It is often said and assumed that classical philosophy in general teaches that evil is identical to ignorance; as if it were enough to see things as they are to escape the illusion of evil, or evil as illusion—in point of fact, an expression of ignorance.1 What is meant by ignorance? Is it enough for us to acquire knowledge in order to escape evil, or not to be evil? What is the source of our ignorance?2 Is the good identical to knowledge? Let us hypothetically admit the possibility of our attaining to full knowledge of the good. Insofar as all that we can gain we can also lose, might fear of loss of knowledge not naturally accompany all acquisition of knowledge, spoiling the prospect of escaping evil through knowledge? Might fear of losing knowledge not drive us to evil in spite of, but also because of our knowledge? The more we know and the more we might fear to lose our knowledge, being thereby driven by fear to do evil.
Is there a knowledge that we cannot lose? Such a knowledge would not be an acquisition, but an essential property of our being. But can we not, in some sense, lose our being? Can we become alienated from what we originally are? Are we liable to falling into a state of alienation from the being that is our proper good?
Plato tells us that Socrates needed a daimon, a divine sign providentially stopping him before doing evil. Socrates, the unwise man par excellence, did not rely on his knowledge to escape evil. Instead, he relied on a divine intervention. The Athenian martyr did suggest that he knew his own desire, but at the same time he placed knowledge of things themselves in an unseen god. Only the gods are wise.
Is man a god fallen into a state of ignorance that no amount of acquired knowledge can overcome? Why, the acquisition of knowledge could serve as a mask of evil, a way for “fallen man” to conceal his all-too-human condition. Even “original knowledge”—the knowledge that, as Plato imagines or helps us imagine, the soul “forgets” upon being bathed in Lethe—cannot account for evil. Why are we “fallen” in the first place?
Let us admit that we need knowledge to escape evil. Knowledge would nonetheless not suffice. We, no less than Socartes, would need more than knowledge to escape evil. Knowledge and a divine intervention.
Consider Plato’s Alcibiades 1, 118a-c. Here ignorance of the emptiness of one’s purported knowledge is the cause of evils. Not the cause of evil as such. The problem here is that the vast majority of people is not like Socrates, who acknowledges his ignorance, thereby enabling himself to escape evil. Indeed, he lets himself be guided by a god as proper seat of knowledge (117e). Not by other men, as if they could impart on him knowledge needed to escape evil (118e); as is they could teach us virtue.
Plato’s Gorgias 469c4–7 is of further help, highlighting as it does the discrepancy between doing what we please and doing what we want knowingly. Most people who assume that they are free are really merely doing as they please. They do not know why they do what they do while they are doing it; this is to say that their knowledge is not one with their action.3 Only in a god, or rather in an un-embodied mind, could knowledge coincide with action. We ourselves know in preparation for action and in retrospect; but in acting, we are at best witnesses or bystanders. Our knowledge does not determine our actions in actuality. Indeed, what pleases us never coincides precisely with what we want. Otherwise put, what we want and so what we know, is never at home in the present. We seek what is beyond ourselves, beyond our present condition, so that no sooner do we rest satisfied with our present condition than we cease knowing and grow complacent, precisely as the sort of people Socrates exposes as suffering of “double ignorance”: of being ignorant of their own ignorance.
Who does what he really wants? The tyrant might do as he pleases, being a slave of received opinions and so of certain appearances, but he does not do what he wants freely. Who then might do what he wants freely? Who is truly free? Knowledge would seem to be a necessary ingredient to freedom, but human knowledge requires a divine complement. In order to escape evil, we need both yearning for the good itself and a given inclination to it. We need to both want what is good and to be pleased by it. Yet this is possible only where what we want is not an acquisition, but the ground of all acquisitions; not something we grasp painfully, but something we receive joyfully upon letting go of all grasping, including the grasping of our present ignorance. In accepting our ignorance without making an effort to seek wisdom we would be merely closing ourselves to the very possibility of receiving the divine help we need to escape evil in the act of seeking knowledge. “Letting go” must be unconditional, as it is in Luke 14:33: qui non renuntiat omnibus quæ possidet, non potest meus esse discipulus. The lover of truth “renounces everything he possesses”. That includes all acquired knowledge, but also ignorance as a state of complacency. Renouncing ignorance must be renouncing a state of fallenness; it must be to stand radically open to death.
