Cont Philos Rev

DOI 10.1007/s11007-014-9312-2

The Socratic question and Aristotle

Hans-Georg Gadamer • Carlo DaVia

Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Keywords Gadamer
Aristotle
Plato
Socrates
Ethics

Translator’s Introduction: Hans-Georg Gadamer first published this essay in 1991

in his Gesammelte Werke, but it appeared shortly before in a Gedenkschrift for Karl-
Heinz Ilting, a scholar of German Idealism and ancient philosophy who studied
under Gadamer’s colleague, Erich Rothacker. The essay is the product of a lifetime
of studies in Plato and Aristotle, reflecting in particular Gadamer’s ongoing
preoccupation with the ‘‘Socratic question’’ and the development of his views on it
since his Habilitationsschrift, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics (1931). The Socratic
question consists of two intertwined questions: (1) what is the good thing to do in a
particular situation; and (2) what is the human good. The latter question is the
subject of philosophical ethics and motivates the thought of both Plato and Aristotle.
As Gadamer argues here, but more extensively in The Idea of the Good in Platonic-
Aristotelian Philosophy (1978), both thinkers see this question of the good as
grounded in the relationship between logos and ethos, between practical knowledge
about how to act and the social customs that inevitably shape habits and the
possibilities for action. The accounts of this relationship given by Plato and
Aristotle differ in their form of expression. Whereas Plato attempts to clarify the
human good in dialogues that poetically incorporate both thought and story (logos
and mythos), Aristotle does so in lecture notes that raise ethical notions like virtue
and prudence (phronēsis) to the level of the concept. As Gadamer has argued since
his earliest writings, conceptualization brings insightful clarity, but it comes at a
cost, namely ‘‘the inexhaustible ambiguity’’ that the words of a living language

A great debt of gratitude is owed to Greg Lynch, David Vessey, Weneta Dischlieva, and Babette Babich
for their help in improving both this introduction and translation.

H.-G. Gadamer
C. DaVia (&)

Fordham University, Bronx 10458, NY, USA
e-mail: davia@fordham.edu

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possess.1 This ambiguity of meaning does not imply that truth in ethics is
unavailable, but only that the truth cannot be fully grasped by this art of
conceptualization. Aristotle’s ‘‘artificial’’ accounts of sophia and synesis, which
seek the univocity distinctive of definitions, exemplify this deficiency. These critical
remarks appear to reflect a recent departure for Gadamer from his earlier conviction
that the content of a Platonic dialogue, if it is to be understood philosophically, must
ultimately be mapped onto the conceptual level, as Aristotle himself does.2
Gadamer seems to have realized that whereas conceptualization can provide some
clarity to features of the phenomenon under consideration, it is the Socratic
conversation that brings one far closer to the truth. For this reason Gadamer
subsequently spent his final years thinking about how philosophy today can move
‘‘to and fro’’ between the living word and the logical concept in the Socratic fashion
that occurs authentically only in dialogue.3
Any understanding of the development of the Greek idea of practical philosophy
depends on seeing that two fundamentally different genres of philosophical texts
have come to us from Plato and Aristotle. On the one hand there are artful
conversations that recall Socrates or someone resembling him in lively presence,
and on the other hand there are artless lines of a mind articulating itself in mental
labor and verbal teaching. The former is literature in the high sense of the word. The
latter is a material that is difficult to decipher and has to be brought to life. But with
respect to both there is the same task. The two kinds of text, like two forms of
speaking, take up the same endeavor of giving an account [Rechenschaft zu geben]
and thereby leading the Socratic question to its truth.
The kind of content conforms to the kinds of text. On the one hand we have in
Plato’s dialogues the movement of conversation like a vivid anamnesis, an
awakening of prior knowledge and an exercise in retaining the known that in such
retention rises to its self-determination out of an indeterminate context. The inner

