Although he converted to Lutheran Protestantism as a young man, Husserl's Jewish origins led to his exclusion from the University of Freiburg after Hitler's seizure of power in 1933. The behaviour of Heidegger—Husserl's former student and successor to his Chair of Philosophy at the university—was particularly shameful; he even denied his former mentor library privileges.
In 1935 and 1936, as the lights were going out all over Europe, the elderly Husserl travelled to Vienna and Prague to give the lectures that were developed into his final, unfinished book, The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology. For Husserl, philosophy is the freedom of absolute self-responsibility and the philosopher is “the civil servant of humanity.” He concludes by asserting that the duty of the philosopher is to confront “the barbarian hatred of spirit” and renew philosophy through “a heroism of reason.” At a time of crisis, then as now, the greatest danger facing “good Europeans” is weariness, the refusal to take up the philosophical battle of reason against barbarism.
According to his former assistant and devoted disciple Ludwig Landgrebe, when Husserl was assailed by the illness that would eventually kill him, he had only one wish: to be able to die in a way worthy of a philosopher. Refusing the intercession of his church, Husserl said, “I have lived as a philosopher and I want to die as a philosopher.”
After the death of his mother in 1912, Santayana—already a celebrated and influential philosopher—resigned his position at Harvard and travelled to Europe, never to return to the USA. Rome became his adopted home. He lived monkishly in the Convent of the Blue Nuns off the Capitoline Hill, though he never converted to Catholicism. When he was asked by a friend why he had never married, Santayana replied, “I don't know whether to get married or buy a dog.” His conservator and former assistant, Daniel Cory, writes of a typical scene with Santayana in the last years.
Unless it was raining heavily, we would walk to a nearby restaurant for luncheon, and here Santayana would order a dish that struck me as being rather rich, such as a spicy Indian curry or an elaborate dolce to cap the feast. And he drank three glasses of wine—nearly a mezzo-litro—with his food. (It always astonished me the way he poured any leftover wine on his cake.)
As if such wanton hedonism was not enough to infuriate American Puritan good taste, his views on politics were wonderfully non-committal. According to Todd Cronan, an article on Santayana appeared in Life magazine after U.S. soldiers discovered him in Rome during the liberation of Italy in 1944. Asked his opinion of the Second World War, Santayana said, “I know nothing, I live in the Eternal.” Santayana had little patience for what did not give pleasure. If we accept that the spirit is rooted in the flesh, then, as he writes in a letter,
The solution would be a sort of Epicureanism, that is, the enjoyment of life from moment to moment in its purity, beyond care and regret.
Santayana counted among his Harvard students such important poets as Robert Frost, T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, and the latter's verse is particularly pregnant with the philosopher's influence. Stevens wrote one of his final poems after the death of Santayana, “To an Old Philosopher in Rome,” where he is pictured “On the threshold of heaven.” The dying Stevens's identification with the dead philosopher is obvious and he writes, with obvious warmth but not without ambivalence,
Your dozing in the depths of wakefulness,
In the warmth of your bed, at the edge of your chair, alive
Yet living in two worlds, impenitent
As to one, and, as to one, most penitent,
Impatient for the grandeur that you need.
Santayana died after a painful struggle with cancer. A couple of days before his death, he was asked by Cory whether he was suffering. “Yes, my friend. But my anguish is entirely physical; there are no moral difficulties whatsoever.”
Santayana was not the only philosopher to choose to die in the Eternal City. Dying of terminal cancer, Bernard Williams ended his days in Rome in 2003.
Croce was the most important Italian philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century and a symbol for opposition to Mussolini's Fascism. After having been orphaned by the earthquake of Casamicciola in 1883, his life became his work. Shortly before his death at the age of eighty-six, Croce was asked about his health. He replied, appropriately, “I am dying at my work.”
Although Croce was a friend of Gentile and they edited the highly influential periodical La Critica between 1903 and 1922, a lasting disagreement arose between them over Gentile's embrace of Fascism. Described by himself and Mussolini as “the philosopher of Fascism,” Gentile became minister of education and held several influential political posts in the 1920s and 1930s. On 15 April 1944, after the liberation of Italy, Gentile was assassinated by partisans on the outskirts of Florence, probably under orders from the Italian Communist Party.