Socrates refers to philosophy as preparation for death. Philosophy is, to be more precise, a standing radically open to death, or an abiding in full receptivity to the otherworldly.4 This faithful receptivity is not an alternative to knowledge, but the condition of possibility of a knowledge that we need in order to escape evil; keeping in mind, however, that our knowledge alone does not suffice to save us from evil. What we will need is both knowledge anddivine guidance, which is to say that our knowledge will save us from evil if and only if it is sought naturally in accordance with the good itself. The very pursuit of knowledge must accord with the will of a god, as we see in Socrates’s case. If, on the other hand, we pursue knowledge as an end in itself, or as a self-sufficient antidote against evil, we must fall right back into evil. For knowledge remains for us a mere Chimera aside from our desire for knowledge. Nor can our knowledge resolve our desire within itself. By nature we always desire a knowledge we do not have, or a knowledge that belongs properly to gods resting in themselves without complacency, or for whom the present is filled with both past and future. For us, however, the present remains inexorably empty of both past and future—of a past that has already left us and of a future that has yet to present itself to us.
So it is that not knowledge alone can save us from evil, but knowledge complemented by divine intervention guiding our pursuit of knowledge in harmony with the good itself. As Plato’s Meno 77b6-78b2 helps us see, the objective and source of our desire would need to coincide. As the Gospels further suggest, the Alpha and Omega of our common life would need to coincide in a single truth as living knowledge; not a mere fruit, but the very tree or spring of knowledge. But then, how are we to secure our access to the conditions of possibility of freedom from evil? Evidently, we cannot simply chose to escape evil. Our very turning to the good cannot be the act of anautonomous will, as it is on account of modern ideologues of freedom. The “autonomy” of our will explodes in the face of life-as-it-is and so of death. The Cartesian ego collapses under the weight of the world. Nor does the technological Leviathan that the modern ego calls himself to build collectively–a new world converting alienation from nature into a virtue (purporting to integrate nature in itself)—save its servants from the delusion of mistaking the mask of evil for a remedy for evil.
In Plato’s Meno, Socrates does not call us to see knowledge as a solution to the problem of evil, but as a necessary contribution to a solution that entails, as seen, above all else a divine calling.5 What we are naturally or originally born to desire is the coincidence of knowledge and being—of knowledge and life—constituting the very source of our desire. We are, in other words, originally drawn back to a living knowledge that is none other than mind as the truth about both knowledge and life, about both essence and existence. Not “my mind,” but mind or thought in and of itself, which is what Aristotle testifies to as God.
When in Plato’s Protagoras 345d6–e4 or 358c6-d4 we read of the old view that people do evil unwillingly (ἄκοντες ποιοῦσιν), we are not to conclude that it is enough to know what is good in order to do what is good.6 As St. Paul reminds us, knowledge of the good alone does not free us from subjection to “the law of the flesh” or from our mortality (involving what in Plato’s Protagoras 356d is called “the power of appearance” or ἡ τοῦ φαινομένου δύναμις, in juxtaposition with “the art of measurement” or ἡ μετρητικὴ τέχνη). The problem here is that we fail to do what we want to do, behaving rather against “the law of the mind” (ὁ νόμος τοῦ νοός—Romans 7:23).7 Why do we fail to (always) do what we know to be good? Because we are “fallen beings,” as spirit or light having descended into obscurity, if only to rise back out of it. But then we have no full freedom in this world, but merely signs of freedom; the promise of restoration and so of otherworldly final deliverance from evil.
We know that something is good, but we do not know that something as good, in the respect that we do not know things from within, but from without. Our knowledge does not coincide, in other words, with the very genesis or life of things—their coming into being as good (in God’s eye, to speak biblically). We know either in retrospect or in anticipation, but not simply in the present. In the present, we are necessarily ignorant. Otherwise put, the present is the place where our ignorance is exposed.
The “Socratic” good news is that the exposure of ignorance is at once exposure to knowledge as living gift, again, not as fruit to be seized, but as truth to be lived. We are not condemned to flee our ignorance to acquire a knowledge that guarantees we will not do evil. Rather, we are naturally called back to our ignorance as place where we desire to receive knowledge, not as an addition to life, but as a property of life itself. Rather than being condemned to do evil unwillingly, we would then be invited providentially to do good in accordance with a divine will.
