Crito

In Crito Socrates makes the argument that because he had enjoyed the citizenship of Athens for 70 years and all the benefits that came with it, he could not now, disobey its laws, since to disobey one law is to disobey the entire body of laws and to disobey the entire body of laws is to destroy the city.

This argument rests on the idea that injustice cannot be met with injustice (and that to now disobey the law of the city he had gained benefit from would be injustice.) But if the law itself is unjust and one still obtains benefit, for example if one is a slaveowner, or if one is the son of a fascist dictator, or if one is the relative of a corrupt politician, is it then sill injustice to disobey the law if one believes that the law is unjust?

I read Plato as an elaborate joke.
Socrates' conclusions, while not absurd to our ears, was patently absurd to Plato.

The trick with Socrates is to try and find the absurdity in the structure of the rhetoric of logic and the representation of his reality by assuming his conclusions to be the result of stupidity.

Then you can see the spirality of the recursion in the narrative process, and the rhetoric in the dialectic structure of arguments in general.

The only thing that matters is if the story is useful to be believed, and there is nothing useful to be believed in suicide.

Socrates doesn't commit suicide; he is ordered to kill himself. Extremely different.

Crito is a text on the importance of Rule of Law, not turning the other cheek.

You can't selectively obey the laws. Either you're a destructive freeloader or a contributing member of the polity. The polity is a collective good, and its not up to individual citizens to act on their conscience to make it better. Changing things requires a manifestation of mutual assent, which (given social contract theory) can be decided upon the people (in a Democracy) or mandated (in a hierarchical system).

>and one still obtains benefit, for example if one is a slaveowner, or if one is the son of a fascist dictator, or if one is the relative of a corrupt politician,

Maybe I'm not understanding your point, I am a bit buzzed, but how would this change Socrates' arguments or position?

Well that's certainly a perspective I've never considered. But even Socrates wasn't convinced of his argument, he actually asks Crito if the argument is sufficient and Crito says yes.

Which doesn't make sense, because if anything, it's not Crito that Socrates should be trying to convince, but himself. Which means he must've had some other more potent justification for his actions, which perhaps would not have convinced Crito but did convince himself, or alternatively, as you suggest, he was just a fool.

But reading Crito I get the sense that's almost advocating facism but from the perspective of the one who holds power, in which the law holds precedence over all so long as its environment provides benefit.

A modern example of this would be Snowden. He was a clear beneficiary of the US government, yet chose to disobey its laws and leak sensitive information. Yet that information showed clear injustice to the American people.

So what is justice if not the body of laws? I'm reminded of "does not even the tax collector do so?", due to the benefit-obedience trade. If Socrates really believed that, then his virtue is false isn't it?

Eat shit. Dead is Dead, and the joke of the Sophistry of sematics like this is exactly what he was laughing at.
You think there is a division between the story of reality and stories that are not real solely based on whether those stories of reality are useful to be believed, but you could not know them as anything but a story of randomness without the story. An amoeba that avoids light has a story. If it did not, then light and dark would have no distinguishing features. Just because the amoeba has not story of the story doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a story. Also, just because the story is useful to be believed doesn’t make it any less a story, and just because it is a story doesn’t mean it isn’t useful to be believed.
The brain is a sense organ that sense itself, then senses itself sensing itself. The story is the sense of the sense of itself. Without the story, there would be nothing to break the chain to make the sense anything more than randomness.
This is the recursion, and it makes our entire representation (not simulation) of our universe. But it is not up to our senses to determine what is useful, and at the same time we can never know what is real.
Plato and the Sophists both make this mistake of thinking that reality is anything but a story just because it can be useful to be believed. But Plato is so over the top about describing the “metaphysics” that he just must be kidding. I look at all of Plato’s writings as an elaborate farce that is making fun of the Sophists whose rhetoric of ethos and pathos was so obviously an appeal to our hardwiring (a term Plato would not have) that Plato just made up a bunch of Sophistic logos situations (the allegory of the cave, the Meno) that you just had to laugh.
Either that or he was an idiot that sparked the stupidity of the entire planet.

That is in effect what I'm asking. Would it change his argument or position or not?

Hmm, but by that argument, isn't Socrates a destructive freeloader? At least according to the judgement of the people. And if not, then who determines whether one is a destructive freeloader or not?

I do.
One is a destructive freeloader if they do not work to benefit myself and others who benefit me.

Oh, then no, absolutely not. The law is to be respected, regardless if one is benefiting or disadvantaged by it.

However, this only applies if the benefit is mandated by the laws. In your examples, the virtuous person ("the important thing isn't to live but to live-well") wouldn't abuse political access and the like.

