Philosophy

Decades ago, my volunteer duties as a grad student in philosophy involved arranging speakers for the Yale Philosophy Club. Calling it a "learning experience" barely captures the practical wisdom acquired. "Phronesis experience," for all its archness, sounds more apt.
I learned that the august German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer couldn't be dragged kicking and screaming to a restaurant called the Old Heidelberg, so we settled for hamburgers at a dive near the New Haven green. I learned that Jacques Derrida would speak English when he had to, as in negotiating his way past jockish students blocking passage at Naples Pizza. I learned that one of my professors, in his mystery life before philosophy, ran an Associated Press bureau in the Congo, seeding my embryonic thought that journalism and philosophy, both committed to the pursuit of truth, might have something to do with each other.
Most important, I learned that no matter how old a philosopher might be, if still alive — make that, no matter how many years over 100 — one shouldn't presume the good fellow gone.
At one point, a veteran department hand advised me to check, regarding invitations to a talk, whether Wilbur Marshall Urban, a somewhat forgotten crusader for the theory of value, was still among us. He would have been about 105 at the time.
He wasn't. But that seemed almost as big a shock to some as if he were. After all, emeritus Brand Blanshard at the time seemed sprightly at 86, a step ahead of Filmer Stuart Cuckow Northrup at 85 in the march to centenarian status. Two other virtual tyros at the time, former Yalies Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (then in their 70s), would make it to 103 and 101, respectively. In doing so, they lived up to the standard set in ancient times (when surviving middle age must have been tougher) by such as Apollonius of Tyana, who expired at 100, and Democritus, said to have atomized at 109.
I therefore exited graduate school with the flinty belief that philosophers live extraordinarily long lives, a no-brainer in light of the standard personality I lazily attributed to them then: calm in the face of challenge, resourceful in planning ahead, synoptic in evaluating big pictures, sensible in avoiding all mistakes that lead to death (except uncontrollable ones, like a plummeting plane or wrong-way driver), and, finally, possessed of scant temper and few ulcers.
Even in the worst circumstances, philosophers didn't go postal. They went, to speak in federal metaphorese, Social Security. Philosophers on the whole got as close to eternal life as one could without drinking the religious Kool-Aid. So despite having forced, like many a philosophy graduate student, Plato's Crito down undergraduate throats in a lecture course or two, I considered death's relevance to philosophy adventitious at best. "How should one live?" remained the quintessential question, not how to fold one's cards.
The jaunty New School thinker Simon Critchley, in his droll, desultory The Book of Dead Philosophers (Vintage, 2009), looks at the species from the other end of the telescope — or teleology. For Critchley, nothing matters more about philosophers than the manner of their deaths, or so he claims in his intermittent moments of seriousness.
He cites Cicero on the first page of his introduction — "To philosophize is to learn how to die" — and thinks that's fine, since "what defines human life in our corner of the planet at the present time is not just a fear of death, but an overwhelming terror of annihilation."
The "ideal of the philosophical death" attracts Critchley and stirs him to defend the notion that philosophy's "main task" is "to prepare us for death, to provide a kind of training for death." He calls that view "a commonplace in antiquity," mentioning Socrates' comment in the Phaedo that "true philosophers make dying their profession."
The Book of Dead Philosophers consequently is, in its author's view, "about how philosophers have died and what we can learn from philosophy about the appropriate attitude to death and dying."
All well and good, except Critchley may be pulling our legs in only a mildly more serious vein than D.H. Mellor's punny and mock-speculative Web site "Causes of death of philosophers" (e.g., "Luther: Diet of worms"; "Wittgenstein: Became the late Wittgenstein.")
Critchley can't seem to decide whether he's writing a gimmick book for sale next to the cash register, an introductory trot on the order of Philosophy for Beginners (that pioneer graphic text), or a serious book in bite-sized pieces. He concedes those pieces are "sometimes very short," as in a sentence long.