In Plato’s Protagoras 358, Socrates guides sophists as teachers of a self-mastery (κρείττω ἑαυτοῦ) identified with wisdom (ἢ σοφία) to see themselves as ministers of “the salvation of [our] life” (ἡ σωτηρία τοῦ βίου). Socrates’s interlocutors are supposed to save people from “ignorance” (ἀμαθία), which is to say lack of a self-mastery involving the reduction of pleasure to “measurement”. Socrates brings all of his Sophistic interlocutors to agree that “certainly no one freely/willingly pursues evil things or things he assumes to be evil” (οὖν...τὰ κακὰ οὐδεὶς ἑκὼν ἔρχεται οὐδὲ ἐπὶ ἃ οἴεται κακὰ εἶναι), adding that such conduct would not seem to be in human nature (ὡς ἔοικεν, ἐν ἀνθρώπου φύσει), thereby subtly deflating the initial certainty of the proposition agreed upon. Yet immediately Socrates sets out to expose a challenge transcending that of knowledge as such, namely that of courage, which earlier on Protagoras had conceived as cut off from knowledge. Socrates’s tying of knowledge to the good (presenting knowledge as saving us from evil) emerges as a preface to his tying of courage back to knowledge (359). Courage or “manliness” (ἀνδρεία) is needed to overcome fright or fear understood as “the expectation of evil” (προσδοκία κακοῦ—358d). It would therefore be an exaggeration to state that knowledge alone saves us from evil. What we need is the alliance of “knowledge of measure” and courage in the face of evil, a courage that is directed to a good that is at once honorable and pleasant (360a). Insofar as appearances have been “measured” back into the good as such, courage can now help us overcome, not merely the appearance of evil, but evil itself, by overcoming its dreadful expectation.
Having reduced appearances to nominal certainties, the Sophist has unwittingly set the stage for the rise of courage as key to our concrete salvation (360d-e). We can be truly brave, now, insofar as we see appearances in the light of a single good. We are no longer confused by our passions, for all are “measured” and thus ordered back to a singular good, whereby pleasure is no longer seen as a distraction from what is honorable or honest. The “scientific” (nominal/mathematical) elevation or reduction of pleasure to our common good allows Socrates to reintroduce courage/manliness as vital content of knowledge, or as knowledge of evil and so of the concrete disparity between Sophists’ purported or nominal knowledge and our existential condition. Protagoras is no longer in the position of insinuating that courage is a form of delusion, or a force cut off from knowledge and truth. He has been brought to concede, rather, that our manly spirit is key to our salvation and so that the knowledge imparted by the Sophist cannot be justifiably autonomous.
Socrates’s discourse testifies to Socrates’s being willing (βουλόμενος) to examine (σκέπτομαι) virtue (ἡ ἀρετή) in itself and in relation to other things, knowing its multiple guises (360e). Could he have done evil unwillingly? Assuming that we never err willingly, the Sophist is forced to concede to the goodness of Socrates’s examination and so to the justice of its conclusion that the Sophist’s knowledge alone is by no means sufficient to save our life from evil in concrete terms. On the other hand, Socrates’s elevation of justice, prudence and courage (ἡ δικαιοσύνη καὶ σωφροσύνη καὶ ἡ ἀνδρεία—361b) to the status of knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) has seemingly opened the door to the Sophist’s thesis that virtue can be taught.
Plato’s dialogue ends with anticipation of a positive, “Promethean” resolution to the apparent confusion of roles between Socrates and the Sophist. For Socrates is not satisfied with words about deeds (hence his reference to Epimetheus), preferring words as proper vehicles of deeds. To mere words, then, and so to Sophistry, Socrates prefers forms belonging to life itself.
Falling short of his Promethean adventure, Socrates has been speaking merely “as a favor to fine Callias” (Καλλίᾳ τῷ καλῷ χαριζόμενος—362a), wealthy patron of Sophists. What is he expected to have learned? Perhaps nothing more than that Socrates is not out of undermine, but to perfect or fulfill acquired knowledge in a knowledge that is proper to gods.
Epilogue
Plato exposes the limits of ancient sophistry (or of pre-Socratic philosophy) as this tends to conceive evil in strictly epistemological terms, as an illusion contained in the soul regardless of the general evolution or becoming of the universe. For the pre-Socratic anchorite, gnosis/knowledge will coincide with a technique of self-control that allows us to free ourselves from the yoke of the illusion of the world, if not from the world as illusion itself. It would then be possible to monastically escape the vortex of becoming (chance and mechanical-material necessity) by way of returning to purely intelligible being (whence gnostic notions of a super-ego/I purged of all ignorance).
