24 PHILOSOPHY tongue was bound with a leather gag – all of the What lies ahead philosophers whom Bradatan considers to have “performed” exemplary deaths exercise complete control and mastery in their last moments: they die walking, talking, laughing he story is as old as philosophy itself. WILL REES Giordano Bruno and Jan Patocka: “martyr- and mocking the authorities that execute them. Socrates, found guilty of impiety and philosophers” who did not simply have ideas They remain themselves right to the end, dying Tof corrupting the youth, is sentenced to Costica Bradatan about death, but who died for ideas. “Once the deaths that are uniquely theirs. Doesn’t the death by an Athenian court. Given the chance body has come into play . everything appeal of this belie a certain anxiety, a fear of DYING FOR IDEAS to save himself, he refuses. In his Phaedo, The dangerous lives of the philosophers changes. Now death can no longer be a ‘topic’, the loss of control and self that more com- Plato explains how, just a few hours before 272pp. Bloomsbury. £19.99 (US $34.95). there cannot be anything abstract about it.” monly awaits us at the end of life? drinking the hemlock that kills him, Socrates 978 1 4725 2551 2 Regardless of their philosophical colours, After all, most of us do not face deaths such proffers a novel redefinition of the philoso- these thinkers are the ultimate empiricists, as these; indeed, for most of us death will not pher: those who practise philosophy do so using their bodies as laboratories in which to be a “performance” at all. One rarely dies on to prepare “themselves for dying and death”. a transcendent arbiter of meaning, how can test their ideas; by turning to them, Bradatan one’s feet, let alone like Socrates, heroically With these words, and with the death that life bear any meaning at all? hopes to depart from the abstract terrain that walking to meet death head on. Most of us will followed them, Socrates established a long- Costica Bradatan’s Dying for Ideas: The characterizes philosophy’s purely textual dieinabed,probablynotourown,underheavy standing tradition where death is not simply dangerous lives of the philosophers is situated brushes with death. sedation which will ease us into unconscious- another topic for philosophy but the very life- firmly within this “thanatological” vision of At one point, Bradatan writes that Hei- ness before the “main event”. This will most force driving it. the tradition. Rather unfashionably, Bradatan degger uses the metaphor of ripening fruit to likely take place after a rather extended stay in The following centuries saw further inter- sees philosophy as a form of therapy – as an describe our relationship with death. The the unmapped cities that lie along the border ventions:fromtheStoics,Epicurus,Ciceroand “art of living” which, crucially, ought to be mistake is revealing. It is true that Heidegger between being and non-being, during which later from Michel de Montaigne, who, borrow- understood as an “art of dying”. In the opening employs this metaphor; but while he admits a time we will become less – not more – like the ing the line from Cicero, wrote an influential pages he argues persuasively that death is not limited comparison between the two things, selves we were. Philosophy has absolutely not essay called “That to philosophize is to learn simply the opposite of life, but that it enters life he also sharply distinguishes them. Like an been circumvented by medicine; however, to how to die”. These classical and Renaissance and lends it urgency – that it can even “breathe unripe fruit, human life seems to be character- remain relevant it must explore the implica- accounts tended to be therapeutic: in the face of new life into life”. ized by an essence which lies ahead of it – by tions not only of that we die, but how we die. death, philosophy’s task was reconciliatory. For Bradatan, there are two aspects to phi- a “not yet” towards which it grows. But that is In an atmosphere of abstraction, Bradatan Philosophy’s infatuation with death con- losophy’s encounter with death. First, death is where the analogy ends. When a fruit becomes hopes to be a dissenting voice. Ultimately, tinued into the twentieth century, becoming a a topic for philosophy (perhaps the topic). ripe, it reaches its fulfilment; when a person however, he rehearses that very abstraction preoccupation first of all in Germany, Here, he provides brief summaries of the writ- dies he or she “comes to naught”. Crucially, itself. Because when confronted with the through Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, ings of Montaigne, Heidegger and Paul-Louis Bradatan ignores the distinction that Hei- realities of the deaths we face, Dying for Ideas and then in France, in the work of Jean-Paul Landsberg. As sophisticated