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It happens rarely, but when it does it causes a commotion of great proportions; it attracts the attention of all, becomes a popular topic for discussion and debate in marketplaces and taverns. It drives people to take sides, quarrel and fight, which for things philosophical is quite remarkable. It happened to Socrates, Hypatia, Thomas More, Giordano Bruno, Jan Patočka, and a few others. Due to an irrevocable death sentence, imminent mob execution or torture to death, these philosophers found themselves in the most paradoxical of situations: lovers of logic and rational argumentation, silenced by brute force; professional makers of discourses, banned from using the word; masters of debate and contradiction, able to argue no more. What was left of these philosophers then? Just their silence, their sheer physical presence. The only means of expression left to them, their own bodies — and dying bodies at that.

Tell me how you deal with your fear of annihilation, and I will tell you about your philosophy.

The situation has its irony. It is an old custom among philosophers of various stripes and persuasions to display a certain contempt toward the body. Traditionally, in Western philosophy at least, the body has been with few exceptions seen as inferior to the mind, spirit or soul — the realm of “the flesh,” the domain of the incomprehensible, of blind instincts and unclean impulses. And so here are the condemned philosophers: speechless, with only their dying bodies to express themselves. One may quip that the body has finally got its chance to take its revenge on the philosophers.

But how have they arrived there in the first place? It so happens that some philosophers entertain and profess certain ideas that compel them to lead a certain way of life. Sometimes, however, their way of life leads them to a situation where they have to choose between remaining faithful to their ideas or renouncing them altogether. The former translates into “dying for idea,” whereas the latter usually involves not only a denunciation of that philosopher’s lifestyle, but also, implicitly, an invalidation of the philosophical views that inspired that way of life. This seems to be the toughest of choices. In simpler terms, it boils down to the following dilemma: if you decide to remain faithful to your views, you will be no more. Your own death will be your last opportunity to put your ideas into practice. On the other hand, if you choose to “betray” your ideas (and perhaps yourself as well), you remain alive, but with no beliefs to live by.

The situation of the philosopher facing such a choice is what is commonly called a “limit-situation.” Yet, this limit does not concern only the philosopher involved; in an important sense, this is the limit of philosophy itself, a threshold where philosophy encounters its other (whatever philosophy is not) and, in the process, is put to the test.

Leif Parsons

Long before he was faced with such a choice through the good offices of the Czechoslovakian political police in 1977, Jan Patočka may have intuited this limit when he said that “philosophy reaches a point 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.’’ [1] Whatever that decision may mean in other contexts, the implication of Patočka’s notion for this discussion is unambiguous. There is a point beyond which philosophy, if it is not to lose face, must turn into something else: performance. It has to pass a test in a foreign land, a territory that’s not its own. For the ultimate testing of our philosophy takes place not in the sphere of strictly rational procedures (writing, teaching, lecturing), but elsewhere: in the fierce confrontation with death of the animal that we are. The worthiness of one’s philosophy reveals itself, if anywhere, in the live performance of one’s encounter with one’s own death; that’s how we find out whether it is of some substance or it is all futility. Tell me how you deal with your fear of annihilation, and I will tell you about your philosophy.

Furthermore, death is such a terrifying event, and the fear of it so universal, that to invite it by way of faithfulness to one’s ideas is something that fascinates and disturbs at the same time. Those who do so take on an aura of uncanny election, of almost un-human distinction; all stand in awe in before them. With it also comes a certain form of power. This is why, for example, one’s self-immolation (meant as political protest) can have devastating social and political effects, as we saw recently in Tunisia, when 26-year-old Mohammad Bouazizi set himself on fire. This is also why the death of those philosophers who choose to die for an idea comes soon to be seen as an essential part of their work. In fact their deaths often become far more important than their lives. Why is Socrates such an important and influential figure? Mostly because of the manner and circumstances of his death. He may have never written a book, but he crafted one of the most famous endings of all time: his own. Any philosophical text would pale in comparison. Nor have Hypatia’s writings survived; yet, the exquisite, if passive performance of her death in the early fifth century has not ceased to fascinate us. A modern scholar, Maria Dzielska, recounts how, at the instigation of the patriarch Cyril (later sanctified by the Church), some of the zealous Christians of Alexandria helped her to join the Socratic tradition of dying:

[A] mob executed the deed on a day in March 415, in the tenth consulship of Honorius and the sixth consulship of Theodosius II, during Lent. Hypatia was returning home… from her customary ride in the city. She was pulled out of the chariot and dragged to the church Caesarion … There they tore off her clothes and killed her with “broken pits of pottery”… Then they hauled her body outside the city to a place called Kinaron, to burn it on a pyre of sticks.[2]

One of the accounts of Giordano Bruno’s death is particularly eloquent. A chronicle of the time (Avviso di Roma, 19 February, 1600) reads: “On Friday they burned alive in Campo di Fiore that Dominican brother of Nola, a persistent heretic; his tongue was immobilized [con la lingua in giova] because of the terrible things he was saying, unwilling to listen either to his comforters or to anybody else.” [3]

Con la lingua in giova! There is hardly a better illustration of what “silencing an opponent” can mean. I don’t really have anything against the Holy Office, except maybe that sometimes they have a tendency to take things a bit too literally.