1
Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Plato’s Dialectical Ethics, trans. Robert M. Wallace (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1991), 8–9.
2
‘‘Thus I would certainly adhere to the guiding thesis, as in my first book, that the Platonic dialogues can
be depicted in their content on the conceptual level of Aristotelian teachings. Nevertheless I would admit
that the real involvement in a Socratic dialogue, composed for us by Plato, moves us closer to the subject-
matter than any conceptual fixation ever could,’’ quoted from Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘‘Gadamer on
Gadamer,’’ in Gadamer and Hermeneutics, ed. Hugh J. Silverman, trans. Birgit Schaaf and Gary E.
Aylesworth (New York: Routledge, 1991).
The present essay is accordingly one of the few occasions on which Gadamer discusses explicitly the
shortcomings of Aristotle’s art of conceptual distinction. See also: Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘‘Aristotle and
Imperative Ethics,’’ in Hermeneutics, Religion, and Ethics, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1999), 155–156; Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘‘Die Idee der praktischen Philosophie,’’ in
Gesammelte Werke, vol. 10 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1995), 240, 246; Aristotle, Nikomachische Ethik VI, ed.
and trans. Hans-Georg Gadamer (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1998), passim.
3
Cf. Gadamer’s 1996 interview with Jean Grondin: ‘‘I would still like to do some basic investigations to
the line that goes back and forth marking the separation between word and concept. One of these essays
would deal with the topic of what ethics is, and what it means that one can talk about something practical
in theoretical terms,’’ quoted from Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jean Grondin, ‘‘Looking Back with
Gadamer Over His Writings and Their Effective History: A Dialogue with Jean Grondin,’’ Theory,
Culture & Society 23, no. 1 (2006): 99.

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unity of ‘‘anamnesis’’ and ‘‘dihairesis’’—of awakening and bringing the idea out of
its not yet illuminated ground, and on the other side the differentiation of this
recollection in thought—is presented not only in the syntactic form of question and
answer, of argument and aporia, but also as a being with one another [Miteinander]
of people whose words are spoken to one another and therein also find ultimate
attestation. It is a communicative event that not only first brings the words into their
own truth through the exchange and commonality of conversation, but also leads
people conversing in this way to their true selves. Everything appears governed by
the Socratic question of the good. As in a marvelous inter-reflection, soul, city, and
universe come across this Platonic recollection as a great image of the good about
which the Socratic question asked and to which the answer was always absent
among his contemporaries. In this way it is a horizon of questioning set forth into a
new reality, a horizon that is expressed half in logos, half in mythos. And it is not
first logos that then finds its crowning in a mythos. At every step it is both thought
and story, logos and mythos.
On the other side stands the Aristotelian work. Here also on occasion there are
series of arguments and analyses of fantastic consequence and at the same time
stylistic force. Such passages are perhaps rightly diagnosed by philological
researchers as quotes from genuine works of literature by Aristotle that are lost to
us. His ‘‘flumen orationis aureum’’ [‘‘golden flow of speech’’] was famous in
antiquity. What we read, however, is generally a casual and elliptical mesh of notes
that all come from living language and define within it [i.e. living language] the
fields of meaning, indicate directions of meaning, and in this way strive to bring
thought to the concept. To the extent that it concerns the Socratic question of the
good, these texts strive to conceptualize the good in human life as a prakton—that is
to say, the good in the whole concreteness of praxis. Two kinds of text, two
frameworks of thought stand here before us and seek an answer to the same
question.
Already from the outset it was clear to me that the task is to think the question of
the human good, as the Platonic Philebus put it in the artful fiction of the mixed
drink of life, together with the Aristotelian analysis of the self-articulation of human
existence in its striving for the good. It concerns the presence of the Socratic
question in Aristotle. Afterwards I often wondered this especially with a view to the
works of Leo Strauss, and here I venture an answer.4 One must approach the
Aristotelian ethics not so much with the question, in what respect does Aristotle
distinguish himself from Plato and the Platonic Socrates, but rather how Aristotle
attempts to take up and integrate into his thinking the intellectual legacy that he
received from Socrates through Plato. The beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics
already shows how this line of questioning is a more fitting approach to the practical
philosophy of Aristotle. There the program of a practical philosophy is developed,

4
Translator note: For more on Gadamer’s relationship to Strauss, see: Ernest L. Fortin and Hans-Georg
Gadamer, ‘‘Gadamer on Strauss: An Interview,’’ Interpretation 12, no. 1 (1984): 1–13. In that interview
Gadamer explains that Strauss, particular in his Persecution and the Art of Writing, helped him appreciate
the ‘‘external or dramatic elements’’ of the Platonic dialogues. Gadamer, however, notes that Strauss and
his followers at times ‘‘overemphasize’’ these dramatic elements and consequently make claims irrelevant
to the content of the dialogue.

