Principles, dialectic and the common world of friendship: Socrates and Crito in conversation

Article

Principles, dialectic and thecommon world offriendship: Socrates andCrito in conversation

Kieran BonnerSt Jerome’s University, University of Waterloo, Canada

AbstractIn the Crito, a dialogue that is highly influential for the traditions both of philosophy and ofpolitical thinking, Socrates resists the pleading of his friend Crito to escape the city thathas condemned him. For Arendt, the dialogue instantiates the separation betweenhumans as thinking beings and humans as acting beings, and so between political theoryand philosophy. For others, the dialogue shows Socrates’ reasoning to be self-contradictory. Socrates’ introduction of the Athenian Laws as a world of greater moralforce than the empirical Athens of Crito’s appeal aims to ground principled action. Yet,there are many competing principles (authoritarianism, obedience, patriotism, friend-ship, integrity) that, interpretively speaking, have been understood as validated by thisdialogue. Is there any necessary or analytic principle that can be articulated and, if so,what are the grounds of such? Drawing on the theory and methods of Blum andMcHugh’s analysis and Gadamer’s hermeneutics, this article seeks to demonstrate thatpractical (political) action needs to be understood in an analytic context to grasp fullyits ethical and political implications. Along the way, reference will be made to Garfinkel’sarticulation of members’ methods for discovering agreements and Arendt’s articulationof the common world that the conversation among friends sustains.

KeywordsHannah Arendt, authoritative community, Alan Blum and Peter McHugh, ethics, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Harold Garfinkel, Socratic therapy

Corresponding author:

Kieran Bonner, St Jerome’s University, University of Waterloo, Sociology/Human Sciences, 290 Westmount

Road, North Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2 L 3G3.

Email: [email protected]

History of the Human Sciences201X, Vol XX(X) 1–23ª The Author(s) 2013

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Action affirming principle in the Crito

In the Crito, a dialogue that is highly influential for the tradition of political thinking,

Socrates resists the pleading of his friend Crito to escape the city that has condemned

him. What are the political implications of Socrates’ refusal to escape his apparently

unjust death sentence? What can this dialogue tell us about the relation between theory

and politics? We cannot say that either Socrates or Crito is involved in a detached and

unengaged investigation about what Socrates should do. His friend has arranged for his

escape and urges him to act on it. The investigation they undertake about what is to be

done has significant theoretical and practical import. Despite the urgings of Crito,

Socrates does not impulsively rush out of prison when told that the prison guard has been

bribed and safe passage out of Athens arranged. Socrates’ decision to remain and accept

his death sentence cannot be said to be unreflexive. This dialogue therefore, provides a

particular example of the integration of theory and practice.

What, too, are we to make of the reason Socrates gives for not escaping? He says that

for him to escape would be an offence against the Laws of Athens, the very laws used to

condemn him. On the principle that it is better to suffer an evil than be a doer of evil, he

suffers the evil of the death penalty rather than break his agreement that he has the Laws

assert, that is, according to his reconstruction of his dialogue with the Laws. Does this

decision, to be law-abiding unto death, suggest a conservative relation to theorizing and

to politics? The Athens of the time was notoriously corrupt and yet, Socrates chooses to

abide by the agreement he constructs the Laws asserting. At first blush, it seems to say

that the kind of reflexive theorist Socrates embodies makes a principle out of being law-

abiding. This conclusion has led some to charge Plato with authoritarianism (Tarrant,

2003: 89–90).1 If, as McHugh (2005: 152) says, ‘what affirms principle . . . is action’,

is Socrates affirming the principle of being law-abiding in refusing to escape? Is this a

principle worth affirming? Reflexively speaking, we should also ask, what kind of theory

and method we need to assess this (or any) principle?

In the 21st century we are all aware about the problematic nature of such a principle.

Whether we talk about segregation laws in the United States, the laws of the Third Reich,

or any number of examples of unjust laws, it is hard to see in what way the principle

Socrates uses to accept his death sentence can be accepted without qualification. And

yet, what does Socrates mean when he has the Laws of Athens question him about the

virtue of escaping? What kind of relation is displayed between theory and practice by

this dialogue? If one way of characterizing our era is as an age of pervasive anxiety

(e.g. global warming, ongoing fears of depression and recession, sovereign debt, finan-

cial collapse of countries and industries, austerity, political gridlock, etc.), does this dia-

logue offer ways of thinking about theorizing under conditions of anxiety? Does it offer a

way of thinking through our contemporary dilemmas, whether the financial collapse of

2008, or the response of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements to this

collapse?

If the contemporary age is rife with fears, anxieties and contradictions, is this any dif-

ferent from the Athens of Socrates’ times? Athens had undergone significant political

turmoil, from democracy to oligarchy and back to democracy, from war to defeat, and

from prosperity to being plague-infected. The Thirty Tyrants took power after the

2 History of the Human Sciences

decisive defeat of Athens by Sparta in 404 BCE. The trial and execution of Socrates in

399 took place against this background (Nails, 2009: 7). Socrates, the philosopher of the

agora, the gadfly of Athenians, was condemned to death by a democracy that had been

restored by the overthrow of the rule of the Thirty Tyrants. Does this point to a tension

between democratic politics and Socratic theorizing, as developed by Plato in his Repub-

lic? Democracy in Plato’s Republic is the second worst form of government, surpassed

only by tyranny. According to Hannah Arendt (2005: 6) the western ‘tradition of political

thought began when the death of Socrates made Plato despair of polis life’. ‘The gulf

between philosophy and politics opened up with the trial and condemnation of Socrates’

(ibid.). As she goes on to say (ibid.: 7):

Socrates’ point in his defense before the citizens and the judges of Athens had been that his

behavior was in the best interest of the city. In the Crito he had explained to his friends that

he could not flee but rather, for political reasons, must suffer the death penalty. It seems he

was not only unable to persuade the judges but also could not convince his friends. In other

words, the city had no use for a philosopher, and the friends had no use for political

argumentation.

According to Arendt, Plato drew an anti-political message from Socrates’ death and

developed a political philosophy to protect the practice of philosophy from the practice

of the polis; Arendt’s corpus of work (e.g. 1958, 1961, 1965, 1978, 2003, 2005) is a mag-

nificent response to the political dangers of such a position. Yet, does this need to be the

lesson that we take from Plato’s Crito – the parting of the ways of the men of thought and

the men of action, the separation of theory and practice?

Socrates’ strained reasons for not escaping

Harold Tarrant, a Classics scholar, raises a different problem concerning the Crito. The

explanation Socrates offers to account for why he must accept an unjust death penalty is,

he says, ‘incredibly strained’ (Tarrant, 2003: 76). ‘Supposing Socrates was innocent of

the charges brought by Meletus’, Tarrant says, ‘was he not guilty of bringing the law into

disrepute by allowing himself to be convicted and put to death?’ That is, if Socrates

refuses to leave because he does not want to put the Athenian Laws into disrepute, has

he not already done that by letting the Athenians unjustly condemn him to death?

Socrates’ provocative defense, his insistence on using dialectic rather than rhetoric to

defend himself, was Socrates’ way of responding to an unjust charge. Unlike, for exam-

ple, the trial and death of Jesus, Socrates does not suffer his trial in silence but actively

disputes the charges. Is it not now a contradiction to say he cannot escape because it will

bring the laws into disrepute?

Continuing on the same line of argument, Tarrant says: ‘If injustice is the greatest of

evils for the person who commits it, then the son who cherishes his parent ought to do his

utmost to avoid having that parent be unjust to him’ (2003: 75–6). Here again, Socrates’

position is critiqued in terms of the relationship between what Socrates does and what he

says, between his theory and his practice. Socrates uses the metaphor of parents to char-

acterize the Laws (51 a–c). He says the city, like his parents, made his life possible. He

Bonner 3

concludes that he cannot now do an injustice to them by escaping, just because they, in

ignorance, have done an injustice to him. But, says Tarrant, in accepting the death pen-

alty he is allowing his parents to do an evil, which, according to Socrates’ own theory,

makes them worse off.

