Costica BRADATAN Department of Philosophy, Miami University Email:
[email protected] Jan Patočka’s Socratic Art of Dying “It is only thanks to death that our life serves us to express ourselves.” (Pier Paolo Pasolini) [Draft – please do not cite without the author’s permission] It happens sometimes that philosophers need something stronger than words to express themselves. In such cases, their words stop helping them, their arguments do not convince anyone anymore, and their remaining rhetorical tricks only betray their impotence. If these philosophers are not to remain completely voiceless, they must unfailingly appeal to some other means of expression, to some non-verbal or, better, trans-verbal ones. Yet, apparently, philosophy is in a structural way tied to the use of language and the art of writing, to the utterance of words and the production of texts. If philosophers’ words and texts become mute, then what is left to them? Contrary to the pessimistic view, there is something left. Under such radical circumstances, when words irremediably fail and any rhetoric only embarrasses itself, philosophers are still left with a very effective persuasive tool: namely, with their own lives – with their own bodies, with their own flesh. True, this would necessarily be their last trick, but, if used properly, it can prove to be a most powerful one. Socrates’ death was the most effective means of persuasion he ever used, and over the centuries he has come to be venerated not such much for what he did when he was alive, as precisely for the way in which he died.