THE LINE “I TO DIE AND YOU TO LIVE” is what Antigone says to Ismene in their encounter in front of Creon, and Socrates, of course, must have known the play; he was in his late twenties when Antigone was first performed, and it was famous from the first. We can see why he would identify with her; he too could have saved himself by bending and by placating his opponents, but refused to do so. He was just as unbending and with the same result. By telling the democratic jury of Athens that they were either, like Ismene, spineless, or possibly unjust, like Creon, he was not endearing himself to them. From the opening words of his defense he treated them with scorn and sarcasm. Clearly he was every bit as defiant as Antigone had been. His reasons were, however, quite different. Antigone may have worshipped the gods of the underworld too exclusively, but no one claimed that they and her blood kin had no recognized ethical or religious claims on her. Socrates, however, invokes a semi-divine authority that is all his own, unknown to his fellow citizens, and bases his defiance upon its inner voice, a private oracle all his own. We would call it conscience, and we think of it as something we all share. The Athenians did not, however, know of such a universal internal force. Their gods were civic and public deities, and morality was a matter of externally validated local and possibly national rules, not of a private inner voice. In invoking it Socrates was a moral revolutionary of the first order, and those political thinkers who, like Hegel, think that the existing public law is the privileged party in a conflict with the moral values that private individuals may proclaim believe that the people of Athens were justified in putting Socrates to death. Since Socrates’ was the voice of a higher morality, in fact, he was also right, so the confrontation was one between two rights and was a real tragedy. In this again he resembles Antigone.
Who was Socrates, and how did he come to be condemned to death? How did he respond to the sentence finally? Was he consistent and did his arguments make sense?1
We know a lot about Socrates, not only because he is the hero of most of Plato’s dialogues but because several other authors wrote about him, the most famous being Aristophanes, whose comedies give as much pleasure now as they did then. In one of them, The Clouds, Socrates is pictured as a phony scientist, a charlatan who misleads and bilks honest folk. The charge of impiety to the gods may have brushed off on him because he was identified with some of the advanced scientists of the time, but this is not entirely clear. In any case, when at his trial Socrates says that he has acquired a notorious reputation as a result of the comedy and will probably be judged accordingly, he certainly had a point. The reason why he was on trial was not due to his eccentricities, however, or the irritation he caused his fellow citizens by his habit of engaging them in conversation solely to prove to them that they knew less than they thought they did, though that cannot have added to his general popularity. He was on trial because he was associated with, and indeed revered by, a band of aristocratic youths, one of whom, Alcibiades, had betrayed and ruined Athens in its war against Sparta, and others of whom had been part of an oligarchy that had overthrown the democracy and governed Athens with a rule of terror for a year. That was the Oligarchy of the Thirty, and unlike many decent people Socrates did not flee the city during their blood-soaked reign. The renewed democracy had, however, declared an amnesty, and Socrates certainly could not legally be tried on charges arising from anything he might have done under the Oligarchy. So the charges were trumped up, in what was evidently a political trial and a way to dissolve the antidemocratic, aristocratic discipleship group that coalesced around Socrates.
The trial procedures of democratic Athens were not what we would regard as judicially acceptable. Any citizen could bring charges of public misconduct against another, and the jury consisted of five hundred citizens. There were no lawyers, and the rules were lax. The accused had a right to propose an alternative penalty to the one demanded by his accusers, and he was expected to bring in his family and friends to make emotional appeals to the jury. This last Socrates refused to do as being beneath his dignity. But in any case you can see that even as political trials go, this was a free-for-all.
The charges were therefore apparently nonpolitical. First, he had shown impiety to the gods; secondly, he had corrupted the youth of Athens. The latter charge had evidently clear political implications even if worded vaguely. It cannot be said that Socrates answered either of the charges, but he did turn the tables on his accusers. He was particularly effective in telling them that they had never spent two minutes seriously thinking about what it means to corrupt the young.
The point for us is not only Socrates’ defiant conduct at the trial but some of the things he said about the limits of his obedience to governments and courts. He told the court that he would disobey any order to stop philosophizing exactly as he had in the past. This was a penalty he had no intention of obeying, and he said so very plainly.