Related More From The Stone Read previous contributions to this series.

“Dying for an idea” in this fashion is, admittedly, a rare occurrence. Thank goodness, philosophers are not put to death on a regular basis. I hasten to add, however: as rare as it may be, the situation is not hypothetical. These things have happened, and will happen again. In a certain sense, the possibility of one’s dying in relation to one’s thinking lies at the heart of the Western definition of philosophy. When Plato’s Socrates states in the Phaedo that philosophy is meletē thanatou — that is to say, an intense practice of death — he may mean not just that the object of philosophy should be to help us better cope with our mortality, but also that the one who practices philosophy should understand the risks that come with the job. After all, this definition of philosophy comes from someone condemned to death for the ideas he expressed, only few hours away from his execution. The lesson? Perhaps that to be a philosopher means more than just being ready to “suffer” death, to accept it passively at some indefinite point in time; it may also require one to provoke his own death, to meet it somehow mid-way. That’s mastering death. Philosophy has sometimes been understood as “an art of living,” and rightly so. But there are good reasons to believe that philosophy can be an “art of dying” as well.



“Dying for an idea” is the stuff of martyrdom — “philosophic martyrdom.” For martyrdom to be possible, however, one’s death, spectacular as it may be, is not enough. Dying is just half of the job; the other half is weaving a good narrative of martyrdom and finding an audience for it. A philosopher’s death would be in vain without the right narrator, as well as the guilty conscience of a receptive audience. A sense of collective guilt can do wonders for a narrative of martyrdom about to emerge. I have written elsewhere about the importance of story-telling and collective memory for the construction of political martyrdom. Much of the same goes for philosopher-martyrs. In a certain sense, they cease to be people in flesh and blood and are recast into literary characters of sorts; their stories, if they are to be effective, have to follow certain rules, fit into a certain genre, respond to certain needs. Certainly, there are the historians who always seek to establish “the facts.” Yet — leaving aside that history writing, as Hayden White showed long time ago, is itself a form of literature — inconvenient “facts” rarely manage to challenge the narratives that dominate popular consciousness.

Enlightenment writers, and then the feminist scholarship of the 20th century, have played a major role in the “making” of Hypatia the philosopher-martyr. Countless anti-clerical writers and public intellectuals have done the same for Bruno, as has Václav Havel for Patočka. Yet, the most influential martyr-maker is by far Plato. Not only did he make Socrates into the archetypal philosopher-martyr, he practically invented the genre. In Plato’s rendering of Socrates’ case, we have almost all the ingredients of any good narrative of martyrdom: a protagonist who, because of his commitment to a life of virtue and wisdom-seeking, antagonizes his community; his readiness to die for his philosophy rather than accept the dictates of a misguided crowd; a hostile political environment marked by intolerance and narrow-mindedness; a situation of crisis escalating into a chain of dramatic events; the climax in the form of a public trial and the confrontation with the frenzied crowd; and finally the heroic, if unjust, death of the hero, followed by his apotheosis.

Beyond this, Plato’s writings have apparently shaped the actual behavior of people facing a choice similar to Socrates’. When Thomas More, for example, shortly before losing his head, said “I die the King’s good servant, but God’s first,” he was making an obvious reference to Socrates’ words during his trial, as rendered in this passage from the Apology: “Gentlemen, I am your very grateful and devoted servant, but I owe a greater obedience to God than to you.”

These philosophers — they cannot even die without giving proper scholarly references! Just as he was saying this More must have had a sudden glimpse that what he was about to do was not as real as he would have liked it to be; as though something “unreal” — the world of fiction, the books he had read — had now crept into his own act of dying. Certainly, dying itself is a brutally real experience, maybe the most brutal of all. And, yet, I am afraid More was right: dying for an idea never comes in pure form. It is always part reality, part fiction (in an undisclosed proportion). Like most things in life.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Cited by Eda Kriseová. “Václav Havel.” Trans. Caleb Crain (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 108.

[2] Dzielska, Maria. “Hypatia of Alexandria.” Trans. F. Lyra (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 93.

[3] Firpo, Luigi. “Il Processo di Giordano Bruno” (Salermo Editrice: Roma, 1998), p. 355-6





Costica Bradatan is an assistant professor in the Honors College at Texas Tech University. He the author of “The Other Bishop Berkeley. An Exercise in Reenchantment” and other books. He is currently writing a book on martyr-philosophers.