I

SEEK WISDOM

Imperturbable wisdom is worth everything.

—DEMOCRITUS

n Greece in 426 BC, the priestess of Delphi answered a question
posed to her by a citizen of Athens: Was there anyone wiser than
Socrates?
Her answer: No.
This idea that Socrates could be the wisest of them all was a
surprise, to Socrates especially.
Unlike traditionally wise people who knew many things, and
unlike pretentious people who claimed to know many things,
Socrates was intellectually humble. In fact, he spent most of his life
sincerely proclaiming his lack of wisdom.
Yet this was the secret to his brilliance, the reason he has stood
apart for centuries as a model of wisdom. Six hundred years after
Socrates’s death, Diogenes Laërtius would write that what made
Socrates so wise was that “he knew nothing except just the fact of his
ignorance.” Better still, he was aware of what he did not know and
was always willing to be proven wrong.
Indeed, the core of what we now call the Socratic method comes
from Socrates’s real and often annoying habit of going around asking
questions. He was constantly probing other people’s views. Why do
you think that? How do you know? What evidence do you have? But
what about this or that?