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and therein we are made fully aware that Aristotle has here a Socratic-Platonic
legacy to manage when he seeks the good, which is what matters in every human
accomplishment, in every inquiring mind and in every practically engaged person.
The good appears as the for-the-sake-of-which of human knowing and willing.
Aristotle does not seek an account from this or that person that he encounters, as
Plato does in the mouth of Socrates. But he seeks to give an account to himself and
to those who hear or read him. To give an account means to put up for discussion
[Rede stehen]. The way in which Aristotle puts the issue up for discussion allows us
to recognize our own questions in him. It concerns a twofold question that still here,
as with Socrates, always appears as one. On the one hand it is clearly the question
that is asked in the carrying out of practical life and that seeks to hit the good, the
correct in one’s own choice and decision. On the other hand there is a kind of
making conscious of what correct action and rational knowledge are and what they
alone can be. So our reflection from the start decomposes into these two intertwined
and yet separate questions about the practical knowledge of humans and about the
thoughtful reflection that has human praxis—conduct and knowledge—for its
object. The latter is the business of a philosophical ethics. The justification of the
philosophical-theoretical undertaking vis-à-vis human praxis is a task accompany-
ing philosophy. Yet how can philosophy serve practical reason and at the same time
be knowledge of the universal? Or should it merely exist as a conciliatory art of
living, as would become the signature of ethics later in the Hellenistic Age? We are
thus compelled to turn back to Aristotle and ask for clarification about the meaning
of a philosophical ethics and its grounding or justification.
There one must certainly begin with the question of practical knowledge itself.
Since Plato the view that ‘‘aretē’’ is knowledge has been believed to be the Socratic
‘‘doctrine.’’ What does Aristotle tell us about this? We must begin with Book VI of
the Nicomachean Ethics (or was it originally a text of the Eudemian Ethics, whose
transmission to us was so mangled?). Book VI takes up the task of laying out in its
own conceptual structure the element of logos to which the more exact analyses of
ethos always amounted. Thus it is convincing that no universally applicable rules
can be formulated when one is concerned with the question of right living and must
act. At first, however, it always appears dissatisfying that as a final answer it always
only turns out: ‘‘as the right logos commands,’’ or ‘‘as the spoudaios would say it,’’
or even hōs dei, ‘‘as is fitting.’’ What then does logos mean here, and how does this
logos relate to ethos?
The relationship between ethos and logos shapes the architecture of the ethics
lecture. It is the result of an analytical work, as it appears already to have become a
fixed stock of tasks for Plato and the Platonic Academy. Aristotle refers explicitly to
this Platonic preparation when in Nicomachean Ethics I.13 he references the
‘‘exoterikoi logoi’’ in which the difference between the logon echon and the alogon
is introduced through a distinction of two parts of the soul. Here it is significant
what Aristotle elsewhere emphasizes much more explicitly, namely that the talk of
parts of the soul is fundamentally inexact and improper. In truth one can indeed
sensibly speak of parts of the body, even though it may be asked if it is proper to say
that one smells with the nose. One surely smells with the help of the nose, but it is
not the nose itself that smells. Plato already brought this to ultimate clarity in the

