- Obedience
The Crito is about obedience. What is it to obey the law? Is it just to do as the law says? No, for a person who is quite lawless, though also cunning, might do that.[1]
Consider the attitude of a cunning but lawless person: he will not just go about breaking laws indiscriminately, for that would quickly result in great disadvantage to him. No, he will avoid violating a law if there is no substantial advantage to be gained by its violation, and some risk of being caught and punished. But he will break the law if the prospective advantages of doing so are great enough and the prospect of being caught and punished are slight enough. And if he can be assured that there will be no punishment whatever forthcoming upon the violation of some law, though there will be some personal advantage, then he will do it. If breaking a law just never offers sufficient advantage, or escaping punishment just never is sufficiently assured, then he will never break the law. Viewed externally, he will appear to be law-abiding. But his attitude toward the law is as toward some source of risk that has to be managed; his reasons for not breaking the law are of the same sort as his reasons for not driving recklessly and for not taking dangerous drugs—one is likely to get hurt that way. No-one intentionally obeys the laws of physics.
In short, it is the prospect of force employed against him that makes the lawless person pay attention to the law and avoid its violation. But this is not real obedience; it’s a mere trade-off of interests that only appears to be obedience.
On the Socratic view, obedience to the law of one’s community essentially involves a concern for the cultivation of a harmonious relation between oneself and the community, a relation that aims at the real good of both. Socrates believed that the relation that one has with the community at large is continuous with, and includes, the relation that one has with one’s parents and, ultimately, the relation that one has with oneself. These three are not, finally, isolated elements but are systematically connected. The attitude of obedience implicitly recognizes this deep and ineluctable continuity of one’s self regard with one’s respect for family and community, recognizes that the relation with oneself is unavoidably and finally extended to the community, just as one’s attitude toward the community rebounds on one’s self-respect, and so seeks to find a beneficial alignment of self, family, and community. The lack of concern for the good of the community characteristic of the essentially lawless person finally manifests itself in a lack of concern for his own real good.
Genuine obedience is an expression of a more general attitude that, in the Socratic dialogues, has been called piety. So let me attempt to put the idea of obedience into a broader conceptual setting by saying something about piety.
To grasp the Socratic idea of piety, it is important to understand that Socrates did not view the world as an essentially lifeless thing as we do (however much the world is populated by living things). For him, the world itself is an organic entity of which humans and their societies are parts. Socrates saw the political arrangement embodied in the polis (the Greek city-state) not as an artificial set-up based on an implicit contract among pre-social individuals, as we tend to view our society, but rather as a natural development of the organic constitution of the world. Socrates would not have recognized any deep difference between positive and natural law. He viewed citizenship as one of the essential and natural functions of the human being. From the gods to the world to the city to the citizen there runs a natural and organic continuity expressed in the idea of cosmos (order). The city-state was not made by humans, as an article of craft is made, any more than the human species was made; a polis grows in the world the way a forest does, as an expression of one of the world’s natural potentialities. Thus, for Socrates, one’s attitude toward one’s state is properly of a piece with one’s attitude toward the world at large. And we have already seen that he considered that this attitude properly and naturally is one of piety.
The Socratic doctrine that humans are social by nature and not by artifice was made explicit in Aristotle’s political theory. It is understandable that the Greeks would regard the polis as the highest and most appropriate expression of this sociality. But one can reject the idea that the polis is the highest development of sociality and still subscribe to the idea that humans are social by nature. If the Socratic idea that psyché is the internal reflex of external dialogue is correct, then human beings need each other for thought itself and conversation is the ground of culture. If thought is natural to human beings just as human, then culture is the natural ground of society.
Piety is the attitude that places one in proper relation to one’s continuity with the world at large; it is an attitude that fosters an awareness of one’s finitude and temporality as a human being but also an awareness of one’s unity with the world, an infinite and eternal being. It is an attitude that opens up, as best as may happen, our essential finitude and temporality to the infinity and eternality of the world. Through this reverence, one knows one’s place in the world, and by extension, one’s place in the city. From piety flows justice in one’s relations with others, humility in one’s relation to ultimate truth, and obedience in relation to the law. Obedience is a specific mode of the more general attitude of piety.
2. The counterfeit of obedience
Socrates’ piety, as expressed toward his native city, was grounded in a concern for the good of Athens. His relation to Athens was as that of a true friend. But Athens mistook his piety for impiety because in a time of conservative repression, moral truth was not a pleasant thing. Athens became tyrannical, confused the good with the pleasurable, and deemed Socrates impious. Had Socrates simply followed orders in this situation (“Mind your own business, Socrates. Go home and keep quiet.”), he would have appeared to be obedient. But following orders without reflection on their moral character is only a counterfeit of obedience. True obedience is not merely submission to men in power and to their edicts. It is submission to the moral truth, and it is expressed in a concern that the community of which one is a citizen be a good community, conducted in accord with its own most basic moral belief. As a friend will recall you to your own belief, so Socrates tried to recall Athens to itself and was executed when Athens resented the discomfort.
[1] For more on the Socratic idea of lawlessness, see the discussions of tyranny as a psychological condition in the Gorgias and the Republic.