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Stabs in the Dark

by Caitlin Roper

FEBRUARY 17, 2009        TAGS: PHILOSOPHY, ACCIDENTS, TRAGEDY, COMEDY         COMMENTS (2)

Friedrich Nietzsche suffered a syphilitic collapse, followed by 10 years of physical and mental decline, until his death in 1900. The philosopher had coprophagic tendencies – he was partial to eating his own feces. David Hume, devout empiricist, died “cheerfully” of a disorder of the bowels. Karl Marx, his body covered in carbuncles, endured countless gruesome illnesses as he wrote Das Kapital. He died severely depressed after the deaths of his wife and beloved first child. He fell asleep in an easy chair and never woke up. Hannah Arendt stepped into a pothole and tripped as she got out of a taxi outside her apartment in New York City and later that night started coughing, passed out, and died of a heart attack. Albert Camus once said he couldn’t imagine a death more meaningless than dying in a car accident. Just three years after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature at 44, he died … in a car accident.

Such are the fascinating, bemusing facts to be found in Simon Critchley’s new study, The Book of Dead Philosophers. The book is organized chronologically and the philosopher’s deaths are loosely grouped, beginning with the pre-Socratics, Physiologists, Sages and Sophists, BC, and ending in the 20th century. Critchley, philosophy chair at the New School for Social Research, writes here for the general reader and proceeds from the reasonable assumption that studying how philosophers die – philosophers being concerned, often, with what it means to die well – will prove instructive. He opens with a quote from Montaigne, “He who would teach men to die, would teach them to live.” Consider Hypatia of Alexandria. Esteemed as the first notable woman in mathematics, she taught Platonic philosophy and was a defender of science against religion, for which a mob of Coptic Christians pulled her out of her carriage, stripped her naked, dragged her into a church and murdered her with pieces of pottery.  They flayed her with oyster shells and cut her skinless body into pieces, then burned them.

The moral? Do not talk of science when unruly Christians are about. Additionally, take care when going out in your carriage.

Or consider Seneca, the Stoic philosopher and tragic dramatist of the first century, an adviser to Nero, who received a message from the whimsical emperor in 63 A.D. ordering him to kill himself. “It is not that we have a short time to live,” Seneca had written, “but that we waste a lot of it.” He reassured his wife, Paulina, that though he would now have to leave her, she would do quite well – she might even thrive. But Paulina insisted on dying, too. They slit arteries in their arms together, but Seneca – so philosophical about his own death, so detached and unafraid – could not endure seeing her in pain, so he sent Paulina to another room. A tardy order arrived from Nero: Paulina was not to take her own life. (Soldiers bound up her arms and she survived.) Seneca waited to bleed to death, but it did not happen. He called for some poison – the same kind that Aristotle had used to kill himself (aconite, an herb related to wolfsbane). The poison did not work, either.  Finally, his servants put Seneca in a hot bath, and there he expired, possibly smothered by the steam. The moral of this one? That even Stoics sometimes have a hard time crossing over? That death laughs last?

Critchley’s engrossing book often reads, intentionally one assumes, like a New York Post “Page Six” of philosophers’ indiscretions, rife with salacious details and perplexing overtones.  Take 18th century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who had a child out of wedlock with an American speculator. After he abandoned her, she attempted to take her own life, twice; once with laudanum, the second time by leaping off a bridge into the Thames. Her suicide attempts were unsuccessful, and later she and William Godwin, the first philosopher of anarchism, became lovers. The couple married (was it an feminist-anarchist ceremony?) and Wollstonecraft gave birth to a daughter, Mary (the future Mrs. Percy Bysshe Shelley and author of Frankenstein) but the placenta did not slough during childbirth and Wollstonecraft died a week later.

Wollstonecraft's early death may have been a tragedy, but Critchley appreciates the absurdity of other philosopher’s deaths. Take Francis Bacon, who leapt out of his carriage — Philosophers, please: Take care while riding in carriages! — on a winter’s night in London, struck with an idea: Perhaps flesh could be preserved with refrigeration instead of salt. Bacon bought a hen and stuffed it with snow. In doing so, he caught a chill and became sick. He died several days later. Periander, one of the Seven Sages of Greece in the fifth century B.C., went to extraordinary lengths to conceal his gravesite. First, he hired two men to meet him at a specific place, where they were to kill and bury him. That arranged, he hired four men who at an appointed time were to pursue the first two, kill and bury them. As the final touch of his bloodthirsty scheme, he conscripted a larger group of men with the mandate that they dispatch the four. Now with all the details in place, he went to his fateful rendezvous and set off the chain reaction of slaughter. His place of burial remains unknown.
 
Sometimes, a name and a manner of death are all that Critchley offers us; for instance, of the philosopher Chilon of Sparta, he writes, “he died after congratulating his son on an Olympic victory in boxing.”  Machiavelli, the author of The Prince, who led a busy life of service to dictators and philosophizing on the side, died impoverished, sorely disappointed to be leaving his family so ill provided for.  (Moral: Secure the copyright and reprint rights to all your books?) Galileo, meanwhile, died under house arrest; he had plenty of time to do more science, but was now blind and unable to make further observations with his telescopes. And then there’s Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer and great reviser of the Ptolemaic model of the universe. Tycho lost his nose in a drunken duel and had to wear a falsie, reputedly made of copper. He died of a burst bladder during a banquet, unwilling to risk offending his hosts by leaving the party to relieve himself.

Critchley is the author of serious-minded books such as On Heidegger’s Being and Time; Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment; Politics of Resistance, and Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, which leads the reader to believe that the topic of death, paradoxically, offers him the opportunity for some rhetorical lightness.  He is Head Philosopher of the International Necronautical Society (www.necronauts.org), which declares in its manifesto, “That death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit.”  The Book of Dead Philosophers suggests that there is a right or a better way to approach death, a more thoughtful, less fearful way.  “Now it is time that we are going,” he quotes Socrates as saying at the end, “I to die and you to live; but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God.”  It is the unknown that philosophy helps us deal with, or the unknowing. Critchley pits this humble, endless, ad hoc effort against all self-help books, spirit quests, and membership in noisy churches.  Socrates “never claimed to know, never promised knowledge,” he says, “and, crucially, never accepted a fee.”  Ally yourself with the old philosophers, Critchley advises us, no matter how incongruously they may have met their end.  There is a consolation in having an idea of death, even a wrong idea, of thinking it through to the end.


Caitlin Roper is the Managing Editor of The Paris Review

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(Images: Three versions of the Death of Seneca)



 


Caitlin Roper is the managing editor of the Paris Review

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