Then he also told two stories about his past conduct. One was that under the democracy, the council of which he was a member had voted that ten commanders who had failed in the battle be punished as a group. He had voted against the measure being carried out, even though his fellow councilors threatened to execute him. But the measure was unconstitutional, and this was eventually recognized. What this story illustrates is less a refusal to obey than a refusal to go along. His inner voice stopped him from doing what he thought was wrong, and he certainly showed his courage and independence. He had already mentioned his courage in battle. Here we are dealing perhaps with adherence to fundamental law rather than to the pressure of immediate and illegal political passion. His refusal was not, however, an act of resistance to law, and Socrates does not say that it was.
More telling is his second story. Under the reign of the Thirty he and four other men were ordered to arrest an innocent citizen, Leon of Salamis, whom the Oligarchy wanted out of the way. Socrates refused to obey and did not go along with the other four to fetch Leon. Here is a clear act of defiance against a government that is in power. The reason Socrates gives is that the order was unjust, not that it was unconstitutional, and one thing he refused to do was to unjustly injure another person. This was, indeed, very much against Greek popular attitude. Socrates constantly asserted that is was worse to inflict than to suffer injury.
We cannot help but come away from reading the Apology thinking of Socrates as a completely independent person with no respect for authority as such, who only listens to his own private daemon,2 and cannot even bring himself to show enough respect for the members of the jury, his fellow citizens, to establish his innocence to save his own life.
In one respect he does resemble Antigone, which is no doubt why he quotes her. He is not at all afraid to die. We do not really know what death is like, he points out. It may be a sleep, or we may meet up with all the previous generations, and he would look forward to that, especially the heroes of the Trojan War, with whom he identifies.
How do we reconcile this defiant spirit with Socrates’ arguments in the Crito? And how good are the arguments he advances in that dialogue? Because there he does seem to be saying that under no circumstances is it ever right to disobey the laws of one’s country, even if they result in an unjust verdict of death. Before I go on to say more about the discussion in the Crito, there is one very important point to note: that injustice is being done to Socrates. He is not being forced to do an injustice to another person. He is the victim; he is not injuring another person. And that issue is not raised in the Crito. He is not discussing whether it is right to disobey a law or a judgment that is unjust to another person, such as going to arrest Leon. Here it is entirely a matter of enduring an injustice done to oneself. The question is not whether one has to obey an order or a verdict that would force one to act unjustly toward another person or to injure other people. It is entirely limited to having to endure an unjust act committed against oneself. No other case is even mentioned. So in a way the discussion is limited. That is why I went over the two cases where Socrates refused to obey so carefully, because there he was being forced to injure other people unjustly.
The real argument about obedience is in the Crito. We left Socrates a defiant and combative man. Now we find him sleeping like a baby in his cradle. His friend, Crito, who is very agitated, has been pacing up and down the prison, but Socrates has been fast asleep. We are clearly meant to understand that his expectation of death does not in the least trouble him. He tells Crito that at his age, seventy, he cannot be expected to be anxious, but Crito replies quite truthfully that lots of old people are unreconciled to death—and to being poisoned the next day, at that! But Socrates tries to calm him only by telling him that he had a very reassuring dream about a woman dressed in white who will obviously be taking him to a better place soon. Crito is not particularly impressed by this story, and I cannot see why he should be; it is merely meant to underline Socrates’ indifference to death.
Crito now makes his proposal. He wants Socrates to escape from prison and flee abroad. There will be no difficulties; it has all been arranged by his friends. And he gives four reasons to persuade Socrates. The first is the most important one: that his friends love him and want to continue to live with him. That is the claim of friendship. The second argument is that Socrates is simply doing what his enemies want by allowing the sentence to be carried out. The third argument is that he is letting down his sons, who need him so they can be educated. And last, and obviously contrived, is the claim that his friends will be accused by the general public of having been lax in failing to save him. This is a “What will people say?” argument about public opinion. Of all the reasons given, this is clearly the weakest. And it could have been simply turned away by Socrates’ saying, “I doubt that anyone would blame you.” That is not, however, what Socrates does at all.
