Emerson is the first American philosopher in this book. He was enthusiastically admired by someone as difficult to please as Nietzsche, although the latter does describe Emerson as “German philosophy that had taken on quite a lot of water on the trans-Atlantic passage.” That said, Emerson is still far too little read in Europe and not taken philosophically seriously enough anywhere else. Most Americans might have read a couple of essays in high school and then he is quickly forgotten. Most non-Americans don't even get that far.
The dense, compact and oracular style of Emerson, combined with the extraordinary meditative voice which defines his prose, can be seen in “Experience” (1844), an essay prompted by the death of his son two years earlier. But this death does not yield the usual ritual lamentation. On the contrary, Emerson writes that the calamity of his son's death “does not touch me.” Something that he thought part of him and which could not be torn away without tearing him apart “falls off from me and leaves no scar.” Emerson goes on, “I grieve that grief can teach me nothing.” He concludes, in utter darkness,
Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, There at least is reality that will not dodge us.
What is being faced here is not the refusal to mourn, but the inability to do so. What, then, is the good of thought? As Emerson quips, against Hegel, “Life is no dialectics.” On the contrary, life is a “bubble and a scepticism, a sleep within a sleep.”
And yet, all is not quite lost. Happiness consists in living “the greatest number of good hours” and this requires the cultivation of the practice of patience. Emerson writes,
Patience and patience, we shall win at the last […] Never mind the ridicule, never the defeat; up again, old heart!— it seems to say,—there is victory yet for all justice.
Emerson died patiently of pneumonia.
A disciple of Emerson, Thoreau's meditations on nature in Walden and defence of individual conscience against an unjust government combine the romanticism and reform at the heart of the movement known as New England Transcendentalism.
Following a typical late-night excursion to count the rings on tree stumps during a rainy night, Thoreau contracted bronchitis. His health declined over the next three years and he seems to have been fully aware that his end was nigh and calmly accepted death.
When asked if he had made his peace with God, he replied, “I did not know we had ever quarreled.” He died at the age of forty-four and there is but one word written on his grave in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts: “Henry.”
In Room 26 of the National Portrait Gallery in London, there is a portrait of Mill by G. F. Watts painted a couple of months before the philosopher's death. Eyes downcast in meditation, lips sealed, face poised and half in shadow, Mill's Atlantean brow is surrounded by almost total funereal blackness.
Happily, Mill's demise was less gloomy. He had retired to his villa at Saint-Véran in Avignon, France, with his stepdaughter, Helen Taylor, who was Mill's constant companion after his wife's death fifteen years earlier. Like the aged Rousseau, Mill took enormous pleasure in botany. On the night of Saturday 3 May, Mill caught a chill after a fifteen-mile walk. His condition deteriorated and he died calmly in his sleep four days later.
Mill's favourite motto was from Thomas Carlyle's wonderfully witty satire on German philosophy, Sartor Resartus: “Work while it is called Today; for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.” Before he died, Mill is reported to have said to Helen, “You know that I have done my work.” He was buried beside his wife in the cemetery of Saint-Véran.
Darwin's final book, published in the year before his death, was The Formation of Vegetable Mould, through the Action of Worms, with Observations on Their Habits. Although hardly a catchy title, the book was—to Darwin's surprise and delight—enthusiastically received and outsold On the Origin of Species. As John Bowlby points out, with Darwin's eye for small detail, immense perseverance and the theoretical cast of mind that characterized all of his work, he showed how our entire ecosystem was dependent on the activity of the earth's humblest creatures.
Of course, it is poignant that Darwin should interest himself in worms on the way to becoming wormfood. He seems to have longed for death towards the end, viewing the graveyard near his house in Downe, Kent, “as the sweetest place on earth.” In his last year, Darwin felt increasingly tired and complained that
I have not the heart of strength at my age to begin any investigation lasting years, which is the only thing which I enjoy.
Life had become wearisome for Darwin and after a heart attack and almost daily anginal attacks, he confessed, “I am not in the least afraid to die.” Against his wishes, Darwin was not allowed to submit to the action of worms in Downe Churchyard. The famous agnostic (Thomas Huxley's neologism to describe Darwin's attitude towards religious belief) was buried with great ecclesiastical ceremony and now rests a few feet from Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey.
Apart from a long period of constipation, Kierkegaard seems to have enjoyed reasonable health. However, he became ill in late September 1855 and collapsed in the street on 2 October. At his own request, he was taken to Fredrik's Hospital in Copenhagen, where his condition deteriorated. Kierkegaard's niece reports that when brought to the hospital, he said that he had come there to die. He died six weeks later on 11 November, aged forty-two. The cause of death is unclear and the tentative diagnosis was tuberculosis.
