The Wall and the Gate

One of the criticisms invoked against philosophers in ancient times (by Christians, for example) was that the very idea of philosophy implied that they could never reach their goal. The word “philosophy” itself suggested this: It means love of or friendship toward wisdom, not the actual possession of wisdom. From at least Socrates on, the philosophers themselves seemed to acknowledge this open-endedness, denying that they themselves were “wise.”


The famous story of the Delphic Oracle’s pronouncement on Socrates, and his interpretation of it (as portrayed by Plato), seems to support this view. On being asked who was the wisest of men, the oracle replied, “None is wiser than Socrates.” This dictum, delivered presumably from the god Apollo, took Socrates by surprise, because he was convinced that he possessed nothing that he could convince himself was real and true knowledge.

And that was precisely the point. All other men thought they knew things that were true and important and wise, but they truly knew nothing. As a result, they didn’t seek to learn, but instead were content to rest in their false certainty.

Socrates, in contrast, understood that he knew nothing true and important and wise, and continuously sought to learn whatever he could of such things. This made him, in the view of Plato and pretty much all subsequent thinkers, the epitome of a philosopher: a seeker of wisdom.

We are accustomed today to thinking of wisdom as knowledge of a certain kind, and this appears also to have been the most widespread view in ancient Greece. In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates’ most implacable opponents were the Sophists, a group of generally itinerant teachers of what we would call today public speaking, persuasion, marketing, personal presentation. Their special forté was teaching the skill of arguing both sides of an issue with equal effectiveness; in other words, how to win an argument, regardless of the truth.

The Sophists’ claim was that they taught wisdom (“sophia” in Greek), and Socrates’ (and Plato’s) counterclaim was that they taught nothing of the sort – and indeed that wisdom could not be taught. But what the philosophers offered in opposition to the Sophists was not a different version of wisdom but instead a different way of thinking about what wisdom is. And their way of thinking about wisdom was in some sense an end in itself: To think about wisdom, what it might be, how to acquire it, is better than to believe one has it.

Then as now, people mostly preferred to believe, or hope, that they could pay a Sophist and in return receive the knowledge they needed to succeed (by whatever yardstick success might be measured). The career of the Roman statesman Cicero provides an object lesson in how the single-minded pursuit of sophistic learning could in fact pay off in the accumulation of wealth and the acquisition of power. But the philosophical question is whether such a life is truly good.

The alternative the philosophers offered was a life of constant self-examination with no tangible reward, and their refusal to admit that wisdom is something definable and teachable continued to be a point of attack by their enemies even after the Sophists had faded from history. Christian apologists took up the argument: The philosophers can only “seek” wisdom, but we know we “have” wisdom because God Himself gave it to us through divine revelation – and we have the divine books to prove it, providing us with a complete and final truth. Our task thus is not to find the truth but just to understand and live according to the wisdom that has been packaged and delivered to us so neatly.

There’s a Sufi story I ran across at some point, I forget exactly where, that seems to me to have some relevance here, though I might be wrong.

Once upon a time, there was a king who ruled over a city where farmers and tradesmen and so on came to sell their goods and services.

This king was genuinely determined to be righteous and virtuous. One day, walking through the marketplace in his city, he heard the sellers of vegetables and livestock and metalware and ceramics and fortune-telling and love potions and so on touting their products and performances, and he was appalled by the dishonesty of it all: Everyone, it seemed, was exaggerating or distorting or otherwise misrepresenting what he or she had to sell.

The king went back to his palace and thought about what he had seen and heard, and he decided that he would find a way to force everyone who came into his city to tell the truth. That night, he sent his soldiers to build a gallows next to the gate by which the farmers and tradesmen entered the city.

At dawn the next day, when all the peddlers and farmers and so on were lined up at the gate to come into the city, the king stood on the wall and addressed them. “All honest men are welcome in my city,” he said, in his archaically gender-specific way. “But dishonest men are never welcome here. So to guarantee the honesty of all who enter here, I have built this gallows. If you want to come into my city, you must answer one question. If you tell the truth, you may come in and do your business. But if you lie, you will be hanged from this gallows. Now, who wants to come in?”

Naturally, everyone hesitated. But after a moment, an old man stepped forward. The king saw him and said, “All right, granddad, where are you going?”

The old man answered, “I’m going to hang on your gallows.”

As far as I know, the king may still be standing on that wall and trying to figure out what he should do with the old man, because whatever he does, he will make himself a liar.