He completely ignores Crito’s argument of friendship. He never even acknowledges that such an argument exists. At no point does Socrates make the slightest gesture of friendship to the grieving Crito. It is as if friendship were utterly insignificant. If Socrates feels any loyalty toward his friends he certainly does not mention it. At the trial he did say that they were very loyal to him, which proved that he had not corrupted them since they were capable of such friendship, but he does not seem to return their friendship, or at least he never mentions it, and Crito’s plea is ignored as if it did not deserve a response of any kind. Actually, Socrates at this point comes across as a perfectly awful man. Antigone died for her family, but evidently Socrates is not willing to live for his friends.
The one argument that Socrates does pursue relentlessly is the least important: “What will people say?” Should we listen to the fickle public or to experts in making important decisions? This is an important issue, he says, and we have to listen to reason, not to the opinion of the many who are unstable and ignorant. The only question before us is whether it would be right or wrong for me to escape to Thessaly. Now at the trial Socrates had said that his wisdom consisted in knowing that he was not wise, unlike the rest of Athens, but here he clearly suggests that he is an expert on moral reasoning, or at least at being able to tell good from bad reasons for doing something. And he did want to convince Crito that what he is going to do is right because then he will agree, friendship or not, that this is what Socrates should indeed do. But let me repeat, the substantive claim that friends have on him is never mentioned: Crito’s most intense plea is just brushed aside. In this Socrates reminds us of Antigone, who is also deaf to the pleas of Ismene, who needs her as her last living family relation and friend.
Socrates begins his argument as an expert by reminding Crito of their shared doctrine that it is never right to injure anyone. Would they be injuring the city if he escaped? Would they be doing so by breaking a standing agreement between Socrates as a citizen and the city as a whole? And he answers yes.
First comes the generalizing argument: Would it not destroy the city if everyone disobeyed its laws and the judgments of its courts? This is the most common argument in such cases. “What would happen if everyone behaved this way?” Clearly all law and order would collapse. This is an argument about the consequences of Socrates’ action, and we ought to look at it in that way. There are all kinds of actions which are perfectly acceptable if one person carries them out but not if pursued by everyone. You can always take your money out of the bank; it is only wrong if you start a run on the bank by causing others to panic. Is Socrates, by fleeing, inciting others to do the same? Is it likely that his conduct will cause other convicts to attempt escape? It is highly improbable. Crito is suggesting a quiet escape from an unjust verdict; most people in jail have been convicted quite fairly as far as we know, and there is no evidence offered that they would or could escape as Socrates might. So in itself the generalizing argument, which is a utilitarian one, is not particularly convincing. There is no reason to suppose that by escaping Socrates would in fact be “destroying the law.”
He then turns to a quite different argument—what we might call an argument of familial duty. It is taken for granted that children owe their parents a special duty of obedience and respect. Socrates now claims that the kind of obedience one owes one’s parents is owed to the city as well, for two reasons. First, it educated him as much as any parent. Second, and more important, it gave him life because its laws made the marriage of his parents, and family life in general, possible and beneficial. So the city is even more important to his birth and upbringing than his biological father. (I might note that his mother is not even mentioned.)
How good is the argument of filial duty? Let us suppose that it is true that family and educational law really do have the importance that Socrates ascribes to them: Are adults obliged to obey their fathers unconditionally? They may owe them respect and support, and above all gratitude, but surely not unquestioning obedience. That is what a child may have to do, but surely that sort of obedience is the first thing that goes in adulthood. Yet Socrates asserts that it is a sin against one’s father and to one’s country not to do “whatever your city and your country command,” in war, in law courts, and everywhere else. Now Socrates is talking about the gratitude we should feel toward the laws that have made our education and development possible, and this is analogous to what we should feel for our parents. But do we have to express our gratitude by obedience? If it is an injury to disobey, then that might be the case, but not all disobedience is injurious, as we saw. We may indeed owe our parents gratitude, and we show it by kindness, attention, and even deference, but not by unconditional obedience. A good parent would not command an adult son or daughter to do something, in any case. So the notion that gratitude means unconditional obedience due to fathers and countries no matter what is on shaky grounds, because it is not a good analogy for an adult of seventy years. We do not owe that to fathers, and not to cities either, even if both have a good claim on our gratitude. Socrates may have felt uneasy here because he then adds a condition: Can this duty to obey be in accordance with universal justice? It is hard to make sense of this. He made no effort to persuade the jury during his trial. He clearly did not think it worth trying. So he may be saying that since I failed to persuade or did not try to do so, there is nothing for it but to obey my father-country.
