Socrates' View of Society Throughout His Trials

Plato’s Apology and Crito follow Socrates through the trial and sentencing of his supposed crimes against Athens. Socrates believes himself to have been wrongly convicted of crimes against society and yet he accepts his punishment. He attempts, throughout this process, to reconcile his belief in the law with the injustice of his sentencing. Apology and Crito ultimately conclude that the injustice done to Socrates was the fault of the body politic, rather than the law itself. Socrates agrees with Antigone’s Creon that individuals have a duty to obey the law regardless of whether it is right or wrong, because right and wrong are constructs of the law, created by humans in the absence of an absolute truth.

Socrates begins his defense by stating that, since childhood, he has been able to engage in a privileged dialogue with the gods, and that they have told him that no man was wiser than he (Plato, 24). He tells the jury that, after much investigation, he has concluded that the source of this wisdom is that he can acknowledge that he is not wise at all; his admission of this fact makes him wiser than anyone who claims otherwise (25). Since the highest form of human wisdom is the acceptance that mere mortals are not wise in the way that the gods are wise, one can conclude that Socrates does not believe that the law concerns itself with wisdom. Human wisdom is characterized by not knowing, and therefore must be left out of the conversation of right versus wrong. Socrates is able to characterize things as being either right or wrong (31, 32, 49, etc.), and therefore we can conclude that they are concepts which exist in a realm in which things can be known, one that is artificially constructed but made real through practice, through acknowledgement of and adherence to rules such as “one must never do wrong” (48). This realm is the law. Socrates explains that his communications with the gods are the very reason he has stayed out of politics, and that he has deliberately led a private life because of his inability to reconcile his own ideas about wisdom with the law. He believes the absolute truth that the gods are privy to is entirely separate from the law.

During his trial, Socrates never questions or contests the law itself. In fact, he defends it as being rational when he says that he cannot imagine why anyone would willingly corrupt his peers, thus making them more difficult to live with (28). He believes the law to be as logical and reasonable as human life allows. His defense rests on the fact that Meletus’ accusations were false; that he never did any of the things he was accused of doing. He believes that he was found guilty because his trial was unfair—the public was already convinced of his wrongdoing and he did not have enough time to adequately defend himself. He says to the jury that “If it were the law with us, as it is elsewhere, that a trial for life should not last one, but many days, you would be convinced, but now it is not easy to dispel great slanders in such a short time” (39). Socrates makes it clear that his devotion is to the law, not to the lawmakers during his conversation with Crito, when he enacts a brief dialogue, not with Meletus or the jurors, but with the law itself. One could argue that any system that unjustly sentences a man to death is deeply flawed, and Socrates would agree with them, but he would point to Meletus and to the executive government’s misunderstanding of the law as the source of this flaw, rather than the law itself.

Socrates has concluded that the laws are not wise, and that they are subject to misinterpretation, and yet he obeys them, because it is not their job to be wise and it is not their fault they are misunderstood. The function of the law, as he explains in Crito, is to serve as a kind of contract that humans agree to in exchange for the privilege of living in society (51). The only possible explanation for Socrates’ faith in the laws, given his understanding of wisdom, is that he believes society to be the best possible situation for humans during their time on earth and he believes the laws to be the most logical means of obtaining a just society.

He credits society with giving him life (through the institution of marriage which allowed his mother and father to give birth to him), nurturing and education, and that by accepting these gifts, he has subscribed to its values (51). Socrates understood the limitations of society, given that it was subject to the executive government, and thus to human error, and he chose to live within it anyway. He believes it is only just that he accepts the consequences that come of knowingly entering into such a contract and he believes that Athens has given him a good life in exchange for his agreeing to it.

“‘It is clear that the city has been outstandingly more congenial to you than other Athenians, and so have we, the laws for what city can please without laws? Will not you stick to our agreements?’” (53) says the city the Socrates. If he were to disobey the laws, they would be meaningless, because, once again, they are made real through acknowledgement and practice. Being that he believes it unwise to suppose one knows things that one does not, one could conclude that Socrates is someone who lives according to a higher power. In matters concerning truth and wisdom, he looks to the gods, but since they have no sway over earthly, political matters, in these instances, he looks to law.

The law cannot offer absolute truth or wisdom, but it offers a compromise to living without these things in the form of presenting humans with a concept of right and wrong. Socrates sees society as an essentially man-made thing, subject to a notion of right and wrong that logical and good, but is ultimately man-made. He sees the human condition as fundamentally flawed as its laws are subject to human error, but offers no solution to this paradox, accepting it as an inevitable consequence of the social contract instead. The social contract, and its resulting society are flawed, but this is what separates the humans from the gods.