Apology and Crito

the source of knowledge in which the moral resides. Everything depends on consciousness: on reflection (phronēsis prudence/practical wisdom), truth (alētheia truth), and, synonymous with that (Apol. 29 E), on the soul, that it be as good as possible. "Soul" becomes here almost identical with concept and truth, because it is identical with consciousness. To maintain the unity of practical consciousness, that is what matters for man (Apol. loc. cit.; Crito 47 E; Prot. 313 A; Men. 88 C); that is what one must care about first and foremost. That means caring about "oneself" more than about "one's own." In this point, Socrates is as positive as one can possibly be. But this positivity is, of course, only that of a demand, and therefore Socrates remains with the view that it is not a knowledge, not a completed cognition.

The supra-empirical character of the moral shimmers clearly through the Platonic presentation. And in this finally lies the connection of Socratic ethics with a highly purified religion placed exclusively on a moral foundation. "I believe in gods as none of my accusers do," Socrates is able to declare. Namely, he believes in the divinity as the expression for the reality of the moral, for the conviction, expressed by him warmly and strongly, that no one and nothing can harm the good, neither in this life nor in another, if there is one: God will not forsake the righteous. A more positive, a more practically effective ethics than this does not exist. The connection of the moral final end with this human life and its earthly tasks, however, does not need to be lost in the process. Once the goal, namely the fundamental law of legality itself, stood unshakeably firm, then the earthly actions of man also had to correct themselves in constant regard for this eternal goal. A multi-faceted system of technical knowledge was at hand, each well-founded on its peculiar law, thereby simultaneously enclosed within its defined limits; thus all were at least formally united by the same, all-mastering point of view of the concept, of the law itself. It only required the more definite working out of that last, direction-giving insight: the explicit elevation of that very point of view of the legal from the level of mere choice of means to that of the choice of purpose, in order to organize all human activity according to this supreme norm. Ethics takes exactly this path in Plato, and thus its completely positive turn becomes understandable as a direct continuation and