The Art Of Not-knowing (IM 980)

Milan Kundera, in his book  The Unbearable Lightness of Being said, "The stupidity of people comes from having the answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything.”

"Not-knowing" is a skill that enables us to question everything and is the inception of great discovery. Socrates, the wisest man ever lived believed that "the disciplined practice of thoughtful questioning enables the scholar/student to examine ideas and be able to determine the validity of those ideas". The Socratic approach of questioning every behaviors (including ourselves) is the first step towards wisdom and discovery. What we find from Socrates era is just the dialogues between him and his students and disciples and his approach is always to question everything.

A friend of Socrates, once asked the Oracle at Delphi, "Is anyone wiser than Socrates?" The Oracle answered “No one.” But as far as Socrates was concerned, he was the most ignorant man in the land.

There is a passage in Plato’s Apology, where Socrates says that after discussing with someone he started thinking that:

"....I am wiser than this man, for neither of us appears to know anything great and good; but he fancies he knows something, although he knows nothing; whereas I, as I do not know anything, so I do not fancy I do. In this trifling particular, then, I appear to be wiser than he, because I do not fancy I know what I do not know....."

Plato in his Republic said:

“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”

Epictetus once said, "It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” He can't be more true. Once we act or behave as we know everything, we start to block everything and every knowledge and experience that we could absorb. If we look at history of greatest discovery from airplanes to spacecrafts, from internet to artificial intelligence, everything started with the art of "not-knowing".

Marcus Aurelius, a Stoic and Roman Emperor wrote: “Learn to ask all sets of actions, "why are they doing that?" Starting with your own.”