It seems that Kierkegaard had simply lost the will to live, exhausted by his voluminous and brilliant literary work and depressed by the sorry state of his personal life and the state of Christianity in Denmark. His lifelong friend Emil Boe-sen visited him as he was dying and kindly suggested to Kierkegaard that much in his life had worked out well. He replied, “That is why I am very happy and very sad, because I cannot share my happiness with anyone.” He continued, “I pray to be free of despair at the time of my death.”
This last remark is significant and poignant because six years earlier, under the pseudonym “Anti-Climacus,” Kierkegaard had published The Sickness Unto Death (1849). This fatal sickness is despair, which is understood by Kierkegaard as the consciousness of sin. The only cure for the sickness unto death is faith, specifically faith in Christ's forgiveness for our sins. For Kierkegaard, following Saint Paul and Luther, the overcoming of despair requires dying to the world through faith in Christ, who is the death of death. Faith is the opposite of sin and is that state where the self wills to be itself and “rests transparently in the power that established it.”
Sadly, Kierkegaard's peaceful rest was short-lived. None other than Hans Christian Andersen reports a scandal that took place at Kierkegaard's kierkegaard (“churchyard” in Danish). Despite his tireless tirades against the degraded Christianity of the Danish pastors, Kierkegaard was buried with a full religious service and the eulogy was delivered by his brother Peter, the Bishop of Aalborg. Outraged by such hypocrisy, Kierkegaard's nephew, Henrik Lund, made a protest speech at the graveside. He ridiculed the clergy, and in particular Bishop Peter, for burying someone who had renounced all connection to what Henrik called the “plaything Christianity of the pastors.”
In the years following his brother's death, Peter Kierkegaard resigned his bishopric and renounced his legal right to take care of his affairs. He ended his days insane in 1888.
Marx seems to have had a long, painful affair with illness. During the writing of Das Kapital (1860–6), he suffered from what he describes in various letters as “abominable catarrh, eye inflammation, bile-vomiting, rheumatism, acute liver pains, sneezing, dizziness, persistent coughing, and dangerous carbuncles.” The carbuncles caused the most “frightful pains” and for periods covered his “whole cadaver.” They were particularly virulent on his genitals, which caused him obvious distress. This is without mentioning pleurisy and the lung tumour that eventually killed him.
The last decade of Marx's life was one of constant illness and endless travel in search of a cure for his many ailments. This took him for long periods to various resorts in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, Algiers and the less exotic destinations of Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, the Channel Islands, Eastbourne and Ramsgate. Marx seems to have been followed by rain wherever he went, even in Algiers and Monte Carlo.
In his last years, he was increasingly politically crotchety and too depressed to engage in serious work. Marx was broken by the deaths of his beloved wife, Jenny, in 1881, and his first and favourite child, whom he nicknamed “Jennychen,” two months before him. However, his end was peaceful enough, falling asleep in an easy chair. As Engels puts it in his funeral oration, with unintended bathos,
On the 14th of March, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, the greatest living thinker ceased to think.
Marx was buried in the same grave as his wife in Highgate Cemetery in north London. His tomb, which has long been a place of pilgrimage, is adorned in gold with the famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach,
The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point however is to change it.
Marx was voted the world's greatest philosopher by a huge margin on BBC Radio 4 in July 2005.
Although a pragmatist, an empiricist and one of the founders of scientific psychology, James had a lifelong fascination with psychical research and mystical experience. This led him to experiment with various drugs; he claimed, for instance, that it was only under the influence of nitrous oxide that he was able to understand Hegel.
In his late essays, James develops the idea of what he calls “pure experience.” Disregarding the idea of consciousness as a fiction, pure experience is an apprehension of the present as it simply is, without regard for divisions of past and future or subject and object. In pure experience, the present is simply there to be lived.
James had an agnostic position on issues like the immortality of the soul and the existence of God. In his Varieties of Religious Experience, he is willing to accept the possibility of “something larger than ourselves,” in which we might “find our greatest peace.” As someone who had suffered from what he called “anhe-donia” in earlier life, which included long periods of depression and even attempted suicide, it is clear that James's curiosity about such realms of experience was not simply theoretical.
James died of an enlarged heart, which was brought on by vigorous hiking in the mountains, his favourite means of relaxation. It is characteristic of James's boundless intellectual energy that he was writing an introduction to philosophy until very shortly before his death. In its opening pages, he writes,
Philosophy, beginning in wonder, as Plato and Aristotle said, is able to imagine everything different from what it is. It sees the familiar as if it were strange, and the strange as if it were familiar.
In the year before his death, James went to hear Freud lecture on his first visit to the USA. Freud recalls walking and talking with James, when suddenly James handed him his bag and asked him to walk on until he got through his attack of angina. Freud continues,
He died of that disease a year later; and I have always wished that I might be as fearless as he was in the face of approaching death.
