“Know thyself”

“Know thyself” is a Socratic maxim that Dr Cottard treats both as an overpraised philosophical commonplace and as a useful piece of academic instruction. Its appearance in his dinner-table argument exposes the gap between his professed skepticism and his own reliance on the phrase as a marker of culture and teaching.

The maxim in Cottard’s argument

Cottard invokes the maxim in Greek while asking what he knows, then grants that Socrates was right to counsel self-knowledge and moderation. The concession is brief: he immediately wonders how those words alone could have kept Socrates’s name alive for so long. To Cottard, the maxim’s enduring reputation seems out of proportion to what he regards as the slight substance of Socrates’s philosophy.

He sharpens the comparison by setting Socrates against Charcot and other modern researchers, whose work on the suppression of the pupillary reflex as a syndrome of general paralysis, he argues, is far more remarkable and grounded in evidence, yet nearly forgotten. The contrast makes the maxim part of a broader dispute over what deserves lasting recognition: memorable teaching and inherited reputation, or scientific work with demonstrable results.

Teaching and self-contradiction

Cottard later admits that Socrates and similar thinkers remain necessary to what he calls superior culture and the ability to expound ideas. He says he begins his own course by quoting the maxim to his students, and cites the praise of old Bouchard, who congratulated him on it. The phrase he has just used to diminish Socrates thus also serves as a credential in Cottard’s account of his own professional practice.

That reversal gives the expression its force in the scene. Cottard disputes the greatness of a philosopher whose celebrated words he continues to teach; his skepticism does not free him from the tradition he mocks. The maxim functions at once as an object of criticism and as a compact, recognizable token of learning.