What Are Friends For?

While Socrates was in his jail cell, during the day friends and family would come to see him and while away the hours with their normal discussions about virtue, justice, good and evil and whatnot. Given that Socrates now had unlimited scholia, or leisure time , to converse, his more well-to-do friends were more than happy to spend their days in the presence of their dear friend. However, to what extent were they friends, or were they more interested in being in the presence of Socrates for their own benefit is somewhat put into question with the odd, yet powerful, little dialogue known as the Crito, whose subtitle is Or, on Duty; Ethical.

Crito, the man, appears to have been in on the very inner circle of Socrates’ friends and acquaintances according to the dialogue, which bears his name. Moreover, the fact that Crito is the one to be bringing the message that he has to give to Socrates suggests that the others in this circle must have felt that he had a certain persuasion over Socrates or he wouldn’t have been chosen to confront him with the proposition that his they had been concocting.

What begins as Crito’s attempt to convince Socrates of this plan rather ends like Hopper’s demonstration to his fellow grasshopper’s when they try to convince him to stay on vacation rather than go back to Ant Island in Pixar’s A Bug’s Life. Socrates is “quite the motivational speaker” as well in the Crito in an uncharacteristic monologue on the nature of duty to one’s country when one decides to stay in that country with respect to obeying the laws.

However, in addition to the blatant message of the importance of Duty to one’s country (with the provision that one has freely chosen to remain in that country and/or city, as Socrates did with Athens), there is a rather subtle subtext of the question of what is a true friend. Crito has been there all along as we are to infer from the dialogue, yet in the final moments of Socrates’ life, this loyalty as “a friend” is squarely put into question.

Crito has come to see Socrates to tell him that there has been a report that the ship with the envoy to/from Delos is returning, which in turn means that Socrates will be executed the following day as per the law. The delay of the ship had caused the month-long stay of execution for Socrates, allowing his associates to come up with a plan to break him out of jail that night as a result.

Crito had been watching Socrates sleep and when he awakes, tells him that he wished that he could be as peaceful as him in such a time of sorrow and pain. Crito says that he had always thought Socrates to be eudaimonisa (normally translated as “happy,” but I feel strongly that it is more literally such as “well-spirited,” with an emphasis on the “spirit” aspect, referring specifically to Socrates’ frequent mention of his personal daimon) to which Socrates answers that he would be a fool to just now be afraid to die after all of the discussions they had had on the nature of the soul.

Crito continues to plead that it will be embarrassing to him and the others if people started to spread rumors that Crito and the gang had not tried their best to get their friend of out jail, especially when they had the financial resources to do so. What a public shame it would be for them if public opinion were to judge them as friends who did not help a “friend in need.”

That is about all that Socrates needs to hear, then, as to what “public opinion” has to say about their actions. Socrates asks for an agreement from Crito, however, before he launches into his full answer. He sets up the condition that one must never do wrong to another, especially if one has been wronged. To requite wrong with wrong is as bad, or perhaps worse than the original wrong done. Before Socrates will agree to continue, he asks if Crito thinks that this is to be agreed upon, for the majority of people would not go so far as to say this. However, for Socrates, if two people do not agree with this condition, then “toutois ouk esti koine boule,” (there is no common desire/wish between them) and that they would be in opposition. Basically what Socrates was saying is that if Crito did not agree to acknowledge what Socrates held to be his deepest philosophical conviction, then all of their decades of friendship would be for nought.

Yet, does that mean that Socrates was asking to agree with him? Not necessarily. Socrates makes it clear  that Crito is in no danger of being executed the following day, so he should be able to make informed, rational decisions, beyond emotional prejudices. In other words, Socrates asking Crito to agree with him, but rather if what he is saying is actually right or not. For, if it is not right, then everything that Socrates believed in and in which he had rooted his life’s philosophy would be in vain.

A true friend then, for Socrates, is not merely someone who agrees with him or not, but rather, if that person is willing to become his enemy by disagreeing with him if he does not think that what Socrates is saying is right or not. Not right by Socrates, but based on what that person knows in his or her soul in relation to be what is right according to one’s prakteos, or duty in life. In Sanskrit philosophy, this is known as Dharma, and is the highest form of action that one can perform in life. Socrates was not asking Crito to agree with Socrates, but rather at the risk of losing their friendship, to follow what he knew was his duty.

How many, indeed, are willing in the face of losing a lifelong friend to contradict him or her when faced with assessing whether that friend be right or not, but based upon whether it is in line with one’s prakteos or dharma to agree or disagree?

Sweet Surrender

When Socrates was waiting for his sentence to be carried out, which had been delayed by the Delian envoy, he did a curious thing, one that has ironically spilt quite a bit of its own ink over the years. He supposedly wrote something down, more precisely, he composed music.

This in itself would not be significant, nor even noteworthy, except for the fact that, as far as we know, Socrates never wrote anything during his lifetime, or at least nothing that ever came down through the ages. All of the words of Socrates, as with Jesus and the Buddha, were written by disciples, students, chroniclers, or scholars. These three men, however, did not put pen to paper, so to speak, and write down their thoughts, ideas or teachings. They spoke, using the oral transmission wisdom as their only instrument of instruction.

