Beyond Knowledge

The Socratic Return to the Understanding

Giambattista Vico reminds us that philosophy-as-science is the pursuit or path of knowledge (scientia/sapientia), where knowledge consists of possession of the principles of things. On this conception, philosophy is an ascent from the world of semblances, or human conventions, to the real world of being. Philosophy will then entail a transformation of what seems to be into what actually is. We could fairly call this an alchemic transformation, or a metamorphosis in Ovidian terms. In any case, we are considering a passage from what is low to what is high, from what is less real to what is more, even eminently real.

Socratic philosophy involves, however, an inversion or a conversion of philosophy whereby we seek the principles of things, not in terms of knowledge, but in terms of understanding, which requires, not merely knowledge, but reflection upon what is supposed to be known, namely the principles of things. Socrates is skeptical of pre-Socratic “knowledge,” which presupposes that evil is reducible to ignorance. In order to rid ourselves or our hearts of evil, we need more than knowledge; we need courage, which is a virtue that cannot be taught. Not knowledge alone can be simply good, but knowledge converted by reflection into understanding proceeding through trust or faith in a mind or living-form of all knowledge.

The Socratic seeks the principles of things, not “Gnostically” as objects of acquisition or means of empowerment, but as living questions or problems disclosed beneath all possible knowledge. What is sought is not a replacement of popular opinion with elitist knowledge, but the ground of the replacement as well as of the tendency to seek it. What is sought is, in a word, God as providential mind containing all forms as at once living and eternal, at once existential and essential.

The Socratic return to the understanding is necessarily at odds with Gnostic or pre-Socratic expectations concerning man’s power to rise autonomously out of his fallen condition through techniques of self-control. All human attempts to overcome the hiatus separating the finite from the infinite and to thus close the gap between our own finitude and the origin and end of all things are exposed as mere mirrors of an agency at work “from the beginning” (in principium) at the heart of all things and calling us to serve as its mediators.

The Socratic man opens himself to divine intervention as absolute paradigm of a human virtue seen here primarily as prudence. The challenge to be faced? To return prudently (avoiding “fall-outs”) to heed, to care for what is hidden to us and in us; to mystery or mysterious being—to being as paramount mystery. Yet, mystery is now not merely something beyond semblances, but something constantly at work in the ordering of all things as carriers of intellective being and so in the governing of forms of noetic illumination. Mystery as providential agency ordering semblances to reflect itself.

In sum, the Socratic ascent to the eminently real—the realm of eternal forms—will not involve a departure from the temporal or earthly, but its illumination: the journey from the low to the high will be a journey to the hidden dignity of the low, a journey testifying to the inherence of the high in the low, and so of an “original blessing” at the heart of things in their “fallen” condition.