Dying for ideas

 As good as dead

In 399 BCE Socrates took poison after he was condemned to death by an Athenian court. The charges were corrupting the youth and impiety. During the trial Socrates made it clear that, regardless of its outcome, he was not going to change the way he lived his life and practiced his philosophy. After the trial and before his execution, Socrates could still have saved his skin with the help of his wealthy friends. Out of loyalty to the city’s laws, however, he refused to escape.

In 415 CE Hypatia, a pagan woman philosopher from Alexandria, was brutally murdered by a mob of Christians, instigated by the city’s Patriarch, Cyril. By 415 Hypatia had become a unique intellectual presence, as well as an influential teacher, in the city. Even the governor, Orestes, although a Christian, actively sought her company and counsel. Apparently Cyril was not happy with Hypatia’s influence in the city and in Orestes’ circles.

In 1535 Sir Thomas More was beheaded in the Tower of London after he was found guilty of “high treason.” What constituted “treason” was More’s refusal to swear an oath of allegiance to the Act of Succession (whereby the succession to the throne was passed to the future Elizabeth I, the yet unborn child Henry VIII conceived with his new wife, Anne Boleyn) and to recognize the Crown’s supremacy in matters religious. As a mere human being, thought More, a king cannot be the head of the Church because “no temporal man may be the head of the spirituality.”

In 1600 Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome after he was sentenced to death by the Holy Office (Inquisition) of the Catholic Church. He had spent the previous eight years in the Inquisition’s prisons. A Dominican friar, Bruno was condemned for holding beliefs contrary to the orthodoxy of the Church in such matters as transubstantiation, the trinity, the divinity and incarnation of Christ, and the virginity of Mary. He stubbornly refused to repent, even on his way to the stake.

In 1977 Jan Patočka, a Czech phenomenologist (a direct disciple of Edmund Husserl), died of apoplexy in a Prague hospital after an eleven-hour-long interrogation at the hands of the Czechoslovakian secret police. Patočka was being investigated for his role in the founding of a human rights movement (Charter 77) deemed subversive by the communist regime. He felt that his involvement in this movement was necessary if he was to remain faithful to his philosophical ideas.

Philosophy as a dangerous pursuit

What kind of a philosopher does one have to be to die for an idea? What these people have in common, in spite of the specific beliefs each held, is a commitment to the notion that philosophy is above all else something you practice. Sure, it involves thinking and writing, reading and talking, but these should not be seen as an end in themselves; they need to serve the final purpose of philosophy, which is that of self-realization. Your philosophy is not something you store up in your books, but something you carry with you. It is not just a “subject” you talk about, but something you embody. This notion has been called philosophy as a “way of life” or as an “art of living.”

What philosophy as an art of living often boils down to is, paradoxically, learning how to face death—an art of dying. The best example is Socrates himself. He understood philosophy as a way of life, and practiced it so uncompromisingly that it led him straight to his death. His disciple Plato was so affected by what the Athenians did to his master that in the Phaedo, a dialogue purportedly recording Socrates’ last hours before execution, he skillfully advances an understanding of philosophy as nothing but “preparation for death” (melétēthanátou). Chronologically, Phaedo belongs to Plato’s “middle period”; he must have written it many years after his master’s death. It would be tempting to see this as an act of “philosophical justice”: a still grieving, unhealed, perhaps even angry Plato smuggles the devastating event of his master’s ending into the very definition of philosophy. “Philosophical justice” or not, Plato’s notion gives voice to a crucial insight: philosophy is an art of living only to the extent that it offers us an art of dying.

The Platonic definition has had resonance right through the present. In the sixteenth century, Michel de Montaigne, echoing Cicero, would title one of his essays: “That to philosophize is to learn how to die.” In the twentieth century Simone Weil would place death at the center of her philosophical project. According to her, knowing how to die is even more important than knowing how to live. For death, says Weil, is “the most precious thing which has been given to man.” The “supreme impiety is to make bad use of it” (Weil 1997: 137). Should we waste our death, in a certain sense we would have lived for nothing. This book is about how a philosopher can make a “good use” of her death and how, in so doing, she re-signifies her life and makes her work whole.

Marginal as the notion of philosophy as an art of living may be in today’s mainstream philosophical circles, the idea doesn’t lack in attraction. Indeed, there is something satisfyingly consistent about a definition of philosophy that presupposes perfect symmetry between word and deed, thought and practice, and which is all about self-realization—that is, the notion that the philosopher’s self is a “work in progress,” something she creates through philosophizing. At the same time, however, this is a dangerous idea because it can get those who take it seriously in trouble. Socially, a philosopher committed to philosophy as an art of living is often a parrēsiastḗs, a radical straight-talker; part of her job description is to not keep her mouth shut. And parrēsía has rarely led its practitioners to happiness.