as these accounts degger draws between death and demise, and – with its (barely) repressed Prometheanism Sartre, Albert Camus and the many others are, however, Bradatan argues that they are this misreading seems to inform his entire and its abstract infatuation with mythic hero- inspired by Heidegger’s work. Such reflec- also rather lifeless – that they are too detached book, which operates around a search for self- ism – teaches us almost nothing about what tions were not so concerned with rubbing from their object to speak about it with the fulfilment through an “exemplary death” (or lies ahead: a fact that would perhaps be easier balm on unsettling truths. Instead they were urgency that it deserves. “demise” in Heidegger’s parlance). to ignore if it weren’t for Costica Bradatan’s connected with the problem of nihilism: Thus Bradatan turns to the second aspect, With the exception of Bruno – who swore professed understanding of philosophy as a given the finality of death and the absence of looking at Socrates, Hypatia, Thomas More, so foully as he approached the pyre that his form of therapy. his book is not a suicide note”, Simon “67. 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or Critchley reassures us at the start of This won’t hurt wanted. Boring . 67, you are getting greedy. TNotes on Suicide. Instead he proposes Act your old age. Relax. This won’t hurt”. to “look at suicide closely, carefully, and per- Critchley admires this sort of end, sober and haps a little coldly”. Yet four pages later we are AMIA SRINIVASAN absolute wrong. Could he be right? Assisted unentitled. But he is attracted most of all to sui- told that Critchley’s interest in suicide isn’t suicide might remain controversial, but ordi- cide done for no apparent reason, as a leap into “remotely” academic. For reasons “we don’t Simon Critchley nary suicide is legal throughout Europe. (Crim- the absurd. He quotes approvingly from Edou- need to go into” (don’t we?), Critchley’s life inalizing suicide raises the problem of how you ard Levé’s novel Suicide (Levé turned in the NOTES ON SUICIDE has “dissolved over the past year or so, like 104pp. Fitzcarraldo Editions. Paperback, £10.99. punish a dead person; the neat solution of Sir manuscript ten days before hanging himself): sugar in hot tea”. In 2013 Critchley and his 978 1 9106950 6 7 William Blackstone, the eighteenth-century “Your death was scandalously beautiful”. psychoanalyst wife Jamieson Webster pub- English jurist, was to ditch the corpse in the Simon Critchley’s ultimate refutation of the lished The Hamlet Doctrine, a meditation on highway with a stake driven through it.) Even absurdist case for suicide is that suicide is too the incapacity to love; they separated soon ing in the balance. Surely no one who has seri- the recent debates in Parliament about the positiveanact:ifnothingmeansanything,then after. It isn’t made clear what this has to do ously contemplated suicide could question assisted dying bill did not refer much to the why do anything at all, let alone kill yourself? with that, though we do learn that Webster whether there might be good reasons for kill- inviolable sanctity of life, but rather to the Why not meet the world, instead, with indiffer- once wrote a fake suicide note that read “Dear ing oneself. Yet Critchley begins his essay by reasonable (if ultimately unconvincing) worry ence – or love? But here the author betrays the Simon,Breakaleg,orallyourlegs”,whichshe making heavy weather of both arguments for that the law would encourage vulnerable casual nihilism he wishes to affect. Love isn’t signed “with all my love-hate, Jamieson”. and against suicide’s permissibility, claiming people to die for bad reasons. The bill failed, something we might as well embrace because Instead of a theoretical way into suicide, they all face insurmountable problems. We but that is at odds with the mood of the country; life is pointless, but one of the things that gives Critchley says he wants to find a practical have a duty to God, some say, not to kill our- a 2010 survey suggests that 82 per cent of life, when it has one, its point. To think other- way out of it, to rid himself of “fantasies of selves – or, in a more secular register, a duty to the British public supports medically assisted wise is to indulge an adolescent fantasy of sui- self-destruction . motivated by self-pity, our families – but what if we’re miserable? We dying for terminally ill patients, and the num- cide, one that not only obscures the real terrors self-loathing and revenge”. He explains that have the right to take our own lives, some say, ber only drops to 71 per cent among religious that drive many people to it, but also the real the book is being written in a hotel room in East but doesn’t this ignore the legitimate claims people.