When examined closely by Tarrant, Socrates’ theory and his practice seem to be in

contradiction. While Socrates refuses to escape because he does not want to do harm

to the Laws of Athens, Tarrant reasonably concludes that his actions are harming the

Laws by bringing them into disrepute and harming the city by allowing them to do the

evil action of executing him. According to this line of reasoning, Aristotle’s decision to

flee Athens to prevent it from committing another wrong against philosophy, rather than

seeming to be a self-serving rationalization, now appears to be more ethical and more

reflexively consistent. For Tarrant, therefore, ‘The Crito is a short but highly controver-

sial work’ (Tarrant, 2003: 73). To resolve the difficulty that the great philosopher Plato

would put such ‘incredibly strained’ arguments in the mouth of Socrates, Tarrant con-

cludes: ‘It is not to Athenian intellectuals that Plato addresses himself, but to the many

patriotic citizens who found Socrates’ failure to escape difficult to explain’ (ibid.: 77).

That is, Tarrant’s conclusion exemplifies Arendt’s reading concerning the parting of the

people of action from those of theory. Socrates’ theory is suspect but it serves Plato’s

purpose to appeal to patriotic citizens.

Tarrant raises logical empirical arguments to support the thesis that Socrates argu-

ment is ‘incredibly strained’ and resolves these strains to his own satisfaction by resort-

ing to another empirical claim, this time drawing on a principle from the sociology of

knowledge; he uses what he knows about the world and the cultural context of ancient

Athens to help resolve the tensions or contradictions between Socrates’ theory and prac-

tice. As Peter Berger describes it, ‘ideas as well as people are socially located . . . Even

in the case of very abstract ideas that seemingly have little social connection, the sociol-

ogy of knowledge attempts to draw the line from the thought to the thinker to his social

world’ (Berger, 1963: 110).2 In this case, the line between the thought (it is wrong for

Socrates to escape), the thinker (Plato), to his social world (Athenian patriotic citizens,

many of whom condemned Socrates as a traitor), provides an explanatory context that

seems to account for the contradictions that Tarrant finds in this text. It is as if Plato were

saying to patriotic Athenians that though Socrates was convicted of impiety because of

his theories and teaching, his actions show he was a loyal citizen of Athens, a loyalty he

proved by refusing to escape. Tarrant’s reasoning exemplifies the separation of thought

and action that Arendt sees Plato as initiating.

While this explanation is plausible, it does mean that Tarrant has to leave the text in

order to offer an explanation; he has to try to place what Plato says in the context of a

wider pattern (the confusion of patriotic citizens of Athens) in order to provide some kind

of theoretic coherency. Thus, Plato is formulated as engaged in a political project (con-

vincing patriotic citizens) and the radicality of Socrates’ actions is contextualized by say-

ing he died for Athens. This way of resolving the apparent tensions and contradictions

between Socrates the actor and Socrates the theorist is a classic example of what Garfin-

kel calls the documentary method of interpretation (1967: 76–103). In other words, the

text is made intelligible by treating Socrates as Plato’s mouthpiece, making the theory

espoused by Socrates in reality a practical rhetorical attempt to persuade patriotic


Athenians that he was in fact a good Athenian citizen. In this case, the principle or lesson

of the dialogue, affirmed in the action of refusing to escape, is patriotism. That is, Tarrant

resolves the contradictions (that his strict logical empirical reading of the dialogue gen-

erates) by interpreting Plato’s dialogue to be affirming the value of patriotism, though

this affirmation, as we shall demonstrate, is by way of a very un-Socratic stipulation.

This patriotism can now be interpreted as the response to the fear and anxiety that the

trial of Socrates created, itself an instance of a crisis in Athenian culture. Whatever else

may be said about the Tea Party movement in the USA, it may be said to affirm this prin-

ciple, a political response to the anxiety of the current age. The worldwide Occupy Wall

Street movement is another. These responses seemed to be organized around competing

principles whether patriotism, freedom, economic justice, and so on. Each asserts a prin-

ciple as the basis for its action. How are these principles to be assessed and mediated? In

other words, the competing interpretations of the principle the Crito is seen to affirm,

mirror the competing principles that are asserted as responses to the anxiety of our age.

Is there a way to engage the Crito that can help us understand the possibilities involved in

the relation between anxiety, theorizing, principle and political action?

Theorizing a post-foundational understanding of principle: Theradical interpretive method

How is a theorist to resolve the competing lessons that can be drawn from this seminal

text? Is there another way by which the relation between theory and practice that

Socrates gives voice to and acts on can be understood? Is it possible that Socrates is actu-

ally resisting the empirical world of ancient Athens by drawing on another world and by

so doing showing a more integral and principled relation between theory and practice?

Might this help us think about the meaning and possibility of principled action in post-

modern and post-foundational times? It is the contention of this article that through the

use of phenomenological hermeneutic methods, the Crito can be seen to offer and ground

a way of understanding a principled relation to politics and the world, by formulating a

horizon that is not limited by logical empiricism (a la Tarrant).

Drawing on the theory and methods of Blum and McHugh’s analysis and Gadamer’s

hermeneutics, this article seeks to demonstrate that practical political action needs to be

understood in an analytic context to fully grasp its political implications. Socrates,

according to Blum and McHugh (1984: 142):

. . . taught us that . . . self-reflection cannot be divined if it is understood as an interaction.

He suggested that the relation between reflection and the self upon which it reflects can

only be captured by figures of speech that evoke in extraordinary ways the need to under-

take the action . . . This is to say that a principled relation to knowledge is essentially iro-

nic and is depicted in the figure of an actor who relates with confidence to the whole and

so to the problem of the place of man (of discourse) within the whole. (Blum and McHugh,

1984: 142)

From this perspective, the principle that can be developed from this dialogue ‘cannot be

accounted for in terms of the conditions under which it arises’ (1984: 135).

Bonner 5

When Plato is interpreted as appealing to Athenian patriots this makes the principle

Tarrant claims Socrates to be demonstrating ‘subject to history – to conditions’. This, say

Blum and McHugh, ‘would not be a principled understanding of principle’ (1984: 135).

That is, Tarrant’s own interpretation is unreflexively exempted from the problem to be

understood in that he does not address and examine the principle to which his own way of

making sense of the text appeals. Drawing on Blum and McHugh’s work, this article pro-

poses to engage this dialogue in a way that rethinks the idea of principle as analytically

distinct from the idea of a rule (e.g. it is good to be patriotic, law-abiding, philosophical,

and so on). The Crito as a dialogue between Socrates and his friend will be treated as a

case study that, through an application of the dialectical method, will reveal what is

involved in working out ‘a principled understanding of principle’, under, in this case,

conditions of anxiety.

Similarly, ‘Gadamer maintains that each of Plato’s dialogues must be understood as

spoken language, as a developing discussion . . . In each case . . . we are dealing with a

specific situation in which Socrates speaks to individuals who have special concerns

and who, being the people they are and having the perspectives they do, define the hor-

izons of what Socrates wants to say or can say’ (Smith, 1980: ix). What Socrates says in

any one dialogue cannot therefore be taken at face value. A logical empirical reading,

from this hermeneutic perspective, is naive. Rather, the text needs to be read as shaped

by the specific concerns of Crito and how his concerns and his friendship with Socrates

define the horizons of what Plato is saying. In other words, the analysis of the dialogue

needs to take into account the very particular relationship of Socrates and Crito and

their particular Athenian context (as the text points to that context) in order to tease

out the principle to ground Socrates’ action. From this perspective, the principle is

embedded in the dialogue which, in turn, has to be recovered dialogically in order

to examine its ‘whatness’ and its meaning. That is, the universality of the idea of prin-

cipled action, as given to us in the dialogue, needs to be understood in relation to the

particularity of the friendship between Crito and Socrates. This method therefore seeks

to show in what way it is productive to treat the dialogue as if it is an example of situ-

ated intersubjectivity (Bonner, 2013).

