There is even a paradox in the name of philosophy.' Philosophy would rather love wisdom than have it. This is what exasperates those who interrogate it for answers and not questions. But this love must not be unhappy: being satisfied with unsatisfied love means loving love and at bottom feeling contempt for its object.' It changes the object, the beloved wisdom is not what one thought one had. Those who say they have wisdom do not doubt, what they have is dogma, but those who doubt whether they have it may gain another wisdom, knowledge. Wisdom seems to change according to its place: it is false wisdom at the beginning of the cognitive process, but may be true in one or other of its relative terms. Knowledge is a wisdom that one works towards and to gain it one must deny having it, know that one does not know. Thus, in order to grasp what philosophy is, we must ask what a knowledge of not-knowing can be -a Socratic question -and what kind of cognitive process it is that can start with what is false to reach what is true; and this is a question to which the answers might be Platonic or Aristotelian. From Plato to Aristotle the ousia, what truly is, which is translated as essence in Plato, and as substance in Aristotle, changes places in this process. And if every philosophy decides to see true being as the thought essence of things or else as their particular substance, it would be a good idea to formalize the difference -gnoseological, ontological, political -between the two philosophers. It is a tricky project because it will have to contravene the rules of interpretation to produce this formal reconstruction.
Knowledge of not-knowingThe paradox of philo-sophia has much to teach us. If I am a sophos, a wise man, then, by the very fact of positioning myself within the truth, I am not in it. We must know that we do not know, which not only defines Socrates, as we know, nor only the starting point of science, the initial shedding of 'preconceptions',3 but rather describes all knowledge. We should include the whole gamut of philosophies and knowledge in this knowing to not know. So we should not be in a hurry to specify this matter by translating it into one philosophy. 'Knowing to not know' means rejecting authority, ideal entities, prejudices ... in a given philosophy, but it is the nature of all of them that concerns us here, this essential paradox that lets them speak in this way. Though, as a general rule, philosophy, knowledge, requires given truth -myth, religion -to be abolished, though it comes out of 'nihilism', the 'speculative Good Friday',4 that does not tell us how knowing can be the way of being of not knowing.
