Ursula Wolf: Is the Socratic question the subject or the motive of philosophical reflection?

Plato has Socrates repeatedly ask the question that is not just any question, but the most important one for human beings: how one should live, how it is good to live, what is the happy life. I call this the Socratic question or the basic practical question. Now Socrates is distinguished by the fact that he knows that he does not know the answer to this question, and instead insists that one must constantly care about one’s own goodness and discuss the human arete. Behind this shift from eudaimonia to arete stands what can be called the existential level of the Socratic question, which, as Erich Fromm puts it, implies irresolvable dichotomies: that we seek true and lasting happiness but, as finite beings who are subject to chance, can neither know nor achieve the perfect good.
From here, there are two paths. Aristotle transfers the problem to a new discipline, ethics, which follows a weaker method than theoretical philosophy and enquires how the virtues provide a practical way of dealing with the human situation. Plato sees human life in the context of the order of the whole, so that Socrates’ originally practical question brings forth philosophical reflection on the structure of being and seeks to secure human knowledge methodologically through elenchos and dialectics.