Ancient & modern
Donald von Rumsfeld, the sinisterly bespectacled US defence secretary, has won a gobbledygook award from the Plain English campaign for the following (paraphrased) apergu: 'There are known knowns, i.e. things we know we know; there are known unknowns, i.e. we know there are some things we do not know; but there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know.' Whatever that last ugly utterance means — there are things beyond the realm of our comprehension? — Socrates might well have wondered if that was the end of the matter. Long after Socrates' execution in 399 BC, Plato wrote a justification of everything Socrates had stood for in the form of a defence speech (Apology). At one point, Plato describes how Chaerophon, a friend of Socrates, went to Apollo's oracle at Delphi and asked if there was anyone wiser than Socrates. The priestess answered 'no'.
Socrates was baffled by this response: he knew he had no claim to wisdom great or small, but the god could not tell a lie. So what could the god mean? Socrates decided to find out. He visited people famed for their wisdom — politicians, poets, craftsmen — and questioned them about their understanding, in order to prove that there was someone wiser than he. To his astonishment, he found that 'the people with the greatest reputations were almost entirely deficient'. The craftsmen, he admitted, could explain themselves on technical matters, but since they reckoned this qualified them to be thought wise on other matters too, they also failed the test.
Socrates' conclusion to his rather unpopular questioning of each of these self-important people was as follows: 'Well, I'm certainly wiser than this man. Neither of us, in all likelihood, has any knowledge to boast about, but he thinks he knows something which he does not know, whereas I am conscious of my ignorance. At any rate it seems to me that I am wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think that I know what I do not know.' On balance, then, he decides he would rather not be wise with their wisdom nor ignorant with their ignorance, but that it was best to be as he was.
Von Rumsfeld's inelegant reflections on 'knowledge' relate to data collection. But data has to be put to use, and all the data in the world will achieve nothing unless used intelligently. In 2004 one looks forward to von Rumsfeld's further reflections on this different sort of knowledge, the handmaid of Socratic wisdom.
Peter Jones
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