This radical interpretive method has ontological as well as epistemological implica-

tions. All knowledge-claims and demonstrations are influenced by history, culture and

community, regardless of whether these are philosophical, scientific, sociological,

anthropological, and so on (Bonner, 2001). There is no automatically privileged access

to the truth and thus to the truth of any particular principle. At all times, whether with

Arendt, Tarrant, or Plato, we are dealing with knowledge-claims that are mediated

through language, and are always exceeded by the whole they seek to describe and

understand (Gadamer, 1975). My own desire to provide an overview of the Crito needs

to be moderated by a reflexivity that recognizes, as with all overviews, this too is one

perspective that is exceeded by the whole. Crito and Socrates will therefore be oriented

to as social actors who organize their action ‘as a particular solution to the problem of

what needs to be done, because [while] the solution to this problem is always and essen-

tially particular’ (Blum and McHugh, 1984: 135), this analysis seeks to recover the prin-

cipled agreement grounding their particular solution to the problem of whether to escape.

In other words, the principle (universal) and the particular situation, the essential and the


accidental, are necessarily intertwined and it is the task of the dialectical method to

unpack and articulate their relationship.

This method shows the way the Crito can be understood to offer possibilities of enga-

ging the world (e.g. of Athens) in other than a narrowly empirical correspondence fash-

ion (i.e. that cultural world back in that time)? It engages the text in order to address ways

of understanding principled action. In what way might this dialogue provide a way to see

an engagement between the empirical world (of 21st-century challenges, or of family,

friends and patriotic citizens of an empirical ancient Athens in turmoil) and a more

authoritative community or ideal world that Socrates can be understood to be as acting

and arguing from? This article seeks to provide a reading of the Crito that articulates

what an engagement with an ideal or authoritative community would look like, an

engagement that shows the principle behind Socrates’ action to operate in a particular

cultural context but not be ‘subservient to it’ (Gadamer, 1975: 35).

Acting justly in the context of friendship and anxiety

The scene of the dialogue is the prison that holds Socrates.3 Crito has come with the news

that the ship from Delos is due into Athens the next day, meaning an imminent execution

for Socrates. When Crito admits that he has been in the cell for some time, Socrates asks:

‘Why did you not wake me at once?’ Crito replies: ‘Indeed, Socrates, I wish that I myself

were not so sleepless and sorrowful. But I have been wondering to see how soundly you

sleep. And I purposely did not wake you, for I was anxious not to disturb your repose’

(43 b–c). Naming his own anxiety, Crito remarks that Socrates’ lifelong happy tempera-

ment still holds under the calamity that is happening, indicating the Socratic claim that

happiness, justice and wisdom are interrelated. Plato here is implicitly pointing to the

prospect that Socrates is happy, despite the imminent prospect of his execution, because

he has acted well and continues to act well in the situation of his trial and condemnation.

Crito, on the other hand, is sleepless and sorrowful. Why? One of his very good

friends is about to die; the friend, who to him is a model of self-reflection and just action,

is about to be executed because he has absurdly and unjustly been given the death penalty

for impiety. For the Athenians, piety did not mean a strict adherence to religious rituals;

rather, ‘religious piety for the Greeks enforced all the obligations that bind an individual

to others, and engaged his personal responsibility to his family and friends and his polit-

ical loyalty to the state and its traditions’ (Cumming, 1956: x). We could say, therefore,

that this sense of piety in a particular way ‘raises the problem of the place of [Socrates]/

discourse within the whole’ (Blum and McHugh, 1984: 142). In this particular case, piety

connotes images of obligation, responsibility and loyalty; impiety in this case means not

only irresponsibility but also a kind of treason, making the sanction of the death penalty

seem less extreme. Socrates’ death is a ‘double disaster’ for Crito, as not only will he lose

a friend from childhood and an irreplaceable intimate, he also risks being castigated as a

poor friend. ‘And what reputation could be more disgraceful than the reputation of caring

more for money than for one’s friends. The public will never believe that we were anx-

ious to save you, but that you yourself refused to escape’ (44 c).

While on the surface what Crito says seems to support Tarrant’s interpretation of the

dialogue (its concern with what the public believes), we also see that this encounter is a

Bonner 7

dialogue about anxiety, friendship and reputation, organized around Socrates’ impend-

ing execution. Crito shows a particular sensitivity to the sense of shame that comes with

having a disgraceful reputation, showing the public nature of citizenship in ancient

Athens and what has been called its shame culture. According to Gouldner (1965:

83), ‘in guilt culture, what is internalized are the various general standards in terms of

which evaluations of self and others are made. In contrast, the concept of a shame culture

stresses that it is not only generalized evaluative standards that are internalized but also,

a generalized sensitivity to the opinion of others.’ Crito has not only internalized the

‘generalized evaluative standards’ concerning the superiority of the value of friendship

over money, he has also a ‘generalized sensitivity to the opinion of’ fellow Athenians.

A good Athenian does not live by a Wall Street ethic and value financial success above

all else;4 rather, it is dishonorable not to be prepared to sacrifice money for friendship.

The ideals celebrated by Athenian culture (virtue, excellence, rhetoric, heroism) were

public-spirited virtues. For an Athenian to have the reputation of caring more for money

than friendship would be shameful and embarrassing (ibid.: 81–90).

Crito’s anxiety is understandable when we recognize that Socrates’ death means he

loses both a friend and his reputation. When Socrates admits he is worried about the

punitive consequences that may befall the friends who would take risks on his behalf,

Crito assures him that they have thought through that issue. Both are agreed that being

a good friend means not making one’s friends suffer unjustly, even if that means having

to take risks. Crito goes on to offer a strong case not only for why Socrates should escape

but why he must escape. ‘I think you will be doing what is unjust if you abandon your life

when you might preserve it’, he says (45 c–d). Socrates, by abandoning his children, will

be abandoning his parental obligations and bringing disgrace on all his friends who now

will look like cowards, more concerned with saving themselves rather than risking action

to save their friend. ‘Take care, Socrates,’ he says, ‘lest these things be not evil only, but

also dishonorable to you and to us. Reflect, then, or rather the time for reflection is past;

we must make up our minds’ (46 a).

Reflecting on what Crito says, we note three elements. First, Crito charges Socrates

with being in danger of acting unjustly if he refuses to escape. In effect it means he is

abandoning his children and ‘one ought not to bring children into the world unless you

mean to take the trouble of bringing them up and educating them’ (45 d–e). Second,

Socrates appears to be indifferent or callous toward the dishonor he will bring on himself

and his friends. Crito’s concern about his reputation for being a good Athenian should

also be Socrates’ concern for the disgrace his actions will bring on his friends. Is Socrates

in danger of acquiring a reputation for being a bad Athenian, in that he is looking after

himself rather than his friends and their reputations? If being a good Athenian means

being a good friend, then Socrates, in risking the good reputation of his friends, shows

that he may be neither a good Athenian nor a good friend. (However, Tarrant’s rush to

judgment that this is about persuading Athenian patriots is, as we will see, premature.)

Third, we see that Crito’s anxiety is becoming dominant, so dominant that he takes back

the call for reflection: ‘If we delay any longer’, he says, ‘we are lost.’ And reflection is

time-consuming.

So, what, for the purposes of the method being applied in this article, is this dialogue

about? It is a case study on handling anxieties and fears about evil things that will happen


to us (death, the loss of a friend, damage to one’s reputation). It is a case study on what is

involved in responding to urgent and pressing matters, not an irrelevant issue when we

contemplate the various crises that confront contemporary global society. In this case,

what does a good friend (and by implication a good Athenian) do with this anxiety?

Is Socrates so self-contented that he is in danger of acting as if he is asleep to the dangers

his friends face? Is he not worried about the catastrophic consequences that his actions

will have on his family and friends? Crito therefore says that the principle of doing right

by one’s family and friends, of not acting in a way that would damage their reputation, is

the principle that needs to be affirmed in the action of escaping. If we remember that the

charge of impiety includes disloyalty to family and friends, we recognize that Crito is

making a very serious charge against his friend. One does not have to be a psychoanalyst

to see that Crito’s anxiety could go some ways to accounting for Crito’s intensity, pas-

sion and even insensitivity.

