(1) What you can derive from Socrates is that it is more important to know what you do not know than it is to know what you do know. There were plenty of people in Athens that knew how to work as a blacksmith and other professions. But they were not aware of the limits of their knowledge.
The oracle had said about Socrates that he was the wisest and that meant he was the most wise because he knew that he knew nothing. That is to say that even when he went around in Athens talking with artisans that in fact knew their own professions very well, that did not add up against the fact that they were unaware of what they did not know. Therefore Socrates was wiser that all of them because of his awareness of not knowing anything except that one fact that he was ignorant of everything.
(2) This is one of the difficulties I discovered in yeshiva. Sometimes you could find someone who knew a little Talmud. But along with that knowledge came a kind of hubris that: "Since we know Talmud, therefore we know everything." Clearly that is a leap in logic that does not follow
(3) This comes up in Reb Nachman a few times. תכלית ידיעה שלא נדע: "The peak of knowledge is that we should not know." [It comes up in a chapter that is reputed to be from the ספר הנשרף the book that had his deep lessons that he burnt because he thought the world was not ready for those higher lessons. ]
This also come up in השמטות the lessons that were left out but later included as an appendix. That is where he says all the מידות were מתפשטות until God limited them and that includes wisdom.
[4] In the way Buddhism is presented in the West [and Hinduism also] you get this impression that often people that teach it and learn it are unaware of what they do not know. They do talk about higher knowledge without actually being aware of what constitutes knowledge in the first place and what makes it different from opinion. Nor does it seem to bother them that if there is no atman-no self then there is nothing that can become enlightened.
[5] I would like to mention Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in this context. Dr Kelley Ross holds that there is a third source of knowledge which is not sensory nor reason. Hegel holds that through a process of dialectics reason can cross the boundaries of reason.
Though I left Kant for last, still I feel his approach to this whole issue is the best.
The oracle had said about Socrates that he was the wisest and that meant he was the most wise because he knew that he knew nothing. That is to say that even when he went around in Athens talking with artisans that in fact knew their own professions very well, that did not add up against the fact that they were unaware of what they did not know. Therefore Socrates was wiser that all of them because of his awareness of not knowing anything except that one fact that he was ignorant of everything.
(2) This is one of the difficulties I discovered in yeshiva. Sometimes you could find someone who knew a little Talmud. But along with that knowledge came a kind of hubris that: "Since we know Talmud, therefore we know everything." Clearly that is a leap in logic that does not follow
(3) This comes up in Reb Nachman a few times. תכלית ידיעה שלא נדע: "The peak of knowledge is that we should not know." [It comes up in a chapter that is reputed to be from the ספר הנשרף the book that had his deep lessons that he burnt because he thought the world was not ready for those higher lessons. ]
This also come up in השמטות the lessons that were left out but later included as an appendix. That is where he says all the מידות were מתפשטות until God limited them and that includes wisdom.
[4] In the way Buddhism is presented in the West [and Hinduism also] you get this impression that often people that teach it and learn it are unaware of what they do not know. They do talk about higher knowledge without actually being aware of what constitutes knowledge in the first place and what makes it different from opinion. Nor does it seem to bother them that if there is no atman-no self then there is nothing that can become enlightened.
[5] I would like to mention Kant's Critique of Pure Reason in this context. Dr Kelley Ross holds that there is a third source of knowledge which is not sensory nor reason. Hegel holds that through a process of dialectics reason can cross the boundaries of reason.
Though I left Kant for last, still I feel his approach to this whole issue is the best.
