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Praise for Simon Critchley's
THE BOOK OF
DEAD PHILOSOPHERS
"A provocative and engrossing invitation to think about the
human condition and what philosophy can and can't do to
illuminate it." —Financial Times
"Concise, witty and oddly heartening."
—New Statesman (A 2008 Book of the Year)
"Full of wonderful absurdities.... Extremely enjoyable."
—The Independent (London)
"Simon Critchley is probably the sharpest and most
lucid philosopher writing in English today."
—Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder
"Ingenious. . . . Packed with great stories."
—Time Out London
"A tremendous addition to an all too sparse literature. . . .
Brilliant, entertaining, informative."
—New Humanist (UK)
"A fabulous concept. . . . [Critchley writes] with dash,
humour and an eye for scandalous detail."
—The Vancouver Sun
"[Critchley is] among the hippest of (living) British
philosophers." —The Book Bench, newyorker.com
"Surprisingly good fun. . . . Worthy of the prose writings
of Woody Allen. .. . Not the least of the pleasures of this
odd book, lighthearted and occasionally facetious as it
is, is that in surveying a chronological history of philoso
phers it provides a sweep through the entire history of
philosophy itself." —The Irish Times
"Critchley has a lightness of touch, a nimbleness of
thought, and a mocking graveyard humour that puts
you in mind of Hamlet with a skull."
—The Independent on Sunday (London)
Simon Critchley
"The Book of Dead Philosophers is something of a magic
trick: on the surface an amusing and bemused series of
THE BOOK OF
blackout sketches of philosophers' often rather humble
and/or brutal deaths, it actually is an utterly serious,
DEAD PHILOSOPHERS
deeply moving, cant-free attempt to return us to the gor-
geousness of material existence, to our creatureliness, to
our clownish bodies, to the only immortality available
to us (immersion in the moment). I absolutely love this
Simon Critchley is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at
book." —David Shields, author of
the New School for Social Research in New York. He is
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead
the author of many books, most recently, On Heideg
ger's Being and Time and Infinitely Demanding: Ethics
"[Critchley] brings the deaths of his predecessors to life
of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. The Book of Dead
in 190 or so energetic bursts."
Philosophers was written on a hill overlooking Los
-The Sunday Herald (UK)
Angeles, where he was a scholar at the Getty Research
Institute. He lives in Brooklyn.
"Critchley gives the nonspecialist, the reader for plea
sure, a point of access into complex material."
—The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia)
"Simon Critchley's book looks death in the face and
draws from the encounter the breath of life. No philoso
pher can pull a more welcome rabbit out of a more for
bidding hat and Mr. Critchley does so in a prose style
that is as deft as his intelligence."
—Lewis Lapham, editor of Lapham's Quarterly
T HE B O OK OF
D E AD P H I L O S O P H E RS
ALSO BY SIMON CRITCHLEY
On Heidegger's Being and Time
with Reiner Schürmann and Steven Levine
Infinitely Demanding:
Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance
On the Human Condition
with Dominique Janicaud
Things Merely Are:
Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens
On Humor
Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction
Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity
Very Little, Almost Nothing
The Ethics of Deconstruction
The
B O OK
of
D E AD
P H I L O S O P H E RS
Simon Critchley
VINTAGE BOOKS
A Division of Random House, Inc.
Mew York
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2OO9 If I were a maker of books, I would make a register,
with comments, of various deaths. He who would
Copyright © 2008 by Simon Critchley
teach men to die would teach them to live.
All rights reserved. Published in the United States MONTAIGNE,
by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., "That to Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die"
New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada
Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in
Great Britain by Granta Books, London, in 2008.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.
Illustration credits appear on page 266.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Critchley, Simon, 1960-
The book of dead philosophers / Simon Critchley.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-O-307-39043-I
