Crito Revisited

In an earlier post, Crito--Quia Absurdum, I said that if we did want to reconstruct the political theory implicit in the Phaedo (a dubious enterprise), we should look to the Crito, on the grounds that the Phaedo was meant to be continuous with that dialogue, and that the Crito would reveal the view of law that Plato took into his middle period (on the usual view of Plato's development).

I said that three passages were important, and here I'll say why.

Recall what is at issue. We are evaluating Bobonich's Claim, in Plato's Utopia Recast, that the Phaedo holds that non-philosphers lack virtue entirely or can't at all be happy, but that the Laws holds that non-philosophers generally can be made virtuous and happy by the laws, and that this marks a real change in Plato's view.

I have been asking, in effect: How do we know that Plato did not always hold, in an ordinary sense, as has often been thought, that laws are meant to make citizens virtuous and happy, and that it's just this ordinary sense that gets unfolded in the Laws--so that there is no philosophical change?

And the Crito supports this latter suggestion.

Passage 3 takes virtue above all to be the goal of the law: "Ah, Socrates, be guided by us who tended your infancy. Care neither for your children nor for life nor for anything else more than for the right, that when you come to the home of the dead, you may have all these things to say in your own defence."

Passage 2 suggests that living under good laws, in the ordinary sense, can make a life worth living: "Will you then avoid the well-governed cities and the most civilized men? And if you do this will your life be worth living? "

Passage 1 (along with several similar passages) suggests that law itself, because it is resonable, is open to persuasion and inherently has an aspect of persuasion: "We say that he who does not obey does threefold wrong, because he disobeys us who are his parents, because he disobeys us who nurtured him, and because after agreeing to obey us he neither obeys us nor convinces us that we are wrong, though we give him the opportunity and do not roughly order him to do what we command."