“I would have you consider, Crito, whether you really mean what you are saying.”
Words are tiny, weak little tries at grasping much larger, much more real concepts. Those concepts, if they exist at all as concepts, hide in a feathery reality outside our daily experience.
‘Justice’, for example — δικαιοσύνη — is critically important in everyday life: the fair application of justice is the obsession of every child and teenager; societies are made or broken by the public perception of justice in a government; just action is the primary concern of German Idealism and permeates our daily internal worries (What was I supposed to do? What does a decent person do in such a situation?).
Conversations are games, forms of entertainment which throw loose rope over the invisible and inexpressible concepts which govern our lives.
Socrates’ conversation will play a game involving Justice. His companion, Crito, meets him at the arranged place — a locked cell southwest of the court of the ‘Apology’, just outside the Agora of Athens.
Crito, rich, weathered, silver-haired, is not the old man we see in our minds’ eye (neither is Socrates, a former foot soldier). These men are loquacious and thoughtful, city creatures (Socrates reportedly leaving Athens rarely and only for day-trips at longest) who nevertheless on occasion rely on the strength of their arms. They do not live in a hyperconnected electronic world of surveillance and ‘objectivity’; justice is a more complex subject to the old friends.
The dawn is breaking.
The jail is not unbreakable. The friends need not stand in this place. Rapidly the reality of the present moment fades away; we will not move from our places, one sitting on a narrow bench along the wall of his cell, the other standing by the window. Our physical world is incidental to the real topic of our conversation, our game, which might take us across the sea or to the heights of mountains. If our discussion is carried by Crito, the cell will fade away entirely, and Socrates will be free. Unfortunately, Socrates is too good at the game to lose and be freed; Socrates will remain in this room until the conversation reported in the ‘Phaedo’ and the terrible news — Socrates, practically still speaking, and practically still now while he speaks at dawn, is dead. The power of the words is more than sufficient to render him cold and white.
The basic matter of the conversation is that death. We begin to play the game of justice only because it touches on that death, but then as Socrates will reveal to us, justice touches on everything.
Crito: “Tomorrow will be the last day of your life.”
Death comes for Socrates like a ship on a long journey at last entering harbor.
Socrates: “When a man has reached my age he ought not to be repining at the approach of death.”
Can execution be something like a natural death? We think of death in old age, the death that catches us inevitably, as the best death, and the other deaths (accident, murder, or in this case justice) to be lesser, unfortunate deaths experienced only by those lacking the agility to dodge them. To us, all deaths but old age are ‘tragic deaths’; we console ourselves that a death from old age comes to one ‘at his time’. Is there not something to be desired even in an unnatural death if it comes ‘at its time’? Death being inevitable, there must be a good and a bad way to die. Every human action can be performed with grace and dignity. Death is one such human action.
Socrates’ death is made so noble and pure in these words we forget he will be put down like a dog for a crime, the crime of corrupting young people. He is executed by the state with anger against him for his crime. Nevertheless he is tranquil. Nevertheless his friends attempt this escape. Socrates seems innocent because of that. The charges in his trial were ultimately true. It is only the way he faces death that make him innocent.
It is only by submitting to his punishment that he becomes innocent.
Crito: “Escape — for if you die I shall not only lose a friend who can never be replaced, but thereis another evil — the ‘many’, the people, will believe I might have saved you, but that I did not care.”
Socrates: “The opinion of the ‘many’ cannot make a man either wise or foolish; and whatever they do is the result of chance.”
Is there something hideously logical and cold about a Socratic Dialogue? Our conversation blooms with friendship and genuine sorrow, but the outcome is one of the coldest. These days it would be popular to use the word ‘autism’. As Socrates says, “I am and always have been one of those natures who must be guided by reason.”
Reason kills him. A situation which would work out quite differently in a dramatic novel — actually this scene could belong to ‘Count of Monte Christo’ — fails to turn into a jailbreak. Crito logically and coldly proposes reasons Socrates should be freed — most touchingly, to raise his children. “No man should bring children into the world who is unwilling to persevere to the end in their nurture and education.” With equal coldness Socrates rejects them. We are given cause to imagine Socrates on the run, Socrates in exile, in Thessaly, among friends on a foreign place. There is both drama and romance in this concept. “You appear to be choosing the easier part,” as Crito tells Socrates — “not the better and manlier.”
Crito, silver-haired though he may be, accuses Socrates of cowardice in accepting death. There is even a hint of malice in this — wasn’t Crito’s first objection, before any consideration of Socrates, worries about his own reputation should he allow a friend to be executed by the state?
The game of the conversation has real-world consequences. This is almost always the case with a good conversation, but it doesn’t make it any less of a game. Suppose Socrates does escape — “Will life be worth having, if that higher part of man be destroyed, which is improved by justice and depraved by injustice?” The subject matter is tremendously important, but the conversation is also clearly a form of amusement and relaxation. Socrates plays with his death like a toy; here too we see his affectionate and child-like nature, his deep delight in life and words, which is apparently simultaneously the foundation of his philosophy, his bond with the youth of Athens, and the cause of his death sentence.
