Supposedly, the reason Socrates is famous is that he walked around Ancient Greece convincing everybody how little they knew about anything. This makes a certain amount of sense to us. He taught us the importance of skepticism, right? We like the idea of the underdog demonstrating that nobody knows as much as they think they do, and that we could probably all stand to be a little less certain about things.
The complicating thing is, Socrates wasn’t really talking about ignorance – he was talking about aporía (ἀπορία), a concept so much further from our ordinary experience that we don’t even have a good word for it in English. A better translation than ignorance might be confusion, but it literally just means a poria – no doors, no passageways, nowhere to go, no exit.
In this light, Socrates’ confusion starts to look a lot less familiar in terms of mainstream culture, but on the other hand maybe more familiar from a spiritual perspective. In The Wisdom of No Escape, Pema Chödrön describes a similar state: “One of the main discoveries of meditation is seeing how we continually run away from the present moment, how we avoid being here just as we are.”
Aporía, the state of no escape, is something we can actively take on with a disciplined practice like meditation, but at times it seems to take us on instead.
To me, The Hanged Man (image here from the Fyodor Pavlov Tarot) is first and foremost a card about aporía, especially in that involuntary sense. Jung describes this situation, unsurprisingly, as something that we bring upon ourselves subconsciously:
The unconscious always has a tendency to create an impossible problem, and as long as the patient has not been faced with such a problem, or as long as he can promise himself a solution of it, he has certainly not yet reached this particular problem, and all else is merely preparatory. For the unconscious always produces an impossible situation in order to force the individual to bring out his very best.
Conscious or subconscious, synchronicity or random chance, this is the thing about aporía: there’s absolutely no exit until suddenly there is.
The pressure inside the container builds up until suddenly the problem is solved (Ace of Swords, anyone?) but also the entire box you were thinking inside basically explodes and you have to look around and reorient yourself completely.
I don’t know about you, but to me, this makes more sense than a vague kind of skepticism as the kind of philosophy you could found an entire culture on.