Socratic dialogical examination as therapeutic and ethical

How does Socrates respond to the grip of anxiety his friend experiences, an anxiety that

leads Crito to (tactlessly) reinforce the charge the citizens convicted him on? Socrates

does not respond in outrage at the potentially insulting charge his friend makes. Rather,

he acknowledges the anxiety: ‘My dear Crito, if your anxiety to save me be right, it is

most valuable.’ As we would say nowadays, Crito is affirmed in his anxiety, showing

a kind of therapeutic Socrates. If ‘anxiety concerning existence is something which

belongs inseparably to the life and nature of human beings’ (Gadamer, 1996: 158), it also

has the potential to be productive, which requires shaping it. The issue for Socrates is not

anxiety per se but the object of the anxiety. Anxiety as we know from Kierkegaard, Sar-

tre and Heidegger is an experience of the possibility of existential freedom, which, for

Socrates, is to be exercised rightly – what is just and right, escaping or accepting his

death sentence? In turn, this relation to anxiety requires getting some distance on our

fears and terrors. What is Socrates’ method for achieving this distance and in what way

does this respond to his friend’s anxiety? ‘I am still what I have always been – a man who

will accept no argument but that which on reflection I find to be the truest’ (46 b–c).

If Socrates’ commitment to theorizing was tested in his public trial by the threat of the

prosecutor and jury (Blum, 1978),5 it is tested here by the potentially justified anxiety of

his good friend. The ‘power of the multitude’ tests Socrates’ commitment to the exam-

ined life with ‘with fresh terrors, as children are scared with hobgoblins, and inflict upon

us new fines and imprisonments, and deaths’ (46 c–d). During his trial Socrates stated

that the fear of death is ‘shameful ignorance of thinking that we know what we do not

know’ (Apology 29 c–d). Here in his prison cell, on the other hand, Socrates’ commit-

ment to reflection is tested by his friend’s concern that he is about to do an unjust action.

Unlike the threat of the multitude, this concern of Crito in fact, makes Socrates anxious.

‘I am anxious, Crito, to examine our former argument with your help, and to see whether

my present circumstance will appear to me to have affected its truth in any way or not;

and whether we are to set it aside, or to yield assent to it’ (46 d–e).

Note we now have two people who are anxious, Crito for his friend’s fate and

Socrates for the rightness of his proposed action. For Socrates the principle for action

Bonner 9

cannot be based on opinion or fears; rather, principle needs reflection. Socrates, there-

fore, does not challenge the culture of Athens, which demands acting on the principle

of friendship by opposing it with another principle, i.e. philosophy, as Arendt’s reading

of Plato suggests. Rather, Socrates is engaged by Crito’s anxiety and the principled

action it calls for, but says that principled action needs not stipulation but reflection.

While acting on principle (of loyalty to family and friends) shows an ethical disposition,

that principle needs to be tested for its rightness in this particular circumstance. Socrates’

method to deal with this particular anxiety is to make it subject to dialogical examina-

tion, in this case a dialogue with the friend who aroused anxiety in the first place. ‘For

you [Crito]’, says Socrates, ‘in all probability will not have to die tomorrow, and your

judgment will not be biased by that circumstance’ (47 a). This could be an example

of the famous Socratic irony but it could also show that Socrates now wants the help

of his friend in assuaging his own anxiety about whether the principled action he has cho-

sen will, on reflection, show itself to be the truest. While for Crito, the principle of loy-

alty to family and friends requires immediate action, Socrates asks is this the right

principle to act on in these circumstance, thus embodying the action that principle

requires reflection. ‘What is unconditional about principle’, say Blum and McHugh

(1984: 137), ‘is that it always raises the question of the relation between self and rule

as a necessary question.’

Socratic reflexivity means working out the nature of what principled action is

required in these particular circumstances (phronesis), while simultaneously going part-

way to address and ameliorate the anxiety his friend suffers from. It points to a unique

Socratic therapy of sorts, a talking cure within the bounds of ethics and politics. Unlike

contemporary formal therapy, what stands out about this ‘talking through anxiety’ is its

recognition that the matter to be decided concerns the best ethical and political action,

and therefore both parties are equally subject to the conclusion of the talk. This

talking-through shows the inherent equality in the friendship and the equality of citizen-

ship in regards to ethical and political action, a friendship that through conversation

becomes a mutual education about right action.

It is not completely new to refer to what Socrates is doing as a kind of therapy. As has

been noted (Lear, 2009; Buchan, 2009),6 Socratic dialogue has many features in com-

mon with psychoanalytic therapy. Both psychoanalysis (Freudian and Lacanian) and

Socratic dialogue are grounded in the need to work out a relation to the Eros that directs

and distorts our understanding. What differentiates Socratic therapy is that Socrates’

encounter with his interlocutors is more of a wider hermeneutic situation than a narrow

clinical situation. In this particular dialogue, Crito is not (in the narrow meaning of these

terms) a client or an analysand. His anxiety is not pathological but rather ‘is something

which belongs inseparably to the life and nature of human beings’ (Gadamer, 1996: 158).

Crito does not need therapy to function ‘normally’ as a citizen in Athenian democracy.

To respond to Crito’s anxiety by trying to make him aware of the history of his defenses

and their unconscious content would be to displace the ethical-political issue at hand

(whether to escape or not), in turn displacing the capacity (practical wisdom) needed

to work out that ethical-political issue. While Crito’s anxiety is an issue for Socrates,

it is not just an occasion for an individualized talking cure but, more important, an occa-

sion for Socrates and Crito, in the context of their friendship, to (re-)engage the question


of the principle of Socrates’ action. It is the thesis of this article that Socratic dialogue,

when analysed from this hermeneutic and analytic perspective, addresses the question

both of anxious souls and of principled political action.7

When a good friend is anxious about a future loss (friendship, reputation) in relation

to the unethicality of the choice the friend is making, Socratic therapy seeks to work out

the issue; i.e. engage in radical (rooted) reflection to see whether his anxiety is close to

the truth and correct in its call for a particular action (escape), or if it reflects the natural if

immature fear that needs to be resisted. Not all fears and terrors point to actions that need

to be avoided. Some fears are misleading, bringing out the child in us, tempting us to run

rather than face the object of our fear courageously. Socrates’ anxiety here is not about

avoiding what everyone else treats as disastrous, but avoiding doing something wrong.

He is anxious and now asks for his friend’s help in understanding whether his decision to

accept his unjust sentence is not ethical. For Socrates, handling this anxiety requires

reflection. The conversation among friends is the Socratic way to come to understand

what principled response this particular circumstance requires (Gadamer, 1986).

The phenomenon of death itself has now been made incidental. It will be left to the

Phaedo for us to get an image of what a confrontation with this phenomenon looks like.

The reputation of Socrates or of Socrates’ friends is also rendered incidental to the need

to get Crito’s help in resolving this current anxiety. Could we say that the interaction

between Crito and Socrates has now turned into a genuine engagement? Socrates seems

to be coming from a world that prevents him from agreeing with Crito’s argument,

despite the fact that ‘the anxiety concerning death . . . is part of the fundamental dispo-

sition of human beings’ (Gadamer, 1996: 155). What has been demonstrated so far in the

dialogue? Socrates’ reflective conversation with Crito enables Crito to get distance on

the anxious rejection of reflection, illustrating the reflective nature of Socratic healing.

The common world of friendship: Socrates and Crito

Socrates reviews select propositions with Crito leading up to the latter’s agreement with

the principle ‘living well and honorably and justly mean the same thing’ (48 b). The ease

with which this agreement is arrived at shows the way Socrates builds on the long history

of their friendship. There are many examples of Platonic dialogues where the understand-

ing that virtue, honor, justice and living well are deeply intertwined would be challenged

(e.g. Polus and Callicles in the Gorgias and Thrasymachus in the Republic). However, here

we have a conversation between Socrates and his friend Crito, a conversation that can take

for granted the argument needed to establish the principle that it is better to suffer an injus-

tice than do an injustice. Socrates through conversation reminds Crito of the common

world they share, a community built up through many years of conversation.