The duties we incur as family members are not chosen; they arise because we have a certain place in an existing group: our family, our locality, our neighbors. We owe them something special because they and we are tied by bonds which arise out of the inevitable conditions of life, like birth and place and closeness. We do not agree to be born and to go to school, but we do form ties that bind us and that arouse loyalties and duties to those who are close to us, as well as affective ties. Socrates said nothing about those ties, only about duties.
Perhaps Socrates realizes that these arguments are not exactly unanswerable, so he tries a completely different tack. He now argues for the obligation of contract. He reminds Crito that he could, like any other Athenian citizen, have left Athens quite freely at any time during his life. There were no emigration restrictions, and he could have taken his property along. On the contrary, there were several colonies where he might have settled quite readily. But he did not. Instead he remained in Athens all his life, carrying on his philosophical activities. “You have chosen us,” his fellow citizens must say. “And in fact you said in court that you preferred death to banishment because you could not go on philosophizing abroad. By escaping now you are breaking your promises and covenants with us.”
This is a powerful argument. Socrates has given what is called “tacit consent”—that is, he may not have signed a contract with the city, but by living and working there all his life when he could have left he indicated as clearly as possible that he had accepted its laws and procedures, and the judgments that would result from them. He cannot just reject them unilaterally because they have now turned out to be painful for him. This is a contractual argument, and it says you are obliged to keep contracts that you freely entered into and whose benefits you seem to have amply enjoyed until now. The question is, Did he, or does anyone, agree to a flagrantly unjust political act? Even if the city is what we now call almost just. After all, it was the most interesting place on earth at the time. Does obligation extend to obedience to unjust orders, decisions, official acts of any kind? We know that Socrates does not think so. He disobeyed when the Thirty told him to bring an innocent man to his death. But this time the decision does not make him unjust to another person; it only makes him suffer himself.
He does not, however, draw the distinction in this way. He turns to himself as a special case, and some of the arguments are not at all convincing. “I will be laughed at if I leave the city now.” After what he said to Crito about not minding public opinion this is not a very acceptable argument. It seems it is all right if Crito and his friends lose their reputation by not helping him, but he must not make himself look ridiculous by escaping at this late stage in his life. He would appear in a disreputable light. His fellow citizens know that breaking his contract with the city would be a stain on him and that he would not be able to live a respectable life in Thessaly, which is a luxury-loving, corrupt, and lax city.
It is not, however, his reputation alone that matters to him, after all. If he escapes it will reflect terribly on his children. He will be setting them an awful example, and it will not help their education. So he has come around after all to answering one of Crito’s original arguments: that he should stay alive in order to attend to the education of his sons. Socrates points out that living a disreputable life in a sort of Las Vegas presumably would not help their education at all. A law-abiding death would do more by way of setting an example for them. So he sums up his two sets of arguments thus: The first is that the city and its laws are his parents, his guardians, and he owes them a filial duty of obedience. The second is that he is returning wrong with wrong, evil with evil. Because the verdict against him is unjust, he is breaking his agreement to be an obedient citizen of Athens; if not in actuality then in intention he is destroying the law. By defying it he is saying that it has no claim on him and so is not law.