However, when Socrates was in his jail cell in Athens, this may have changed. In the prologue of the Phaedo, which is Plato's chronicle of the final day of Socrates' life, Echecrates asks the eponymous Phaedo if he knows the story of the final days of Socrates and if he could relate it. Phaedo answers that he was actually there in person and the bulk of the dialogue is the fictional "memory" of Phaedo's account of the conversation in the jail cell.

When asked if he would relate the story, for Echechrates says that "sweetly" he would like to hear it, Phaedo answers that he will do his best, and the motif of bittersweet becomes rather prominent. Phaedo felt a mixture of pleasure and pain that final day with Socrates in that he was happy to have been there and to have known him, but deeply sad in that it was in fact the last day on the planet. He relates the conceit of Aesop that pleasure and pain are really one entity and that "a very curious mixture of pleasure and pain was present" while Socrates and his friends were discussing the nature of the Soul, sometimes laughing, sometimes weeping, in short, a very human affair.

When Phaedo begins his re-telling of the story, he describes what Socrates was doing. Apparently, during the final month of his life, while waiting in his jail cell and after the daily visits were over, Socrates' daimon had spoken quite distinctly to him, yet in a manner even more distinct in its aberration from the norm, than in its message. For the first time, his daimon had told him to do something, rather than the accustomed message of dissuading him from doing something. His daimon had told him to "make music."

For seventy years, Socrates had not composed anything, yet upon his imminent death, his inner voice, his daimon, or his hotline to the divinity, asked him to compose hymns to Apollo, the God who figures so prominently in Socrates' life-long quest to "Know Thyself."

Socrates obliges, and since he does not know how to compose his own, he choses to set some of the words and fables of Aesop to music as his paean to the God. For all his life, he listened to this voice tell him not to act, until Time was truly of the essence. The final directive, his soul's will and testament, was to compose hymns of praise to God.

He obeyed, and in his final act, he showed gratitude to this God and he composed. He made music. He acted. He was grateful.

Exercising My Daimon

The charge of heresy against Socrates was largely due to his claim that he, for lack of a better word, had a hotline to the gods. Socrates asserted that he had a voice that he heard, that he called his daimon, which is an entity similar to an angel (which originally means messenger in Greek), that is something between humans and the Gods, quite like Hermes and the hermetic messages that he brought to mortals from atop Mt. Olympus.

In Plato's Apology, Socrates refers to this daimon quite a bit, and he likewise has to calm the madding crowd with his heretical remarks that this daimon is actually relating the will of God, most probably Apollo, as it was his oracle at Delphi who made the prophecy that no man was wiser than Socrates. However, as is often with Socrates, there is an ironic twist. Irony, for Socrates was not meaning what one says, (according to most scholarship on the subject, specifically Vlastos).

His daimon did not tell him what to do, but rather only told him when not to do something. So, for Socrates, the reason that he did not pursue a public political life is because his daimon never dissuaded him from not doing soon instead of urging him on to pursue one. A bit of reverse daimonology if you will.

For his closing statement, Socrates says that his daimon never stopped him from saying the things that he said during his trial, meaning that he had no regrets for what he said, nor that he felt he had given up his life without realizing the consequences. He needed to goad Athens and to annoy them and to irk them. For, as he correctly predicted, there would not be another one like him to follow. In fact, soon after his his sentencing was revealed and justice had been served cold to the Athenian population, they did in fact heavily regret their actions for putting him to death.

However, did his "curse" live on?

Demons have become a cliche in the past decade of self-help and recovery, and usually refer to something bad, a character defect, a fault, a sin.

A daimon was originally neither good, nor evil, but merely an intermediate essence or being that existed between the world of man and the world of the god/s. Daimons, soon to be demons started to become quite popular during King James I/VI of England/Scotland with his tome on Daemonologie around the time of Shakespeare. Now King James was a bit of a drama case, much like the current King James of basketball, and is more known for his Bible that his demons, but his legacy there is no less interesting.

Demons became quite a popular motif in the Flemish school of Painting around the same time,  most notably with Hieronymus Bosch's "Garden of Earthly Delights" where you get some pretty psychedelic rendering of demons, mostly ghastly and ghoulish, definitely not neutral.

Socrates felt compelled to listen to his daimon which helped to exorcise his demons and to help others to work on their own demons, though that work had to be done by themselves. You cannot exorcise another person's demons.

Over the years, I have been trying to take Socrates' charge to heart and to exorcise my own demons, which I have done. Many of them show up in Indra's Net, often mockingly (because nothing pisses off a demon more than being mocked) or when necessary, with all earnestness and seriousness if my demons have caused emotional duress or pain to others.

More important, for me at least, has been learning how to exercise my own daimon, and to be guided by that voice, which is beyond good and evil, and to learn to Know My-self.