1. Philosophers —Death. 2. Philosophers—Anecdotes.
I. Title.
B72.C68 2009
I9O —DC22
[B] 2008047719
Author photograph © John Simmons
Book design by Rebecca Aidlin
www.vintagebooks.com
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION xv
Learning How to Die - Socrates xx
To Die Laughing xxv
Writing about Dead Philosophers xxxi
190 OR SO DEAD PHILOSOPHERS 1
Pre-Socratics, Physiologists, Sages and Sophists
Thales 4 • Solon 4 • Chilon 5 • Periander 5 •
Epimenides 5 • Anaximander 6 • Pythagoras 7 •
Timycha 9 • Heracleitus 10 • Aeschylus 11 •
Anaxagoras 12 • Parmenides 12 • Zeno of Elea 12
Empedocles 13 • Archelaus 15 • Protagoras 15 •
Democritus 17 • Prodicus 18
Platonists, Cyrenaics, Aristotelians and Cynics
Plato 19 • Speusippus 21 • Xenocrates 21 •
Arcesilaus 21 • Carneades 21 • Hegesias 22 •
Aristotle 22 • Theophrastus 24 • Strato 25 • Lyco 2
Demetrius 25 • Antisthenes 25 • Diogenes 26 •
Crates of Thebes 28 • Hipparchia 28 •
Metrocles 29 • Menippus 30
xi
XU CONTENTS CONTENTS Xlll
Sceptics, Stoics and Epicureans Renaissance, Reformation and
Scientific Revolution
Anaxarchus 31 • Pyrrho 32 • Zeno of Citium 33 •
Ariston 34 • Dionysius 35 • Cleanfhes 35 • Marsilio Ficino 103 • Pico della Mirandola 104 •
Chrysippus 36 • Epicurus 37 • Lucretius 40 Machiavelli 105 • Erasmus 106 • St. Thomas More 107
Luther 108 • Copernicus 109 • Tycho Brahe 110 •
Petrus Ramus 111 • Montaigne 111 • Giordano Bruno 114
Classical Chinese Philosophers
Galileo 115 • Bacon 116 • Campanella 117
Kongzi (Confucius) 43 • Laozi (Lao Tzu) 45 • Mozi 46 •
Mengzi (Mencius) 47 • Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) 47 •
Han Feizi 51 • Zen and the Art of Dying 52 Rationalists (Material and Immaterial), Empiricists
and Religious Dissenters
Romans (Serious and Ridiculous) and Neoplatonists Grotius 119 • Hobbes 119 • Descartes 121 •
Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia 124 • Gassendi 125 •
Cicero 55 • Seneca 56 • Petronius 59 • Epictetus 60 •
La Rochefoucauld 126 • Pascal 127 • Geulincx 129 •
Polemo of Laodicea 62 • Peregrinus Proteus 62 •
Anne Conway 130 • Locke 131 • Damaris Cudworth 134
Marcus Aurelius 63 • Plotinus 64 • Hypatia 66
Spinoza 135 • Malebranche 138 • Leibniz 139 •
Vico 140 • Shaftesbury 141 • Toland 142 •
The Deaths of Christian Saints Berkeley 143
St. Paul 69 • Origen 71 • St. Antony 73 •
St. Gregory of Nyssa 75 • St. Augustine 76 • Boethius 79 Philosophes, Materialists and Sentimentalists
Montesquieu 145 • Voltaire 146 •
Medieval Philosophers: Christian, Islamic and Judaic Radicati di Passerano 148 • Madame du Chätelet 150 •
La Mettrie 151 • Hume 153 • Rousseau 155 •
The Venerable Bede 83 • John Scottus Eriugena 84 •
Diderot 157
Al-Farabi 85 • Avicenna (Ibn Sina) 86 • St. Anselm 88 •
Solomon Ibn Gabirol 89 • Abelard 89 •
Averroes (Ibn Rushd) 91 • Moses Maimonides 93 • Many Germans and Some Non-Germans
Shahab al-din Suhrawardi 94
Winckelmann 159 • Kant 160 • Burke 162 •
Wollstonecraft 163 • Condorcet 164 • Bentham 164 •
Philosophy in the Latin Middle Ages Goethe 166 • Schiller 167 • Fichte 167 • Hegel 168
Hölderlin 170 • Schelling 171 • Novalis 172 •
Albert the Great 95 • St. Thomas Aquinas 95 •
Kleist 173 • Schopenhauer 174 • Heine 176 •
St. Bonaventure 98 • Ramon Llull 98 •
Feuerbach 176 • Stirner 177
Siger of Brabant 99 • St. John Duns Scotus 100 •
William of Ockham 101
X !V CONTENTS
The Masters of Suspicion and Some
Unsuspicious Americans
Emerson 179 • Thoreau 180 • Mill 181 • Darwin 181 •
Kierkegaard 182 • Marx 184 • William James 185 •
Nietzsche 187 • Freud 189 • Bergson 191 • Dewey 192
INTRODUCTION
The Long Twentieth Century I: Philosophy in Wartime
Husserl 193 • Santayana 194 • Croce 195 •
Gentile 196 • Gramsci 196 • Russell 197 • Schlick 198 •
Lukäcs 199 • Rosenzweig 200 • Wittgenstein 202 •
Heidegger 204 • Carnap 206 • Edith Stein 207 • This book begins from a simple assumption: what defines
Benjamin 208 human life in our corner of the planet at the present time is
not just a fear of death, but an overwhelming terror of anni
hilation. This is a terror both of the inevitability of our demise
The Long Twentieth Century II: Analytics, Continentals,
with its future prospect of pain and possibly meaningless suf
a Few Moribunds and a Near-death Experience
fering, and the horror of what lies in the grave other than our
Gadamer 211 • Lacan 212 • Adorno 214 • body nailed into a box and lowered into the earth to become
Levinas 216 • Sartre 218 • Beauvoir 220 • Arendt 221 •• wormfood.
