First Chapter

point where no induction is able to provide an answer anymore. It is the strangest misunderstanding that Socrates taught the finding of the definition by way of induction. If the testimony of Plato is to count for anything at all, he taught them to seek and not to find. That was his science of non-knowing.

Yet it never becomes doubtful that the excellence of human action, just like that of any technique, must rest upon the concept, that it must depend absolutely upon knowledge, upon understanding; that in the field of action (the choice of purpose) just as in that of making or executing (the choice of means), the law must rule. Reflection, consciousness must here, as there, hold sway in man. His doing is good insofar as it is in accordance with the law, with the ratio reason (the Logos, Crito 46 B, 48 C etc., synonymous with: "truth itself," 48 A), and not otherwise. True, Socrates does not know how to determine this required law in any closer way; in this respect, his confession of non-knowing is to be taken quite strictly. He does not get beyond the merely formal point—that virtue must consist in the concept, in the law—not as if he were already satisfied by this, but because he truly does not know how to proceed further here. But even so, there lies in it a double positivity. Firstly, the formal aspect of knowing first achieved pure detachment in this way. Therefore, the development of logical consciousness, that is, of the consciousness of science, has received its decisive, eternal impulse in its form from Socrates. One must appreciate the triad of Socrates-Plato-Aristotle as the birth of the spirit and the form of Western science. But secondly, even viewed merely as ethics, the philosophy of Socrates has truly not remained without positive content and effective power. Indeed, Socrates cannot tell us what the Good is in the end; but that it is unconditionally the healing of man, that no consideration of prudence may arise against the unconditional demand of legality, that for this one thing everything else—"life" with everything it may offer, even the hope of another life—is to be willingly sacrificed: this emerges in the Apology and the associated short dialogue Crito sublimely enough, and truly not merely with rhetorical effect. This contrast is consciously defined for Socrates as that of the psychic and the bodily, of the self and that which is only of the self (ta heautou things belonging to oneself). We recognize in this the indication of practical self-consciousness as