Mortal Democracy and Plato’s Apology

Introduction

Plato’s Apology is traditionally read as opening a “gulf” between democratic politics and philosophy. ¹ This reading partly rests on Socrates’s hopeful orientation toward his own death, which seems to reject the shadowy world of embodied democratic politics in favor of philosophic truth and the immortal soul. Here, however, I suggest that the discussion of death in the Apology, rather than turning away from political life in Athens, further “entangles” Socrates’s defense with the politics of the democratic city. ² I argue that the Apology presents Socratic philosophic practice as politically ambiguous: its constant push to examine the core conventions of mortal, democratic Athenian life threatens polis stability, yet simultaneously engages democratic values of openness, contest, and critique in uncertain but potentially generative ways.

At the heart of the Apology is a consistent interrogation of Athenian customary attitudes toward death and their proper place in political life. Socrates questions how these conventions, anchored in an unexamined fear of death, distort democratic ideals of frank speech, sound reasoning, and the justice garnered through collective judgment. While the Athenians praise a life that courageously faces death, Socrates admits he does not know whether death is innately frightening: “as I have no adequate knowledge of things in the underworld, so I do not think I have. I do know, however, that it is wicked and shameful to do wrong” (29b–c). ³ I thus read Socrates’s treatment of death in the Apology as part of a deeply political turn, one aimed at transforming the mortal, democratic city through a reconsideration of its central practices.

As John Seery has argued, a reluctance to speak about death openly in popular political discourse does not prevent anxieties over death and its meaning from shaping political behavior. ⁴ Indeed, discomfort over the role liberal, democratic states play in producing so much death in contemporary times, disproportionately benefiting some while exposing others to greater mortal violence and precarity, remains an all-too-present part of contemporary political life and has generated a robust conversation in political theory about death, mourning, and the dead. ⁵ I suggest here that by viewing our attitudes toward death as a contingent and contestable part of political life, as Socrates encourages his fellow Athenians to do, we stand to be more attentive to background political narratives of legitimation and desire, which these attitudes support; made aware of harmful political dynamics otherwise overlooked; and invited to imagine alternative ways of being.

I argue Socrates’s insistence that we “do not know if death is a good or bad thing” provides an aporetic orientation useful for this task, one I call “mortal ignorance.” I develop this position through a close reading of Socrates’s interrogation of several competing conventions of death in the Athenian polity, showing how, for each, Socrates reorients Athenian political practice away from hubristic claims to power over death and life and toward an ethical consideration of what kind of life is worth living. These interrogations are disruptive of polis life and are famously met with resistance from many of Socrates’s judges, illustrating how confronting death is painful and risky. Nonetheless, I argue here that adopting a Socratic perspective of mortal ignorance could support a more self-reflective politics of death, one which accepts the impossibility of closing off death’s meaning in any final sense—an aporia suitable for the unending, precarious work of democratic politics.

Part I: Democratic Philosophy?

Socrates has a complicated relationship with Athenian democracy. While sometimes lauded as a model for contemporary citizenship, the historical Socrates was characterized as a dangerous sophist by Athenian orators for generations after his death. ⁶ The distrust goes both ways: Socrates insists twice in the Apology that had he participated in Athenian politics he would have been executed long ago (28b, 33a). As I will argue here, however, it is easy to overstate the hostility between democracy and philosophy in the Apology.

As Peter Euben has argued, Socratic philosophy and democracy both “remind us of, and exist because of our mortality, partiality and insufficiency. Both emphasize our need for others to compensate for our own one sidedness and incompleteness.” ⁷ Philosophy requires community to produce knowledge capable of transcending the narrow experiences of individual life; Socratic practice is thus centered upon dialogue and rational deliberation with others. As this suggests, Socratic philosophy also remains bound to the community that produces it. Socrates’s criticisms of mortal and political life are “immanent to the account of the human life they appear to transcend” where knowledge of mortality is gained by attending “to those moments when human experience points beyond itself, a ‘beyond’ that includes the city as well as the cosmos.” ⁸