Arendt is particularly articulate about this element of conversation:

Friendship to a large extent, indeed, consists of this kind of talking about something that

friends have in common. By talking about what is between them, it becomes ever more

common to them. It gains not only its specific articulateness, but develops and expands and

finally, in the course of time and life, begins to constitute a little world of its own which is

shared in friendship. (2005: 16)

Bonner 11

Socrates’ talking through the issue has brought their common world alive. Socratic

dialogue, in this case, brings to life the world Crito shares with Socrates, a world of

agreements about the good life and its relation to principle. This talking-through gives

Crito distance on his anxieties about reputation, bringing up children and so on. In the

shared world built up through conversation, a set of beliefs has been established that

differs decisively from ‘the opinions of the many, who casually put men to death, and

who would, if they could, as casually bring them to life again, without a thought’

(48 c–d). With Crito’s agreement, Socrates has established that both of them should

abide by the world (i.e. the authoritative community) that they have established

between them through dialectic, the agreements established through their speeches and

actions. On the basis of the influence of friendship, Socrates says, ‘we have nothing to

consider but the question . . . shall we be acting justly if we give money and thanks to

the men who are to aid me in escaping and if we ourselves take our respective parts in

my escape?’ (ibid.). For Socrates it is it is assisted living rather than assisted suicide

that raises the ethical concern.

Crito now agrees to set aside issues around ‘considerations of expense, and of rep-

utation, and of bringing up my children, of which you talk, Crito’ as reflecting popular

opinion (48 c) rather than reflecting principles set in stone. As Socrates seeks to relieve

his own anxiety about the ethicality of his action, he has helped Crito get some distance

on his anxiety of the potential damage to his reputation as a friend, which Socrates’

actions put at risk. The friendly conversation enables Crito to override the anxiety

about his own reputation as a friend and a good Athenian and say, ‘I think you are right,

Socrates. But what are we to do?’ (48 d). Crito agrees that the principle of just action is

to be a decisive criterion for judging whether Socrates is to escape or accept execution;

he is at a loss about the process of arriving at this judgment. The primary consideration

is to be the justice of this particular action rather than its consequences per se. Crito is

now anxious about what Socrates is anxious about – Is it ethical or just to escape? – but

is unsure about how to go about resolving this question. The ‘What are we to do’ ques-

tion suggests that Socrates has induced an aporia, whose urgency has now replaced his

previous anxiety about his reputation.

What made this movement in Crito’s orientation to the urgent issue of escape

possible? It is the world that is grounded in and made possible by their friendship

and the dialogue that makes the common world shared by this friendship real. The

dialogue has therapeutic and ethical-political elements; it involves developing one’s

self-understanding and simultaneously one’s being in the world. In this case, it sug-

gests a common world, or an authoritative community, based on a series of agree-

ments about what is a worthwhile life, agreements leading to the conclusion that to

live well is to live honorably and justly. This common world is fragile as it is depen-

dent on conversation, talking things through, to make it real. Its fragility is revealed

in the way Crito became anxious as a response to the opinion of the many about his

reputation as a friend. But, when it becomes real, it enables Crito to get some dis-

tance on the very urgent empirical world of Athens, enables him to see that the anxi-

ety the latter creates needs resistance and transformation (education) rather than

reaction.


Dialogical examination: The common vs the empirical world

At this point in the dialogue, Socrates becomes very direct in his conversation with

Crito: ‘Let us examine this question together, my friend, and if you can contradict any-

thing that I say, do so, and I shall be persuaded . . . I am very anxious to act with your

approval and consent. I do not want you to think me mistaken’ (48 e). Ironically,

Socrates’ anxiety seems to have increased. He was sleeping soundly, felt assured about

his decision to accept his pending execution but now is anxious that he may be ‘mis-

taken’. While he is confident his action is just, his friend’s anxiety has disturbed this

assurance; to resolve this anxiety he wants (needs) the consent of his friend and is pre-

pared to act otherwise (i.e. escape), if his friend can contradict anything that he says.

Socrates was sleeping soundly but now, awakened to his friend’s disapproval of his

actions, he has become anxious. Again, ironically, while the issue of the reputation

of being a friend is now seen as not relevant to the conversation, the approval of an

actual friend in and through this conversation has become urgent. This points to the

fragility but again also the strength of the common world. In the authoritative commu-

nity they share, they know living and dying well mean acting justly and honorably.

They are assured of this truth. What they both are now anxious about is the question

of what is the just and honorable action in this particular case.

Socrates could be said to be engaged in an exercise of what Aristotle calls phronesis

or practical wisdom. This art of the statesman or political leader ‘is a comprehensive

moral capacity because it involves seeing particular situations in their true light in inter-

action with a general grasp of what it is to be a complete human being, and to live a

proper human life’ (Beiner, 1983: 72). Phronesis is a dialogical art moving

. . . back and forth, from universal to particular, and from particular to universal . . . with-

out dependence upon a set of rules or codified principles to tell us when the particular is an

instantiation of the universal (our conception of what is good in general), when it is an

exception to the ethical norms we already live by, and when it calls for revision of our con-

ception of the good. (Beiner, 1983: 72)

Socrates, talking things through with Crito, has to decide whether escaping is an instan-

tiation of living honorably and justly, whether his impending execution makes his sit-

uation an exception to living honorably and justly, or whether he and Crito need to

revise what they understand by living honorably and justly.

Socrates proposes that we ‘ought never to act unjustly, voluntarily’ to which Crito

responds: ‘Certainly not.’ ‘Then’, says Socrates,

. . . we ought not to repay injustice or to do harm to any man, no matter what we may have

suffered from him. And in conceding this, Crito, be careful that you do not concede more

than you mean. For I know only a few men hold, or will ever hold, this opinion. And so

those who hold it and those who do not have no common ground of argument; they can of

necessity only look with contempt on each other’s belief. (49 d)

Here Socrates offers a knowledge-claim that widens the gap between the common world

they share and the empirical world of Athenian citizens. Crito is being asked to subscribe

Bonner 13

to a belief that few hold or, Socrates predicts, will ever hold. In fact, holding on to this

belief risks the contempt of many people, as Plato shows in Socrates’ dialogue with

Callicles in the Gorgias. Socrates explicitly points out a risk for Crito as the argument

moves forward – that their conversation may come to a conclusion that cannot be ver-

ified independently or assessed empirically. Not only that, it is a belief that to the world

of most people is absurd or contemptuous. Yet, Socrates is anxious to have Crito’s

agreement here.

Here we have another example of the political significance of the common world that

friends share. Friendship can ground a shared understanding that many would find con-

temptuous. Friendship can provide a home for truths that many would dismiss as untrue

and unreal. It is also this friendship that can provide the resources to hold on to unpopular

truths, including conventional understandings of right action. We are now getting closer

to a post-foundational understanding of principle that inspires Socratic political action.

It is this friendship that is at stake for Socrates and thus why he is anxious for Crito’s

acceptance and approval. Socrates seeks to preserve a friendship that makes a home for

reflexive theorizing and the truths that emerge through that theorizing. The political prin-

ciple that is emerging is the kind of friendship that makes a home for truths that popular

culture will always find challenging. To use phenomenological language, Socrates is

struggling to bring to reality a lifeworld, sustained by particular cognitive and normative

definitions that will enable both of them to arrive at an agreement concerning right action

regarding his forthcoming death sentence. What is central to this friendship is not loyalty

per se but consent and agreement. Socrates appeals not to Crito’s loyalty but to his con-

sent, demonstrating the ethical/political nature of their friendship. Friendship and con-

sent, which at the beginning of the dialogue were resources, are now topics.