James died cradled in the arms of his wife, Alice, at the family home in Chocorua, New Hampshire. He told his wife that he longed to die and asked her to rejoice for him. She notes in her diary, “William died just before 2:30 in my arms … No pain at the last and no consciousness.” His son Billy photographed his father's corpse lying in rumpled white sheets on his iron bed and made a death mask.
William's brother, the novelist Henry, died six years later in 1916. For the pained and utterly honest beauty of her prose, I'd like to cite Edith Wharton's testimony of the death of Henry James from A Backward Glance (1934):
His dying was slow and harrowing. The final stroke had been preceded by one or two premonitory ones, each causing a diminution just marked enough for the still conscious mind to register it, and the sense of disintegration must have been tragically intensified to a man like James, who had so often and deeply pondered on it, so intently watched for its first symptoms. He is said to have told his old friend Lady Prothero, when she saw him after the first stroke, that in the very act of falling (he was dressing at the time) he heard in the room a voice which was distinctly, it seemed, not his own, saying: “So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!” The phrase is too beautifully characteristic not to be recorded. He saw the distinguished thing coming, faced it, and received it with words worthy of all his dealings with life.
Much—perhaps too much—has been written about Nietzsche's collapse in Turin in early January 1889, his subsequent “madness” and his death eleven years later. A good deal of the speculation about Nietzsche's madness turns on the role of his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. She returned to Germany after trying to establish a colony of Aryans in Paraguay called Nueva Germania. Elisabeth's husband committed suicide in 1889 and the colony foundered financially.
A passionate anti-Semite, Elisabeth was clearly not a pleasant person and her role in the editing and distortion of Nietzsche's work and the concealment of her brother's medical history is revealing. She always insisted that her brother's madness was due to mental exhaustion brought about by excessive intellectual labour. Elisabeth never accepted that Nietzsche's collapse was the consequence of the syphilitic infection that he contracted as a student in a brothel in Cologne in 1865, for which he was treated in Leipzig in 1867. However, the course of Nietzsche's syphilis is entirely typical, from his first incapacitations in 1871 to his collapse in 1889 (tertiary syphilis was the AIDS of the late nineteenth century).
The only peculiarity is the length of time between Nietzsche's collapse and death. (Incidentally, Richard Wagner thought that the cause of Nietzsche's sickness was excessive masturbation, and the great composer was kind enough to communicate his diagnosis to Nietzsche's doctor.)
After his return to Germany, Nietzsche was delivered into the care of Otto Binswanger, uncle of the famous existential psychologist Ludwig Binswanger, who would be greatly influenced by Heidegger. Otto Binswanger was clearly a remarkably assiduous doctor and, although Nietzsche was virtually unrecognized as a philosopher at the time, he studied Nietzsche's work in order to better understand his patient.
Binswanger diagnosed Nietzsche's condition diplomatically as “progressive paralysis.” The contents of Nietzsche's medical file reveal some rather nastier details. Nietzsche seems to have been coprophagic, that is, to have been partial to eating his own faeces and drinking his own urine.
On one occasion, there is a deeply poignant exchange between Nietzsche and Binswanger, where the former smiles at the latter and asks him, “Please, give me some health.”
Such was Elisabeth's obsession with concealing the nasty truth about her brother that it would appear that she arranged to have Nietzsche's medical file stolen and its contents only became known in the years after her death in 1935 (Hitler attended her funeral).
What is often underestimated in the works of Nietzsche's “madness” is their lacerating irony and self-parody. Is one meant to take seriously the title of Nietzsche's pseudo-autobiography, Ecce Homo, the words that Pontius Pilate said to the flogged and humiliated Christ? Is there not the slightest levity in chapter titles like “Why I am So Wise,” “Why I am So Clever,” “Why I Write Such Excellent Books,” and “Why I am a Destiny”? When Nietzsche writes, “One pays dearly for being immortal: one has to die several times while alive,” is one not meant to smile, just a little?
In the letter of 6 January 1889 that led to his friend and former colleague at Basel, Franz Overbeck, coming to fetch him from Turin, Nietzsche writes to the historian Jakob Burckhardt,
Dear Professor, ultimately I would much rather be a Basel professor than God, but I did not dare to push my private egoism so far as to neglect the creation of the world.
Something similar might be speculated about Nietzsche's attitude towards Christianity. EcceHomo ends with the seemingly dramatic words, “Have I been understood?—Dionysos against the Crucified.” But Nietzsche's long war on Christianity should not lead Christians to see him as some sort of satanic apostate. On the contrary, he notes, “The most serious Christians have always been well-disposed towards me.” As if to prove his point, the present Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams—a very serious Christian—has written a poem on Nietzsche's “madness” and death. It ends with the following words:
At night he roared; during the day, My voice
Is not nice, he would whisper. White,
Swollen, his skull drowned him like a stone,
His breath, at the end, the sound
Of footsteps on broken glass.
