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Assignment I: Is Socrates a good citizen? Discuss with reference to the Apology and the Crito. The Socratic Citizen Plato’s Socrates is a character plagued and prized with contradictions. He professed to care for nothing so much as virtue and human excellence but was incriminated by the greatest and most open democracy in ancient history. He was wrongfully convicted, yet unwilling to avoid his unjust execution. He is at once the most Athenian, citizenly, patriotic, and other-regarding of philosophers—and yet the most critical and self-regarding of Athenians.
In exploring that contradiction, between “Socrates the loyal Athenian citizen” and “Socrates the philosophical critic of Athenian society,” Aristotle’s Politics comes to mind: “the good citizen need not of necessity possess the virtue which makes a good man. ” Socrates’ duality, as illustrated by the Apology and Crito, qualifies him as both a good man and a good citizen. The Apology presents Socrates as a highly patriotic citizen who attempted to improve his fellows through beneficial provocation and criticism of popular ideas.
Socrates avoided addressing the Assembly and engaging in a ‘public life’, but he carried out his critical obligations in public places as well as in private houses. The Apology opens with Socrates justifying himself and his way of life before a jury of his Athenian peers. It shows him speaking in a public forum, defending the utility of philosophy for political life. Socrates’ speech is a rhetorical masterpiece; but by its end he has not aligned himself with the democratic norms embraced by his fellow citizens.
It is worthwhile to note that Socrates never defends himself by reference to the doctrine of unlimited free speech. Rather, he maintains that the examined life is alone worth living. His is a highly individual quest for self perfection and not a doctrine about the value of freedom of speech in general. Socrates’ capacity to do good for his fellows is implied by his clever ‘gadfly metaphor’. He associates his patronage to the polis to the good done by a gadfly to “a large and well bred horse, a horse grown sluggish because of its size and in need of being roused… I rouse you.
I persuade you. I upbraid you. I never stop lighting on each one of you, everywhere, all day long. ” (30e-31a). He believes that his critical sting really can awaken at least some Athenians by inflicting therapeutic pain upon them. The trial speech, itself, represents a sincere attempt to employ public rhetoric for the purposes of mass education and is in line with his self-description of a good citizen and public benefactor.
Socrates proves that his own political convictions and irritating, idiosyncratic everyday practice of examining his fellow Athenians (and finding them painfully wanting in wisdom), though drastically at odds with popular views, followed necessarily from his convictions. Socrates saw his own fierce, biting criticism of the status quo, both before and during the trial, as “doing good”. Being a social critic was his duty to his god, himself, and his polis. This attests that Socrates was both a philosophical social critic and a good citizen.
Socrates repeatedly maintains that the path he has taken is not of his own choosing but the result of a divine command. He says, “…the truth is, O men of Athens, that God only is wise; and by his answer he intends to show that the wisdom of men is worth little or nothing; he is not speaking of Socrates, he is only using my name by way of illustration, as if he said, He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing. ” He is under some kind of divine calling and it is his devotion to this divine command that has led him to neglect his worldly affairs.
He reminds us, at various points, of his extreme poverty, his neglect of his family and his obligations to his wife and children. He even rejects a ‘potential’ pardon that may have set him free upon the condition that he gave up his practices by saying, “understand that I shall never alter my ways, not even if I have to die many times. ” At the very end of Apology he requests his jury to treat his sons the way Socrates has treated Athenian society. He presents himself as a human being of unparalleled piety and devotion who will risk life itself rather than abandon the duty that has been given to him.
Socrates claims to be a selfless benefactor of the polis in that he had exhausted his private resources in the pursuit of the public good (23b-c, 30a, 31a-c). Because he does what is good for his fellow citizens for whom he feels regard despite the danger to which this exposes him, Socrates claims to be a benefactor of the Athenians. He refers with pride to his record of military service and underlines that it was service to the democracy: “When the commanders that you elected to command me stationed me at Potidaea and Amphipolis and Delion, I remained there like nyone else, and ran the risk of death” (28e). He is an honorable citizen who disregards death and preaches that “The difficulty, my friends, is not to avoid death, but to avoid unrighteousness; for that runs faster than death. ” He has demonstrated that he is, by his own right, a patriotic citizen who cares deeply about the good of his polis and one who consistently acts in what he sees as his city’s best interests; but he has also shown also that, in light of his own definition of patriotism, Socrates must be regarded as a uniquely patriotic Athenian.
Unlike the Apology, the Crito seems intended to exhibit the character of Socrates in one light only, not as the philosopher fulfilling a divine mission and trusting in the will of God, but simply as the good citizen, who having been unjustly condemned is willing to give up his life in obedience to the laws of the state. Crito thus serves as the companion piece to the Apology, substantiating the citizen in the philosopher.
