The Book Of Dead Philosophers (critchley, Simon)

Montaigne writes, ‘He who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave.’ This is an astonishing conclusion: the premeditation of death is nothing less than the forethinking of freedom. Seeking to escape death, then, is to remain unfree and run away from ourselves. The denial of death is self-hatred.

It is in stark contrast to our drunken desire for evasion and escape that the ideal of the philosophical death has such sobering power. As Cicero writes, and this sentiment was axiomatic for most ancient philosophy and echoes down the ages, ‘To philosophize is to learn how to die.’ The main task of philosophy, on this view, is to prepare us for death, to provide a kind of training for death, the cultivation of an attitude towards our finitude that faces – and faces down – the terror of annihilation without offering promises of an afterlife.

Socrates always claimed to follow his own daimon, what Cicero called a ‘divine something’: a personal god or spirit, what we might be inclined to think of as conscience. However, Socrates’ daimon was not some ‘inner voice’, but an external sign or command that would suddenly cause him to stop in his tracks.

Having been condemned to death, Socrates concludes his speech with the following extraordinary words: Now it is time that we were going, I to die and you to live;but which of us has the happier prospect is unknown to anyone but God. These words encapsulate the classical philosophical attitude towards death: it is nothing to be feared. On the contrary, it is that in relation to which life must be lived. Socrates’ enigmatic last words – ‘Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius’ – articulate the view that death is the cure for life. Asclepius was the god of healing, and the offering of a sacrifice was something that people suffering from an ailment would offer before sleep in the hope of waking up cured. Thus, death is a curative slumber.

Socrates only seems to embody a weak paradox. On the one hand, Socrates is declared the wisest man in Greece by the Oracle at Delphi. On the other hand, Socrates always insists that he knows nothing. How therefore can the wisest man in the world know nothing? This seeming paradox evaporates when we learn to distinguish wisdom from knowledge and become lovers of wisdom, in other words, philosophers. For example, in The Republic, the object of inquiry is justice. ‘What is justice?’ asks Socrates and various more or less conventional views of justice are discussed, dismantled and dismissed. But in the central books of The Republic, Socrates does not give his interlocutors an answer to the question of justice or some theory of justice. Instead, we are given a series of stories – most famously the myth of the cave – that indicate to us indirectly the matter at hand. The path to justice, we are told, is only to be followed by orienting the soul towards the Good, which is precisely not a matter of knowledge but a work of love. Philosophy begins, then, with the questioning of certainties in the realm of knowledge and the cultivation of a love of wisdom. Philosophy is erotic, not just epistemic.

There has never been a more important time to emphasize this distinction between philosophy and sophistry. We are surrounded by countless new sophistries. Televangelists offer authoritative knowledge of the true word of God and perform miraculous cures in exchange for appropriate donations to the cause. An entire New Age industry has arisen where Knowledge (capital K) of something called Self (capital S) is traded in expensive, brightly coloured wrappings. I am writing these lines on West Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, not far from the palatial ‘Self-Realization Center’, complete with lavish gardens, a lake shrine, Hindu kitsch architecture and expensive programmes for improving spiritual self-knowledge and communion with God. I think it is fair to say that Western societies, and not just Western societies, are experiencing a deep meaning gap that risks broadening into an abyss. This gap is being filled by various forms of obscurantism that conspire to promote the belief that, first, such a thing as self-knowledge is attainable; second, it comes with a price tag; and third, it is completely consistent with the pursuit of wealth, pleasure and personal salvation. By contrast, Socrates never claimed to know, never promised knowledge to others and, crucially, he never accepted a fee.

As Marcus Aurelius writes, it is one of ‘the noblest functions of reason to know whether it is time to walk out of the world or not’. Unknowing and uncertain, the philosopher walks.

The Book of Dead Philosophers is not a ‘Book of the Dead’, whether Egyptian or Tibetan. These exquisite ancient writings carefully describe the rituals necessary to prepare with certainty for the afterlife. The Egyptian Book of the Dead comprises 189 spells to ensure that the soul passes to an astral or solar afterlife. The Tibetan Book of the Dead describes the death rituals necessary to break the illusory cycles of existence and achieve the Enlightenment (capital E) that allegedly comes with the realization of Nirvana. The influence of such approaches is vast, from the ‘Secret Doctrine’ of Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society in the late nineteenth century, through Timothy Leary’s psychedelic 1960s version of The Tibetan Book of the Dead achieved with the help of LSD, to the contemporary obsession with ‘near-death’ or ‘out-of-the-body’ experiences spawned by Raymond Moody’s Life after Life, from 1976. Such is the position that Nietzsche called ‘European Buddhism’, although there is a good deal of American Buddhism around as well. The crucial point is that in both the Egyptian and Tibetan Books of the Dead and their contemporary epigones, death is an illusion. Existence is a cycle of rebirth that is only broken by a final passage to Enlightenment. It is thus a question of gaining access to the right Knowledge (capital K, once again) that will strip away what Schopenhauer saw as the illusory veils of Maya and allow the soul to free itself. This approach to death is encapsulated in the words of the influential Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, ‘Death is not extinguishing the light; it is putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.’

