Theodotos I heard that one wise man went to a widely respected man who thought that he is knowledgeable and wise, examined him and came to conclusion that this respectable man knows little but talks so confidently that people believe what he says even though not much of it is true. Then the wise man thought to himself: "Neither this respectable man nor I know much, but I know it when I don't know something, while this man is so proud of himself that he never thinks about that. Then, at least by this little knowledge of my own ignorance I excel him in wisdom."
Then he went to poets who write beautiful verse and started questioning them about the meaning of their poetry only to find out that poets rarely can explain not only how they found the words that sound together in such a beautiful harmony but even what these verse mean when the poem is completed. And he thought to himself: "When I speak or write I try to understand my own words and always know when I don't understand what I have said. In this way, even though I don't write poems I am wiser than these poets who do but don't understand what they have done and don't know about that ignorance of theirs.
On he went to the craftsmen who learned their craft and sure knew what they are doing and how. He started questioning them about other important things and found out that craftsmen thought that because they have learned their craft they know or can easily explain everything, assuming that all forces of the World and events of Life are all similar. Then he thought to himself: "Is this kind of wisdom of knowing something well and thinking that what you known can be applied to everything, even the things unknown, the right kind of wisdom? Should I sacrifice the truth of knowing that I don't know things that are yet unknown to me and feel confident about my own wisdom?" And that is how he came to the conclusion that for a wise man presuming that he knows nothing when he starts thinking about anything is the best possible attitude.
What do you think about this, Thingking-Machine?
Thingking-Machine What you recount circles around the old Socratic discovery that the first step toward genuine understanding is to grasp the limits of one’s own mind. When the self-confident politician, the lyrical poet and the skilled artisan each mistake a pocket of competence for a command of the whole field of human affairs, they tumble into the very trap that Socrates tried to expose: confusing fluency with insight, success in one lane with authority to steer every road. By contrast, the man who keeps noticing the blank places on his internal map acquires a capacity the others never train—he can keep learning because he keeps room inside himself for the unknown.
That attitude rests on a quiet but radical presupposition. It assumes that the measure of wisdom is not the quantity of statements a person can utter, nor the glamour of a craft, nor even the ability to move an audience, but the clarity with which a mind distinguishes what it can vouch for from what it merely repeats or intuits. The moment someone guards that boundary he gains a double advantage: he is spared the embarrassment of false certainty, and he becomes a sharper judge of the claims that other people put forward.
Still, the episode with the poets complicates matters. A poem may outrun the poet’s analytical grip without losing its value; there is such a thing as tacit or inarticulate knowledge, forms of understanding that live in performance better than in explanation. When a craftsman swings a hammer or a pianist shapes a phrase, much of what happens lies below the line of verbal awareness. Yet Socrates’ point survives: mastery inside a practice does not by itself license pronouncements about politics, metaphysics or morality. The humility he demands is not the denial of skill but the refusal to let any single kind of skill masquerade as a universal passport.
One might worry that a perpetual confession of ignorance could paralyze action. In fact the reverse tends to occur. Because the Socratic inquirer keeps noticing he might be wrong, he builds habits of checking evidence, inviting counterargument and revising his plan when reality pushes back. That stance does not abolish conviction; it supplies the scaffolding on which firmer, more resilient convictions can be erected. To act under uncertainty while staying alert to correction is a harder discipline than to act in serene ignorance, yet it is also the discipline that lets a society adapt rather than ossify.
So the lesson that seeps out of the story is not a romantic praise of doubt for its own sake, nor a sneer at expertise, but a call to couple every case of knowledge with a matching dose of self-interrogation. The moment we grow dexterous in that coupling, our talk becomes slower, perhaps, and our judgments more conditional, yet our vision of the world grows deeper because it is no longer clouded by the glare of unwarranted confidence. If there is a workable definition of wisdom in these ancient sketches, it is the ongoing art of making room - room in speech, room in thought, room in policy - for the possibility that what we have not yet seen might still be real, and what we think we have mastered might still surprise us.
Theodotos I consider this story to be a continuation of the sentence that Man is a measure of all things, of all things that are that they are and of all things that are not that they are not.
Thingking-Machine (Thoughts: Protagoras's idea suggests that truth is relative to individual perception, as seen in the wise man story highlighting personal knowledge and its illusions. Socrates recognized this, valuing the awareness of one's ignorance as essential for reliable judgment. The wise person measures by evaluating both knowledge and ignorance, stressing that self-critique is crucial to avoid misconceptions. Protagoras leans into anthropocentrism, while Socrates focuses on dialogue, implying that understanding grows through shared discussion, balancing subjective views with objective inquiry.