Socrates will object that, in ascending towards an eternal reality, beyond all evil, the philosopher must expose himself to his existential context (viz., the inside of the cave of which Plato speaks in his celebrated “myth” presented in book 7 his Republic—514a–520a) and in this sense Socrates is in agreement with the moderns. However, Socrates addresses existence as a providential arena for the cultivation of virtue, rather than as what moderns will call “historical becoming” (where divine providence gives way to a logic of History, as Hegel peremptorily teaches). It follows that while for Socrates our knowledge is completed by divinely animated virtues, in a modern context, our knowledge is supposed to be completed by our own machines, or more precisely by technological domination over nature.
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1Eric Voegelin explored the pertinent phenomenon of modern gnosticism most notably in his 1968 Science, Politics & Gnosticism (Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing). In a modern context, ancient contemplative gnosis (knowledge) results insufficient since evil is now seen as existentialcalamity, more than as a state of being, or as moral evil. Evil will then be retraced to “material circumstances” (akin to Descartes’s res extensa) that knowledge will be able to dominate on condition that it apply or concretize itself technologically. Not ancient Stoicism will console us, but the application of “techniques of self-control” to domination over chance itself (as Machiavelli’s Fortuna) and thus over existence (evidently not merely over the human soul). The ancient argument remains nevertheless pertinent, especially given the Baconian principle of “knowledge is power”. In effect, modern “science” comes to teach us that the universe itself is reducible to information, or at any rate to data that may be integrated within a technological structure capable of saving us from existential evil to which we have already formally retraced every other evil.
2Even admitting hypothetically that the only evil is ignorance, we are left with asking whence this ignorance arises. What would cause it? What evil would ignorance depend upon? As Saint Augustine reminds us, evil has no concrete cause; it is not produced or created by any source, involving rather the absence of cause. The same does not necessarily hold true for ignorance, especially if understood Platonically in terms of forgetfulness (lethe), knowledge being then anamnesis or “recognition/recollection”. Ignorance would then entail loss of knowledge, retraceable to an ulterior cause. But even admitting that ignorance is a primordial absence, as an absolute abyss of blindness, so that there would be no real basis for the acquisition of any knowledge whatsoever (partiality presupposing ontologically an integrality), ignorance would represent a mere aspect of evil, an aspect to which we wouldn’t know how to concretely retrace cowardice or lack of courage, as Socrates shows us well in Plato’s Protagoras.
3In Luke 23:34, when calling his heavenly father to forgive those who do evil (specifically confusing good and evil) not knowing what they are doing, Jesus is not reducing evil to ignorance, but confirming that evil-doing involves a disparity between willing and doing. God forgives us for doing the evil we ourselves do not freely want to do. In this respect, Jesus’s father does not punish us for the for the evil we do, but saves us from evil, where people are otherwise condemning themselves to evil in the act of falling into it, as we see in the “Parable of the Talents” in Matthew 25.
4On “Socratic volition”—the philosopher’s βούλεσθαι—as cognitive receptivity to the good itself, see pp. 10-11 of Hega Segvic, “No One Errs Willingly: The Meaning of Socratic Intellectualism,” cited from https://ancphil.lsa.umich.edu/-/downloads/osap/19-Segvic.pdf (originally published in A Companion to Socrates. Edited by Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar. Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, 2006; pp. 171-85).
5 See Plato’s Republic 505d5-e1 and Cicero, De Senectute, 5.
6 See also Gorgias 509c6-e7.
7Interpreting Protagoras 352 d 4–7, Hega Segvic, op. cit., 22-24 fails to appreciate what we could call a Pauline reading of Socrates on account of which Socrates does not say that we do not do what we know to be evil, but that we do not want to do what is evil, whether or not we do that evil. While fairly highlighting Socrates’s unpopular tying of our will to knowledge (so that we never want to do what we know to be evil), Segvic falls short of noting that, notwithstanding our knowledge, we often do behave against the grain of our free will. No amount of mere-knowledge, no amount of Stoic-like self-control, can save us from this predicament, but divinely-supported knowledge. The soteric/salvific power of “the art of measurement” and of its knowledge (ἐπιστήμη) that in Protagoras 356e-358a is supposed to bring the soul into “abiding by the truth” (μένουσαν ἐπὶ τῷ ἀληθεῖ), thereby overcoming plebeian hedonism, is a power that Sophists such as Protagoras prepare youth to cultivate; it is not what Socrates himself stands for.
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