This is a controversial area in modern scholarship about Socrates and I cannot hope to reproduce all the nuances of the scholarly debate. I also doubt whether it is possible to find an entirely satisfactory solution. Socrates the radical sceptic undermines Socrates the moralist, and vice versa. Either we must see Socrates' renunciation of knowledge and wisdom as just a rhetorical gesture or we must view his claims about morality as mere guesses or beliefs, albeit perhaps true ones, but not knowledge.
If the problem has a solution, it might seem to lie in the concept of 'Socratic irony'. Socrates' irony is one of his most famous attributes. But it is difficult to define, because the term is used to mean a number of different things.
In antiquity, Socrates was known for his eironeia. But this ancient Greek term does not correspond exactly to the modern concept of 'irony'. In English, 'ironic' utterances may be those where a speaker says the opposite of what he means to convey. I might, ironically, claim that they have lovely weather up in Glasgow. But 'irony' can have a much wider range of meanings than this. In 'dramatic irony', for example, the words of the speaker are more true than he realises. So Oedipus says that he will fight for Laius as if he were his father - not realising that he really is his father. 'Irony' is used to describe any kind of gap between appear- ance and reality.
Eironeia is more specific. It is a mode of behaviour - a kind of mock modesty or hypocrisy. Eironeia involves speak- ing in understatements, describing oneself as less good than one really is - or perhaps as less good than one believes one really is. Uriah Heep in Dickens's novel David Copperfield is a classic modern example of a person characterised by a kind of eironeia. Heep claims, ad nauseam, to be 'very 'umble'. But the reader always knows that Heep is a snake: we can hear in the name 'Uriah Heep', 'you are a creep'. His self-professed humility is a not very successful mask for his ruthless avarice and social ambition. In fact the mask acts as an advertisement: the claim to humility underlines Heep's desire for power.
When other characters in Plato's works accuse Socrates of 'your usual eironeia', they often seem to mean something like Uriah Heep's fawning false modesty. In the Republic, for example, when Thrasymachus accuses Socrates of eironeia, it is because he is enraged by Socrates' sly deceitfulness, his refusal to fight fair.
Mock modesty, in the case of either Socrates or Uriah Heep, can be seen as a form of inverted boasting. It is clear - as we shall see in more detail in the next chapter - that many of Socrates' contemporaries felt he acted in a superior or arrogant way towards his fellow citizens.
In general, Socrates' professions of ignorance are not explicitly described as eironeia in our ancient sources. But one might well connect Socrates' disavowal of wisdom with his arrogant mock modesty. Socrates pretended to think he knew nothing in order to take the moral high ground against his interlocutors. His modesty was a form of pride. On this interpretation, 'Socratic irony' is a way of being fake. It need not be seen as actually deceptive: Uriah Heep, for example, does not fool anybody into thinking that he really is humble. Instead, Socratic eironeia, like Heep's humility, might be a supposed claim to inferiority that really functions as a claim to superiority.
But many of Socrates' admirers have been troubled by this way of understanding his 'irony' - for obvious reasons. It makes him sound so thoroughly horrible.
There are several possible ways to make Socratic mock modesty sound less obnoxious. The central question here is what Socrates' motives were for speaking and acting in a way that seems, on the face of it, dishonest.
Aristotle suggested that Socrates was self-deprecating out of genuine dislike for showing off - not out of arrogance. He presents Socrates' eironeia as a gentlemanly refusal to blow his own trumpet. But Aristotle lived a generation after Socrates and never knew him. Contemporaries certainly did not see him this way.
Modern interpreters struggle to understand Socratic irony. One approach to the problem, favoured by Leo Strauss among others, is to regard irony as a mechanism to protect a hidden, unspoken truth from the uninitiated mob. According to this view, Socrates - or rather, Plato - uses 'irony' in order to express his secret doctrines to a set of ini- tiated students, while keeping them secret from those who do not and cannot understand. Plato's Socrates does indeed have definite moral beliefs, but he chooses at times to speak 'ironically' or to distance himself from his own doctrines, so that stupid or frivolous people will not have access to his true meaning. Here, 'irony' is still a mark of extreme arro- gance, but it is arrogance harnessed to a political mission.
Alternatively, irony may be seen as a tool for teaching everybody - not just those who are already initiated. An important champion of the ironic Socrates as a devoted moral teacher was the philosopher Gregory Vlastos. He insisted that Socrates never tries to deceive anybody, or tell anything other than the truth. Instead, his ironic utterances are true in one sense, although obviously false in another. Vlastos dubbed this possibility 'complex irony'. According to Vlastos, when Socrates says, 'I am not wise', he means that he does not possess certain knowledge, but he does possess 'elenctic' or 'fallible' knowledge, derived from refuting the claims of his interlocutors.
It remains a little unclear why Socrates did not spell out his position clearly, without any irony at all. Perhaps, as other commentators suggest, Socrates wanted to make his students figure out the answer for themselves. Speaking in an ambiguous or opaque way about, for example, knowl- edge could be seen as a means to force students to analyse the different types of knowledge for themselves. Another, related possibility is that Socratic irony typically depends on an unspoken conditional - which, again, students or inter- locutors must work out for themselves. If Socrates' profes- sion of ignorance is an example of 'conditional irony' (as suggested by another scholar, Iakovos Vasiliou), the implied conditional could go in one of two directions. He could mean, 'I know nothing of any value (if valuable knowledge is the stuff which generals, poets and politicians know - but of course it is not).' Or he could mean, 'I know nothing of any value (if valuable knowledge is the property of the god alone).' It seems possible to understand Socrates' irony in both of these two ways. On either reading, he is extraordi- narily self-confident in relation to his fellow human beings and extraordinarily humble in relation to the god.
One final possibility is that Socratic irony should be understood as a kind of radical ambiguity, or unknowability. Perhaps - as Alexander Nehemas suggests - Socrates' para- doxical statements have no 'hidden doctrine' behind them, and no specific pedagogical purpose. Rather, Socrates' irony is a fundamental unknowability. We cannot tell whether he is arrogant or humble, whether he is wise or not, or whether his provocative attitudes should be seen as claims to truth or simply philosophical gestures.
None of these approaches provides an entirely satisfac- tory solution to the problem with which we began. The scholarly debate on the topic is extensive and more complex than I am able fully to indicate here. But whatever we think of Socrates' irony, it remains difficult to reconcile his claim to know 'little or nothing of any value' with his confident assertions about ethics. We may still wonder what status any positive claim by Socrates can have, if no human being is capable of true wisdom.