Goethe once remarked that ignorant men raise questions already answered by wiser minds long ago. In that observation lies a quiet rebuke of modernity’s obsession with novelty-the belief that progress is measured by distance from the past rather than depth of understanding. Long before Goethe, Plato warned of the same danger through Socrates: when a person believes he knows what he does not know, error becomes inevitable. Both thinkers converge on a single insight: the gravest threat to human understanding is not ignorance itself, but ignorance masquerading as knowledge.

From this follows a common obligation-intellectual, moral, and civic-to challenge the modern cult of novelty, scientific authority, and technocratic conceptions of the human soul. The question is not whether science has value, but whether speculative theories should be permitted to parade as settled knowledge simply because they speak in technical language. When conjecture acquires institutional authority, it ceases to be a hypothesis and becomes a dogma, shielded from the very scrutiny that genuine inquiry requires. This is not progress; it is a failure of intellectual humility.

Few figures exemplify this failure more vividly than Sigmund Freud. By presenting interpretive speculation as scientific discovery, Freud displaced the ancient pursuit of wisdom with a new mythology of the unconscious. Where classical philosophy understood the soul as a living harmony to be cultivated through virtue, reflection, and moral struggle, Freud recast it as a battlefield of repressed drives. Where Socrates urged humility before the mystery of the self, Freud promised mastery through interpretation. The result was not enlightenment, but confusion-an elaborate system of conjecture clothed in the authority of science. The elevation of such systems reveals a deeper cultural error: the belief that technical mastery can replace moral and spiritual insight. Plato, Socrates, and Goethe were not technicians of the psyche; they were guides to the art of living. Their genius lay not in producing explanatory mechanisms, but in understanding that mental suffering is ethically and existentially meaningful. They recognized that disorder of the soul is inseparable from questions of justice, purpose, and character. No amount of technical sophistication can replace this insight, because it belongs to wisdom, not method.

Freud's influence reshaped modern conceptions of morality, sexuality, and consciousness precisely by severing them from this ethical framework. Human beings ceased to be moral agents engaged in lifelong formation and became clinical subjects to be diagnosed. Self-knowledge, once understood as an arduous discipline of reflection and responsibility, was reduced to a technical exercise administered by experts. The tragedy of Freud's legacy lies not only in the weaknesses of his theories, but in their cultural aftermath: generations trained to see themselves as cases rather than souls.

This reduction has profound consequences for how suffering is understood and treated. What we now call mental illness is not always a disease to be eradicated; it is often a strategy of survival-an adaptation to trauma, injustice, or existential dislocation. Many symptoms psychiatry labels as pathology are better understood as the psyche's attempt to endure what feels otherwise unendurable. To recognize this is not to romanticize suffering, but to acknowledge the intelligence and resilience inherent in the human soul.

The ancients understood something modern culture prefers to avoid: there is no pathology where justice exists, and no justice where it does not. Much of what is diagnosed as mental disorder arises not from internal defect but from external injustice-social, economic, moral, and political. Is it truly difficult to grasp this, or do we simply prefer not to? Our prisons, after all, function in many respects as mental institutions, filled with those whose suffering has been criminalized rather than understood. To deny this is not realism; it is moral evasion.

By severing psychological distress from its ethical and spiritual dimensions, modern psychology stripped human experience of depth and meaning. The individual became a mechanism, healing became adjustment, and suffering became something to be managed rather than comprehended. What earlier traditions recognized as a possible path toward wisdom was reclassified as a symptom to be controlled. Transformation gave way to normalization, and insight was replaced by compliance. The warnings of Goethe and Plato therefore speak directly to our age. When speculation is mistaken for knowledge, authority for wisdom, and technique for understanding, humility disappears from inquiry. Yet humility is the beginning of all genuine knowledge. The task of philosophy-and of any serious attempt to understand the human mind-is not to invent ever-new explanatory systems, but to recover enduring truths: that self-knowledge precedes healing, that suffering carries meaning, and that the soul cannot be understood apart from moral life.

What is required now is not reactionary rejection, but purposeful living. We must abandon both blind faith in technical authority and reflexive opposition to it, and instead recover a vision of care grounded in moral seriousness. Without purpose, we become dismissive; without humility, we become cruel. Only by recognizing the ethical weight of suffering can we hope to provide the kind of care that heals rather than manages, that restores rather than categorizes. To remember this is to reclaim something nearly forgotten in the modern world-that understanding the human psyche is not a matter of technical mastery, but of ethical insight. The ancients knew that wisdom begins with the admission of ignorance. If that humility could be recovered, mental suffering might once again be seen not as a flaw in the machinery of the brain, but as the soul's cry for justice, balance, meaning, and truth.

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