Situating Socrates’s practice within the context of the polis complicates traditional narratives concerning philosophy’s enmity for democracy, and advances in classics over the last few decades have enabled a reconsideration of Socrates along these lines. ⁹ In this spirit, Sara Monoson notes that Socrates “finds the lived experience and ideology of Athenian democracy repulsive and fascinating, troubling and intriguing.” ¹⁰ Others have shown how Socrates’s arguments are thoroughly enmeshed with political debates of his time, appropriating, transforming, and sometimes radically extending democratic values of frank speech and critical self-examination, also playing on the erotic relationships that defined Athenian citizenship. ¹¹ As Joel Schlosser puts it, “While engaging the politics of his own day, Socrates’s philosophy offers an alternative to ‘politics as usual:’ modeling what it might mean to assert one’s thoughts publicly and contesting the extant democracy through questioning and dialogue.” ¹²

To the extent Socratic philosophy serves democratic ends, then, it does so in unconventional ways—ways, at times, actively threatening to the established polis. As Josiah Ober notes, Athenian democracy strove for “rhetorical and even epistemological hegemony over all members of Athenian society . . . key terms (for citizen, justice, freedom, equality and so on) within Athenian political terminology became so strongly marked in their use in democratic contexts that it required great effort for dissidents to redefine them for use in non-democratic discourse.” ¹³ These discourses formed robust epistemological orientations, what Ober terms “regimes of truth” comprised of “an integrated set of assumptions about what is regarded as right, proper, and true,” which philosophers like Socrates engaged and attempted to transform. ¹⁴

For Ober, Socrates’s attempts to transform Athenian discourse amount to “an epic rejection of Athenian political culture.” ¹⁵ As we will see, however, while the Apology challenges the traditions of the democratic polis, Socrates nonetheless argues as an Athenian citizen and for the polis—indeed, he claims he was “attached to this city by the god” (30e, also 30a, 31b). Socratic philosophy often challenges the formal boundaries of Athenian politics, even when appropriating its core conventions; yet these challenges themselves offer potential avenues for democratic openings. As Euben puts it, Socrates offers the “regeneration of [democracy’s traditional] inadequate prevalent discourses, practices, and institutions according to the best ideals of that past as criticized by philosophy.” ¹⁶

Among the “prevalent discourses” taken up by the Apology is the polis’s treatment of the dead. Death and mourning were intensely political in democratic Athens. As Olga Taxidou and Bonnie Honig have each shown, Solon’s reforms curbing family mourning displays aimed to replace aristocratic conventions of death with practices that would bolster the fledgling polis. ¹⁷ Yet such communal mobilizations of death are not always supportive of democratic ends. As many contemporary scholars have argued, responses to death may provide occasions for democratic critique and more expansive ethical recognition through shared loss, but frequently these moments are defined less by “a commitment to rigorous interrogation of the nation’s values than by an unquestioning celebration of the same.” ¹⁸ There is good reason, in other words, to consider how contemporary “regimes of death” also exert conceptual hegemony in need of examination, and which, left intact, undermine openness, contestation, and the ongoing work of engaging with others that democratic practice requires.

While Socrates’s specific engagement with the Athenian conventions of death cannot give a straightforward response to contemporary concerns, his aporetic approach nonetheless provides a useful vantage for considering how attitudes about death powerfully shape our political lives. As we will see in the next two sections, Socrates engages in a critical appropriation of several competing “regimes of death” in the Athenian polity, disrupting their core conventions through an account of mortal ignorance. This disruption, rather than devaluing polis life, encourages a deeper engagement with, and potential transformation of, the democratic polity and its central practices along critical, Socratic lines. Socrates takes up the charges of impiety and sophistry that have been laid against him to accomplish this disruptive task.

Part II: Mortal Ignorance

In his defense, Socrates responds to the charge that he studies “things in the sky and under the earth” (18b). This charge, given by Socrates’s first accusers—those who have believed rumors about Socrates since childhood—places Socrates’s offense against Athens in terms of mortal behavior, mortal knowledge, and the boundaries that circumscribe each: the sky is the realm of the immortal divine, and the dead dwell under the earth. To study or claim knowledge of either requires an epistemological transgression, as the knowledge available to embodied beings does not extend beyond the limits of mortal existence. To have knowledge of the gods would require access to an immortal, unchanging experience that transcends human life. To have knowledge of the underworld, one must already be dead.