>Eat shit. Dead is Dead, and the joke of the Sophistry of sematics like this is exactly what he was laughing at.
this is a really bad opinion... in my opinion

I kind of skimmed your post but your idea of Plato as a big jokester is totally unfounded.. have you read Republic? If anything Crito is just a stepping stone towards that project. Nobody would have cooked up a text as autistic as Republic unless they really believed what they were saying.

Even "A Modest Proposal" is only ~10 pages long, and it's still 'sincere' in the way that satire always is.

I understand my perspective is neither common nor accepted, and Plato probably wasn't kidding.

Look. Once you get over the Platonic and Sophistic fallacies that reality tells the story of reality, and is not just very useful, you can start to see the recursion that created your representation, and the failure of dialectic thinking to do anything but realign your story to one that is useful for your desire.

When discussing the collective, I refer to the Social Bargain which separates the physical benefit of collective action from the agreements to split the rewards equally.

I can lift 100 lbs, you can lift 100 lbs. That sum is 200 lbs of work, but if we work together we are no longer limited by 100 lb work.
Same is true for being in two places at once and getting good at one thing over another.

That is the story that is the physical basis for collective action, but the other half of that story takes place, not in the physical narrative, but in the agreement narrative, and that is where human societies get into trouble.

Thinking from the individual would assume you looked out for the best result for yourself, but the rewards of the collective action is a zero-sum-game - a pie that is only so big.

We therefore have to have a new reality to divide up the pie in a way we will continue to work collectively and get more than we could alone.

This change of universes is the moral dilemma Socrates faces.

Fuck morality though if it results in your death.

Morality is a story of the emotional brain, not the instinctual brain or the inferential brain which we are using to make the story of the story.

Why get so confused?
What is the story that is useful to be believed? If you kill yourself, you have no more story.
But that's okay, because the story never existed, nor do you...

>wouldn't abuse political access and the like
Fair enough, but in many cases one has no choice in the matter. For example, if you're a white middle class man in the 60's before segregation by the very circumstances of your birth you are given benefits which you cannot virtuously deny. However, you see the injustice which is mandated by law (segregation), is disobeying this law (by protest for example or by other more direct means) still an injustice?

Not necessarily, if he actually did follow the laws. Just because his peers judged him guilty doesn't mean he was guilty. He still comports with his sentence though because it's the virtuous/just thing to do.

He could have groveled and gotten off, but instead he broke social custom and decided against it. He willingly subjected himself to the codified vagaries of public opinion, and therefore he had to accept whatever outcome it produced.

More broadly, the people manifested mutual assent to putting Socrates' to death. He simply upholds his end of the social contract by drinking the hemlock.

>you are given benefits which you cannot virtuously deny
you're approaching this problem with some serious a priori assumptions.

Socrates would tell you, if you found segregation to be so heinous, to renounce your citizenship and to stop availing yourself of the benefits your polity has conferred upon you.

It's not up to private citizens to decide what the policies of the state should be. That is a public function.

>is it then still injustice to disobey the law if one believes that the law is unjust?
Nope. Socrates himself said he could have easily left Athens if he found the laws to be principally unjust. Since he didn't leave, but instead remained in Athens to raise his family nonetheless, he must have been in agreement with the laws (think of the Euthyphro Dilemma here).

Besides, Socrates probably wouldn't have been able to live with himself if he did not abide by his own principles and had lived to be permanently labelled an unjust hypocrite.

So then this means disobeying that law is an injustice? What if the situation were reversed, if you obtained no benefit or if obtained harm (if you were a black man in the same time period for instance). You state earlier that the law must be followed regardless of whether one gains benefit or if one is disadvantaged

>disobeying this law (by protest for example)
Socrates would not tell you not to engage in legal protest.

If, for example, there were a law against miscegenation, Socrates would tell you to follow it.

If you grew up and decided to keep on living within a society, then yes you have struck an agreement to respect the laws. Suppose you're a bus driver, you would have to tell any African-Americans to sit in the back/give up their seats for Whites because by living in and taking such a job, you agree to participate in whatever socio-political structure is currently in place.

>(by protest for example or by other more direct means)

Socrates would probably only advocate/allow for peaceful protests and general legal methods for political change.

Athens was a slave-owning society dude. Feel free to read about how they handled the issue.

>you are given benefits which you cannot virtuously deny
>you're approaching this problem with some serious a priori assumptions.

