whose uncertainty principle. Seems the very model of Socratic ignorance.

Heisenberg uncertainty principle states by precise inequalities that certain pairs of physical properties, such as position and momentum, cannot be simultaneously known to arbitrarily high precision. The more precisely one property is measured, the less precisely the other can be measured.

For Socrates much the same exists. The more we come to any kind of certainty, the more we are forced to define that certainty and frame it from our own perspective. As Plato states in the section on rhetoric from the Phaedrus, that the problems of language automatically engender a misunderstanding. Our means to describe phenomena are only as good as the speaker, and since their perspective is subjective and biased, so any attempt at a true description will follow.

Thus we find ourselves always reaching a point were our understanding falters. A good example of this might be proponents of String Theory, a theory of the universe that is so abstract, so settled in the world of Ideas, that there is no physical experiment that can prove its existence. Instead it is described in the world pure mathematics, a language that many people associate with reason and logic. But in this case it is a language that describes a world so unlike anything that we can imagine that logic has become a kind of poetry to the senses and that can convey a meaning or understanding of this world that physical science cannot touch. For Plato, it is the world of Pure Ideas.

Poetry, is seems is the world where knower and known can finally be one, and in which the identity of self and other begins to dissolve away. In many ways it is the same sort of idea that the Upanishads talk about. That it isn’t simply enough to say “I don’t know” but that beneath the idea that I understand that I don’t know is a recognition that any act of knowing does not validate our knowledge of the world, but rather undermines it, and in a way destroys it. The minute you choose speed, or direction, the world becomes a smaller place for knowledge is actually lost and not gained. So that in the end it isn’t the language of knowledge, science or mathematics, that is vital to our understanding of the world, but the language of poetry.

Finally. It is ironic then that Plato dismisses the poet, the artisan and others like them as mere imitators, as he does in his Ion and later in the Republic. For as it would seem, what Plato dismisses as “the divinely inspired” are in fact the guardians of the most profound truths known to human existence.