SAINT SOCRATES
SAINT SOCRATES
There’s a rumor going around, after my Warwick’s Reading on January 20, that I am a wise woman. I feel compelled to dispel it for several reasons, the most powerful and life-changing of which is the Socrates Story that follows. There may be some hubris involved in comparing myself to Socrates, but I mention him only for the lesson the story has offered to me time and time again when I have fallen into the delusion of thinking myself wise.
So, here’s the Socrates story I meant to tell many sentences, thoughts and ideas ago. The fact that it is still a relevant entry is evidence that I try to keep it close to my heart at all times. It is from another of my favorite books, so favorite that I have two copies of it, one in India and one here in the US. The latter copy I inherited from my late husband, Donald Dean Powell, who turned me on to Plato: THE COLLECTED DIALOGUES OF PLATO, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, 1966 (Bollingen Series).
A friend of Socrates, Chaerephon, had gone to the God of Delphi, and asked whether there was anyone wiser than Socrates, and the priestess had replied, “None.” When Chaerephon told this to Socrates, he was nonplussed and confused. “How,” Socrates asked him, “can this be? I am very conscious that I have no claim to wisdom, great or small. And yet the God at Delphi never tells a lie.”
So, being the bulldog (and gadfly) in the service of truth, Socrates decided to check it out for himself by undertaking a pilgrimage of sorts. Socrates intention was to prove that the oracle was mistaken. He wanted to find a wise man, and tell the priestess, ‘here is a man wiser than I.’
Socrates examined three men with the highest reputations for wisdom and found all of them wanting. When Socrates tried to show them, through his impeccable reasoning, that they were not as wise as they thought themselves to be, he was resented by them. Socrates knew that they were not wise for the simple reason that they thought they knew something they didn’t know. Socrates, on the other hand, was very conscious of his own ignorance. To the small extent that he did not think he knew what he did not know, he was wiser than they were.
These so called wise men of Athens trumped up charges against Socrates and condemned him to die. But Socrates went to death joyfully knowing that since he did not know anything about death – whether it was in fact an end or a beginning — there was no cause for despair.
So, Socrates’ definition of a wise person is someone who knows s/he doesn’t know. This knowing that one does not know seems to me to be the essence and acme of wisdom and joy. This definition of wisdom is so intimately tied to humility that I think my next entry will have to be a story from the BE HUMBLE section of RUMI’S TALES FROM THE SILK ROAD (or PILGRIMAGE TO PARADISE, if you are in India).
I’ll end by being confessional. I count myself an utter and total fool. In big ways and small I forget I do not know and get trapped in my certainties, and suffer for them. I think a great deal of suffering is caused by our thinking that we know the ultimate answers about the why and wherefore of our lives and of people in them. We rarely have the humility for those “Ah Ha!” moments in which our own folly becomes painfully evident. Most fights with the people in our lives spring from our certainties that our point of view is the only right one. In some ways we are so hard wired to survive aggressively that we don’t see how these very skills, appropriate in some situations, are totally inimical to happiness in others. I know this is true of me, and all I can do is remember to stay in that soft place of not knowing where all I know is the raging mystery that is life; remember to not get sucked in by those who think I am wise and get too inflated for my own boots. This has to be watched assiduously, for as the Sufis say, “more invisible than the footprints of an ant on a black rock on the darkest night of the year are the workings of the ego.”
I also want to add that being a fool gives me a lot of latitude and freedom that ‘being wise’ would not. It’s also – when it doesn’t cause suffering – a lot more fun!
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