How could Socratic schools arise?  In some ways it was perhaps inevitable, given the enigmatic character and charismatic personality of Socrates.  He seems to have modeled his approach to the virtues without explaining it, even to his closest disciples.  To some extent they found what they wanted to find in him and his activities.  The case is not unlike a modern phenomenon.  Ludwig Wittgenstein, a brilliant but idiosyncratic thinker from Vienna made his way into the center of the philosophical life at the University of Cambridge in England, where he eventually set up shop as a philosopher who pursued his researches in the classroom with sympathetic students.  He did little publishing but had the students who were his audience and sounding board take notes of classroom discussions.  After his death, the intellectual world was eager to hear more of his ideas, and his erstwhile students became his spokespersons.  But soon it became evident that they themselves had found different themes and objectives in his philosophizing, and several schools of Wittgensteinian interpretation emerged.

            This did not mean that the Wittgensteinians were inventing the master out of whole cloth or that they were using his memory to forward their own personal agendas.  In some sense, no doubt, they interpreted his methods and teachings in accordance with some deeply-held commitments of their own.  But each one could cite statements of Wittgenstein that supported his or her interpretation.  Similarly, the Socratics understood Socrates’ enigmatic statements, inquiries, and antics in terms of their own dispositions.  But some interpretations were more philosophically interesting and theoretically viable than others, reflecting, perhaps, a greater capacity for insight and superior level of comprehension. 

            As with Wittgenstein’s so-called Ordinary Language Analysis, so the Socratic movement gradually evolved into different sects or approaches to philosophy.  The one approach which was destined to become the most powerful and influential of all was that of Plato.  As one of the greatest writers who ever lived, Plato could turn a Socratic conversation into high drama as in the Phaedo, where the question of whether the soul is immortal is pursued on execution day on death row.  And as one of the greatest thinkers who ever lived, Plato was in a unique position to make Socrates come alive on the page, to see and communicate the method in his madness and the theory behind that method, and to explain the difference it would make for the intellectual world.  Plato was himself, as he well appreciated, an offspring of the master, whose idealistic vision of the world could never have arisen without the down-to-earth moral thinking and tireless moral probing of Socrates. 

            Socrates invented moral philosophy.  He put it at the center of the intellectual project.  And he put man, homo sapiens, at the center of the moral realm.  He dismantled or at least turned his back on the pursuit of natural philosophy, which had been the stock-in-trade of philosophy since Thales.  He replaced it with discourse on what was right and wrong, good and evil.  

Plato believed in Socrates’ revolutionary philosophy.  But he worried that by itself it was lacking.  If values were manmade as many sophists insisted, if sensory experience was the only source of knowledge, if the world itself were always in flux as the Heracliteans said, how could there be any knowledge of right and wrong, good and evil, much less a practice of morality?  For there to be a science of right and wrong, there would have to be a science of knowledge in general, of what there is in the world, of human nature.  There would have to be permanent structures in the world that could form a basis of reliable judgments.  Plato’s quest would be to make Socratic moral philosophy the cornerstone of a comprehensive theory of everything.  Eventually, indeed, Plato would reinvent even natural philosophy—but only after he had revalued the cosmos and made everything in it new and glorious … and moral. 

In any case, before Plato ever put his hand to constructing an edifice of knowledge around moral philosophy, he needed to clarify what it was that Socrates was really doing with his quest for definitions, his personal interrogations, his paradoxical utterances, his disavowal of knowledge and expertise, and his stubborn adherence to moral principles.  Plato had to resurrect Socrates in his own dialogues to recover the foundations of moral philosophy.  Only then could he proceed to develop a comprehensive theory of everything that had at its core the heartbeat of Socratic morality.