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“To philosophize is to learn how to die.”
-- Cicero
I do like this perspective on the philosophical pose, though it does suggest a wallowing in self-pity, not that I personally have a problem with that. Of course, it may be more meaningful to see philosophy as the study of the good life and how to live it, including what is truth and beauty. But it is in coming to terms with death and the meaning of our life that we are philosophers all.
___ ___ ___
Heraclitus, who believed that everything was in a state of flux, died, according to one account, of drowning in cow dung. The philosopher Francis Bacon, that great champion of the empirical method, died of his own philosophy: in an effort to observe the effects of refrigeration, on a freezing cold day he stuffed a chicken with snow and caught pneumonia.
As a philosopher dies, so he has lived and believed. And from the manner of his dying we can understand his thinking, or so the philosopher Simon Critchley seems to be saying in his cheekily titled “Book of Dead Philosophers.”
Mr. Critchley has taken as his thesis Cicero’s axiom “To philosophize is to learn how to die.” That is, to understand the meaning of life the philosopher must try to understand death and its meaning, or possibly its lack of meaning. And for Mr. Critchley you cannot separate the spirit of philosophy from the body of the philosopher. As he says, “The history of philosophy can be approached as a history of philosophers that proceeds by examples remembered, often noble and virtuous, but sometimes base and comical.” He adds, “The manner of the death of philosophers humanizes them and shows that, despite the lofty reach of their intellect, they have to cope with the hand life deals them like the rest of us.”
As a result, Mr. Critchley, philosophy chairman at the New School for Social Research, has made a book out of marvelous and funny anecdotes about the deaths of some 190 philosophers, from ancient to modern. Don’t be daunted by the many centuries involved. And you don’t have to read the book all at once, Mr. Critchley advises. You can just dip in and out of it at your pleasure. Fortunately this reviewer was obligated to read it all. And, as the philosopher would say, it was all for the good.
Thus, we have Diogenes, who disdained fleshly pleasures and was said by some to have committed suicide by holding his breath; Julien Offray de La Mettrie, atheist and hedonist, who died after eating large amounts of truffled pâté; and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who saw life and death as part of the same timelessness. He died the day after his birthday. A friend had given him an electric blanket as a present. “Many happy returns,” the friend said. “There will be no returns,” Wittgenstein supposedly replied.
Mr. Critchley recounts that Voltaire, after decades of denouncing the Roman Catholic Church, announced on his deathbed that he wanted to die a Catholic. But the shocked parish priest kept asking him, “Do you believe in the divinity of Christ?” Voltaire begged, “In the name of God, Monsieur, don’t speak to me any more of that man and let me die in peace.”
Hegel, who, as much as any philosopher, Mr. Critchley says, saw philosophy as an abstraction, while he was dying of cholera, moaned, “Only one man ever understood me ... and he didn’t understand me.”
On its surface this is a lighthearted book. Mr. Critchley is listed as head philosopher of the International Necronautical Society, an avant-garde group whose Web page (necronauts.org) says its central tenet is “inauthenticity” and its purpose is devotion to the study of death, a “space which we intend to map, colonize and eventually inhabit.” But Mr. Critchley has a serious side and is author of learned works like “Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance,” “The Ethics of Deconstruction” and “Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity.” He is at ease playing in the fields of intentionality, categorical intuition and the phenomenological concept of the a priori. This book has a 13-page scholarly bibliography.
In Mr. Critchley’s serious view Western philosophy is wrongly seen as having been derived mainly from the Greeks. Not true, he says, pointing to its origins among Arabs, Persians, Chinese, Indians and others. Philosophy, he says, has abandoned its original purpose, which is to give us wisdom and help us achieve happiness. The development of philosophy, he writes, has been a process of “westering” or “bestering.” Philosophy has tried to mimic science in its constant striving toward the perfection of ideas and its quest for absolute truth. Gradually philosophy has been abstracted from the concerns of everyday life, leaving us in the grip of the “terror of annihilation.” To calm us, Mr. Critchley says, there are endless sophistries for sale, New Age nostrums, self-help books and the “mindless accumulation of money and possessions.”
All well and good. But dare we amateurs question Mr. Critchley’s organizing principle, that we can find that wisdom we are missing in the deaths of philosophers? Kant died of a stomach ailment. What does that say about “The Critique of Pure Reason”? His last words were apparently spoken after his disciple gave him a little water mixed with wine. “Sufficit,” said Kant. (“It is enough.”) But was Kant saying that he had lived sufficiently long to refine his theories on metaphysics and epistemology? Or that he simply didn’t want any more water?
Some philosophers Mr. Critchley cites may not even have existed. “Let’s not allow Pythagoras’s mere nonexistence to deter us, as the stories that surround him are so compelling,” he suggests at one point, before telling us the legend that Pythagoras died because he refused to cross a field of beans to escape his enemies.
