Tag: Christianity

Review and Summary of Plato's Crito

A Reading of Plato’s Crito

Chris Khatsch1 Comment

A summary of Plato’s Crito

In one of Plato’s famous dialogues called Crito, Crito visits Socrates’ prison cell before daybreak to persuade him to escape. Socrates is in prison and is condemned to death, but when Crito tells him they could bribe people to bring him out of prison, he refuses. In fact, almost comically, even in prison, Socrates finds the time to use his signature “Socratic method” to decide whether he ought to escape or not. The answer, of course, turns out to be no because, even when one is wronged, one must not wrong the other in return. And the laws must be obeyed even when one is unjustly found guilty.

According to Socrates, the Law is like a father (or a master); the individual is like a child (or a slave). The individual belongs to the State and must do what the state orders him to do. Why? Because, from the day he is born, the individual is nurtured and educated by the State, protected by the State, given his rights by the State, etc. And if he does like what he is given, he can always pack his stuff and leave. (Where to? That’s not the State’s problem.) By staying in the State, the individual enters “into an implied contract that he will do as we [the State] command him.”

This is, in short, why Socrates chooses not to escape and, therefore, die.

Socrates, Jesus, and the opinions of others

Reading Crito now, on a cool Wednesday morning in September, I am reminded of that story in the Bible in which Peter draws his sword and cuts off the high priest’s servant’s ear who, among others, had come to the Garden of Gethsemane to arrest Jesus. “Put your sword into the sheath,” Jesus says to Peter. “Shall I not drink the cup which My Father has given Me?” (John 18:11) We see here that, like Socrates, Jesus also chooses not to escape. The cup which His Father has given Him is His hemlock.

Moreover, Crito is not (only) Peter. He is also an inverted Judas. Judas betrays Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, but Crito is ready to do the opposite for Socrates. “But, oh! my beloved Socrates, let me entreat you once more to take my advice and escape,” Crito says. “For if you die I shall not only lose a friend who can never be replaced, but there is another evil: people who do not know you and me will believe that I might have saved you if I had been willing to give money, but that I did not care.”

When Socrates hears these words, he says that one shouldn’t care about the opinion of the many. Crito disagrees because the opinion of the many has the power to ruin a man’s life. (Remember when Pilate offered to release Jesus, but the crowd persisted, demanding his crucifixion?) Yet Socrates manages to show Crito that the opinions of the unwise don’t matter. Only the opinions of the wise matter. And if there’s only one wise man among many, it’s only his opinion that matters.

In this sense, neither Socrates nor Jesus cared about the opinions of the masses. We can even say that they died because they didn’t care about their opinions.

From the POV of authorities (and the masses), they may have been lawbreakers; from the POV of their followers, however, they were either law-abiding citizens or “fulfillers” of the law. Most importantly, they themselves knew they were doing the right thing.

What can we learn from this?

Socrates did what Bukowski once said, “Find what you love and let it kill you.” He died defending what killed him…

References

Plato. The Trial and Death of Socrates: Four Dialogues. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Dover Publications, 1992.

Genesis: On the first day, the day was created

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

On the first day of creation, God enabled repetition. Prior to (the initiation of) repetition, the earth was formless and engulfed in darkness. There was no time; there were no days. Without the spirit (or essence) of repetition, time and space could not have existed — or, more specifically, spacetime and everything in it could not have been activated. God said, “Let there be light,” and that was when time began. He liked what He saw. From then on, light had its turn, and darkness had its turn. He called the former Day and the latter Night, and they were set to repeat: night to day, day to night, night to day, day to night, ad infinitum. Accordingly, (a representation of) repetition was the start of creation. On the first day, the day was created.

Then, on the fourth day, God commanded more lights to appear in the heavens. These lights, the stars and the moon, did not only illuminate the world and the universe, but they made time observable, (referential), and measurable. They gave us days, seasons, years, et cetera — (cycles of) units of time. [There’s a correlation between time and light, but does that mean anything?] God planted repetitions within repetitions, cycles (of days) within cycles. And when He created all living things, he planted the seed of multiplication in them and commanded them to multiply — i.e., to bring forth repetitions. Furthermore, God made man in His own image; and in that sense, man is a repetition of God programmed to repeat. [But does that mean that man is equal to God? No, not necessarily… because repetition = the repeated subject/object + difference. And difference can be negative, positive, or equal to zero.]

Let us evoke Gilles Deleuze here and accept repetition as a process that generates difference. We can also quote Richard Dawkins who, in The Selfish Gene, wrote that, if he wanted to guess (and put his money on) one fundamental principle, it would be this: “that all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.” In other words, the spirit of repetition provides an ecosystem in which difference gets a chance to actualize its potential. So, it is only natural for repetition (and difference) to be at the core of the fundamental principle(s) of the universe and, therefore, at the core of the story of creation.

[In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins (who, let’s not forget, is probably the most famous atheist in the world today) says that “the only kind of entity that has to exist in order for life to arise, anywhere in the universe, is the immortal replicator.” And I ask myself here, “Is this not God, the enabler of the spirit of repetition?” Who wrote the code of the immortal replicator?]

The spirit of repetition allows copy-pasting and, more importantly, it is the source of the nested loops and adaptive algorithms of the universe. A universe without repetition is unperceivable. Perceiving already involves the act of repeating the perceived object in one’s mind. Moreover, without repetition, God would not have rested on the seventh day because he would have to keep creating new, unrepeated things and beings until the end of time. The spirit of repetition puts chaos in a system then lets it unfold automatically (and purposively) without the interference (or piloting) of the Creator. Repetition is the power that tames chaos, guiding it with laws and systems, (although chaos cannot be tamed absolutely). [Note: The spirit of repetition “automates” the universe but does not turn it deterministic. Man, like anything else in the universe, is chained to the repetitions allotted to him but is simultaneously free thanks to the irregular, uncontainable bursts of chaos.]

Can we remove the spirit of repetition from the code of the universe? No. What happens when we remove it? We already have the answer. We’ll go back to square one. We’ll go back to (timeless) chaos. The absence of repetition eliminates the possibility of a systematic universe; therefore, it eliminates the possibility of living organisms; hence, to make all things possible, God enabled repetition on the first day and made it the first day.