Not only was Socrates a midwife, helping people give birth to their brainchilds, he also bore responsibility for one birth himself: the birth of philosophy. As such, he may have been sterile in doxastic generation, for he seemed to have no beliefs of his own,[1] yet rather fecund in methodological procreation. To the extent that Plato (Socrates' pupil) can be seen as the philosopher to which all Western philosophy is a series of footnotes,[2] it might just as well be said that the Western history of philosophy consists of footnotes to the Socratic method. This is where philosophy began; and it is where philosophy went astray.

The Socratic method – referring to Socrates' approach to dialogue – revolves around defining words. When Laches gives an example of courage, Socrates retorts, underscoring that he did not want to inquire about particular instances of courage, but about the abstract concept of courage itself.[3] In short, he sought a definition.

By means of definition, words become concepts. Courage, when defined accordingly, ceases to be merely a word that can be used in various ways to effectuate events. It is no longer simply assigned to recruits to validate their efforts; no longer a literary device to give substance to the protagonist's character; no longer a way to shame the aesthetic preferences of the eccentric. It has been transformed into a concept – an entity ontologically independent from the ways in which the word, which is supposed to correspond to the entity, can be used in practice.

This artificial creation of a thing out of what is (technically speaking) not a thing marks the reification that is so characteristic of Western philosophy. It is the correspondence theory of language that Ludwig Wittgenstein took to be the foundation of Western philosophy – and a misguided one at that.[4] Through the language games that we have played for centuries, in order to find our way in the world, we have invented objects out of their names – and not the other way around. An actual glass of water is not the central meaning in the question "Glass of water?", for there exists a plethora of possible desires to be fulfilled, actions to be undertaken and other events to become realized. Thus, words need not be descriptions – and virtue, in most cases, is certainly not.

Therefore, if you, my readers, ever come across this maniacal Socrates, demanding by the gods to tell him what virtue is, tell him to grab his things (which are not things) and fuck off.

REFERENCES

[1] Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind: The Groundbreaking Investigation on How We Think (HMH, 1981), 172.

[2] Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (Simon and Schuster, 2010), 39.

[3] Plato, Laches, 190e-191e.

[4] Ludwig Wittgenstein, 'Philosophische Untersuchungen,(Ed.) GEM Anscombe & R. Rhees' (Oxford, 1953).