The other charges leveled against Socrates by his first accusers, that he makes “worse the stronger argument, and he teaches these same things to others,” attach this frame of mortal impiety to the conventions of the democratic polity. These charges depend upon the close link Athenians saw between public argumentation and political wisdom. Socrates’s method of questioning his fellow Athenians, of exposing their poor logos for public critique, is thus described in formal terms usually applied to sophistry, or “making the weaker argument stronger,” a serious charge in a polity that attached the justice of its decisions to the wisdom of collective decision making (19b–c). Socrates’s later accusers, who have brought Socrates to trial, reinforce these ideas by charging Socrates with “corrupting the young” and “not believing in the gods in whom the city believes” (24b). ¹⁹ These charges set Socrates’s philosophic practice, here explicitly concerning beliefs about the divine—what is not mortal—against the authority and welfare of the democratic polis regarding the same. Socrates responds in kind.

The conflation of democratic and mortal perspectives in Socrates’s defense transforms the charges of impiety and corruption into an examination of Athenian political life and its core conventions, chief among them a belief in the collective wisdom of democratic bodies—a kind of wisdom Ober terms “democratic knowledge.” ²⁰ The pivotal moment of the defense turns on a statement of aporetic, mortal ignorance:

To fear death, gentlemen, is none other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils. And surely it is the most blameworthy ignorance to believe that one knows what one does not know. It is perhaps on this point and in this respect, gentlemen, that I differ from the majority of men, and if I were to claim that I am wiser than anyone in anything, it would be in this, that, as I have no adequate knowledge of things in the underworld, so I do not think I have. (29a–c)

The implication here is that the democratic knowledge of the Athenians has been compromised by an unexamined fear of death, such that they lack the critical perspective to make sound judgments; they are enslaved to unexamined fears.

Athenian democratic knowledge rested on a commonly held conviction that “both consensus and freedom of public speech were desirable,” a “belief in the superior wisdom of decisions made collectively by large bodies of citizens.” ²¹ This belief was grounded in several ancillary conventions, chief among them “frank speech,” or parrhesia. Frank speech is consistently and closely associated with two things: criticism and truth telling. ²² Monoson comments, “To speak with parrhesia was to confront, oppose or find fault with another individual or a popular view in a spirit of concern for illuminating what is right and best.” ²³ It was the legal privilege of every free-born adult male citizen to speak before the Athenian assembly—also a duty. Frank speech was considered a “necessary precondition for the smooth functioning of democratic deliberative and decision-making institutions.” ²⁴

Socrates repeatedly references the conventions of parrhesia, but he does so by positioning democratic knowledge as vulnerable to corruption by unexamined popular beliefs, setting himself as a true, patriotic practitioner of democratic truth telling. Socrates thus begins his remarks by (conventionally) emphasizing the dignity of speaking plainly to a critically engaged audience of equals. “I put my trust in the justice of what I say. . . . It would not be fitting at my age, as it might be for a young man, to toy with words when I appear before you” (17d). Here Socrates aligns his philosophic practice with frank speech and conventional ideas about dignified adult behavior. Frank speech and public deliberation were considered by the Athenians as proof that they were more courageous than other Greeks, as well as more intelligent, manly, and mature.

Socrates argues his Athenian peers remain caught up in baseless rumors about his character, which have circulated within the polity for decades—namely, that he is an impious sophist. He argues that his detractors “got hold of most of you from childhood, persuaded you and accused me quite falsely” before the Athenians had learned to critically evaluate the knowledge they encountered. Thus, his opponents “won their case by default, as there was no defense” (18a–c). ²⁵ These unquestioned beliefs will need to be exposed and reexamined for his judges to accurately evaluate Socrates’s defense, as the democratic conventions of parrhesia and dignified behavior demand.

