i know i know nothing

to a large extent, to understand, which is often the same as to know, is being able to classify. you don't really understand a thing, so you don't really know it, unless you are able to place it in a context, in a category. that is what teaching is mostly about: giving people the tools to decipher the information that comes their way and place in a box that, in turn, is related to other boxes. the more the boxes, the larger the capacity for understanding, the deeper the knowledge. the deeper the knowledge, i.e. the capacity of relating things to things, the deeper the awareness that we know so little we might as well admit that we know nothing at all. when socrates said that the more he learned the better he knew that he knew nothing, that's what he meant, though i doubt he would have put it this way: that, accumulation of information aside, knowledge is relating things to things, knowing in what place in the grid of "things" some piece of information will go; knowledge, in other words, is perspective, and once you acquire a deep feel for putting things into perspective the paucity, the utter meagerness of what you know will not escape you.

very often lack of articulateness, inability to think clearly, is a function of not knowing how to classify things. when you look at something unfamiliar and you are able to call that unfamiliar, and also perhaps to say in what ballpark that unfamiliar object resides (a form of greeting, a work of art, an internet tool, things french, astrophysics), you feel enormously empowered. people who place stock in increasing their knowledgeableness experience this almost daily. something they used to find utterly baffling and strange becomes suddenly familiar, not because they know much more about it, but because they can place it. this empowerment generally produces the only apparently contradictory ability to say comfortably, "i don't know." it's hard to say "i don't know" when you don't know what it is you don't know, and how to go about finding out. so this is another sense in which socrates' famous statement works: that increase in knowledge is necessarily also increase in awareness of one's ignorance, and capacity not to be utterly terrified by it.