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Theaetetus. But in any case it is still clearer that with the parts of the soul it is
always the entire soul, the entire living human, that is put into one or another
possibility of being. One is always wholly involved in feeling, desiring, or thinking.
Even with the division of the soul that Plato develops with artful emphasis in the
Republic, one should not forget that the possible division is associated with the ideal
citizenry and the ideal state. This means that in principle the ideal of a city consists
in the parts, classes, or however one may want to designate it, which constitute the
citizenry of a city, a citizenry who live in concord and not in strife, division, and in
the horrors of civil war. It is exactly in this very sense that one must begin with the
harmony of the soul and unity of the human, which can conceptually explicate its
normative orientations in either the manner of ethos or phronēsis. Also here it is not
the division, but the unity that is essential. Aristotle himself gives the illustration of
the concave and convex sides of a curve. The task which Aristotle has put for the
grounding of practical philosophy is therefore principally to clarify this inner
connection between a knowledge of what is practically correct and ethos, the being
of a person that has become and is already pre-formed. It does not, therefore,
concern a knowledge for everyone. It is not a knowledge that someone can achieve
through learning. This knowledge exists only in the orientation in which the agent
always already finds herself as having been raised in society. In this respect the
distinction between intellectual and moral virtue is an analytical separation of the
inseparable, and that is the actual truth of the Socratic question about the being and
knowledge of the good.5
If that is so, there is then a twofold distinction to make in the ways of knowing
that concerns us here. The one is a distinction between (1) the kind of theoretical
knowledge that knows to recognize that which is immutably true, and (2) the
practical kind of knowledge in which the object of knowing is what one has to do. It
must thereby concern beings that are subject to change. That is certainly the first
distinction between theoretical and practical knowing. That sounds completely
innocuous, almost like the new version of the classic Platonic distinction between
being and becoming. But does this distinction suffice? Will we not be led down a
wrong path with this Platonic distinction? Is the practical knowledge about which
we are asking really a knowledge of the changing and changeable? Here it is
pressing to distinguish the knowledge that we find so essentially fused [verschmol-
zen] with ethos from that other knowing that has in view the production of
something. The craftsman makes something by the power of his knowledge and
ability such that he changes a material, a changeable material. The person acting has
the good in view. Thus these two main issues emerge, the distinction between
theoretical and practical knowledge, as well as the distinction between technical and
practical knowledge. Both distinctions are developed by Aristotle with an inventory
of words that Plato himself deliberately still used without any real distinction. To
distinguish them is the particular task of conceptual development that Aristotle takes
up in Bk. VI of the Nicomachean Ethics. We will be able to see from the analysis
5
That the expression ‘‘prohairesis’’ ultimately points to the same inseparability of ethos and phronēsis
has, it seems to me, recently been confirmed in Lambros Couloubaritsis, ‘‘Le problème de la proairésis
chez Aristote,’’ in Annales de l’Iinstitut de Philosophie (Brussels: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles,
1972), 7–50.

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what gain conceptual development brings. And perhaps also what it loses and
relinquishes.
Looking briefly at the particular aim of practical knowledge, let us examine the
precise analysis of the five forms in which the Greek language knew to speak of a
complete kind of knowledge. These are: technē, knowing skill; epistēmē, science;
phronēsis, practical knowledge; sophia, wisdom; and lastly nous, reason [Vernunft]
(if it is permitted here to use this questionable equivalent for the Greek word). In the
treatment of these five guiding words for complete knowledge the Aristotelian art of
distinction proves its worth. It offers the opportunity to consider the gain and loss of
the turn to conceptual speech. What is lost is without a doubt the inexhaustible
ambiguity that the poetic word always has and that imbeds a truth in the Platonic art
of Socratic conversation that the concept can never fully exhaust, even when the
conceptual word contains some of the radiance of meaning [Bedeutungsaustrah-
lung] that a word alive in language possesses. Aristotle’s art of distinction has its
model in Plato’s dihairesis, his dialectical art of distinction that culminates in
conversation. But with Plato this always remains bound in an ironically-colored
event of understanding. Aristotle’s conceptual analysis certainly does not want for
its part to be understood as a form of demonstration, as apodeixis. It can only be
epagoge, a leading towards the sense of the thing up for discussion [der in Rede
stehenden Dinge]. But it must refine and be adequate to the tightened demand of
conceptual determination, more so than is in place and required in the course of
Platonic dialogue. Thus Aristotle is here led to bring the matter to clarity by
separating epistēmē, as science, from technē, the skill of making, the knowledge of
how one makes and produces something. Plato, by contrast, had in his dialogues
maintained the solid fusion of both concepts which he discovered in linguistic use.
The Aristotelian undertaking becomes even clearer when he seeks to separate
phronēsis from sophia, although ‘‘sophia’’ in Greek usage undoubtedly possesses no
exclusive connection to the theoretical attitude. Thus what language knew is here
lost when it gives up the intrinsic belonging together of epistēmē, technē, sophia,
and phronēsis. The gain from this, however, is that practical knowledge, the
‘‘knowing-for-oneself,’’ clearly emerges as an entirely different kind of knowledge.
Only in the obscure concept of nous—the common root of all knowing awareness
that is present still even before logos—does that which is common find an echo in
the Aristotelian analysis.
The fundamental Aristotelian concern reveals itself above all in the separation of
technē from phronēsis. There we read, for example, the challenging sentence: ‘‘For
phronēsis there is no lēthē, no forgetting’’ (EN Z.5, 1140b29). As if one would have
such an intellectual conception of the virtue of practical knowledge, a conception of
the sort that certainly belongs to learnable knowledge and even technē. The
separation of phronēsis from technē is here clearly supported in that forgetting and
unlearning, which can only belong to learnable knowledge, are not attributed to
phronēsis. In this way we point in the direction of ethical rationality, of sensitivity
to what is obligatory, which we could call ‘‘conscientiousness,’’ though without
thereby being able to offer an appropriate concept. I once told Ilting that in 1923
Heidegger remarked about this distinction between phronēsis and lēthē whereby
phronēsis cannot forget: ‘‘That is conscience.’’ Ilting objected to this, however the

