Plato's Theory of Ideas

The entirely new reflection upon the form of knowledge had to lead, in an initially exclusively critical application to the examination of the existing, accepted knowledge, to the purely negative result that this accepted knowledge was not true knowledge because it did not fulfill the formal requirements of such. And Socrates, according to Plato's account, did not go beyond this merely critical application. Therefore, his philosophy was entirely absorbed in criticism: in seeking, testing, exposing, in reflecting upon oneself, and awakening toward self-reflection. Its exclusive method was conversation, question, and answer, regularly with a negative outcome. The investigation begins with the near, the everyday, the supposedly known, but only to ask back from there to the general, lawful basis, to the logical presuppositions of the judgments that were confidently—but without logical reflection—made on the basis of experience. It always turns out that one is unable to provide a satisfactory account of these, but instead finds oneself immediately entangled in contradiction with oneself. The Socratic not-knowing thus signifies a failure to understand that which is empirically conscious, but which, according to the now-attained stricter concept of knowledge, cannot be called "known."

Nevertheless, the Socratic not-knowing experiences more than a limitation. Firstly, positive knowledge in the empirical-technical domain is so little denied by Socrates that its recognition is, rather, the presupposition of his entire reflection. He had observed that technical correctness in everything and anything for which there is a technique—and he understood this concept so broadly that it includes the theoretical understanding of every determined, bounded activity—rests on one thing alone: namely, understanding. He transferred the law of technique—that the ability to do something is founded in knowledge (for understanding tells us both in one)—as a requirement, to all human action, especially to general and peculiarly "human," that is, moral "virtue." Yet in doing so, he encountered a strange contrast. In the entire field of technique, understanding (that is, knowledge and thus the ability to do) is attainable; therefore, the intellect exercises an undisputed rule. In the moral sphere, to which the political also belongs—in the sphere not of making or merely external acting, but of doing—it should be even more so, for it concerns most closely "ourselves," our practical consciousness, and not merely "what is ours," that is, what remains external to us.