I’m not having some sort of crisis. I’m not. Now that’s out of the way: Socrates. The philosopher, not the footballer. Two and a half thousand years ago, he’d be hanging out in Athens, having the bants with other philosophers, politicians and what today people in industry modestly call “thought leaders”.
Everyone would have an opinion on something, but not Socrates. Sort of. By all accounts – and there aren’t many of those – Socrates exercised what became later known as the Socratic Method.
The Socratic Method sounds a bit like a self-help technique to help you visualise your billionaire goals or give you abs of iron, but it was essentially a way of interrogating an idea by asking questions.
Boil it down to the basics, and Socrates would spend hours in the company of self-regarding individuals and deploy one word, over and over: Why? Each answer given would prompt another why, until, all too often, the answers revealed that their original contention was nonsense.
Róisín Ingle: I walk most days without leaving the house. Who cares if I look stupid?
Sean Moncrieff: Class might be less obvious in Ireland but it’s just as insidious
Hilary Fannin: I now accept I’ll never be a ‘high-net-worth individual’
Hilary Fannin: Ignoring the elephant in the room – and its enormous erection
Socrates is generally credited as the father of western philosophy, yet the why technique is one used daily by any four year old. Both can become tiresome. In the latter, it usually ends with the parent distracting the child with television or crisps. In the former, they eventually put him to death.
There are accounts of how Socrates lived and died, but he – annoyingly – didn’t write any of it. Like an ancient Boswell, his student Aristotle scribbled down a lot of what he said.
Because of that, modern academics have had decades of fun disputing what Socrates might have actually said, rather than what others wished he’d said; particularly in relation to Socrates’s most famous quote: I know that I know nothing.
There are acres of work pointing out that, on occasion, Socrates did claim to know something: but to my mind such intense nerdiness has nothing to do with the Why Method. For every new dialogue, he would attempt to reform himself into pure ignorance: because that’s the best place from which to learn.
Back to the crisis I’m not having. Herself says I’m leaning into something. There’s the beard, a coat that she says is a bit gangsta, and then I went and got a tattoo.
I didn't get it because I want to recapture my youth. Rather the opposite: I'm at an age where I can decide what I look like, without having to worry what anyone else thinks. It's liberating
If you don’t have one, they’re quite difficult to get. One place told me that they didn’t have availability on a Friday. Ever. Several more didn’t like what I wanted and suggested something else.
But eventually I found a place, and the experience wasn’t at all what I expected. It reminded me of acupuncture. It hurts a bit, but the pain forces you to let your thoughts drift. Admittedly, many of those thoughts involved how the ceiling of this establishment really needed a good clean. Yet there was a stillness to it.
What I got was three words along my right forearm. The first letter just peeks out of my sleeve, which makes me look a little dodgy. Dodgy, but also pretentious. The words are scio me nescire: Latin for I know I know nothing. (Yes, if Socrates said it at all, it wouldn’t have been in that language, but I couldn’t figure out the Greek lettering.)
And I didn’t get it because I want to recapture my youth. Rather the opposite: I’m at an age where I won’t be applying for a job in the bank or running for office. I can decide what I look like, without having to worry what anyone else thinks. It’s liberating.
It’s also liberating to embrace one’s own ignorance. At my age, I’m supposed to know stuff, but I don’t really: and the tattoo is a permanent reminder of that. Scio me nescire is about all sorts of pointy-headed philosophical ideas, but it’s also about humility, about accepting that we live in a largely puzzling universe.
Much easier said than done, of course, but if a four year old can do it effortlessly, grown-ups can give it a go too.