Apology and Crito

has the value of the means for another purpose; it should therefore, above all, be subject to the rule of consciousness. But it is evidently not dominant there, for examination shows that no one, however high a reputation for superior understanding he may enjoy, is able to provide a satisfactory account of the grounds of his judgment and action in this field when seriously questioned. Every artistic activity, every most common craft or business has its definitely definable efficiency, virtue, or excellence (aretē excellence/virtue, to be understood throughout as an abstract noun derived from agathon good, i.e., efficient); likewise, man according to his bodily being has: health; for each of these areas there exists the "expert" to whom anyone who is not knowledgeable in the matter can turn; each of these things is accordingly also teachable and learnable; in none of them does one easily consider oneself an expert, or is considered as such by others, if one is not, for the sure test is the work one can show as the achievement of one's art, or the success in teaching, which in turn manifests itself doubtlessly in the achievements of the students. Only in the most important of all, the specifically human, namely moral "virtue," is no one able to prove themselves irrefutably as an expert. What is the reason for this strangely different behavior? Evidently none other than this: in technical matters, it is only a matter of the fitness of the means for a purpose already assumed, whereas in moral matters, it is a matter of the justification of the purpose-setting itself, of the principle of action. To inquire back to the principle—that was the great, new thing that Socrates initiated. Without the principle, however, technical knowledge also stands as if in the air. This knowledge is, to express it in advance in the terminology of Plato's developed theory of science, only hypothetical: a knowledge based on assumptions that are themselves not further accounted for, or are not demanded at all within the consideration in question. Such conditional knowledge is undoubtedly possible on the basis of experience and is achieved. But it does not form the actual point of inquiry for Socrates, who rather aimed at a radical justification of human volition and action. For such a purpose, mere technical understanding—however highly he held it in its own sphere—could not suffice. Therefore, for him, "induction," which proceeds from the empirically known and undisputed, never serves the solution of the question raised, but always only as a means to a progressive deepening of the questioning itself, which then very soon reaches the