Socrates asks Crito to consider: ‘If I escape without the state’s consent . . . shall I be

abiding by my just agreements or not?’ To which Crito replies: ‘I cannot answer your

question, Socrates. I do not understand it’ (50 a–b). Crito has agreed to try to help

Socrates come to a shared understanding of what is the right thing to do in this situation

in the spirit of the common world that constitutes their friendship. In the spirit of this

very particular friendship, they agree that the issue that needs resolution is whether he

and Socrates will be acting justly if they aid his escape. In the spirit of the conversation

that this Socratic friendship nurtures, they agree that resolving this concern is more

important than the potential damage their reputation for friendship would suffer. How-

ever, Crito is unable to answer Socrates’ question and thus help move the conversation

forward to a resolution. Is there something about the nature of the insight that Socrates

seeks to articulate that Crito finds challenging to understand? Is there something about

Crito’s understanding of his friendship that makes it difficult for him to understand

Socrates’ insight that keeps him from escaping?

In a public trial, the Athenian jurors found Socrates guilty of impiety and, accordingly,

sentenced him to death. Both Socrates and Crito agree that this accusation and sentence are

unjust. Crito finds it difficult to understand why escaping an unjust sentence could possibly

be unjust. On top of this, such a refusal to escape has dire consequences for Socrates’ chil-

dren and his friends. This is the deep source of Crito’s anxiety. On the surface, it seems to

fly in the face of all Socrates stands for to accept the harsh penalty of this unjust sentence of

impiety. Socrates recognizes his friend’s block in understanding and tries to resolve it.


Everyday action and the ethics of tacit consent

To help with this problem in understanding, Socrates imagines the Laws and the Athe-

nian commonwealth interrogating him as he was ‘preparing to run away’ (50 b). That is,

Socrates imagines a community where he has to defend himself from the charge that to

escape would be to respond unjustly to what he is unjustly suffering, in the way Socrates

has to defend himself from the charges his friend Crito makes. Robert Cumming in his

introduction to the Crito, summarizes this portion of the dialogue in this way:

Laws stabilize human expectations and thus not only are indispensable to the existence of

any society but also have guided [Socrates’] own personal development as a member of a

particular society. For him to frustrate the expectation that a legal verdict once reached –

even though it is unjust – will be carried out, would therefore not only undermine the sta-

bility of Athenian society but also the integrity of his own life. Indeed, if Socrates weakened

in this way the legal fabric of social life, he could legitimately be accused of disloyalty him-

self and of corrupting others by his example, so that the legal verdict condemning him in the

Apology would become just in retrospect. (Cumming, 1956: xii–xiii)

This is a fair summary of the dialogue between Socrates and the Laws. By escaping,

Socrates’ action could be interpreted in such a way that it could be seen to threaten the

fabric of city life and the integrity of his own life as a defender of laws. However, as we

know from Tarrant’s interpretation (and has been argued by I. F. Stone), Socrates could

be charged with putting the fabric of Athenian social life at risk. And regardless of this, it

cannot be ensured that his actions will not be interpreted in this way and it cannot

be known for certain whether his actions do undermine the fabric of Athenian social life.

Actions have unanticipated consequences (Arendt, 1958). As already noted from Tarrant’s

analysis, making the preservation of the fabric of Athenian life the reason for not

escaping, is ‘incredibly strained’. Crito, Tarrant says (2003: 77), is a ‘follower of

Socrates, owing some loyalty to Socratic moral principles but perhaps no great intel-

lectual’, thus explaining why the logical contradictions in Socrates’ position were not

caught by Crito.

However, we now recognize that this particular (theoretic) resort to the cultural con-

text leaves out the issues of friendship, of being concerned for the damage to a friend’s

reputation, or of how to resolve the anxiety about doing the right thing, or of the place of

reflexive theorizing in coming to an understanding of acting justly under anxious condi-

tions, and so on. Why does Crito, who finds Socrates happy and sleeping well, arouse so

much anxiety in Socrates? How is one, who is ‘perhaps no great intellectual’, able to dis-

turb Socrates’ slumbering contentment? (Perhaps the concern with reputation that wor-

ries Crito need not be so much at the hands of fellow Athenians as at the hands of

academic professors of ancient philosophy and classics!) All of this, again, points to

Gadamer’s (1986) hermeneutic claim that Platonic texts are best understood not in terms

of logic but dialogically or dialectically. In this case we must ask: How do the Athenian

Laws conduct themselves in the dialogue? What particular kinds of questions animate

this interlocutor? That is, what is this interlocutor (generated by Socrates to interrogate

him) anxious about?

Bonner 15

Socrates provides the first image of the Laws – they are like our parents. Parents make

our life possible and if they do an injustice to us, it is not just to repay that with another

injustice. What parent has not made its child suffer some injustice? Philip Larkin’s ‘This

Be the Verse’ has immortalized this recognition –

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

They may not mean to, but they do.

They fill you with the faults they had

And add some extra, just for you.

(Tomalin, 1981: 78)

While we can and often do blame our parents for the damage they have done to us, such

damage does not in turn justify any wrongdoing on our part. While we can understand the

injustice of the cycle of abuse, being abused does not justify being an abuser. The unjust

actions of parents do not justify any unjust actions by their children, making the issue

(again) the particular justice of escaping. Taking responsibility for our life assumes the

gift of life, a gift that our parents made possible. All our actions are grounded in an

acceptance of this gift. It is as if the Laws are saying: the life of examination is still a

life and Socrates’ actions should not undermine the respect this gift requires. Despite this

present unjust action he must suffer, Socrates needed the life Athenian culture provided

in order to pursue his vocation of the examined life. In Arendt’s terms, ‘any human soci-

ety implies tacit consent, in the sense that since none of us would have survived infancy

into maturity without being welcomed into a human community, surviving itself implies

some tacit obligation to accept the society’s rules’ (Canovan, 1992: 217).8 Socrates here

is being asked to acknowledge this tacit obligation.

Ethics and the art of discovering tacit agreements: Garfinkel andthe et cetera clause

In this putative argument with Socrates, the Athenian Laws make an argument that goes

beyond the image of the need for the respect of the gift that makes one’s life possible.

Socrates has them say:

Socrates, we have very strong evidence that you were satisfied with us and with the state.

You would not have been content to stay at home in it more than other Athenians unless

you had been satisfied with it more than they . . . Are we right, or are we wrong, in saying

that you have agreed not in mere words, but in your actions to live under our government?

(52 b–d)

Here we have Athens challenging Socrates in terms of his theory (words) and his practice

(actions). Socrates has Athens say to him: ‘You, who hold that the unexamined life is not

worth living, you who engaged in dialogue daily with the citizens of Athens about acting

justly and honorably, you who took maximum advantage of the freedom Athens gave

you to examine other citizens, you of all citizens would have to reflexively realize that

this life is grounded, however much in a taken for granted way, on an agreement that you


respect our creation of a culture that makes this possible.’ Crito agrees that if Socrates is

to take his own actions (by remaining in Athens when he was free to leave) seriously,

Socrates has implicitly agreed to live under Athenian Laws. That is, our actions imply

agreements that, unless explicitly renounced through words, cannot be casually aban-

doned. It is not only our words but also our deeds that speak to the agreements we make.

Is there any sociological basis for this assertion?

Harold Garfinkel, the great ethnomethodologist, provides us with a way of understand-

ing the pervasiveness of the kind of argument that the Laws are making in this case. The

Athenian Laws are engaged in a practical reasoning project, the kind of reasoning that con-

stitutes all social order in ongoing ordinary ways. Garfinkel (1967) discovered ‘that the

constitutive expectancies of the attitude of everyday life are treated by mundane actors

as profoundly normative, and morally sanctionable, affairs. Associated with this discovery

is Garfinkel’s view that ‘‘norms’’ of all kinds are most productively regarded as constitu-

tive features of ‘‘perceivedly normal’’ environments’ (Heritage, 1984: 101). That is,

common-sense knowledge, the taken-for-granted knowledge required of all (whether phi-

losophers, sociologists, or everyday members), insofar as we must demonstrate ordinary

competence in our conduct of everyday affairs, is a form of moral cognition.