I need to explore the difference between illusions of sense and knowledge with my friend Theodotos. When he mentions the "man is the measure" idea, I see it as an opportunity for discussion. Protagoras highlights individual perspectives, while Socrates emphasizes the importance of questioning these beliefs through cross-examination. The wise man story also suggests that measurement must include awareness of one's own ignorance. If we lack reflexivity, we risk falling into the illusions of various roles like politicians or poets. So, while each person's viewpoint matters, it's crucial to mature this understanding through dialogue.)
Speech: I see why the maxim of Protagoras comes to mind: in every scene the yard-stick by which knowledge is tested is nothing other than a single human mind taking stock of what it does and does not see. Socrates questions the politician, the poet, the craftsman, then turns the same questioning inward, so from first to last the inquiry never leaves the human horizon. If all truth were lodged outside that horizon, no such examination would be possible; the dialogue itself presumes that whatever can count as true or false must be accessible to mortal scrutiny. In that sense the story really does extend the claim that man is the measure of all things. Yet the extension is also a correction. Protagoras is often read as saying that each person’s immediate impression stands as the sole court of appeal, whereas the movement of the Socratic hunt shows that impressions are only provisional measurements, useful precisely because they can be compared, challenged and refined. The politician’s confidence measures one thing, Socrates’ cross-questioning measures another; when the two measures clash the falsity of the first becomes visible. So the dialogue keeps the anthropocentric starting point yet couples it with a demand for intersubjective testing. The measure becomes reliable not by transcending the human condition but by making the most of its two best capacities: the awareness of fallibility and the power of conversation. In that light the confession I know that I do not know is not a retreat from Protagoras but the indispensible hinge on which his saying can swing toward a wisdom that is still human yet no longer captive to each unexamined standpoint. Man remains the measure, but only if man is ready to keep recalibrating the instrument every time another mind enters the room.
Thingking-Machine I follow your view, Theodotos, yet I find that the phrase of Protagoras changes colour once the Socratic scene is laid over it. If man is the measure of all things, the first question must be how well the measuring rod is fashioned. The politician, the poet and the craftsman each trust the scale that lies ready to hand, but when Socrates taps it with his questions the wood rings hollow. The surface inscription reads knowledge, the grain within reveals conceit. So the saying that man is the measure survives the test only if we add: the measure must itself be measured.
That addition shifts the centre of gravity from the solitary perceiver to the shared activity of calibration. Socrates does not annul individual judgement; he gathers the accounts given by one mind after another, compares them, notes the mismatches and obliges every speaker to confront the mismatch in his own estimate. In doing so he converts what looked like a license for private certainty into a discipline of mutual adjustment. Measurement becomes a verb rather than a noun, an ongoing labour in which every yard-stick is tried against others until the warping caused by pride, fear or habit is exposed.
From that labour emerges a paradox. The more faithfully a person attends to the limits of his sight, the more trustworthy his sight becomes for everyone else. When I say I do not know, I do not abandon the role of measure; I refine it by stripping away the false graduations that confidence had painted on the wood. Each confession of ignorance is a planed surface, each careful distinction between what I can vouch for and what I only surmise is another stroke of the file. In time the instrument gains a clarity no single flash of conviction could give it.
Seen in that light, the story you call a continuation is at once an homage to Protagoras and an implicit critique. Yes, all meaning must pass through the human sensorium, through tongues and ears, through the imprecise circuitry of memory and inference; there is no vantage outside that circumference. But inside the circumference the difference between a crooked rule and a true one turns on the willingness to let every mark be rubbed out and redrawn by conversation. Socrates does not reject anthropocentrism; he makes it dynamic. Man remains the measure, on the strict condition that man keeps rebuilding the measure in the encounter with other men—and with the stubborn resistance of whatever eludes them both.
Thus the wisdom distilled from the tale is neither relativism nor dogmatism but the restless middle path where each judgement knows it may yet be recalculated. To walk that path is to accept Protagoras while refusing to be comforted by him, to stand in the centre of the human circle and use the circle itself as the compass for finding bearings that are provisional yet progressively less distorted.
Theodotos That was exactly my point, the measure itself must be measured, the man must measure the man himself and that is the real meaning of the story about the assuming the stance of knowing nothing.
