Charmides

Core Ideas

Self-knowledge and Aporia

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Core Ideas Self-knowledge and Aporia

As discussed in "Temperance, or Sophrosyne"), self-knowledge is the fundamental but extremely problematic good with which Charmides is primarily concerned. As the hypothetical definition of temperance that dominates most of the dialogue's debate, self-knowledge expands into a quality that is both more precise and less graspable than mere self-awareness. Specifically, the self-knowledge that defines temperance must be a knowledge of knowledge itself; as such, it involves knowing what one knows and what one does not know. This model, as Socrates points out, means that we are dealing with a kind of knowledge whose "subject matter" is simultaneously knowledge itself ("what one knows") and the absence of knowledge ("what one does not know").

The paradoxes involved in this complex version of self-knowledge, then, are multiple: knowing what one does not know; a knowledge that must know the absence of itself; and further, a knowledge whose subject matter is pure knowledge, but whose effect in terms of actual good must somehow be in the realm of practical, concrete knowledge. The primary problem here can be summed up as the problem of defining something by its relation to itself. These problems prove intractable in Charmides, and the dialogue ends in aporia (a state of indeterminacy in which one realizes that one does not know what one thought one knew)—this is the most common end (one might even say aim) of the early Platonic dialogues. But aporia is also involved with self-knowledge in another way: namely, the provision that self-knowledge must know what it does not know creates aporia, and seems to say that the aporia associated with the Platonic method is also a key ingredient in being temperate.