Ward Farnsworth‘s uncanny skill at putting the most difficult things in simple and clear words just amazes me.

I can’t even envy him. The man is in a whole different league, as thinker or writer, but obviously more than that.

I am especially loving his chapter on aporias in Socratic Method. It builds on the topic of ignorance and something he calls “double ignorance” from the chapter before:

…Socrates regards unconscious ignorance as the source of great evils. Ignorance is why we go wrong in general. People have vices, do wrong, and make themselves wretched because they don’t really understand what they are doing and why. They haven’t thought hard enough about it. But there’s a special tier of Socratic dread and contempt for double ignorance the ignorance of those who don’t know but think they do. Everyone is in that position sometimes. We have a felt sense of confidence built on sand. It wouldn’t survive cross-examination but doesn’t receive any. Those in that position are badly off and also dangerous to others, like drunk drivers who think they are sober.

Aporia is what happens when we apprehend our own double-ignorance.

If you were questioned by Socrates, he would eventually convince you that nothing you say is good enough. After getting the hang of Socratic thinking, you may reach the same conclusion yourself. Any statement you make about a big question can be revealed as wrong, incomplete, or otherwise inadequate in some way. This discovery can ultimately lead to a sense of skepticism. But most immediately it leads to aporia (pronounced ap-or-EE-ah). Aporia is a kind of impasse; literally it means “without a way.” It is the state reached when your attempts to say something true have all been refuted and you don’t know what else to do or think. Sometimes it is described as a state of mind — a sense of disorientation and perplexity; but strictly speaking those states are a reaction to the impasse. They are what you feel when you run out of resources for answering a question. Your feet are trying to find something solid to stand on and can’t.

Aporia can be a sign that its holder is departing a state of compound ignorance. You thought you knew something, but it turns out that you don’t understand it; you were ignorant of your ignorance, and now it’s clear. … People aren’t alarmed when they are questioned and know the answer. They aren’t alarmed when they know that they don’t know the answer. They are alarmed when they thought they knew and then realize that they don’t.

…double ignorance is, for Socrates, a kind of sleep through which everyone walks to some extent. Then you walk into a wall. The wall is aporia. The awakening is a rude one, but deeply valuable. The sensation of ignorance — of realizing that you know less than you had thought — is unpleasant, at least at first. It is experienced as loss by the ego, which has a built-in good opinion of its own wisdom. But Socratic study helps make that discovery feel more welcome. One comes to see that such a discovery isn’t really the loss of wisdom. It’s the arrival of it.

Then Farnsworth begins listing practical benefits of aporia:

…Aporia may be seen as a necessary stage before real learning can happen. You realize that you’ve been pushing words around as if their meaning were obvious but that you don’t really understand them. Now you have a sense of something missing. Your confidence in your knowledge is gone. It needed to go to make room for something better.

…Aporia in this sense can also cleanse you of obnoxious qualities. Recall the discussion of the Theatetus … Theatetus had given birth to an idea that was pronounced stillborn. Socrates encourages him to keep trying, but says that Theatetus will be better off even if his ideas never improve. Aporia will have made him easier to put up with. Such humility may not seem a very exciting reward at first. But then think about how often people are too sure of themselves, and feel smart when they’re not, and how unendurable they are, and how dangerous, and how likely we are to be just as insufferable to others for the same reasons, and how many problems arise from nothing but this. Other people, it seems clear, would be better off if they realized how little they know, and with a suspicion that in the long run they show themselves to be fools in most of what they say. So would we all. Some shock therapy is a small price to pay for relief from those curses. — Aporia is a form of it.

…Aporia can not only prepare you to learn but make you want to learn. It feels frustrating. In effect Socrates says: good-now get going on the search for an answer, this time with a better sense of the work it takes. You are made hungry for knowledge by discovering how little you have.

Then things get (at least for me) even more interesting…

We’ve just talked as though there are right answers to the questions under pursuit, and that aporia might inspire a harder search for them. But suppose you conclude, after many rounds of all this, that the answers will never be found. It still wouldn’t be time to give up. On a Socratic view it’s never time to give up. We do better by accepting that the search probably has no end but going on anyway as if it might. For even if you can’t possess the truth, you can get closer to it. Discourse that improves understanding becomes the valuable thing, but it works best if you forget that and act as though you’re in it to capture the truth.

And they start pressing into mystical regions. It becomes more apparent how Plotinus really was a neo-Platonist:

A more radical view of aporia regards it as sometimes inspiring speechlessness because you have arrived at a truth that can’t be spoken. The idea goes: there are unspeakable truths — that is, truths that defy language, and so can be called ineffable. Perhaps they are verbal analogues of irrational numbers. But they sometimes can be perceived without words. It may be that justice, for example, can’t be captured by a definition. But it can be encircled by the close failure of many efforts at definition. Instead of that result seeming to be a mess and therefore a failure, the mess is the thing sought. The goal of the effort at reasoning isn’t a conclusion based on the reasoning but a grasp of something larger. We learn that the truth isn’t coextensive with our ability to talk about it or with our powers of comprehension.

This way of looking at aporia might be inferred from the approach of the early dialogues. Why is the truth always sought and never discovered? Perhaps because it can’t be; that is the discovery. This idea finds some support in Plato’s Seventh Letter… “This much at least, I can say about all writers, past or future, who say they know the things to which I devote myself, whether by hearing the teaching of me or of others, or by their own discoveries — that according to my view it is not possible for them to have any real skill in the matter. There neither is nor ever will be a treatise of mine on the subject. For it does not admit of exposition like other branches of knowledge; but after much converse about the matter itself and a life lived together, suddenly a light, as it were, is kindled in one soul by a flame that leaps to it from another, and thereafter sustains itself.”

Now I will do a mic drop for Farnsworth by quoting Nietzsche:

Young people love what is interesting and odd, no matter how true or false it is. More mature minds love what is interesting and odd about truth. Fully mature intellects, finally, love truth, even when it appears plain and simple, boring to the ordinary person; for they have noticed that truth tends to reveal its highest wisdom in the guise of simplicity.

This book exemplifies wisdom concealed in simplicity.

I’m halfway tempted to shelve my Farnsworth collection alongside my Marty Neumeier books.