Having dispatched a few incomprehensible emails in response to those I sent out yesterday, I settled down to my day’s work.
I have managed to prise from the dead hand of the Spanish post office a book I have been eagerly awaiting, ‘The Book of Dead Philosophers’ by Simon Critchley ISBN 978 1 84708 010 3. It has been published by Granta and that gave me a pang of guilt when I remember that my subscription to that excellent magazine of new writing has been allowed to lapse with my removal to another country.
This book was recommended by The Week and it seemed to appeal to my ragbag approach to knowledge: notes on the deaths of 190 philosophers. This books as been designed to be read either straight through or by dipping. Exactly the sort of thing I like.
I read it straight through and although it is necessarily episodic you begin to see that Critchley is not writing this with the intention of producing philosophical lollipops but rather with substantiating his central thesis that paradoxically reading about death leads to affirmation of life. Philosophy can illuminate this by posing some “irresistible intellectual temptations from which we might finally learn how to live.” For Critchley philosophy is “to learn the habit of having death continually present in one’s mouth. In this way, we can begin to confront the terror of annihilation that enslaves us and leads us into either escape or evasion.” It is not an easy problem with which to wrestle but, “To philosophize is to learn to love that difficulty.”
This book is easy to read, but not necessarily easy to understand fully. There is an open invitation in the style of writing to be accompanied on an exploration of a frankly bewildering array of philosophers, some of who merit no more than a name and dates in bold print and a few lines. Others have more substantial space, but this is no balanced introduction to a few thousand years of philosophical thought it is a book with a thesis which is illuminated by anecdote, comment and even poems by Rowan Williams snatched from Wales to be Archbishop of Canterbury! The stories and lives are mundane, astonishing, bizarre and frankly unbelievable – but always fascinating.
Critchley wears his considerable erudition lightly enough for it not to repel but consciously enough for a reader to feel that he is in a safe pair of hands.
He is not afraid to let his own prejudices and experiences colour his prose. Who cannot warm to a man who, when talking of Elizabeth of Bohemia says, “whose uncle was Charles I of England, rudely but rightly beheaded in 1649.” Or when confronted by an apparent about face by the atheist Sartre in 1974 when Sartre refers to “this idea of a creating hand refers to God” Critchley adds “as a student of mine one said to me during a class I was teaching on Hegel, people say all sorts of things when they are drunk!”
There are names famous and names obscure for the neophyte philosopher in this book and it assumes a background of some historical and literary knowledge to set the characters in place. There are subtle and not so subtle references embedded in the text which, as in a good episode of The Simpson, you will either use to enhance your enjoyment or simply be unaware of as part of the narrative.
This is a satisfying book which will repay rereading. Perhaps it needs to be promoted to join the Sacred Texts of The Bathroom where philosophic contemplation is a sine qua non!
I have managed to prise from the dead hand of the Spanish post office a book I have been eagerly awaiting, ‘The Book of Dead Philosophers’ by Simon Critchley ISBN 978 1 84708 010 3. It has been published by Granta and that gave me a pang of guilt when I remember that my subscription to that excellent magazine of new writing has been allowed to lapse with my removal to another country.
This book was recommended by The Week and it seemed to appeal to my ragbag approach to knowledge: notes on the deaths of 190 philosophers. This books as been designed to be read either straight through or by dipping. Exactly the sort of thing I like.
I read it straight through and although it is necessarily episodic you begin to see that Critchley is not writing this with the intention of producing philosophical lollipops but rather with substantiating his central thesis that paradoxically reading about death leads to affirmation of life. Philosophy can illuminate this by posing some “irresistible intellectual temptations from which we might finally learn how to live.” For Critchley philosophy is “to learn the habit of having death continually present in one’s mouth. In this way, we can begin to confront the terror of annihilation that enslaves us and leads us into either escape or evasion.” It is not an easy problem with which to wrestle but, “To philosophize is to learn to love that difficulty.”
This book is easy to read, but not necessarily easy to understand fully. There is an open invitation in the style of writing to be accompanied on an exploration of a frankly bewildering array of philosophers, some of who merit no more than a name and dates in bold print and a few lines. Others have more substantial space, but this is no balanced introduction to a few thousand years of philosophical thought it is a book with a thesis which is illuminated by anecdote, comment and even poems by Rowan Williams snatched from Wales to be Archbishop of Canterbury! The stories and lives are mundane, astonishing, bizarre and frankly unbelievable – but always fascinating.
Critchley wears his considerable erudition lightly enough for it not to repel but consciously enough for a reader to feel that he is in a safe pair of hands.
He is not afraid to let his own prejudices and experiences colour his prose. Who cannot warm to a man who, when talking of Elizabeth of Bohemia says, “whose uncle was Charles I of England, rudely but rightly beheaded in 1649.” Or when confronted by an apparent about face by the atheist Sartre in 1974 when Sartre refers to “this idea of a creating hand refers to God” Critchley adds “as a student of mine one said to me during a class I was teaching on Hegel, people say all sorts of things when they are drunk!”
There are names famous and names obscure for the neophyte philosopher in this book and it assumes a background of some historical and literary knowledge to set the characters in place. There are subtle and not so subtle references embedded in the text which, as in a good episode of The Simpson, you will either use to enhance your enjoyment or simply be unaware of as part of the narrative.
This is a satisfying book which will repay rereading. Perhaps it needs to be promoted to join the Sacred Texts of The Bathroom where philosophic contemplation is a sine qua non!
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