This article discusses Socrates's idea of human wisdom and how it is used in his defense before the people of Athens.
Introduction
When Socrates came on trial before a jury of the people of Athens, as described in Plato’s text Apology, he chose to defend himself not only against the official accusations for which he was brought to trial – i.e., that he allegedly had created new gods, not believing in the gods of the city, and that he corrupted the young men -- but also against various pieces of slander that he thought must have biased his jurors against him over the years. Those slanderous rumors or ‘old accusations’, which he took to be of greater danger to him than the official or ‘new accusations’, were the following:
• He ‘busies himself studying things in the sky and below the earth’
• He ‘makes the worse into the better argument’
• He ‘teaches these same things to others’
• He ‘charges a fee’ for teaching other people.
Much of the Apology consists in Socrates’s defense against each of these accusations. It is in the context of explaining to the jurors how they came about that Socrates introduces his concept of human wisdom.
Wisdom According to Socrates
To explain how the slander against him originated Socrates tells the jurors a story about how his friend Chairephon once consulted the Oracle at Delphi about whether any man was wiser than Socrates; and the god Apollo replied that none was wiser. This, according to Socrates, was part of the reason why the impression was created that he regarded himself as being above everyone else concerning his wisdom and attempted to make others believe so as well.
As Socrates saw it, the second factor contributing to this impression lies in his reaction to the god’s reply. Far from taking the god’s response literally, Socrates tried to explore its true meaning. In doing so, he interviewed various people in the city who were reputed to be especially wise: Politicians, poets, writers of tragedies, and craftsmen. He targeted people who obviously seemed more knowledgeable than him in one way or the other in order to test the god’s response and find out its true meaning.What he finds is this: While each of the individuals interviewed by him clearly knew things that he did not know all of them greatly overestimated their amount of knowledge. One philosophically famous demonstration of how Socrates exposes the lack of alleged knowledge in such an individual is Plato's dialogue Euthyphro.
In sum, what all those people thought to be wiser than him had in common was the fact that they all thought they knew something when in reality they did not. Socrates, by contrast, always knew when he did not know something (or so he thought). Thus, Socrates was wiser than those interviewed by him precisely with regard to his knowledge of whether or not he knew something.
Conclusion
Socrates's idea of wisdom, while not formulated as a full-fledged theory, thus amounts to something like this: Wisdom is when we know that/what we know or do not know. Thus, wisdom is some form of meta-knowledge: Knowledge of the presence or absence of knowledge in oneself, and possibly in others as well. For as against other people and the individuals themselves, Socrates is able to see not only his own lack of knowledge but also the lack of knowledge in his interlocutors, and this is the second reason why people began to dislike him, i.e. for his ability to discern fake knowledge from real knowledge, and wisdom from the lack thereof.
But is such meta-knowledge even possible? Recent empirical studies appear to challenge at least some aspects of Socrates idea of human wisdom.