Here's Critchley's entire entry on Demetrius: "Fatally bitten by an asp." Strato? "Strato became so thin that it is said he felt nothing when he died." It doesn't only happen to ancient thinkers. Here's the dope on Frenchman Paul Ric?ur: "The great and gentle hermeneutician died peacefully and without incident in his sleep at the age of 92."
Further inclining one to think that Dead Philosophers aims at the lighthearted and philosophically virginal buyer, Critchley retells hoary chestnuts of the tradition in a tone that suggests he's auditioning as a transplanted Jostein Gaarder (Norwegian author of the popular philosophical novel, Sophie's World), eager to make philosophy go down smoothly with first-timers: "On the one hand, Socrates is declared the wisest man in Greece by the Oracle at Delphi. On the other hand, Socrates always insists he knows nothing. How therefore can the wisest man in the world know nothing?"
Then there's Critchley's carnival-barker assurance that "the history of philosophers' deaths is also a tale of weirdness, madness, suicide, murder, bad luck, pathos, bathos, and some dark humor. You will die laughing, I promise."
Promise unkept so far, says this reader.
Critchley isn't wrong about the sheer entertainment value of some demises, confirmed or not. Heracleitus suffocated in cow dung, Diogenes died either by holding his breath or eating raw octopus. Francis Bacon succumbed "after stuffing a chicken with snow in the streets of London to assess the effects of refrigeration." Diderot choked to death on an apricot.
Critchley, to be fair, hardly promotes his scholarly side in the book ("I have decided not to clutter the text with footnotes. The reader will have to trust me."). That leaves one at sea in such entries as his longish one on Plato, which unhelpfully tells us Plato may have died at his writing desk, or at a wedding feast, or of a lice infestation.
More troubling, Critchley never argues convincingly for his claim that the question "What is a philosopher?" is "indistinguishable" from the question "How does a philosopher die?" Despite Critchley's assertion that "the classical philosophical attitude towards death" is that "it is nothing to be feared," there doesn't seem to be any uniform philosophical approach to death.
At one end arguably lies Susan Sontag who, we know from the memoir of her final year by her son, David Rieff, treasured life so much that she desperately pursued any cure that promised to beat the cancer that finally claimed her. At the other, perhaps, Isocrates, who starved himself to death at 97.
Critchley says his own view of death is close to Epicurus', and "what is known as the four-part cure: Don't fear God, don't worry about death, what is good is easy to get, and what is terrible is easy to endure."
Fair enough, but such wisdom can't lessen the horror of the many grisly deaths he describes, such as Roland Barthes's encounter with a laundry van or La Mettrie's succumbing to indigestion "caused by eating a huge amount of truffle pâté."
"What I have presented here," Critchley writes, huffing and puffing about how casual his book is, "is a messy and plural ragbag of lives and deaths that cannot simply be ordered into a coherent conceptual schema."
True enough. That leaves wordplay and irony as Critchley's choice of weapons, which can be turned against his vision as well.
I keep thinking that everything Critchley says about the philosopher's general comfort with death makes more sense in regard to the philosopher's general enthusiasm for life. Philosophers, in truth, cling to their lives. Take the great Norwegian eco-thinker Arne Næss, who died in January at age 96. Best known for spurring his country's precocious green movement, a beacon for sustainable living long before we heard of Al Gore, Næss managed, in a long life, to even fit in uncle-in-law duties to the high-maintenance Motown star Diana Ross, who divorced his billionaire nephew after many years of living on a different continent.
Did Næss stop in the name of love, or adopt some "philosophical ideal of death" in his later years that counsels going gentle into the good night? No, instead, he kept working and writing and lecturing, perhaps internally adjusting one of his niece-in-law's lyrics to: "My World is Empty Without Me, Babe."
Long live philosophers! As any good analyst would point out, that's not just a spirited apostrophe. It's a fact.
Carlin Romano, critic at large for The Chronicle Review and literary critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer, teaches philosophy and media theory at the University of Pennsylvania.