This appeal lays the grounds for a more general critique of democratic knowledge; the authority of democratic knowledge, which rests in its pluralism and openness to criticism, is vulnerable to its own success. Failure to recognize, or remember, that longstanding knowledge and the conventions of the polis are themselves products of provisional and, at times, confused beliefs yields a dangerous blindness, fostering complacency and overconfidence that may result in injustice. ²⁶ As Euben writes, “knowledge is not an object that can be finished or completed. . . . To suppose otherwise is to embrace those tyrannical impulses that transform politics into command and obedience.” ²⁷

Socrates thus attacks a central point of pride in Athenian culture, as the cumulative power of democratic knowledge, generated through practices of equal and frank speech, was understood as a tonic against the self-serving beliefs that defined tyrannical regimes. Monoson notes that “an intolerance of parrhesia marked tyranny” in Athens, where “being free meant being able to hold those who exercise power accountable, . . . to expose lies, name abuses, and demand change.” ²⁸ When Socrates doubts his judges can move past their spurious beliefs (24a), lists the polis’s past injustices (32c), criticizes them for refusing to give an account of themselves (39a), and encourages them to alter their ways (29d–e), he implicates Athens while aligning philosophy with the democratic struggle against tyrannical behavior. Athens must reexamine its own conventions, a task requiring some orientation capable of disrupting long-held beliefs and sustaining ongoing criticism, to avoid these tyrannizing impulses. Mortal ignorance provides such a position.

Socrates develops this position by unveiling the true origins of his poor reputation: “what has caused my reputation is none other than a certain kind of wisdom” (20d–e). Socratic wisdom remains well regarded for its productive skepticism, but what is often passed over is the central role mortality plays in this perspective. Socrates knows he is ignorant because he is mortal. He explains,

When [Apollo’s oracle] says this man, Socrates [that none are wiser], he is using my name as an example, as if he said ‘this man among you, mortals, is wisest who, like Socrates, understands that his wisdom is worthless.’ So even now I continue this investigation as the gods bade me. (23b) ²⁹

To be human is to possess an essentially limited epistemological vantage compared to the perspective of the deathless immortals. Socrates presents his awareness of mortal ignorance as the basis for his patriotic service to Athens. He reminds his fellow citizens of their mortal limits.

This perspective allows Socrates to reassert the provisional nature of democratic knowledge. While democratic knowledge exceeds the limited historical and political perspective of any given individual, it never transcends those limits entirely. Thus, it never moves beyond the need for active, critical (re)evaluation of its conventions. Death throws this fact into relief because it presents an absolute limit that democratic knowledge, or any democratic citizen, cannot claim to cross without committing an act of hubris. Socrates thus reveals the limits of his interlocutors’ beliefs by destroying those claims that overextend their certainty, as mortality demands (21b–23a). There can be no final or absolute wisdom in a community of mortal beings, no matter how many voices contribute to its knowledge, because no person can concretely know what takes place beyond the threshold of death.

Rather than gesturing beyond political contestation and disagreement, then, mortal ignorance directs attention toward the specific context of embodied political life with its plural, limited perspectives. The limits mortal ignorance exposes also apply to philosophic knowledge. For the philosopher, knowledge also remains provisionally tied to embodied experience, including the experiences of political life, with the full range of emotional and formal attachments to city this entailed. Socratic philosophy thus shares with democracy a commitment to community and open-ended deliberation, one that seeks the best argument for the sake of ethical and political practice.

This points to a mutual reliance between politics and philosophy. Even the philosopher who cares only for virtue and the afterlife must worry about the laws and conventions of her city, as these shape the soul—both the philosopher’s and her potential interlocutors on whom she relies. Likewise, the purging, reforming effects of philosophy prevent the conventions produced by democratic knowledge from becoming tyrannizing, treated as beyond critique or examination in ways that collapse the robust practices of frank, critical inquiry upon which democratic justice depends. ³⁰

Mortal ignorance thus provides a position from which the deliberations of the polity may be examined. Yet instead of a stable point of uncontestable truth, transcending politics, mortal ignorance gives structure to a concrete, aporetic lack that produces many potential responses. These responses must be provisional, requiring ongoing examination from an active community of inquiry, as there is no mortal way to reason conclusively through death’s limit. Socrates thus invites his judges to reaffirm their commitment to truly open, ceaseless inquiry by transforming his trial into a public interrogation of several Athenian conventions of death. In doing so, he asserts mortal ignorance to challenge polis beliefs about what kinds of lives, and deaths, the Athenians should value.

