I know that I know nothing

“Then an argument came up about injustice being more profitable than justice, and I couldn’t refrain from abandoning the previous one and following up on that. Hence the result of the discussion, as far as I’m concerned, is that I know nothing for when I don’t know what justice is, I’ll hardly know whether it is a kind of virtue or not, or whether a person who has it is happy or unhappy” (I:354b)

One of the most profound parts of our group discussion for me was the chance to really look at the text and attempt to understand how it related to my own life and my own ambitions in academia. So often in American society we look towards Scripture as the only way to obtain abstract, moral guidance on the decisions we make in our lives, when there is a centuries old intellectual tradition which we can appropriate to additionally help us understand the world around us. In that way, the above quote caused me to reflect on my own behavior, and on the behavior of other academics in my field of medieval history.

How can we ever be trusted as medievalists if we do not admit to the fundamental problem at the center of our field–in reality, we know nothing. We are creatives who never stopped imagining the beauty of the past, the lives of those which exist in a space so wildly different from our own. Much like in Book I of The Republic,we ask constant questions in the pursuit of an elusive “truth” that we know we will never reach. When we write books, we extrapolate to construct the reality of the historical figures that we are studying. There must be some worth in Socratic reasoning–there must be something to be learned from this chain of ostensibly meaningless questions about justice in The Republic. This line of reasoning is essentially the same one I make use of myself when I try to eke out details of the life or political ambitions of the object of my study, Alfonso X of Castile. I ask questions, I investigate immaterial claims, and oftentimes the most profound things that I learn throughout the course of my study of medieval Castile come about somewhere in the middle of my investigative process. The arrived at realization is always that I know nothing–the important part is that I have learned through investigation, understood through listening and engaging with scholarship, and further advanced my understanding of the topic through focused thought.

I deal in nothing. I am a historian of nothing. I deeply believe in “the nothing,”–in looking to where there is nothing to be read and where the silence is awesome in order to better understand what hides in those absences in medieval society. There is no reason that we have to be uncomfortable with knowing nothing–there is no reason that we as scholars of the humanities should be afraid of being unable to answer the questions that we set out to ask. The profound beauty of the way that we do research and understand the medieval world is that we may always continue to ask while still knowing nothing.

Of course things may be learned from this dialogue. Learning how to think and how to exist is far more important than any concrete answer that is to be arrived at anyway. I am reminded of a profound quote from Maya Angelou, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but they will never forget how you made them feel.” The real lessons we learn throughout our investigation are certainly not factual ones. Presumably, we will forget what we said and did in college, the exact facts we learned, the content we examined. What will be left with us after this class (and others) are over is probably, for the majority of students, not the facts that they learned, but how they internalized meaning and the way they went about discovering it.