e a sophisticated philosophy that he was presenting. The complex philosophical and literary problems involved here cannot be resolved in a paper of this small scope. Let it suffice to say that the ôSocratesö whose views are considered here is ôSocrates-as-described-by-Plato;ö and this paper will not attempt to decide whether that Socrates is ultimately different from Plato or not.
Another issue that arises is that of suicide, and of whether it is unethical, sinful, or what. Plato has Socrates discuss this in the Crito (and then again in the Phaedo). The issue is ultimately whether Socrates cooperated more willingly in his own death than he needed to.
Perhaps Socrates was sufficiently sure about the nature of the afterlife that he knew it was something to be looked forward to, rather than feared; this point will be considered below. He is presented as arguing that it would be wrong, and an affront to the gods, to purposely take his own life, but this seems to be merely because the gods, affronted, would then sentence him to punishment, so that he would therefore lose the reward he had hoped for. Hence the attitude is not that suicide is inherently immoral, but that it is illegal and ineffectual.
However, he does seem to feel that since the Athenian court has sentenced him to death legally, he is not morally obliged to attempt to avoid the sentence. As long as he is passive, he will not arose the wrath of the gods, and thus will pass on to the reward of the heroes that he desires (and which is described in Phaedo 114c). In Christian ethics, with its emphasis on the concept of ôsins of omissionö as being just as serious as ôsins of commission,ö this failure to act to preserve his life when he had been condemned unjustly (although legally) would still count as a form of suicide--but one must be careful not to impose this later Christian theological development onto the thought of Plato or Socrates.
It seems f...