Merleau-Ponty 223 • Quine 224 • Weil 225 • We are led, on the one hand, to deny the fact of death and
Ayer 226 • Camus 229 • Ricoeur 230 • Barthes 230 • to run headlong into the watery pleasures of forgetfulness,
Davidson 230 • Althusser 232 • Rawls 233 • intoxication and the mindless accumulation of money and
Lyotard 234 • Fanon 235 • Deleuze 237 • possessions. On the other hand, the terror of annihilation
Foucault 238 • Baudrillard 240 • Derrida 240 • leads us blindly into a belief in the magical forms of salva
Debord 243 • Dominique Janicaud 244 • tion and promises of immortality offered by certain varieties
Simon Critchley 245 of traditional religion and many New Age (and some rather
older age) sophistries. What we seem to seek is either the
transitory consolation of momentary oblivion or a miracu
' LAST WORDS 247
lous redemption in the afterlife.
Creatureliness
It is in stark contrast to our drunken desire for evasion and
escape that the ideal of the philosophical death has such
GEOGRAPHICAL DETAILS AND THANKS 251
sobering power. As Cicero writes, and this sentiment was
axiomatic for most ancient philosophy and echoes down the
BIBLIOGRAPHY 253
ages, "To philosophize is to learn how to die." The main task
of philosophy, in this view, is to prepare us for death, to pro
vide a kind of training for death, the cultivation of an attitude
towards our finitude that faces—and faces down—the terror
xv
XV! INTRODUCTION INTRODUCTION XVII
of annihilation without offering promises of an afterlife. Seneca knew whereof he spoke, having been all but con
Montaigne writes of the custom of the Egyptians who, dur demned to death by Caligula in AD 39 and banished by
ing their elaborate feasts, caused a great image of death — Claudius on a charge of adultery with the emperor's niece in
often a human skeleton —to be brought into the banquet 41. Eventually, when he was the most important intellectual
hall accompanied by a man who called out to them, "Drink figure in the Roman world and one of its most powerful
and be merry, for when you are dead you will be like this." administrators, he was forced to commit suicide by Nero in
Montaigne derives the following moral from his Egyptian 65. He writes, prophetically,
anecdote: "So I have formed the habit of having death con
tinually present, not merely in my imagination, but in my I did know in what riotous company Nature had enclosed
mouth." me. Often has the crash of a falling building echoed beside
To philosophize, then, is to learn to have death in your me. Many who were linked to me through the forum and
mouth, in the words you speak, the food you eat and the the senate and everyday conversation have been carried off
drink that you imbibe. It is in this way that we might begin to in a night, which has severed the hands once joined in
confront the terror of annihilation, for it is, finally, the fear of friendship. Should it surprise me if the perils which have
death that enslaves us and leads us towards either temporary always roamed around me should some day reach me?
oblivion or the longing for immortality. As Montaigne
writes, "He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to Now, although the actual manner of philosophers' deaths
be a slave." This is an astonishing conclusion: the premedi is not always as noble as Socrates, and the vile circumstances
tation of death is nothing less than the forethinking of free of Seneca's botched suicide will be described below, I want
dom. Seeking to escape death, then, is to remain unfree and to defend the ideal of the philosophical death. In a world
run away from ourselves. The denial of death is self-hatred. where the only metaphysics in which people believe is either
It was a commonplace in antiquity that philosophy pro money or medical science and where longevity is prized as
vides the wisdom necessary to confront death. That is, the an unquestioned good, I do not deny that this is a difficult
philosopher looks death in the face and has the strength to ideal to defend. Yet, it is my belief that philosophy can teach
say that it is nothing. The original exemplar for such a philo a readiness for death without which any conception of con
sophical death is Socrates, to whom I will return in detail tentment, let alone happiness, is illusory. Strange as it might
below. In the Phaedo he insists that the philosopher should be sound, my constant concern in these seemingly morbid
cheerful in the face of death. Indeed, he goes further and pages is the meaning and possibility of happiness.
says that "true philosophers make dying their profession." If Very simply stated, this is a book about how philosophers
one has learnt to die philosophically, then the fact of our have died and what we can learn from philosophy about the
demise can be faced with self-control, serenity and courage. appropriate attitude to death and dying. My hope, to echo
This Socratic wisdom finds even more radical expression the epigraph from Montaigne, is "to make a register, with
several centuries later in the Stoicism of Seneca, who writes comments, of various deaths." My wager is that in learning
that "He will live badly who does not know how to die well." how to die we might also be taught how to live.
The philosopher, for him, enjoys a long life because he
doesn't worry over its shortness. What Stoicism tries to teach
is "something great and supreme and nearly divine," namely Allow me a caveat and a word on the form of The Book of Dead
a tranquillity and calm in the face of death. Philosophers. The book comprises short, sometimes very short,
Description:“To philosophize is to learn how to die.” —Cicero; assassinated by order of Mark Antony “One who no longer is cannot suffer.” —Lucretius; suicide, allegedly driven mad by a love potion “Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” —Hobbes; died in bed, age 91 In this collect