Such a ridiculous and human concept to talk over your death with a good friend before going to it. Such an intimately, deeply human action to enjoy this airy philosophical discourse on how man ought to act before accepting a death which is not entirely in your hands. The height of rationality rendered in this Dialogue is both intimately possible for all human beings (I imagine this conversation happens daily between death row inmates and prison chaplains) and an impossibility of cold, analytical behavior. So on we talk.
We speak against democracy — “We must not regard what the many say of us: but what he, the one man who has understanding of just and unjust, will say, and what the truth will say.”
We speak of a high aristocratic standard of behavior — “Injustice is always an evil and dishonor to him who acts unjustly.”
Oppressed by Athens, Socrates cannot strike back against Athens. In his game of logic, a thinking person must act in concord with the state that created him even if it harms him. The Laws and the Government speak through Socrates. They interrogate him with the same sadomasochistic cruelty and lack of tact with which he has torn apart the illusions of grand Athenians out for a day in the Agora. Here, the Laws treat Socrates as he has treated Athens.
“Tell us, Socrates,” say the Laws of Athens, “What are you about?”
His Father, his Master, the Laws of Athens tell this old man “You do not have a right to do to us as we are doing to you.” The Golden Rule is broken in these words. Communities may do what an individual cannot; we can’t behave towards our societies and governments as they treat us. “Country is more to be valued and higher and holier far than mother or father or any ancestor, and more to be regarded in the eyes of the gods and of men of understanding” — Athens is more important than its citizen whose words are most current in historical memory, Socrates.
The Laws of Athens defeat Crito because they are a stronger voice. This is not a Democratic voice summoned up from majority opinion, but an ancient voice. This voice even has a name, although it does not appear in this dialogue — Solon the Lawgiver, Herodotus’s internationally-exiled soujourner and true lover of wisdom washed away from his homeland after setting its laws, rootless as Socrates might be if he disobeys Solon’s laws and abandons Athens. The voice of Solon the Lawgiver threatens even supernatural punishment after death for the crime of fleeing justice:
“If you go forth, returning evil for evil, and injury for injury, breaking the covenants and agreements which you have made with us, and wronging those whom you ought least of all to wrong, that is to say, yourself, your friends, your country, and us, we shall be angry with you while you live, and our brethren, the laws in the world below, will receive you as an enemy; for they will know that you have done your best to destroy us.”
It is amusing that many have pretended Socrates’ injunctions here carry the force of universal law. The principal Socrates discovers in his conversation with Crito is the social contract — the idea that the masses of people submit willfully to the laws of states in return for the good provided by the state, and that under this social contract fall all our conventions (police, trials, prisons, jails, and executions among them). The Enlightenment made this social contract a secular principle, but it is not secular here at all. Socrate’s disobedience in the world above would be reflected in the world below, the world where he intends to speak with Achilles and Odysseus and the other heroes, to join the ranks of heroes in his heroic submission. There is no principle we can carry on our shoulders from Ancient Greek city-states to contemporary democratic Empires. Somehow the voice of Solon is more important than a dear friend:
“Listen, then, to us and not to Crito.”
Somehow the voice of Solon can discipline even the most primal of fears:
“Punishment is to be endured in silence.”
What stoic and perfect advice this would be for a perfect person, a person operating on moral and logical laws, the person Socrates pretends to be (and perhaps becomes in the context of this game). He has entered deeply into the domination of Athens by living within the city walls. Now, there is no escape from its justice: “He who has experience of the manner in which we order justice and administer the state, and still remains, has entered into an implied contract that he will do as we command him.” Still, injustice is only one part of this game. The real logic is not in fairness here, but in appearances. Crito worries for his appearance if Socrates dies, but Socrates worries more if he should escape and live, and “make himself ridiculous by escaping the city,” doing nothing but harm to himself and his friends, forcing the companions into exile or poverty, fleeing from one place to another until his death. Fleeing from justice unfairly applied, like the conspiracy which condemned Socrates, would make him into the liar, thief of innocence, corrupter of morals which was presented at the trial.
To be innocent, Socrates submits himself to injustice.
There is a voice in his ears which prevents him from hearing any other. His ears are ringing with Solon’s voice. We must desire to be part of a community so grand and so worth protecting that, like Socrates, we can lie to ourselves and tell grand stories in the game of conversation, justifying even death to protect our Grand Something — be it a Church or a community of like-minded persons, or even a grisly, massive contemporary State. We must fulfil the will of God, and if we cannot locate or convince ourselves of God, of something similarly massive, simply because it gives life meaning and makes the game of conversation more interesting and invested, and because it is foolish and disgusting to escape from a prison cell without the dignity and grace you carried with you behind the bars.