Part III: Three Regimes of Death

Death was governed in democratic Athens by what I term several coherent “regimes of death,” a term modified from Ober’s “regimes of truth,” mentioned above, where “an integrated set of assumptions about what is regarded as right, proper, and true” shape behavior and thought. ³¹ I explore three in particular: first, an archaic, heroic understanding of death, exemplified by Achilles; second, the civic understanding of soldierly death, found in Perikles’s Funeral Oration; and third, feminine rituals of death and private memorial. ³² These competing, politically contested regimes actively demanded different sorts of behaviors, beliefs, and attachments from Athenian citizens, thereby complicating the practices of the democratic polis.

For the Athenians, death marked an important transformation where the individual became the collective property of public memory, held in the minds of those who felt the dead’s absence, or who confronted monuments to their lives. ³³ Indeed, it was understood that the dead could be apprehended in ways living persons—still becoming, still capable of reinvention or disaster—could not. This is the meaning of the famous maxim given by Solon, who would not judge any man happy who was still alive. ³⁴ But this fixed quality, and the judgment it enables, also allowed the dead to be claimed by competing political causes. The dead served as models of political and ethical behavior, often rhetorically used to persuade citizens to uphold communal ideals or undertake specific actions. ³⁵ Death and memorial were thus thoroughly political in the ancient polis.

Images of the dead, recreated in speeches, poems, and monuments, likewise encouraged reflection on how one’s choices would appear from the perspective of the eulogizing community. Through the example of the heroic dead of song, or those praised by the city, one learned to view life from this social, disembodied perspective. Hence when Socrates meditates on death, including his own death, as a means of criticizing the polity’s ethical practices, he remains within the conventions of Athenian moral and political discourse. His defense, however, leverages these conventions to invite a transformation of Athenian democracy along philosophic lines—a potential reinvigoration of, also a threat to, established polis life.

Socrates introduces this section of his defense with his strongest statement of mortal ignorance, quoted above in full: “No one knows whether death may not be the greatest of all blessings for a man, yet men fear it as if they knew that it is the greatest of evils” (29a–c). This passage serves as a pivot in Socrates’s argument, shifting from a direct response to his accusers into a more general argument about mortality and proper civic behavior. Here Socrates holds himself up as an alternative model of patriotic citizenship, engaging democratic conventions that ordered life in the Athenian polis while simultaneously challenging their traditional meanings. Socrates examines three regimes of death, showing for each how the unfounded fear of death distorts democratic practices. I consider these in the order that Socrates presents them: archaic, heroic death; patriotic service unto death; and, finally, feminine, household death.

Part IV: Mortal Democracy

Through his interrogations of these Athenian regimes of death, Socrates encourages his audience to weigh the unexamined costs their practices exact from others. He seeks to transform Athens by reorienting its collective, democratic practices of frank speech, deliberation, and collaborative inquiry away from an unexamined fear of death. Famously, he fails. The Athenians reject Socrates’s appeal and sentence him to die—but the verdict is close. Many have been persuaded (36b). As the trial’s ambivalent outcome demonstrates, Socratic mortal ignorance produces many different political responses—some defensive and violent, others joyful, capacious, and gracious. Adopting the perspective of mortal ignorance is thus to commit to an undetermined practice that is potentially liberating and rejuvenating, if fraught with risk.

That Socrates views the stakes of his trial as the potential transformation of the democratic community is apparent in the way he responds to the court’s verdict. Having been voted guilty, Socrates suggests his penalty should be “free meals in the Prytaneum” (37a). This assertion, again, is brash but not simple. Meals in the Prytaneum were awarded to the descendants of the tyrannicides who, in Athenian political lore, enabled the founding of Greek democracy. ⁵⁶ In suggesting this “penalty,” Socrates again asserts himself as an enemy of tyranny and a (refounding) servant of the Athenian polis. He justifies this penalty with a declaration of mortal ignorance. “What should I fear? That I should suffer the penalty [of death . . . ] of which I say I do not know whether it is good or bad” (37c)?