The escape urged by Crito is shown to be unjust on the basis of Socrates’ premise that, contrary to popular belief, it is never right to commit injustice, even in response to injury (49a-50a). Since escape would constitute harm, it is unjust. Socrates starts an imaginary conversation with the personified Laws which raises questions such as “Do you imagine that a state can subsist and not be overthrown, in which the decisions of law have no power, but are set aside and trampled upon by individuals? ” This clearly depicts a Socrates that is servile to the law and hence a good citizen.
He professes an element of debt and high ‘parental’ regard owed to the law in the lines: “…since you were brought into the world and nurtured and educated by us, can you deny in the first place that you are our child and slave, as your fathers were before you…you are not on equal terms with us…Would you have any right to strike or revile or do any other evil to your father or your master…. our 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? Thus, maintaining the rule of law is (for Socrates) an issue of ethics not ‘politics’, and it depends upon the behavior of the individual. Socrates’ high regard and belief in the necessity of Laws for subsistence of the State makes him obey incorrect legal judgments of the Athenian court. His obedience is given in exchange for having received from the Laws benefits such as his birth, nurture and education. The Laws narrate that for any citizen to break the law is manifestly to do harm to an entity that deserves special regard and gratitude.
He also reveals a prized place in his mind for “Athenian citizenship” by saying that he could not deny it to his children. This firmly establishes Socrates’ loyalty to the State and high regard for his Athenian citizenship. He is by no measure a rebel or corrupter of the State and its laws. There is an inevitable tension between philosophy and the civic pieties that hold the city together. This tension gets represented in the contrast between Apology and Crito.
While the Apology defends a politics of principled abstinence or disobedience to the political life, the Crito makes a complete and far-reaching case for obligation and obedience to the law. The Apology shows Socrates defending himself and his life as a gift of the god that most truly benefits the city but in the Crito, we see him bow down to the authority of the laws that he seems to have previously rejected. If the Apology presents Socrates as the first martyr for philosophy, the first person to die for the cause of philosophy, the Crito shows Socrates’ trial and sentence as a case of justice delivered.
Out of this conflict and struggle to merge the duality of ‘Socrates the philosopher’ and ‘Socrates the good citizen’, Plato proposes a new conception of what it is to be a citizen. He opposes the traditional or Homeric conception of the citizen which requires mostly notions of citizen loyalty and patriotism and replaces that with a new kind of rational or philosophical citizenship: a view of citizenship that relies on one’s own powers of independent reason, judgment and argument.
Socrates’ position initially appears similar to that of a standard Athenian politician: both Socrates and politicians claimed to be civic-minded activists who sought to improve the polis. Yet “Socratic politics” rejects trying to persuade mass audiences in public and Socratic ethics is a matter of private conscience rather than social control. Socratic dignity, as opposed to democratic dignity, is the adherence to a personal standard of virtue: the self-willed determination of the one good man to avoid shaming himself and, ultimately, his polis.
This is observable even in his “prophesy” condemning the Athenian jury. He suggests that the prudent response to Socratic criticism is not to kill the one gentle critic they now have, but to take care to make themselves into better people (39c-d). As we have seen, Socrates’ life was spent in attempting to improve his fellows by philosophical conversations held in public and private places. Socrates attempts to do good for his fellow citizens because he believes that he has both a duty and a capacity to do so.
His commitment to duty is implied by his interpretation of the Delphic Oracle’s statement regarding his unsurpassed wisdom. It is further demonstrated by the contractual argument of the Laws in the Crito. The establishment of a duty to seek to do good (as well as to avoid doing harm) is the “music” that Socrates hears as he listens to the arguments of the Laws and that is what sets the scale for a good citizen. As a side note, it is interesting to reflect whether the Athenian society should be judged for its lack of tolerance to its noble citizen, Socrates.
In the words of Prof. Smith, “The one thing that Plato does not argue is that Socrates should simply be tolerated. To tolerate his teaching would seem to trivialize it in some sense: to render it harmless. The Athenians at least pay Socrates the tribute of taking him seriously, which is exactly why he is on trial. The Athenians refuse to tolerate Socrates because they know he is not harmless, that he poses a challenge, a fundamental challenge to their way of life and all that they hold to be noble and worthwhile.
To tolerate Socrates would be to say to him that we care little for our way of life and that we are willing to let you challenge it and impugn it every day. ” Is a healthy society one that is open to literally every point of view? The trial of Socrates asks us to think about a society’s limits of toleration, its dissociation from the absolute good and the ideal citizen’s attempt to bridge the two. ——————————————– [ 2 ]. Aristotle, The Politics Book III (1276b34)