I have already observed that the tone of the Kriton is rhetorical, not dialectical — especially the harangue ascribed to Athens. The business of the rhetorician is to plant and establish some given point of persuasion, whether as to a general resolution or a particular fact, in the bosoms of certain auditors before him: hence he gives prominence and emphasis to some views of the question, suppressing or discrediting others, and especially keeping out of sight all the difficulties surrounding the conclusion at which he is aiming. On the other hand, the business of the dialectician is, not to establish any foreknown conclusion, but to find out which among all supposable conclusions are untenable, and which is the most tenable or best. Hence all the difficulties attending every one of them must be brought fully into view and discussed: until this has been done, the process is not terminated, nor can we tell whether any assured conclusion is attainable or not.
Now Plato, in some of his dialogues, especially the Gorgias, greatly depreciates rhetoric and its purpose of persuasion: elsewhere he employs it himself with ability and effect. The discourse which we read in the Kriton is one of his best specimens: appealing to pre-established and widespread emotions, veneration for parents, love of country, respect for covenants — to justify the resolution of Sokrates in the actual case: working up these sentiments into fervour, but neglecting all difficulties, limits, and counter-considerations: assuming that the familiar phrases of ethics and politics are perfectly understood and indisputable.
The Kriton makes powerful appeal to the emotions, but overlooks the ratiocinative difficulties, or supposes them to be solved.
But these last-mentioned elements — difficulties, qualifications, necessity for definitions even of the most hackneyed words — would have been brought into the foreground had Sokrates pursued the dialectical path, which (as we know both from Xenophon and Plato) was his real habit and genius. He was perpetually engaged (says Xenophon[17]) in dialectic enquiry. “What is the Holy, what is the Unholy? What is the Honourable and the Base? What is the Just and the Unjust? &c.” Now in the rhetorical appeal embodied in the Kriton, the important question, What is the Just and the Unjust (i.e. Justice and Injustice in general), is assumed to be already determined and out of the reach of dispute. We are called upon to determine what is just and unjust in a particular case, as if we already knew what justice and injustice meant generally: to inquire about modifications of justice, before we have ascertained its essence. This is the fundamental assumption involved in the rhetorical process; which assumption we shall find Plato often deprecating as unphilosophical and preposterous.
[17] Xenoph. Mem. i. 1, 16. Αὐτὸς δὲ περὶ τῶν ἀνθρωπείων ἀεὶ διελέγετο, σκοπῶν, τί εὐσεβές, τί ἀσεβές· τί καλόν, τί αἰσχρόν· τί δίκαιον, τί ἄδικον· τί σωφροσύνη, τί μανία· τί ἀνδρεία, τί δειλία· τί πόλις, τί πολιτικός· τί ἀρχὴ ἀνθρώπων, τί ἀρχικὸς ἀνθρώπων, &c.
We see in Xenoph. Memor. i. 2, 40-46, iv. 2, 37, in the Platonic dialogue Minos and elsewhere, the number of dialectic questions which Sokrates might have brought to bear upon the harangue in the Kriton, had it been delivered by any opponent whom he sought to perplex or confute. What is a law? what are the limits of obedience to the laws? Are there no limits (as Hobbes is so much denounced for maintaining)? While the oligarchy of Thirty were the constituted authority at Athens, they ordered Sokrates himself, together with four other citizens, to go and arrest a citizen whom they considered dangerous to the state, the Salaminian Leon. The other four obeyed the order; Sokrates alone disobeyed, and takes credit for having done so, considering Leon to be innocent. Which was in the right here? the four obedient citizens, or the one disobedient? Might not the four have used substantially the same arguments to justify their obedience, as those which Sokrates hears from personified Athens in the Kriton? We must remember that the Thirty had come into authority by resolutions passed under constitutional forms, when fear of foreign enemies induced the people to sanction the resolutions proposed by a party among themselves. The Thirty also ordered Sokrates to abstain from discourse with young men; he disobeyed (Xenoph. Memor. iv. 4, 3). Was he right in disobeying?
I have indicated briefly these questions, to show how completely the rhetorical manner of the Kriton submerges all those difficulties, which would form the special matter of genuine Sokratic dialectics.
Schleiermacher (Einleit. zum Kriton, pp. 233, 234) considers the Kriton as a composition of special occasion — Gelegenheitsschrift — which I think is true; but which may be said also, in my judgment, of every Platonic dialogue. The term, however, in Schleiermacher’s writing, has a peculiar meaning, viz. a composition for which there is no place in the regular rank and file of the Platonic dialogues, as he marshals them. He remarks the absence of dialectic in the Kriton, and he adduces this as one reason for supposing it not to be genuine.
But it is no surprise to me to find Plato rhetorical in one dialogue, dialectical in others. Variety, and want of system, seem to me among his most manifest attributes.
The view taken of the Kriton by Steinhart (Einleit. pp. 291-302), in the first page of his very rhetorical Introduction, coincides pretty much with mine.