The Book of Dead Philosophers

This book is called The Book of Dead Philosophers and it is by Simon Critchley.  In his rather lengthy introduction he explains two main points:


1. That he believes philosophers have death on their minds all the time and spend most of their time reconciling themselves with their own annihilation.  He has put together this book of 190 deaths of philosophers because he believes that the way in which a person's dies can illuminate their personal philosophy.  He also writes about each philosopher's vision of death in the cases in which they have been written upon.

2.  That religion and it's version of an afterlife is in fact an escapist way of running away from death.  He believes that true happiness can be found only by embracing death because only then can you experience freedom in life.

The book starts in antiquity and follows on through modern philosophers with the only requirement of whom he includes in the book being that they interest him and that they have died.  Some of the entries include lengthy explanations of what the particular philosopher believed and some are very brief - just a sentence or two about how they died.  The ones that he goes into more in depth are the ones that are historically believed to have more significance (Socrates, Plato, Nietzsche, etc) and those that have written texts on death. 

I took special interest in the following philosophers:

Jean-Francois Lyotard, who translated and wrote a book called The Confessions of Augustine, referring to the saint.  Lyotard, in my mind, must have been a spiritual man.  It quotes a passage from the book:

  "But do you, Oh Lord my God, graciously hear me and turn your gaze upon me, and see me, and have mercy upon me, and heal me.  For in your sight I have become a question to myself, and that is my langour."

He says that translated the word for languor means limp - the kind of weakness of spirit and physicality that one would expect with old age.  Lyotard died of leukemia, and shortly before dying he wrote:
     "...that is my langour.  Here lies the whole advantage of faith; to become an enigma to oneself, to grow old, hoping for the solution, the resolution from the Other.  Have mercy upon me Yahweh, for I am languishing.  Heal me, for my bones are worn."

Michel Faucault, who was active in the GLBT movement.  He criticized Christianity versus being a pagan and said that the difference between being late antiquity and early Christianity could be reduced to the following:  "The Pagan asks: 'Given that I am who I am, who can I fuck?'  The Christian says 'Given that I can fuck no one, who am I?"  He is pointing out that the Christian's identity begins with their knowledge of their own sinful nature and continues under that "bad conscience".  Faucault was an early sufferer of AIDS, and died of that in 1984.

Jacques Derrida, who refuses that "to philosophize is to know how to die", thinks of death from the other end.  He writes about the survivors of death and how the loss of a loved one means to them the loss of a piece of themselves. 

At the end of the book is a fantastic bibliography that recounts some of the books from which Critchley found his information.  I intend to use this bibliography as a "To Read" list.