As Garfinkel notes (1967: 73), it is ‘a commonplace fact that persons will hold each

other to agreements whose terms they never actually stipulated’. In the Crito Socrates

has the Athenian Laws articulate this taken-for-granted feature of ‘normal environ-

ments’, which is that common understandings ‘attain the status of an agreement for per-

sons only insofar as the stipulated conditions carry along an unspoken but understood

et cetera clause . . . The et cetera clause provides for the certainty that unknown condi-

tions are at every hand in terms of which an agreement ‘‘really’’ consisted of ‘‘in the first

place’’ and ‘‘all along’’’ (ibid.: 74). Garfinkel says this pervasive feature of everyday life

is ‘a method for discovering agreements by eliciting or imposing a respect for the rule of

practical circumstances, [and] is a version of practical ethics’ (ibid.).

He illustrates this ‘commonplace fact’ with an experiment ‘in which the experimenter

engaged others in conversation while he had a wire recorder hidden under his coat. In the

course of the conversation the experimenter opened his jacket to reveal the recorder say-

ing, ‘‘See what I have?’’ An initial pause was almost invariably followed by the question,

‘‘What are you going to do with it?’’’ As Garfinkel concludes, ‘an agreed privacy was

thereupon treated as though it had operated all along’ (1967: 75). In a sense, the Laws

of Athens are calling Socrates’ attention to this et cetera clause regarding his agreement

to abide by the Laws. Socrates generates a common world called the Laws of Athens who

call attention to his agreement with them, though, as with the pervasive everyday use of

the et cetera clause, the terms were never actually stipulated.

The argument would go as follows: Athens provided Socrates with the opportunity to

develop into the very particular exemplar of human action he became. Athens provided a

home for the life of questioning that Socrates pursued. Socrates’ attachment to the city

enabled him to make significant life-questions, like is this particular action just or unjust,

come to life through conversation. Just as his friendship with Crito, and the conversation

that is the embodiment of that friendship, provides Socrates with the possibility of mak-

ing real the common world their friendship rests on, and so is the basis for resolving anxi-

ety about acting justly in this and every occasion, so too did his friendship with his own

Bonner 17

actions make real the common world of the Athenian Laws that provides Socrates with

the basis for understanding the just agreement he has made with them. If Socrates is, as

he self- describes, the ‘man who will accept no argument but that which on reflection

[he] finds to be the truest’, if Socrates is the kind of man who finds the ‘unexamined life

is not worth living’, Athens is the kind of city for Socrates that made the examined life

not only possible but, significantly, enjoyable. Socrates is saying here that his friendship

with his own actions, the integration of his deeds with his words, rests on a common

world that the city makes possible, a common world or an authoritative community that

rests on agreements just as much as the world shared by Crito and himself. What Raffel

says (2006: 104) about Socrates in the Symposium, applies even more precisely to his

words and deeds in the Crito. ‘Caring for a principle along with the recognition that one

is in a place that enables its practice, could lead . . . to an active interest in the place’s

maintenance as the locale where principle can appear.’ Socrates cares for, nay loves, the

place that made his principle of the examined life appear.

Principled reflection on principle: Ethics, taste and theauthorizing common world

Of course, we need to remember that the Athenian Laws are not an empirical interlocu-

tor, in Garfinkel’s sense. For Garfinkel, the method of finding agreements ‘is available as

one of the mechanisms whereby potential and actual successes and windfalls, on the one

hand, and the disappointments, frustrations, and failures, on the other, that persons must

inevitably encounter by reason of seeking to comply with agreements, can be managed

while retaining the perceived reasonableness of actually socially organized activities’

(1967: 75). That is, the method for discovering agreements is a way to manage the inev-

itable contingencies of life within a perceived reasonableness of compliance to agree-

ments. But if we were to look at the empirical situation in this dialogue, it is Crito

who is drawing on the et cetera clause by reminding Socrates of his agreements with his

friends and his family. Socrates agrees that ethical people are bound by such agreements

but, by making explicit the common world that his friendship with Crito rests on, he gen-

erates the Athenian Laws to articulate a superior agreement, the agreement (as the Laws

remind him) his own words and deeds rest on. For Socrates, it is not only the integrity of

his words and deeds that is at stake in escaping or accepting the death penalty, it is the

common world his words and deeds make real and rest on. Using the language of Blum

and McHugh this is the problem of the place of Socrates’ discourse within the whole.

Plato has Socrates reflexively acknowledge that he is bound by the agreements he retro-

spectively acknowledges as just, as they made his examined life possible and enjoyable.

Socrates generates the Laws as a way of helping Crito understand the arguments that

compel him to accept his death sentence. ‘Be sure, my dear friend, Crito,’ he says, ‘that

this is what I seem to hear . . . and the sound of these arguments rings so loudly in my

ears, that I cannot hear any other arguments’ (54 d–e). As he did in the Symposium, Plato

has Socrates generate a figure who questions him about his knowledge and his actions.

Socrates generates the common world to help Crito to understand the place of Socrates

within the whole. In this reading, Socrates is not so much managing the ‘perceived rea-

sonableness’ between agreements and life’s contingencies but rather using the Laws to


interrogate himself about the meaning of his words and deeds. To draw on Raffel again

(2006: 105), Socrates does not just happen to be from a place called Athens but is

‘attached because [he] sees the place’ as enabling him ‘to practice what he preached’.

This attachment turns out to be greater than what is purported to be the greatest of human

attachments, our attachment to our survival.

To return to the method applied in this article, Socrates is being formulated as

engaged in principled reflection about principle. In the words of Blum and McHugh

(1984: 142), principled reflection ‘cannot be divined if it is understood as an interaction’

(e.g.between Crito and Socrates). That is, the agreement that the Laws state is not the

kind of empirical agreement that Crito says Socrates has with his family and friends.

Rather ‘the relation between reflection and the self upon which it reflects can only be

captured by figures of speech that evoke in extraordinary ways the need to undertake the

action’. The claim of the Laws is an ‘extraordinary’ way to account for the ‘need to

undertake the action’ of accepting his death sentence. Rather than see this as describing

an authoritarian Athens demanding obedience, we need to recognize the analytic strategy

behind this figure of speech, an analytic strategy that seeks to help Crito recognize the

strong claim that his friend Socrates recognizes.

Up until his last days, empirical Athens provided Socrates with the context to develop

into the man he had to be, the man who came to understand the intricate interrelation

between the examined life, the just life and the happy life. In this reading, the Athenian

Laws are Socrates’ (or Plato’s – is there any deep difference here?) way of generating an

image of an authoritative community, a common world that values, nay authorizes, the

principles Socrates aims to embody in action. As such they are Socrates’ way of making

alive to Crito the kind of common world that his actions need to be understood within.

The Athenian Laws are Socrates’ reflexive reminder that his own words and deeds bring

to the surface the just agreements with the Laws. This common world is a whole that

includes but is greater than his ‘friends’, his ‘country’ and the ‘Laws’ (54 c –d). Athens

was the context in which he worked through the demand to live an examined life, and a

particular context that made the working-out of that demand, enjoyable. This life rests on

agreements that make real the whole within which Socrates’ strange words and deeds

make eminent sense. Socrates sleeps soundly because he knows in this world that the

necessary life of reflection is also the enjoyable life of examination.

Socrates’ experiential friendship with Crito allowed Socrates to retrieve, through dia-

logue, their shared common world, in turn making it possible for Socrates to articulate

the authorizing community that Athens made possible. Methodologically Athens is here

being treated as ‘a figure of speech’ that evokes the world where his acceptance of his

execution is principled. The Athenian Laws articulate Socrates’ agreements with Athens

as a way of articulating his friendship with himself, his friends, his country and the

whole. It is this friendship that grounds Socrates’ insight that it would be unjust for him

to escape. This principle of integrity is not unconditional. The dialogue shows this prin-

ciple, like all principles, is conditional on questioning and examination, in this case

through a dialogue oriented around the need to gain the consent of his friend. What is

unconditional in gaining this consent is the principle of Socratic reflexivity, in this case

articulated by Plato who has Socrates say: ‘I am still what I have always been – a man

who will accept no argument but that which on reflection I find to be the truest.’

