Socrates Staying In Prison Analysis

The first premise that Socrates presented to support his choice of staying in prison was “that some opinions, and the opinions of some men only, are to be valued, and other opinions, and the opinions of other men, are not to be valued.” He formed this premise in response to Crito’s reason to why Socrates should escape the prison with him. The reason is that the people will think that Crito values money more than friendship, and people will also think that Socrates is betraying his life and his children. Although it may sound like a convincing argument on Crito’s behalf, it’s not in Socrates habits to listen and comply right away; he likes to either persuade or be persuaded with better reasoning. So Socrates adds more details to his premise
in order to reinforce his premise. He says that the people whose opinion should be considered are people who have deep understanding of issues such as just and unjust, good and evil, honorable and dishonorable… If I could put his premise in simple modern words, it would be; we should consider the opinion of people who are experts in their professions. Since we now have the premise, we can unfold the logic supporting the premise. Socrates proposes an analogy in the form of an example to back up his premise.
He talks about the situation of a student and a gymnastics teacher. By common sense, we know that the student should listen, fear, and trust the teacher and his instructions, and should not be taking any advice regarding gymnastics from the public because they don’t understand it and don’t have experience in it. Thus, Socrates’s premise holds. Then, he dives into a more specific issue in the premise which is having understanding. He approaches it with a two parts situation, physical and moral, referring to it as “a parallel instance.” The first part says that taking advice from the public, who doesn’t have an understanding regarding the asked issue, will more likely result in a physical harm because they either have no reason or weak reason to their advice. The second part talks about “The higher part of man,” the moral part, where taking advice from people without understanding of moral issues like just and unjust is more likely to produce a person with weak morals which is harmful, too. Therefore, we should listen to the opinion of certain people who have
understanding.
The way this premise connects to his main argument of not escaping is as follows; since Socrates should not consider the opinion of everybody, it does not make it a reason for him to escape even if the people thought he
should.