As we have seen, however, Socrates’s interrogation of Athenian regimes of death engaged several of the most politically charged conventions of the Athenian polis. As Jonathan Lear puts it, Socrates is “traumatic . . . an incessant source of disruption to the established customs of Athenian life. . . . Socrates is trying to establish a new kind of thinking, and a life with that thinking has not yet been constituted.” ⁵⁷ Socratic mortal ignorance, and the practices it enables, expose political conventions toward death as conventions—some of them deeply flawed yet central for how persons understand themselves and their place in the world. This is a particularly painful kind of revelation for beliefs as intimate as those surrounding the meaning of life and death. Yet this exposure, in turn, creates critical distance and space for alternative practices to be imagined. Like Socrates himself, the generative potential for new, different ways of responding to death are thus politically ambiguous. Political responses to mortal ignorance may include those that are not particularly democratic, open, or just. Dependent as it is on those caught up in deathly regimes, the Socratic project is both incredibly demanding and prone to failure.

Who is to bear the costs of these failures, however, is often a question of power. Athens may be legitimately threatened by Socrates, but it is Socrates who is sentenced to death. To those who have failed to hear his appeal, Socrates thus offers a grim prophecy concerning the dangers of using power to avoid self-examination and criticism. “You are wrong if you believe that by killing people you will prevent anyone from reproaching you for not living in the right way . . . it is best and easiest not to discredit others but to prepare oneself to be as good as possible” (39c–d). Socrates reinforces the idea here that the Athenians are in danger of living in a womanly world of destructive vendetta justice, one divorced from reality. No amount of power over life and death can insulate a polity against the limits mortality places on its members, or from living with the consequences of their actions.

Taken within the larger frame of mortal ignorance, this moment emphasizes how denying mortal vulnerability exposes the polity to greater danger. This point is reinforced by the ambivalence of the three regimes Socrates has just examined. Homeric, heroic death generates immortal glory worthy of song, as well as the tremendous grief-rage (menis) of Achilles that nearly destroys the Greeks at Troy, costs Achilles his life, and underlies deadly cycles of aristocratic vengeance that threatened the young democratic polis. Death structures the reciprocal relationship between soldiers and city, as eulogized by Perikles, yet easily devolves into a self-referential cycle of mortal sacrifice at home, and violence abroad. Finally, death stresses boundaries between household and polis, but the impulse to regulate death easily slides into the self-serving use of power over life to exclude or kill those who challenge the polity’s hubristic self-image. Socrates’s critique of those judges who have failed to acknowledge their ignorance is thus both prophecy and warning: a polity that does not take seriously the danger that false promises of security and power over life presents is doomed to suffer the very kinds of mortal violence it has exacted on others—a warning that remains both timely and important.

Yet if Socratic mortal ignorance threatens polis life by destabilizing its core conventions, it is also a source of energy, renewal, and, as Socrates controversially suggests, pleasure. To those who voted for Socrates’s acquittal, “being my friends,” Socrates speaks kindly and with comfort. “What has happened to me may well be a good thing, and those of us who believe death is an evil are certainly mistaken” (40c). He goes on to anticipate the potential pleasures of death: that it might be like the most refreshing, dreamless sleep (40d), or, more joyously, that he might question the great poets Orpheus and Homer, and the dead heroes of Troy—finally, a truly ceaseless Socratic dialogue (41c).

This section is troubling to some commenters, as it seems to contradict earlier elements of the defense. As Euben notes, Socrates “for one” counts a dreamless state of sleep as a blessing, yet he describes philosophy as the gadfly that will rouse Athenians from sleep. Death, then, would seem to negate the purpose of philosophy. ⁵⁸ But these “blessings” of death do not displace the framework of mortal ignorance through which Athens has been partially reformed; they reinforce it by reasserting the distance between natural, embodied life on the one hand, and immortal timelessness on the other. These arguments thereby reinforce the central claim of Socrates’s defense, that the most important question to confront is not how one should die, but how one should live within mortal limits.

The conclusion to the Apology thus presents Socrates’s audience with several alternative responses to death. Like his prophesies of violence for those who live in thrall to their unexamined fears, these hopeful alternatives are offered provisionally as possibilities for his judges to evaluate; they remain grounded in the perspective of mortal ignorance. As there is no way to reason conclusively through death, mortals can only speculate on the afterlife through myth or poetry. Alternatively, as Socrates models, they may extrapolate with logical trains of thought from the examined experiences of life into the unknown. ⁵⁹ Indeed, Socrates presents the myth of the afterlife as an object of hearsay, reemphasizing the provisional (and collective) aspects of mortal knowledge. “They are happier there than we are here in other respects, and for the rest of time they are deathless, if indeed what we are told is true” (41c, my emphasis).