Like Nietzsche said, with his tongue firmly in his cheek, “Some men are born posthumously.”
In a letter written in his final year, Freud speaks of “a new recurrence of my dear old cancer with which I have been sharing my existence for sixteen years.” Between April 1923 and his death, Freud had numerous operations for cancer of the mouth, jaw and palate. Estimates vary from twenty-two to thirty-three operations. The cause was his prolific cigar smoking, up to twenty a day, without which he was unable to think and write and which he never gave up.
Freud lived in constant pain, but the only drug he ever took prior to the very end was a little aspirin. He wrote to Stefan Zweig, who also spoke at his funeral, “I prefer to think in torment than not to be able to think at all.” In his last months, Freud developed a cancerous growth on his cheek that created such an unpleasant odour that his favourite dog, a chow (and Freud was unusually fond of dogs), refused to stay with him and cowered instead in the corner of the room. After the growth had eaten through his cheek and his body had atrophied because of his inability to eat, he said to his trusted physician, Max Schur,
My dear Schur, you remember our first talk. You promised me then you would help me when I could no longer carry on. It is only torture now and it has no longer any sense.
Schur gave Freud morphine and he fell into peaceful sleep, dying the following day.
Freud had a rather morbid disposition and said that he thought of death every day. He also had the disturbing habit of saying to departing friends, “Goodbye; you may never see me again.” Without entering into discussions of the death drive, where Freud claims, in a way that is explicitly indebted to Schopenhauer, that the goal of human striving is an inert state where all activity ceases, there is also evidence of a longing for death on Freud's part. After a fainting attack in Munich in 1912, Freud's first words after regaining consciousness were “How sweet it must be to die.”
However, Freud's response to his physical suffering shows a complete absence of self-pity and an acceptance of reality. Freud showed no sign of complaint or irritability with his painful condition, but accepted it and was resigned to his fate. Much closer to Epicurus or Montaigne than Schopenhauer, there is no celebration or evasion of suffering in Freud. There is simply a lucid acceptance of reality and the pain that can accompany it. As Ernest Jones put it in his funeral oration in Golders Green Crematorium in north London, a few weeks after the outbreak of the Second World War,
If ever man can be said to have conquered death itself, to live on in spite of the King of Terrors, who held no terror for him, that man was Freud.
Bergson died a genuinely heroic philosophical death. Under the racist laws implemented by the collaborationist Vichy government after France's defeat by Nazi Germany in 1940, Jews were required to line up to register with the authorities. Although an exemption had been granted to Bergson because of his fame, on 3 January he chose to stand in line with the other Jews and died from the ensuing chill. Although he was spiritually attracted to Christianity, Bergson refused to convert, saying,
I would have become a convert, had I not foreseen for years a formidable wave of anti-Semitism about to break upon the world. I wanted to remain among those who tomorrow were to be persecuted.
Bergson was a widely read and hugely influential philosopher during his lifetime, who received every conceivable literary and academic honour. His fame was such that the French spoke of “le Bergson boom” after the appearance of Creative Evolution in 1907. The first recorded traffic jam on Broadway in Manhattan was caused by Bergson's inaugural public lecture in 1913 and he was the first of the very few philosophers to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1928. However, after his death Bergson disappeared from the philosophical scene until the recent renewal of interest in his work, which is largely due to the influence that Bergson exerted on Gilles Deleuze.
Dewey is an unjustly under-appreciated figure in contemporary philosophy. The influence of the huge body of work written during his long life was eclipsed, after his death, by two factors: the emergence of an increasingly scientistic trend in Anglo-American philosophy in the 1950s and a compensating tendency towards phenomenology and Marxism in Continental thought during the same period.
Dewey's work belongs to neither of these philosophical tendencies, but embraces both of their concerns. It is open to the influence of Continental thought, particularly Hegel, and Dewey did important work in logic and the philosophy of science, particularly on the influence of Darwinism on philosophy. There is much, sometimes flatulent, discussion of pluralism in philosophy. Dewey got there first and a long time ago.
Philosophy has arguably always had an allergic reaction to democracy, from Plato's ridiculing of a politics based on opinion and not knowledge to Nietzsche's lampooning of egalitari-anism. Dewey shows the contribution that philosophy can make to democratic life. This doesn't mean that philosophers will be Platonic kings, but neither are they simply Lockean “under-labourers” or janitors in the Crystal Palace of the sciences. All turns here on the relation between democracy and education. Dewey sees education as the dynamic and continuous development of democratic life, what he called “reconstruction,” and rightly believed that society cannot transform itself without paying scrupulous attention to pedagogy. Dewey saw learning as more important than knowing and defined philosophy as “the general theory of education.” He set his influential views on education to work at the newly established University of Chicago after 1894 and later at Columbia University in New York.
He died from pneumonia after suffering a fractured hip in 1951 from which he was not able to recover.