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remark, which was provocative at the time, made apparent how difficult it was for
Aristotle to develop an appropriate conception of practical knowledge. The concept
of conscience familiar to us is, as is well known, first coined in the Hellenistic Age
with the word ‘‘syneidēsis,’’ finds further Christian development in the word
conscientia, and it remains then still free of all Pietist connotations. And yet
whoever is reminded of the Socratic dialogues must recognize the connection
between Socratic justification and the internalization of moral self-understanding
within Christian teaching.
A similar instance in which difficulties arise for Aristotle in the development of
concepts lies in the deliberate shift in meaning that Aristotle asks of the concept
‘‘synesis.’’ Here Aristotle clearly picks up an expression for a purely intellectual
capacity, for facility of learning, and so for understanding that takes place in
learning. Aristotle here shifts the meaning of ‘‘synesis’’ in an entirely different
direction, namely in that it means an insightful understanding. Being sympathetic
when someone needs another has its place in the realm of phronēsis and moral-
ethical relations. This is what Aristotle wants to indicate. Here the nearness of other
expressions comes to his aid, namely gnōmē and suggnōmē, which we can render in
German as ‘‘insight’’ [Einsicht] and ‘‘leniency’’ [Nachsicht]. All that brings into
play the field of epieikēs, of the fair, i.e. of considerations of fairness, and the
judgment of human ethical conduct. Thus the new Aristotelian art of distinction
succeeds both in replacing the poetic means with which Plato presents the Socratic
elenchos and gives its ethical effect, as well as in bringing everything to conceptual
statement. Here the famed Socratic doctrine of virtue as knowledge acquires its true
sense. This becomes completely clear at the end of Book VI of the Nicomachean
Ethics.
When we look at the critical dispute with Plato that Aristotle raises in the field of
metaphysics, of ‘‘first philosophy,’’ the art of conceptual distinction becomes
especially valuable insofar as he in his critique makes evident the fact that the true
sense of ‘‘eidos’’ can only consist in the discerning of its being in a being. In this
way it in reality dissolves a false hypostatization of the Idea. Through his kind of
critique he has for a long time blocked the true reading of the Platonic dialogue. In
an entirely different, late, inwardly turned attitude of the soul [innerlich gewordenen
Seelenhaltung], Plotinus then completely re-interpreted and raised to the stage of a
world- and soul-drama the doctrine of two worlds, which Aristotle had polemically
sharpened and, even as he combatted it, dogmatically reinforced it.6 The Platonism
of Plotinus and its adoption by Augustine thereby reached a new productive effect
and always subtly accompanied the school of Christian philosophy that experienced
its completion under the banner of Aristotle. There it becomes even explicit how
Aristotle uses the Aristotelian mean to legitimize the Socratic-Platonic insight into
the unity of all virtue. The Aristotelian outline of a practical philosophy remains far
closer to the fundamental Socratic-Platonic intention than the Aristotelian critique
of Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas allows one to suspect. There we are concerned with a
style of Aristotelian argumentation that is deliberately critical, an argumentation

6
Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘‘Denken als Erlösung,’’ in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 7 (Tübingen: Mohr,
1991), 407–417.

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which, so to speak, fundamentally refrains from taking up the author, in this case
Plato, in his own actual intentions. The great model of all authentic conversation,
which takes the strengths of others rather than their weaknesses and productively
carries them forward, is surely Plato. Aristotle carries out his critique of the
‘‘chōrismos’’ of the Idea on the basis of his physics. But one should not, however,
fall back on the fanciful expedient of regarding the Platonic Parmenides as not
Platonic (perhaps instead as a Megarian refutation)—and one would indeed also
have to abandon the Statesman, whose doctrine of the metrion, the right measure,
and all its applications do not fit with Aristotle’s critique either. It is therefore not
Plato, but Aristotle who is the creator of the doctrine of two worlds, and that which
in Neo-Platonism enduringly misrepresents the image of Plato goes back to him.
Thus the task still remains for us—not only for Plato but also for Aristotle—to carry
out a productive conversation with them. The standard at which Hegel had set this
conversation seems to me still not to have been reached again.

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