Socrates’ QuestThe wisdom of politicians and poets was found wanting.
Socrates next wondered whether the oracle was referring to a
different kind of knowledge, that of artisans and professionals.
After all, he reasoned, they know how to make things like shoes
and how to do things like heal someone, matters about which
he knew nothing. Surely, they would be wiser than he. He spoke
to them too.
It turned out that Athenian craftsman were certainly good
at their craft. But like the London taxi driver who has the
Knowledge and an opinion on everything else, they made the
mistake of thinking that an ability in one area meant they were
knowledgeable about everything else too. A third group of
people had been questioned and shown up for their ignorance.
But at last Socrates was getting it. ‘Would I prefer to be as
I am with neither their wisdom nor their ignorance, or to have
both?’ he asked himself. He would prefer to be as he was, not
wise, but not ignorant of his lack of wisdom either. And with
this realisation the riddle from the oracle was solved. He under-
stood what it meant. ‘This man among you, mortals, is wisest
who, like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is worthless.’
Man the measure?
Today it is easy to think of Socrates as a champion of rationalism –
a critical mind who was not truly appreciated for centuries, when
the clouds of religious superstition cleared, as it’s sometimes put.
However, what can be gleaned of the historical Socrates, through
Plato’s appropriation of him, suggests that he was no such atheis-
tic fi gure at all. Rather, he was a conviction agnostic.
Agnosticism about gods, that sometimes became or was inter-
preted as atheism, was one of the features of developments in
fi fth-century BCE Greece of which Socrates was part. Protagoras’
book On Gods captured the mood. Its fi rst sentence reads:
About the gods I cannot say either that they are or that they
are not, nor how they are constituted in shape; for there is