Mr. Critchley himself points out that there are also philosophers in the book whose deaths he doesn’t describe or whose last words are missing. There are also sections in which he makes no attempt to connect the philosopher’s death to his ideas.
Never mind. Many deeds and utterances attributed to philosophers are apocryphal or compiled posthumously by disciples. It’s a long tradition. Philosophical writing is in its essence metaphorical.
This book is just fun to read. You do learn a lot, including the way in which the wise Mr. Critchley envisions the manner of his own death.
“Exit,” Mr. Critchley says, “pursued by a bear.”
-- Dinitia Smith for The New York Times
Speaking for myself, I have no expectation of making more of a success of my death than I have of my life, for the ultimate philosophical insight to which I subscribe is a basic, earthy one: shit happens.
-- Cicero
I do like this perspective on the philosophical pose, though it does suggest a wallowing in self-pity, not that I personally have a problem with that. Of course, it may be more meaningful to see philosophy as the study of the good life and how to live it, including what is truth and beauty. But it is in coming to terms with death and the meaning of our life that we are philosophers all.
___ ___ ___
Heraclitus, who believed that everything was in a state of flux, died, according to one account, of drowning in cow dung. The philosopher Francis Bacon, that great champion of the empirical method, died of his own philosophy: in an effort to observe the effects of refrigeration, on a freezing cold day he stuffed a chicken with snow and caught pneumonia.
As a philosopher dies, so he has lived and believed. And from the manner of his dying we can understand his thinking, or so the philosopher Simon Critchley seems to be saying in his cheekily titled “Book of Dead Philosophers.”
Mr. Critchley has taken as his thesis Cicero’s axiom “To philosophize is to learn how to die.” That is, to understand the meaning of life the philosopher must try to understand death and its meaning, or possibly its lack of meaning. And for Mr. Critchley you cannot separate the spirit of philosophy from the body of the philosopher. As he says, “The history of philosophy can be approached as a history of philosophers that proceeds by examples remembered, often noble and virtuous, but sometimes base and comical.” He adds, “The manner of the death of philosophers humanizes them and shows that, despite the lofty reach of their intellect, they have to cope with the hand life deals them like the rest of us.”
As a result, Mr. Critchley, philosophy chairman at the New School for Social Research, has made a book out of marvelous and funny anecdotes about the deaths of some 190 philosophers, from ancient to modern. Don’t be daunted by the many centuries involved. And you don’t have to read the book all at once, Mr. Critchley advises. You can just dip in and out of it at your pleasure. Fortunately this reviewer was obligated to read it all. And, as the philosopher would say, it was all for the good.
Thus, we have Diogenes, who disdained fleshly pleasures and was said by some to have committed suicide by holding his breath; Julien Offray de La Mettrie, atheist and hedonist, who died after eating large amounts of truffled pâté; and Ludwig Wittgenstein, who saw life and death as part of the same timelessness. He died the day after his birthday. A friend had given him an electric blanket as a present. “Many happy returns,” the friend said. “There will be no returns,” Wittgenstein supposedly replied.
Mr. Critchley recounts that Voltaire, after decades of denouncing the Roman Catholic Church, announced on his deathbed that he wanted to die a Catholic. But the shocked parish priest kept asking him, “Do you believe in the divinity of Christ?” Voltaire begged, “In the name of God, Monsieur, don’t speak to me any more of that man and let me die in peace.”
Hegel, who, as much as any philosopher, Mr. Critchley says, saw philosophy as an abstraction, while he was dying of cholera, moaned, “Only one man ever understood me ... and he didn’t understand me.”
On its surface this is a lighthearted book. Mr. Critchley is listed as head philosopher of the International Necronautical Society, an avant-garde group whose Web page (necronauts.org) says its central tenet is “inauthenticity” and its purpose is devotion to the study of death, a “space which we intend to map, colonize and eventually inhabit.” But Mr. Critchley has a serious side and is author of learned works like “Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance,” “The Ethics of Deconstruction” and “Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity.” He is at ease playing in the fields of intentionality, categorical intuition and the phenomenological concept of the a priori. This book has a 13-page scholarly bibliography.
In Mr. Critchley’s serious view Western philosophy is wrongly seen as having been derived mainly from the Greeks. Not true, he says, pointing to its origins among Arabs, Persians, Chinese, Indians and others. Philosophy, he says, has abandoned its original purpose, which is to give us wisdom and help us achieve happiness. The development of philosophy, he writes, has been a process of “westering” or “bestering.” Philosophy has tried to mimic science in its constant striving toward the perfection of ideas and its quest for absolute truth. Gradually philosophy has been abstracted from the concerns of everyday life, leaving us in the grip of the “terror of annihilation.” To calm us, Mr. Critchley says, there are endless sophistries for sale, New Age nostrums, self-help books and the “mindless accumulation of money and possessions.”