The politics of mortal ignorance are in this way plural and ambivalent. The failure of Socrates’s defense illustrates the dangers that confronting death can provoke, but the close verdict and Socrates’s entreaties to “be of good cheer” also suggests these dangers are not the only responses available. Acknowledging mortal ignorance is thus to admit that how we are best to respond to death is never a question above political contestation. The reminder that death might be viewed differently places a great burden on Socrates’s audience, and us, by insisting that while our own regimes of death may play a central role orienting our moral and political lives, sometimes in deeply intimate ways, we nonetheless remain responsible for their effects on how we live—particularly when these regimes, and their failures, implicate us in acts of injustice toward others.

That life remains Socrates’s concern is evident in the final lines of the Apology, where he turns from describing the pleasures of ceaseless dialogue with the dead to express concern for his sons who will become citizens of Athens. “When my sons grow up, avenge yourselves by causing them the same kind of grief I caused you, if you think they care for money or anything else more than they care for virtue” (42a). Where Socrates earlier warned the Athenians they were in danger of falling prey to their own violent reality of vendetta justice, here he offers an alternative “avenging” response to the suffering death provokes: practices of critical reflection, education, and care. It is thus the mortal political community, inclusive of his family who will live and die within it, that Socrates takes as his penultimate concern. This is contrasted with the final line of the Apology where Socrates reiterates his stance of mortal ignorance. “I go to die, you go to live. Which of us goes to the better lot is known to no one, except the god” (42a).

The distance between these final thoughts is significant. The concern for the future of his sons, who will be raised within the mortal democratic polity, on the one hand, and his ignorance toward death compared with the knowledge of immortals (who literally get the last word on death ⁶⁰ ) on the other, reaffirms that the proper orientation toward death is a clear-eyed awareness of one’s limits, coupled with a desire to live well with others. Unlike death as a universal object of fear or longing, the aporetic orientation toward death directs attention toward the specific choices and relationships our hopes and fears about death may activate. Socratic, mortal ignorance leaves these open to evaluation and invites our response.

Conclusion

As we have seen, mortal ignorance enables the critical transformation of three different regimes of death central to Athenian political life. These Socratic transformations draw attention to the limits of mortal experience and democratic knowledge but yield an important lack of resolution. This lack, finally, invites the ongoing transformation of a community of critical inquiry, an activity oriented toward unresolvable but urgent questions of how to live within mortal limits. I have thus argued that the Apology illustrates a productive orientation through which death might be admitted more openly into democratic political life—one inclusive of great danger, discomfort, failure, and risk, but one that also reminds us of our responsibilities toward others and the liberating potential to enact new ways of being.

We live, currently, in a moment when our own regimes of death, also the violence and injustice they produce, are more apparent than ever. ⁶¹ Like Athens, our political world is ruled by competing regimes of death, ones that impose violence and suffering unequally on some for the comfort of others. Mortal ignorance cannot offer concrete, or even guaranteed, solutions to these problems. And, as we have seen from the failure of Socrates’s defense, not all reactions to mortal ignorance are conducive to democratic ends. Nonetheless, mortal ignorance presses us to ask what kinds of life—what core political values and commitments to oneself and others—we find worth living and dying for, and whether and how the costs of those commitments are justified. Acknowledging mortal ignorance requires assuming responsibility for our conventions and how we act in mortal conditions.

Socratic mortal ignorance therefore does not provide a stable political definition of death’s meaning. Instead, it has the more modest, if urgent, aim of illuminating the ways that attitudes toward death shape the concrete moral and political possibilities available to us in our specific lives, lived within specific communities. While democratic communities may always be subject to the limits of mortal knowledge and the kinds of hubristic distortions such limits invite, Socrates nonetheless insists that mere mortals are capable of the difficult, dangerous, and sometimes joyful work of living well with others.