Notes on Plato’s Crito

04Apr07

I know very, very little about philosophy. I’m trying to fix this by going back and reading some. Tonight I read Plato’s Crito, in which Crito tries to persuade Socrates to escape from prison and avoid death by fleeing to another city.

If Socrates was so content upon obeying the law and doing what was just, why did he stay in Athens and teach if he knew he was disobeying the law.

If he was not aware that he was disobeying the law, how can he argue that the law could say to him:

‘You, Socrates, are breaking the covenants and agreements which you made with us at your leisure, not in any haste or under any compulsion or deception, but after you have had seventy years to think of them, during which time you were at liberty to leave the city, if we were not to your mind, or if our covenants appeared to you to be unfair. You had your choice, and might have gone either to Lacedaemon or Crete, both which states are often praised by you for their good government, or to some other Hellenic or foreign state

If he was not consciously disobeying the law then his understanding of the law was flawed and thus his acceptance of the law was based on a misunderstanding rather than an agreement that the law was good.

Would not allowing himself to be put to to death, when there are other options–exile or escape, based on the verdict of a law which once he understood, he did not agree with, be morally wrong? Would it not be better for him to do what he would have done had he understood the law better before he was sentenced (either change the law or leave Athens)?

On a different note, I found this part which is closer to the beginning particularly interesting:

In questions of just and unjust, fair and foul, good and evil, which are the subjects of our present consultation, ought we to follow the opinion of the many and to fear them; or the opinion of the one man who has understanding? ought we not to fear and reverence him more than all the rest of the world: and if we desert him shall we not destroy and injure that principle in us which may be assumed to be improved by justice and deteriorated by injustice;–there is such a principle?

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