All well and good. But dare we amateurs question Mr. Critchley’s organizing principle, that we can find that wisdom we are missing in the deaths of philosophers? Kant died of a stomach ailment. What does that say about “The Critique of Pure Reason”? His last words were apparently spoken after his disciple gave him a little water mixed with wine. “Sufficit,” said Kant. (“It is enough.”) But was Kant saying that he had lived sufficiently long to refine his theories on metaphysics and epistemology? Or that he simply didn’t want any more water?
Some philosophers Mr. Critchley cites may not even have existed. “Let’s not allow Pythagoras’s mere nonexistence to deter us, as the stories that surround him are so compelling,” he suggests at one point, before telling us the legend that Pythagoras died because he refused to cross a field of beans to escape his enemies.
Mr. Critchley himself points out that there are also philosophers in the book whose deaths he doesn’t describe or whose last words are missing. There are also sections in which he makes no attempt to connect the philosopher’s death to his ideas.
Never mind. Many deeds and utterances attributed to philosophers are apocryphal or compiled posthumously by disciples. It’s a long tradition. Philosophical writing is in its essence metaphorical.
This book is just fun to read. You do learn a lot, including the way in which the wise Mr. Critchley envisions the manner of his own death.
“Exit,” Mr. Critchley says, “pursued by a bear.”
-- Dinitia Smith for The New York Times
Speaking for myself, I have no expectation of making more of a success of my death than I have of my life, for the ultimate philosophical insight to which I subscribe is a basic, earthy one: shit happens.
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Philosophy's problem
Date: 2009-01-31 04:47 pm (UTC)From:Several folks have preconceived notions about Philosophy's ``usefulness.'' I too would have continued this way were it not for accident. (I like girls with glasses, and for some reason most of them were concentrated in the Philosophy department.)
I want your take on this, but I think a big cause of this attitude is that Philosophy cannot shake off this tag of being this `loser discipline,'' which rarely makes progress.
All subjects started off as philosophical enquiry, and when they matured, they split from the parent to form a new discipline. Sure, they may come home to do laundry once in a while, (like say questions about Multi-verses in Physics or viruses as life forms in Biology etc.,) but these cases are rare.
Thus, the only questions that Philosophy is left with are those that we do not know the answers. We fall for the illusion is that this was always the case, and so Philosophy seems like a subject that never makes progress.
Will Philosophy ever beat this curse? I do not know, but I am pessimistic about it.
Still, it is not all gloom though. Nowadays, most sciences have significant mathematical content to them, and maths is not a science. (One does not perform experiment to validate a mathematical proof.)
As time passes, this ``maths infection'' of various disciplines is only going to increase. The spread of computers will hopefully accelerate this, because the nice thing is, that despite its name, Computer Science is not a science.
Re: Philosophy's problem
Date: 2009-02-01 05:13 am (UTC)From:My sense is that philosophy is actually a respected discipline, and that only true intellects should apply, because there are easier ways to come away with a Bachelor’s Degree. Though, I suppose there may be some stigma associated with the fact that even for these intellects, philosophy comes across as being a more purely academic discipline, which is how I perceive it, because once you get your degrees, including the Maser’s and Doctoral, the only natural course is to teach it, perhaps becoming a professor of philosophy yourself.
But perhaps more to your point, philosophy is not the cutting edge. The main life blood for philosophy seems to be logic and ethics (with ethics being broadly understood to include political theory), and philosophers can come across as being more of a rarefied literary critic, that is, people skilled to analyze complex arguments, which is quite intellectual, but it is not the world-changing stuff of technology-altering fields, whether in computers or the hard sciences. Philosophers only seek to understand the world, rather than lead and change it, or if they do seek to change it, they then leave off being philosophers and become something else.
I don't know if this is really a problem for philosophy, either. I think that's what it is - more reflective than active.
Re: Philosophy's problem
Date: 2009-02-01 01:13 pm (UTC)From:Maybe you are right.
I found Philosophy, especially its more technical aspects to be extremely hard. Perhaps it is a good thing that only people of high caliber become Philosophers - it keeps up the quality.
My exposure to Philosophy only came when I was in grad school, and that too, informally - I was friends with several Philosophy undergrads who taught me a few cool things. I wish I could have had some formal classes in it, but this does not happen in Indian engineering schools.
Still, I cannot help but feel a bit bad about my lack of exposure; even though I find Philosophy very tough going, it has bettered the quality of my life and thought. That is why I am sad that most folks do not study more of it.