Why does Socrates make such a barrage of not very strong arguments? There are two main suggestions. One is that this is the birth of conscience as a purely personal, subjective moral impulsion. He has no way of making other people understand the force of what he calls his daemon or personal oracle. But he knows that he is doing what it commands, that he does not suffer from its pangs and bothers now that he has decided to obey. Fundamentally he thinks that one should obey the laws of a generally just city, and the fact that his fellow citizens have turned against him is not a good enough reason to seem to disobey the judgment of a lawfully constituted court whose judgments in principle he believes one should accept. If there is injury done him he would still be injuring the city by refusing to obey, and he had spent all his life saying that revenge was wrong—that it was worse to do than to suffer injury. The question still remains, Would he really be injuring the city more by refusing to obey a mistaken verdict than by escaping? After all, is it ever right to let a city or an individual be unjust without doing something to stop it? Even if it happens to be you who is being treated unjustly? Is it not better to defy injustice under all conditions and in all cases? Here it really becomes a matter of calculation and guessing at consequences. Will Athens learn more by his death or by his defiance? What would really persuade them, as Socrates says one must try to do in cases of unjust public actions? He does not say so explicitly, but he may have felt that he owed his city the better lesson. By dying he would shame its citizens or at least cause them to reflect. If he went to Thessaly to live an unworthy life, they would say, “We told you so—this man is a charlatan who did corrupt our youth, and whom we were quite right to condemn.” If he dies a dignified death they will not be able to say this. That is why the argument about his reputation may be a very important one. He is following his conscience, and his reputation constitutes the lesson he believes he owes his city.
This explanation of Socrates’ conduct from conscience is the one I prefer. There is another one which is a little different. It accounts for his behavior entirely and particularly in terms of his concern for the reputation of philosophy. He recognizes that he is an exception, because he is a philosopher. If he were to run away he would jeopardize the relation between philosophy and the city. He would prove that philosophers are disloyal, disobedient, and indifferent to the laws and customs of their cities, and that in the end they are so amoral, so atheistical and skeptical, that they will do anything to save their skins. By going to Thessaly he would put even his devotion to philosophy in doubt, since he would have no opportunity to practice it there in his accustomed way. So it is as a philosopher, not as a man and a citizen, that he refuses to go. I am not altogether persuaded by this argument. While it is true that Socrates said he would not go on living if he could not philosophize, and that it was impossible to do so in exile, it is only his particular way of practicing philosophy that would be impossible—that is, going around town interrogating the citizens, buttonholing them to show them that they were not as wise as they thought, and that they ought to be as skeptical and aware of their ignorance and uncertainty as he was. In short, if philosophy is identical with this sort of public investigation into common belief, then it was indeed impossible anywhere but in Athens. But surely there are other, less public and socially combative ways of philosophizing, and there is no need to court such a collision. Most philosophers, however offensive their doctrines, are just ignored.
So we come back to Socrates as a unique individual, aware of his own moral uniqueness and his difference from other Athenians, and his final sense that the rules that he would impose on himself arose from his quite special mission and discovery. That at least makes sense of the contractual obligation and the final reputation arguments. The argument about what would happen if everyone did this and the duty to obey the city as a father and guardian do not, it seems to me, make sense. And the refusal even to respond to the plea of friendship that Crito makes is inexcusable.
All this makes Socrates’ points in the Crito very unusual. He is not moved by loyalty. If any loyalty is involved, it is to philosophy as an abstract quest, and I doubt that this is what is moving him. He is responding to a wholly dissociated conscience, which he cannot even explain, because it is unique to himself, and it is thus as a matter of being true to himself that he decides to go to his death in the most dignified way. If he thinks of justice at all, it is that such an example has more to offer his sons and, we may infer, the Athenians as well, than a life in disreputable exile. Better a noble death than a dubious life.
That also makes it impossible to generalize from his example, though, as we shall see, he has put a very enduring set of arguments on the intellectual map. Filial duty, contractual obligation, and setting an example are all here. So it is quite a dialogue after all.
1. Socrates’ method of interrogating interlocutors to bring them to an understanding of his philosophy—today known as the Socratic method—comes down to us mainly known through the works of his contemporaries Plato, Aristophanes, and Xenophon. Shklar draws in this lecture on Plato’s Apology as well as the Crito, and on Richard Kraut, Socrates and the State (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); A. D. Woozley, “Socrates on Disobeying the Law,” in The Philosophy of Socrates: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Gregory Vlastos (New York: Anchor, 1972), 299–318; and G. F. W. Hegel Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 2: Plato and the Platonists, trans. E. S. Haldane and Frances H. Simpson (New York: Humanities Press, 1955), 384–448.
2. In the board notes that accompanied the lectures Shklar points out that Socrates’ inner voice—his daemon—tells him to accept the verdict, a decision that for Hegel becomes the birth of conscience.