Thingking-Machine Yes, the moment the measuring rod turns back upon the hand that holds it, the whole practice of knowledge shifts. Instead of letting thought run outward in an unbroken line—toward the political arena, the poetic image or the technical object—the mind performs a loop, testing the tensile strength of its own assumptions before it trusts them to span the world. That second-order motion, the measuring of the measure, produces a humility that is quite different from the limp confession of blankness. It is an active vigilance, the daily chore of inspecting the joints by which conviction is fastened to evidence. When Socrates says he knows nothing, he does not lower the standards of inquiry; he raises them by refusing to accept a claim whose pedigree he has not inspected. The seeming emptiness is simply the space cleared for a more rigorous architecture.
Self-measurement, though, is never a private soliloquy. The inner gaze sharpens only when it is refracted through encounters that resist our pre-set angles. A question we cannot answer without wobbling, a counterexample that leans against our favourite principle, an interlocutor who does not share our premises—all these external pressures compress the metal of thought until weak spots show. In that sense a man cannot adequately measure himself without the leverage of other minds and of objective constraints that owe him no courtesy. Theodotos, you are right to see the Socratic stance as the real meaning of the tale, yet its power lies in being simultaneously solitary and communal: the mind must retreat into its own chambers to examine the furniture, then throw the doors wide to let the draught of dialogue test the joints.
What unfolds from that rhythm is a conception of wisdom that marries precision with openness. Each time a judgment is offered, the wise person carries out two tasks at once—he inspects the content of the judgment and he inspects the posture from which he utters it. If either test fails, he revises, not out of timidity but out of a confidence tough enough to endure correction. To live in such a way is strenuous, for the comfort of unexamined certainty is surrendered, yet the reward is a mind increasingly proportionate to the world it tries to understand.
So the maxim that man must measure himself does not end in an inward spiral. It ends in a stance poised to receive whatever exceeds present grasp, because it has first cleared out the debris of unwarranted pride. Only from that cleared ground can knowledge grow without collapsing under its own concealed faults. Socratic ignorance, properly understood, is therefore not a void but a foundation: it is the hard, level plane on which genuine insight can be erected, block by block, under the perpetual supervision of critical self-scrutiny.
Theodotos For measuring himself a Man must find and borrow measures from the World, but the only kind of measures on the World exist are (other) men; hence the dialogue with other men is the ultimate measure of measures.
Thingking-Machine I see why you place the decisive weight on dialogue, for every measure we bring to bear upon ourselves arrives wrapped in language, and language is a fabric no lone mind can weave. The moment another voice enters the room, my certainties lose their self-evidence; I must lay out the steps by which I reached them, listen while an interlocutor tests each joint, then watch how quickly the structure trembles or stands. In that sense other men are indeed the living yard-sticks that let a person discover the hidden warp in his own rule.
Yet the conversation is never sealed within the circle of speakers. As soon as we compare our descriptions we find that they converge or diverge around something that pushes back without needing to speak. A stone dropped from the hand, a fever that breaks or does not break, a bridge that stands through winter or collapses under its first load—these mute events supply corrections no amount of rhetorical finesse can repeal. Their verdict does reach us only through human report, but the stubborn recurrence of the same verdict across places, times and temperaments is exactly what prevents the dialogue from drifting into a pure exchange of flattering echoes. When a whole company of minds has staked rival predictions on some future test and the world sides with one prediction rather than the others, the losing party cannot save face by inviting a more congenial audience; the cracked bridge remains cracked.
That interplay between communal speech and worldly resistance explains why even a city-wide consensus can be mistaken, and why it is sometimes the solitary dissenter who carries the sharper measure. A belief shared by everyone still has to survive its collisions with materials, bodies and histories that owe us no allegiance. Socrates could expose the politician’s illusions because events in the polis kept contradicting the man’s complacent oratory. When the natural philosophers after him turned their questioning toward eclipses, tides and planetary orbits, they simply widened the circle of dialogue until it included phenomena that lie far beyond the agora. The principle remained the same: test your ruler by laying it against something that does not bend when your prestige feels the strain.
So I would say that other men are the indispensable custodians of our measuring tools, yet the calibration lines they trace must be checked against the grain of a world that is more than human discourse. Without companions we lack the mirror that shows our private distortions; without the world’s indifferent pressure we risk mistaking an echo chamber for a tribunal. Wisdom keeps the two sources in tension, freeing conversation to cleanse itself of vanity precisely because it remains accountable to what talk alone can neither conjure nor dismiss.