This is the problem with dialectic arguments that don't return you to the story that is useful to be believed, and runs you off on tangents.
When you look at the Narrative as a recursion, you don't get stuck arguing dialectics across narrative universes, and don't have to worry about being fooled by the rhetoric of tricking your inference into accepting one set of givens from one universe and using them in another.

Your reading that Socrates would tell you to renounce your citizenship is a story that is useful to be believed, but the argument for or against this is muddled with stories that have no usefulness in this situation.


Not to be a prick or anything, but there is a difference between learning what other people know, and knowing their arguments, and being able to make arguments that are your own.

Start to doubt the foundations of western thought: reality is real is just a persuasion trick; comparing stories that never happened doesn't make the stories happen; the dialectic is a myopic trick, think in recursions.

And understand that all stories are just that, until the World you cannot know even with a story decides whether your story is useful, or it stops.

Hmm but solution of "leave the country" is not always adequate. For instance if the country by law forbids emigration (Cuba and North Korea for example).

So in that case, what can be done? Or is there an implicit assumption that the argument holds only in situation where one has the freedom to leave when one does not agree with the laws?

I agree with you on this point, and it's the same thought I had when I studied Crito. From here we can really only extrapolate what Socrates would have thought. If you're barred from leaving, then I do believe there comes a point where the regime you're leaving under does become invalid, or permissible to disobey.

At this point, all we can really say is morality has changed as political reality has changed.

Can you see the paradox that Socrates has that makes him kill himself is the same paradox you just stated by saying you have to obey the law and if there is a law that says you can’t leave society then you are stuck unless the society has a law that you can leave? Can you see how that paradox, and all paradoxes - semantic, inductive, and deductive – are the result of your ignorance of your own recursive thinking? Can you see how the myopia of the dialectic forces paradox?

Plato was so insane with this, he made up a magical metaphysics complete with faeries and angels and demons that philosophers have invoked ever since.
Everything is a story, and it doesn't exist. The World exists, and you can't know it.

The only philosophy that matters is the one that is told from the 4th person narrative of the narrative by telling the story of the story making process that can make the story of the story making process.

The Ouroboros is not a snake the eats itself; it is the snake that vomits itself up from its tail.

>makes him kill himself
meh I think he was just making an epic move. That and he was tired. And curious of the afterlife.

>reality is real is just a persuasion trick

Reality is a true story whether anyone can speak about it properly or not, there must exist a solid foundational trueness, realness, for anything else to follow, which also in its exact way of existing, must be real.

>Can you see how the myopia of the dialectic forces paradox?
Apparently everybody's a Zen Buddhist by necessity.

>>Can you see how the myopia of the dialectic forces paradox?

Im sorry, I cant exactly see that, could you generalize how so?

Historic Socrates went against the orders of the 30 tyrants during their rule with refusing to carry out seizing the property of a metic, which is a contradiction to his excuse in Crito. In-fact, the 30 were doing a lot of those acts just so every citizen under their oligarchy (I think it was 3000-4000) would 'share' in the blame as them in case there was ever a revolt by the exiled citizens. Socrates takes pride of refusing to submit to their orders during Plato's Apology; and even if he didn't and carried out their order from their threats, he would presumably feel some guilt by complying with the new unjust government.
Both in Plato and Xenophon's accounts he's willing not to comply with the law if his inquiry-elenchus is considered to be unlawful by the State, which contradicts his legalist argument in Crito as well.

Either Plato was purposely quizing his students on legalism without asserting his or Socrates' real beliefs on the matter in it, or he actually believed in the points Socrates says (which could be viable, seeing how Plato advocates for a highly collective and organize society--similiar to the Spartans, but not as intellectually backwards--and for having so, he evidently emphasizes the need for citizens of his ideal or figurative States to either embrace their legal system in order for it to properly function, or don't live there). I think Xenophon's Socrates was more closer to the historic one with his rational of why he was willing to embrace his conviction (which was that he was already very old--like 70 at the time--and knew that his control of bodily and cognitive functions were going to dramatically decline there-on in age and didn't believe it was worth living that much longer if it went against his own moral beliefs, compared to Plato who inserted that he did it also out of respect of following his city's laws as-well).

Socrates also makes the argument in other dialogues that a philosopher should always take his time to answer a question. Crito comes to Socrates in a hurry and tries to convince him of leaving without giving him enough time to really think about it. If he were to give in and leave, he would be betraying himself.

Socrates also said that citizens have a duty to challenge unjust laws, which he himself did (he opposed the Thirty Tyrants, for instance), but that in this particular case, what is unjust is not the law, but the people that have judged him, which is different. Therefore Socrates cannot betray the Laws and he must accept his fate.