Introduction

Alongside the Aristotelian idea of a natural desire to know that culminates in contemplation, ancient philosophy offers another figure of the search: the one that starts from acknowledged ignorance, examines one’s own life, and lets itself be led by a desire for the true that transforms whoever pursues it.

1. Socrates: ignorance and examination

The Socratic search does not start from knowledge, but from the absence of knowledge: the awareness of not knowing, the aporia. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates recounts that the oracle had declared him the wisest precisely because he acknowledged his ignorance (21d–23b).

The instrument of that search is the elenchus, the examination — of oneself and of others — that puts opinions to the test. The phrase that condenses this activity is that of Apology 38a5:

«ὁ δὲ ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ» — “the unexamined life is not livable for man”.

Two precisions matter here. The first is that anexétastos (ἀνεξέταστος) means “not subjected to examination”, not “without reflection” in the abstract. The second is the consequence: for Socrates, to seek the truth is to care for the soul — epimeleia tēs psychēs — and therefore a constitutively ethical activity, not a neutral exercise. The search is not separable from the life one leads.

2. Plato: the desire for the true

Plato turns that activity into a doctrine of desire (eros) oriented toward the true. In the Symposium and in the Phaedrus, eros is the force that ascends from the sensible to the intelligible; in the Phaedrus (246a–247e) the soul already contemplates the “plain of Truth”. And knowing does not start from zero: in the Meno (80d–86c) Plato proposes anamnesis — to know is to remember — so that the search is a movement of return, not an acquisition from nothing.

The central text is the allegory of the cave (Republic VII, 514a ff.), together with the analogy of the sun (Republic VI, 508e–509b). The Idea of the Good (τὸ ἀγαθόν) makes truth knowable and is “beyond essence” (ἐπέκεινα τῆς οὐσίας, 509b). True knowledge is described as conversion (periagogē, Republic 518c–d): a turning-around of the soul, a transformation of the knower, not a mere sum of contents.

Hence, in Plato, truth and good are articulated together: to know the true is, at once, to become good. The search for truth is not a theoretical end isolated from life.

Socrates and Plato offer the figure of the search as process — aporia, examination, eros, conversion, ascent —; Aristotle offers the figure of the term — possession, contemplation, theoria. The first is a movement that is not exhausted; the second, an arrival that culminates.

The two figures should not be merged. The Socratic-Platonic search is existential and ascending; the Aristotelian one, teleological and contemplative. In something essential, however, they agree against modern sensibility: for both, the search for truth is not indefinite curiosity or accumulation, but an orientation of the soul toward something that surpasses and transforms it.

Conclusion

It can be safely asserted that Socrates tied the search for truth to the examination of one’s own life and that Plato describes it as a desire oriented toward the Good that converts the knower. It should not be asserted that this figure is equivalent to the Aristotelian one of contemplation: one emphasizes the process; the other, the term. The Platonic critique of representation is studied in Mimesis: art and reality; the Aristotelian version of the desire to know, in Knowledge in Aristotle.

References

Primary sources

  • Plato, Apology 21d–23b and 38a; Meno 80d–86c; Republic VI 505a–509c and VII 514a–521b and 518c–d; Symposium; Phaedrus 246a–247e (Stephanus ed.).

Secondary sources

  • Hadot, P., Qu’est-ce que la philosophie antique? (1995).