My own view of death is closer to that of 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. He writes in the final of the four extant letters attributed to him, Get used to believing that death is nothing to us. For all good and bad consists in sense-experience, and death is the privation of sense-experience. Hence a correct knowledge of the fact of death makes the mortality of life a matter for contentment, not by adding a limitless time to life but by removing the longing for immortality.

Highly tempting as it is, the obvious problem with this position is that it fails to provide a cure for the aspect of death that is hardest to endure: not our own death, but the deaths of those we love.

The idea that philosophy has a uniquely Greek source and that everything prior to the Greeks is simply not philosophy finds its most powerful modern expression in Dietrich Tiedemann’s six-volume Geist der spekulativen Philosophie (The Spirit of Speculative Philosophy, 1791–7). This is a work that deeply influenced much subsequent writing of the history of philosophy and John Passmore describes it as ‘the first history of philosophy in the modern manner’. Tiedemann makes crystal clear in his Preface that he is not going to deal with ‘Chaldeans, Persians and Indians’, and he judges these traditions to be either poetic or religious, but not philosophical in the strict sense. What also happens in Tiedemann’s approach is that the doxographical elements in the history of philosophy are minimized and emphasis is placed, as his title suggests, on the speculative spirit of philosophy that can be expressed systematically, rather than the individual flesh and bones of a philosopher’s life.

My approach is therefore deeply at odds with that of Hegel. I do not see the history of philosophy as the progressive logical unfolding of ‘Spirit’, which culminates in showing that it has its destiny in the Western philosophy of the present. This is ‘westering’ as ‘bestering’, which judges the facts of philosophers’ lives as irrelevant. Indeed, there is something intensely narcissistic about such a conception of philosophy, where the sole function of history is to hold up a mirror so that we may see the reflection of ourselves and our own world.

Sadly, it is now almost universally assumed by classical scholars that Pythagoras never existed. It seems that there was a group of people in southern Italy called Pythagoreans who invented a ‘Founder’ for their beliefs who, accordingly, lived and died in a manner consistent with those beliefs. But let’s not allow Pythagoras’ mere non-existence to deter us, as the stories that surround him are so compelling. They are also illustrative of the wider point that disciples of a thinker will often simply invent stories and anecdotes that illustrate the life of the master in whom they want to believe. Perhaps we should be suspicious of this desire for a master.

Pythagorean doctrines were bound by an oath of secrecy, so we know very little prior to the version of them that appears in Plato. These include a belief in the immortality and transmigration of the soul and the view that the ultimate reality of the universe consists in number. Pythagoreans regarded even numbers as female and odd numbers as male. The number 5 was called ‘marriage’ because it was the product of the first even (2) and odd (3) numbers (the ancient Greeks considered the number 1 a unit and not a proper number, which had to express a multiplicity). Pythagoreans also believed that their master had established the ratios that underlie music. This had huge influence in the notion of musica universalis or music of the spheres, where the entire cosmos was the expression of a musical harmony whose key was given in mathematics.

Following a typical late-night excursion to count the rings on tree stumps during a rainy night, Thoreau contracted bronchitis. His health declined over the next three years and he seems to have been fully aware that his end was nigh and calmly accepted death. When asked if he had made his peace with God, he replied, ‘I did not know we had ever quarreled.’ He died at the age of forty-four and there is but one word written on his grave in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts: ‘Henry’.

Dewey sees education as the dynamic and continuous development of democratic life, what he called ‘reconstruction’, and rightly believed that society cannot transform itself without paying scrupulous attention to pedagogy. Dewey saw learning as more important than knowing and defined philosophy as ‘the general theory of education’. He set his influential views on education to work at the newly established University of Chicago after 1894 and later at Columbia University in New York.

In 1935 and 1936, as the lights were going out all over Europe, the elderly Husserl travelled to Vienna and Prague to give the lectures that were developed into his final, unfinished book, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. For Husserl, philosophy is the freedom of absolute self-responsibility and the philosopher is ‘the civil servant of humanity’. He concludes by asserting that the duty of the philosopher is to confront ‘the barbarian hatred of spirit’ and renew philosophy through ‘a heroism of reason’. At a time of crisis, then as now, the greatest danger facing ‘good Europeans’ is weariness, the refusal to take up the philosophical battle of reason against barbarism.

Although in very poor health and initially forced to share a cell with five other prisoners, Gramsci’s brain kept working and he produced the posthumously published Prison Notebooks which offer a powerfully consequent critique and reconstruction of the basic concepts of Marxism. Gramsci described his position as a ‘philosophy of praxis’, which meant the unity of theoretical reflection with practical life in the way described above in Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. In Gramsci’s hands, Marxism is not reduced to some sort of historical determinism where all aspects of life have to be explained in terms of their economic causes. On the contrary, conceived as a philosophy of praxis, Gramsci’s Marxism expands to take into consideration the spheres of politics, ideology, religion and culture in the broadest sense.