Ignorance and the path to truth

One of the first things that I noticed when I started reading Plato's dialogues was that many of them had no conclusion, a dialogue could begin with the question: What is knowledge?, then the characters in the dialogue would review some popular hypotheses that seek to answer this question, and then proceed to discard them one by one, and end the dialogue without the initial question being answered. This is because such writings are aporetic in nature and are designed not to have an answer. Plato does not want you to read them and know the answer to the question, at all, that would be very convenient, if someone just showed up with the truth ready for us to digest, but in reality, it has to do with something bigger than the question itself, he wants to prepare you for a journey to the truth, he wants you to read the dialogue, throw away everything you thought you knew about it, all your pretended knowledge, that he will be in charge of refuting and proving false, so that you become aware of your own ignorance, so that you become aware of the state in which you are, believing you know something that you don't really know, and leave yourself in that state, so that you feel the urgency, the same urgency that someone drowning feels for the air, but for the truth. He does not want to give you the truth, he believes that you yourself can find the truth, if you wish, he only wants to wake you up, free you from this cave in which you find yourself locked up so that you can find the path to the truth. He wants to start you on the path to knowledge, which begins with the admission of your own ignorance.

Because, you will never seek the truth if you think you have it, if you think you know everything there is to know, then it is impossible for you to learn something new, to know the truth it is necessary that you admit your own ignorance, that you become aware of it, that you get rid of all the false beliefs that you have and that obstruct the truth, that prevent you from seeing it as it is because they are taking its place, because these false beliefs are the greatest impediment that a person can have to know the truth. The opposite of truth and true knowledge is not ignorance, as many might think, but falsehood and false belief, which are hindrances from which we have to free ourselves so that, light as birds, we can open ourselves to accept the truth.

An ignorant person will have no problems accepting the truth, he should only perceive it and it is certain that he will accept it, but for someone who believes that he knows it will not be that easy, because he thinks that he is already in possession of the truth, he is clinging to it dogmatically and it is possible that he is even emotionally attached to his belief, so he will refuse to accept the truth even if it hits him directly in the face. The problem is that in the vast majority of cases there are very few "ignorant" people in the world and many people who "know", so the truth ends up going to the background and ends up being forgotten.

That is the reason why what can be knowledge before our eyes can end up being our greatest enemy when it comes to finding the truth, we can (almost) never be sure that what we call by the name of "truth" is not exactly the opposite, that is why we must detach ourselves from our ideas and be humble, because it was by chance, or perhaps causality, that the first truth that we know before knowing the others is that we don't know, so that in this way we learn to be humble.


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