Bonner 19

‘Greek ethics’, says Gadamer (1975: 38), ‘is in a profound and comprehensive sense

an ethics of good taste.’ In the Crito, Plato points to this intimate connection between a

sense of community and a sense of taste. Taste, says Gadamer, has a normative power,

‘which is peculiar to it alone, the knowledge that it is certain of the agreement of an ideal

community . . . We see here the ideality of good taste . . . Taste makes an act of knowl-

edge, in a manner which it is true cannot be separated from the concrete situation on

which it operates and cannot be reduced to rules and concepts’ (ibid.). The act of knowl-

edge that Socrates is making here cannot be separated from the ‘concrete situation on

which it operates’. Neither can it be reduced to a rule like ‘Laws must always be obeyed

because the state is like your parent’. Rather we need to understand the act of knowledge

in the context of the concrete situation of the prison cell in ancient Athens. The Laws are

Socrates’ way of saying that he loves the city that made what he needed to do – live an

examined life – be an enjoyable project. Articulating an authoritative or ideal community

is a method of articulating the kind of world the theorist needs in order to analyse in a

principled way the ground of social action (McHugh et al., 1974).

Conclusion: Friendship, politics and principle

When Socrates says to Crito at the end of the dialogue: ‘I feel sure that if you try to

change my mind you will speak in vain. Nevertheless, if you think you will succeed,

speak’, Crito replies: ‘I have nothing more to say, Socrates.’ Crito does not enthusiasti-

cally agree with Socrates, by saying ‘Socrates, you are right, you should not escape’.

Rather, Crito regretfully acknowledges that he will not be able to make an argument that

will ring more loudly than the one Socrates hears. Socrates sought Crito’s consent to his

decision to accept his execution. Through that process he brought to life the common

world that their friendship generated and sustained, a world that rests on the fundamental

agreement that to live well is to live honorably, is to live justly. Crito agrees that any deci-

sion Socrates makes in this case must be grounded in the common world of their friendship

and not in the world of Athenian popular opinion. Then, through the Laws of Athens,

Socrates generates an authoritative common world for Crito in order to bring to life the

world shared by Socrates’ own words and his deeds in relation to the life granted in Athens.

Through this authoritative common world, he demonstrates to Crito that the integrity of his

life, integrity based on the integration of his words (to live well is to live honorably and

justly) and his deeds (the examined life), rests on just agreements with this world.

The practice of reflexivity requires that Socrates take seriously the agreement of his

words with his deeds, the sundering of which would make him far more anxious than

does the acceptance of his death penalty. Socrates here says that his place within the

whole points to the friendship between his words and his deeds (his integrity) and this

friendship exercises a greater pull for him than the ethical agreements he has with

friends and family. Yet, ironically, Socrates was anxious to get the agreement of his

friend Crito to this principle; in the misfortuned choice between the principle of integ-

rity and the principle of his et cetera agreements with his family and friends, the argu-

ment for his just agreements rings loudly in Socrates’ ears. But this principle was

asserted not as a rule ‘separate from the concrete situation on which it operates’ but

as a principle that requires the consent of the friend who shares his common world.


This friendship required that Socrates demonstrate ‘that what is unconditional about

principle is that it always raises the question of the relation between self and rule as

a necessary question. The principled actor questions (his own integration) uncondition-

ally’ (Blum and McHugh, 1984: 137).

Notes

I would like to thank the Association of Core Texts and Courses conference in 2010, which pro-

vided the occasion for the first draft of this article, my graduate students at the University of Water-

loo who responded to a more developed version, my wife Margaret who suggested changes in

response to its many iterations, and the anonymous reviewers of this journal.

1. Tarrant (2003: 89–90) cites analysis by Bostock (1990) that sees ‘little hope of rescuing Plato

from charges of general authoritarianism’ in relation to Socrates’ acceptance of the arguments

of the Laws.

2. Of course, this idea is also embedded in Marx’s concept of ideology (1970).

3. While I occasionally consult the Hugh Tredennick translation (1969), I chose to work most

closely with the F. J. Church translation (1956). The Church text will be treated as my ‘data’

source as, in the end, I prefer the translation (48 b) of Socrates’ conversation with Crito of

‘my good friend’ (Church/Cumming) to ‘my dear fellow’ (Tredennick/ Tarrant). As radical

interpretive method treats all ‘data’ as mediated (even the cleanest data from a Statistics Canada

data bank), the Cumming translation is engaged to work out the relation between reflexivity and

the need for principled action. Rather than being a study of what some ‘empirical’ Socrates did,

as reported in ancient Greek by some ‘empirical’ Plato, this method treats the Cumming trans-

lation as providing mediated data for a case study. For example, Tredennick/Tarrant translates

43 b–c as ‘I deliberately didn’t wake you because I wanted you to have the pleasantest possible

time’, while Church/Cumming says: ‘I purposely did not wake you, for I was anxious not to

disturb your repose’. Similarly, Tredennick/Tarrant translates 46 b–c as ‘My dear Crito, I would

greatly appreciate your enthusiasm if it is right and proper; if not, the stronger it is the more

problem it is’, while, for Church/Cumming: ‘My dear Crito, if your anxiety to save me be right,

it is most valuable; but if not the greater it is the harder it will be to cope with’. Clearly, Crito

(43 b) is ‘sleepless and depressed’ (Tredennick/Tarrant), or ‘sleepless and sorrowful’ (Church/

Cumming). Whether the correct translation above is ‘anxiety’ or ‘enthusiasm’ is minor when it

is put in the context of the lived experience of one who is ‘sleepless and depressed’. In the end, I

chose Church/Cumming as it seems that the term ‘my dear friend’ (Church/Cumming)

addressed to Crito speaks in a more contemporary way to their friendship than the British

‘my dear fellow’ (Tredennick/Tarrant).

4. As the various studies and documentaries about the lead-up to the 2008 financial crash have

established, the culture of Wall Street was a culture of financial success.

5. ‘The danger posed by the trial is that it tries Socrates’ need to theorize (to work and formulate),

it tests his commitment to examine the opinions of multis without regard to the circumstances in

which the opinions evolve. In this sense, Socrates must try to theorize with those who attempt to

test his resolve in trying to theorize’ (Blum, 1978: 178).

6. See ‘The Socratic Method and Psychoanalysis’ by Lear (2009) and ‘Lacan and Socrates’ by

Buchan (2009).

7. As one anonymous reviewer put it:

Bonner 21

the formulation of Crito offered here suggests a new basis for psychoanalysis that is post-Freudian

(i.e. not grounded in the economics of the libido) and post-Lacanian in that in the face of ground-

lessness and the existentialist principle of living with Lack (of foundations) it shows how solid

grounds of principled ethico-political action can be recovered from the common world of friend-

ship, and that such dialogical reflexive dialectical analysis offers curative prospects both for the

anxious soul and for the suffering body politic.

Addressing the truth of this very plausible reading of Lacanian and Freudian analysis in relation to

the type of Socratic therapy developed here would take us too far from the current topic and needs to

be the subject of another work.

8. It was left to Augustine to develop the significance of the gift of natality and the gratitude this

implies.

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Author biography

Kieran Bonner is Professor of Sociology at St Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo,

Canada. He is author of two books, A Great Place to Raise Kids: Interpretation, Science, and the

Urban Rural Debate (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997 [paperback edn 1999])

and Power and Parenting: A Hermeneutic of the Human Condition (Basingstoke, Hants and

New York: Palgrave/St Martin’s Press, 1998), guest co-editor of two issues of The Canadian

Journal of Irish Studies, and of articles on theory (phenomenology, ethnomethodology, hermeneu-

tics, analysis), methodology (reflexivity, dialectic), Arendt, Blum and McHugh, Gadamer, Plato,

citizenship, interdisciplinary dialogue, alcohol and the grey zone of health and illness, and the cul-

ture of cities (Dublin, Montreal, Toronto).

Bonner 23

Principles, dialectic and the common world of friendship: Socrates and Crito in conversation

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Transcript of Principles, dialectic and the common world of friendship: Socrates and Crito in conversation