Indeed, to embrace the notion of philosophy as a self-transformative practice is to make yourself fundamentally vulnerable. If a philosophy is genuine only to the extent that it is embodied in the one who practices it, then the philosopher is not unlike the tightrope walker performing without a safety net. The philosopher’s life is a perpetual balancing act: the slightest wrong step, one side or the other, could be fatal. If he accommodates the demands of the world at the price of a disconnect with his philosophy, he is lost; if he obeys the demands of his conscience at the cost of his personal safety, he is lost again. This is precisely the situation that Socrates, Hypatia, More, Bruno, and Patočka faced. At one point in their lives these philosophers have had to make a choice: either they remain faithful to their philosophy and die or renounce it and remain alive. The exact details may have differed; some of them were specifically asked to desist and repent, while others were just given to understand that they should stop or else. The fundamentals of the situation, however, are the same. And so is the precariousness of these philosophers’ tightrope walking. Dying for Ideas has been born out of a fascination with their perilous performance.

The significance of the choice between dying to remain faithful to your ideas, on the one hand, and changing your philosophy to remain alive, on the other, cannot be overestimated. Since for these thinkers philosophy is not just a body of doctrines that you can in principle keep quiet about or even discard, but a way of life, something that has pervaded your entire biography, the choice carries considerable existential weight. You cannot change your philosophical views in the same way you change your clothes. Since philosophy is embodied in the philosopher, to give it up would be to tear her apart. The philosopher facing such a choice soon realizes that what is at stake here is not just a matter of avoiding a hypocritical position. The choice in fact conceals a test: if it is not to remain just empty talk, philosophy needs to pass the test of life. Showing, in hindsight, an uncanny prescience, Jan Patočka describes the situation in unambiguous terms. “Philosophy reaches a point,” he says, where “it no longer suffices to pose questions and answer them, both with extreme energy; where the philosopher will progress no further unless he manages to make a decision” (In Kriseová 1993: 108). We need, then, to look at philosophy with new eyes: ultimately philosophizing is not about thinking, speaking or writing—not even about performing them in a bold, courageous fashion—but about something else: deciding to put your body on the line. In this book I follow as closely as I can the inner workings of this decision process, as well as what happens to the philosophers’ bodies as they are put on the line.

These philosophers’ situations are worth recalling in some detail. One day they found themselves in what must have been a profoundly disturbing position. As sophisticated speakers, they had now to realize that arguing and debating was out of the question. Masters of logic and persuasion, they were now in a place that had no use for words or arguments, sophisticated or not. Here they were, in all the nakedness of their predicament, unable to do the one thing they have been doing all their lives. Whether in a clear or a more obscure manner, these thinkers must have realized that, if they were not to be completely silenced, they needed something stronger than words to make themselves understood. And in a limit-situation like theirs—intense, straightforward, stark—what was stronger than words was their own death. With the spectacle of their dying bodies alone they had to express whatever they could not communicate through all their rhetorical mastery. Throughout his life Socrates had spoken persuasively, yet he died even more persuasively. His death was the most effective means of persuasion he ever devised—to such an extent that, many centuries later, he is remembered not so much for what he did when he was alive, but precisely for the way he died.

It is telling that, at its most radical, when it comes to its final test, philosophy has to abandon its ordinary routines (speaking, writing or lecturing) and turn into something else: performance, bodily performance. We’ve thus come full circle. Living philosophically presupposes the body, but so does the philosophical death. These philosophers need the body not only to practice their philosophy, but—more importantly—to validate it. In Dying for Ideas I examine, in a manner that hasn’t been tried before, the philosophers’ dying bodies as the testing ground of their thinking.

So these philosophers choose a path that leads them to dying “eloquent” deaths, which are subsequently constructed as a culmination of their philosophical work. Whatever these thinkers’ work may otherwise have been, in light of their ending there is a sense that it is incomplete if we dissociate it from the way they died. Indeed, such a death is a philosophical work in its own right—sometimes a masterpiece. The manner of Socrates’ death, for example, has become such an inalienable part of his philosophical heritage that it is hard to imagine him dying of old age in his own bed. As time passes and the memory of their deaths start haunting subsequent generations, these philosophers’ endings take on more and more layers of meaning. Eventually they end up in mythology.

From: DYING FOR IDEAS

The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers

COSTICA BRADATAN