Goethe once remarked that "ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago." In that simple observation lies a quiet rebuke of modernity's obsession with novelty-the restless belief that progress is measured by how far we move from the past. Long before Goethe, Plato warned of the same intellectual arrogance through the voice of Socrates: "When a person supposes that he knows and does not know, this appears to be the great source of all the errors of the intellect." Both thinkers reveal the same truth: the gravest danger to human understanding is not ignorance itself, but ignorance parading as knowledge.

Few figures embody this danger more fully than Sigmund Freud. In presenting his theories of the human psyche as scientific truths, Freud replaced the ancient quest for wisdom with a new mythology of the unconscious. Where the ancients viewed the soul as a living harmony to be cultivated, Freud saw it as a battleground of repressed drives. Where Socrates urged humility before the mystery of the self, Freud declared mastery through interpretation. His legacy, therefore, is not one of enlightenment but of confusion-an intricate web of speculation clothed in the vocabulary of science.

Freud's influence reshaped how entire generations came to understand morality, sexuality, and consciousness. The timeless moral and philosophical insights that once guided human self-understanding were displaced by the rigid dogmas of psychology. In ignoring the accumulated wisdom of the ancients, Freud helped usher in an age in which self-knowledge ceased to be a process of ethical cultivation and became, instead, an exercise in clinical diagnosis. The tragedy of his influence lies not merely in the errors of his theories, but in their cultural aftermath. The harm is tragically incalculable, for it extends beyond the realm of ideas into the very foundations of how modern people are often dismissed, reduced, and misunderstood-all because Freud was not intellectually honest about the limits of his knowledge.

In truth, what we call mental illness is not always a disease to be eradicated; it is often a coping strategy-a way the mind adapts to distress, trauma, or existential dislocation. The symptoms that psychiatry labels as pathology may, in many cases, be understood as the psyche's effort to endure what feels unendurable. To see this is not to romanticize suffering, but to recognize the intelligence and resilience inherent in the human soul. The ancients grasped this profoundly: they treated mental and moral disorder as part of the same spiritual struggle, to be met with reflection, virtue, and inner balance-not merely medication or analysis. By reducing such struggles to diagnostic categories, Freud and his intellectual heirs stripped human experience of its moral and spiritual dimension. The individual became a case, the soul a mechanism, and healing a process of adjustment rather than transformation. What was once considered a path toward wisdom became a symptom to be managed.

The wisdom of Goethe and Plato thus converges as a warning to our age. When we mistake speculation for knowledge, when we forget that wisdom begins with humility, we lose sight of what it means to know ourselves. The task of philosophy-and indeed of all true inquiry-is not to invent new dogmas but to recover forgotten truths: that self-knowledge is the beginning of healing, and that the soul's disorder cannot be cured by denying its depth. To remember this is to reclaim something the modern world has nearly forgotten-that understanding the human mind is not a matter of technical mastery, but of moral insight. The ancients knew that wisdom begins with the admission of ignorance. If we could recover that humility, we might once again learn to see mental suffering not as a flaw in the machinery of the brain, but as the soul's cry for balance, meaning, and truth.

Next: Cicero was another very prophetic ancient. CLICK HERE