Summary |
Plato's Charmides is the earliest and most radical investigation of the structure, limits, and value of self-knowledge to be found in Ancient Greek thought. It initiates as a typical “Socratic dialogue” in search of the definition of a virtue, here σωφροσύνη (sophrosune/sophrosyne) variously translated as “moderation”, "temperance," “sound-mindedness”, "self-control", etc. The dialectic steeply accelerates at 164d, when Critias proposes to identify sophrosune with the familiar Delphic and Socratic ideal of "knowing oneself". Suitably unpacked, the definition becomes, first, "knowledge of knowledge and ignorance", and then, "to know what one knows and what one does not know". Remarkably, in light of the central role played by an ideal of self-knowledge (as well as other self-relations) in Plato’s dialogues, Socrates' examination here raises three significant challenges to the possibility and usefulness of self-knowledge. 1) Self-knowledge would be a species of self-relation, but the logical form of a self-applying relation or power (δύναμις), is unclear, leading in some cases (notably quantitative relations) to contradiction and in others (notably intentional relations) to a lack of well-foundedness. 2) The formulation "to know what one knows and what one does not know", invokes an important distinction between knowing what (ἅ) is (not) known, viz., something about something, and knowing only that (ὅτι) a given judgment is an instance of (not) knowing, without distinguishing the object of first-order (non-) knowledge. Socrates finds that when we are most confident in the possibility of second-order knowledge, we are speaking of its opaque form, while when we are most confident in its usefulness we are speaking of its transparent form. 3) Supposing that the object/s of second-order knowledge can somehow be correctly specified, the virtue-making usefulness of such knowledge can be directly challenged, for it seems not to be knowledge of knowledge and ignorance that helps us but instead knowledge of the good and the bad. The dialogue invites its readers to reconsider the concept of self-knowledge in light of these problems, and to try to determine in what the significant differences between Socratic and Critian versions of an ideal of self-knowledge might lie. |