If You Think You’re Stupid, You May Be in Luck! This is For You. (And Everyone Else, Too.)

Street magicians and stage magicians alike are most often known for marketing their “superhuman abilities” which are actually just sleight of hand or works of illusion. These people are just your average, everyday people that have very particular skills, yet they sometimes become celebrities, famous to the point of being world renowned. Nearly everyone knows or has at one point heard of Harry Houdini, David Copperfield, Criss Angel, or Penn and Teller, all of which are men famous for their skills in illusion which we commonly call “magic” even though any competent adult (and most kids, honestly) know that it is not actually magic.

In the same way, there are other qualities that are seemingly superhuman but are really just… well, human. In Plato’s “Apology” from The Trial and Death of Socrates: Four Dialogues, Socrates talks about an extraordinary intelligence or wisdom that others may have, but he definitely does not. He describes his form of wisdom as “such wisdom as is attainable by man” but describes the wisdom of others as “a superhuman wisdom, which [he] may fail to describe, because [he has] it not”(22). He is unable to describe it because he does not understand it; his lack of understanding is not because he does not himself have the superhuman wisdom, though he does not, but rather that this so called superhuman wisdom does not exist at all.

Socrates describes his quest for someone who possesses this supernatural wisdom, yet each person he thinks he has found that has the supernatural wisdom for which he is searching turns out to not be as wise as he thought. Even the politician who Socrates chose to examine, thinking he was a wise man, he realized that “although he was thought wise by many, and wiser still by himself,” he was not truly the wise man everyone thought he was(23). Socrates then realizes that he is better off than the politician, “for [the politician] knows nothing, and thinks that he knows,” but Socrates says that he “know[s] nothing nor think[s] that [he] know[s],”(23).

Allow me to present you with this, for a thought: If Socrates thinks that he knows nothing, then regardless of whether or not he actually knows anything, he would not know the truth about whether or not he knows anything in the first place. He could know everything in the world but think that he knows nothing, and he would never know how much he knows or does not know. (What? I just confused myself. It’s a whole mess of a paradox.)

The point is, the ability to give off the appearance of wisdom, or the appearance of a lack thereof, is completely independent of actually having wisdom. There are plenty of people in the world who seem intelligent, but when they speak you realize they are not; there are also plenty of seem not so bright, but their minds are quietly working wonders and pondering things many of us would never imagine. Even the smartest sounding people can be incredibly stupid if you really dig into what they say.

Because of the inconsistency between the appearance and actuality of intelligence or wisdom, this “supernatural wisdom” Socrates is in pursuit of is something he will never find, because no one has this wisdom he wants to find. It does not exist on a human scale, hence the name superhuman. Even Socrates most likely knows it does not exist if he is the one labeling it as superhuman in the first place. So the next time you see someone who seems to be a genius, or able to do extraordinary things that a human should not be able to do, proceed with caution. Take their presence with a grain of salt and do not discount your own intelligence compared to the way theirs seem to be. Socrates is renowned as one of the wisest and most intelligent philosophers of all time, and he literally said that he knows nothing at all. He thought he was stupid, but he was much wiser and more intelligent than he thought. (So you probably are too.)