The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley

For many non-philosophers, what is most fascinating about the subject is the stories told about the lives of philosophers. Philosophers, after all, must be half crazy, and they do all sorts of amusing things. This book is a collection of such stories, among other things, and Critchley is a breezy, irreverent storyteller and often quite funny. Wittgenstein once suggested that it should be possible to write a book of philosophy composed of jokes. This book isn’t quite that, but Critchley is one philosopher someone could imagine trying that.

The Book of Dead Philosophers is not, however, merely a book about the lives of philosophers, it is a book about their deaths. The message of the book is how the deaths of philosophers might teach us about our lives. After all, it is an old saw (since at least Plato) that philosophy is just basically the preparation for one’s death. That has always seemed at least a little bit right, and also a little bit too morbid. However, the philosophical obsession about death is about living in the face of the inevitable end, and as Critchley says in the introduction, his “constant concern in these seemingly morbid pages is the meaning and possibility of happiness.”

What then is Critchley trying to do? Surely, he must know that the philosophical genius is to abstract things until nothing remains but the husk of a notion. That is why philosophical treatments of most things in life?say, art for example?are always in some way unsatisfying. This is especially true of philosophical treatments of death. Who cares if death is like a long sleep, or whatever it’s supposed to be like? The most important philosophical truth about death is that death is always particular. Death is always untameable. But even that is already abstract. It gives no reassurance, either in the face of one’s own death, or anybody else’s.

It’s a neat idea, reparticularizing the abstract philosophical death by telling the death of each philosopher in turn. However, the promise of 190 or so dead philosophers doesn’t add up to the deaths of 190 or so philosophers. For example, Archelaus is given with unknown dates, and Critchley readily admits “the cause of his death is unknown.” For the moderns, instead of fragmentary information, often Critchley will give a half page or slightly longer summary of a philosopher’s position, which is frequently disappointing. To be fair, a page or two is hardly the length to do justice to a philosopher’s work, and he stays mostly to the storytelling.

Philosophers, as it turns out, are no better as a class at facing death than anybody else. As much as we may admire Socrates or Seneca for their equanimity in the face of death, there is also a Petronius or de la Mettrie who die in a fit of hedonism every bit as “unphilosophically” as Alexander of Macedon. In spite of these occasional desperate deaths, there is no shortage of heroic deaths in this book. Among the early moderns, Hume especially stands out. Critchley wants to ask of his death, “can an atheist die happy? That is, can an atheist embrace the prospect of annihilation without recanting his heresies and embracing God in a last-minute confession.” This strikes me as an awfully strange question to ask. The evidence of his death is quite clear, that he died in a cheerful calm, but so is the reaction of those around him,

Boswell was deeply shocked by Hume’s persistence in his unbelief. He asked his mentor Samuel Jonson for ounsel and hte later said, “Why should it shock you, Sir? Hume never owned that he had ever read the New Testsament with attention.” In other words, you can’t believe what an atheist says because he is an atheist.

And if his words can’t be believed, then neither can his outward demeanor! Obviously, Hume’s example would have done nothing to convince anybody. There is Critchley’s answer: Yes, but not that anybody will believe it.

What becomes abundantly clear though these pages (and perhaps to Mr. Critchley’s chagrin, though one gives him the benefit of the doubt) is how disconnected the deaths of the philosophers are from their philosophies. With the exception of the executions and suicides?these are often the most poignant in the book?philosophers, like the rest of us mortals, sometimes badly, sometimes well. I suppose this is the real lesson of the book, that philosophers?whatever else their philosophy might do for them?don’t have a monopoly on dying well. That is at least some consolation for the rest of us.

Reviewed by James Liu

The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley
Vintage Books USA, 2009
Paper, 304pp, $15.95
ISBN-10: 0307390438