Which brings us to the greatest communist philosopher in Italy or arguably anywhere else. In 1926, in breach of parliamentary immunity, Gramsci was imprisoned by the Fascists after he had been elected a parliamentary deputy in 1924. Following a special tribunal in 1928, Gramsci was sentenced to twenty years and eight months in prison. Apparently, the prosecuting attorney said of Gramsci, “For twenty years we must stop this brain from working.”
Although in very poor health and initially forced to share a cell with five other prisoners, Gramsci's brain kept working and he produced the posthumously published Prison Notebooks which offer a powerfully consequent critique and reconstruction of the basic concepts of Marxism. Gramsci described his position as a “philosophy of praxis,” which meant the unity of theoretical reflection with practical life in the way described above in Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach.
In Gramsci's hands, Marxism is not reduced to some sort of historical determinism where all aspects of life have to be explained in terms of their economic causes. On the contrary, conceived as a philosophy of praxis, Gramsci's Marxism expands to take into consideration the spheres of politics, ideology, religion and culture in the broadest sense.
After his health was broken in prison, Gramsci became legally free in 1937, but was too ill to move. He died on 27 April following a cerebral haemorrhage.
The first hardback book that I remember buying was a first edition of Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian (1957). On the rather tattered blue cover, Russell writes, in words that echo Epicurus and Lucretius,
I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.
Any conception of the immortality of the soul is therefore both iniquitous, because it is untrue, and destructive of the possibility of happiness, which requires that we accept our finitude. As such, Russell thought that all the great religions of the world were both fallacious and morally harmful. The world that we inhabit is not shaped by some divine plan, but is a mixture of muddle and accident. What the world needs, then, is not religious dogma but an attitude of scientific inquiry that may enable us to make a little sense of the muddle and accident.
Russell died after suffering from acute bronchitis in the company of his fourth wife, Edith. He insisted that there should be no funeral service and the place of his cremation should not be made public. It was also stipulated that there should be no music. Russell's ashes were scattered over the Welsh hills and his granddaughter Lucy wrote to Russell's somewhat resentful second wife, Dora, “If there are ghosts to lay, let them be laid, along with our childhoods, among the magnificent mountains.” As Russell's biographer, Ray Monk, has shown, his life was defined by the ghost of madness and these ghosts survived his death. Monk writes,
At his death Russell left two embittered ex-wives, an estranged schizophrenic son and three granddaughters who felt themselves haunted by the “ghosts of maniacs,” as Russell had described his family back in 1893.
Five years after Russell's death, Lucy got off the bus in St. Buryan in Cornwall, doused herself in paraffin and set herself alight like a Buddhist monk in Vietnam during the American occupation. The pain was too intense and she ran screaming to the blacksmith's shop, where they wrapped her in blankets and sacks to put out the flames. She lost consciousness and died before reaching hospital.
In the history of philosophy, there are happy and unhappy accidents. Happily, Moritz Schlick took a chair in philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1921, the same year as the publication of a short and difficult book by a young Viennese philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Tradatus Logico-Phibsophicus.
Schlick became the figurehead for a hugely influential intellectual group that became known in 1929 as the Vienna Circle. Roughly and readily, Viennese logical positivism believed that all truth was either logically valid or empirically verifiable. In this way, all traces of metaphysics could be eliminated from philosophy.
Unhappily, the Vienna Circle dispersed after Schlick was murdered by a mentally deranged student on the steps of the University of Vienna. Austria drifted towards the Anschluss with Germany in 1938 and the remaining members of the Vienna Circle gradually left for England and the USA, where they had an enormous influence on the development of professional philosophy.
Although the student became a member of the Nazi Party, the murder seems to have been the consequence of a personal grudge because Schlick had rejected his doctoral thesis. Apparently, the student had been stalking Schlick for several weeks before he killed him. The student would follow Schlick and his wife into the cinema, take a seat in the aisle immediately in front of the Schlicks and spend the whole time turned around in his seat, looking Schlick straight in the face. Schlick's other students and friends advised him to get the police to put a stop to the stalking, but Schlick—a devoted liberal—refused to get the police to intervene.
In a paper from the Philosophical Review in the year of his death, Schlick writes,
I can easily imagine witnessing the funeral of my own body, for nothing is easier than to describe a world which differs from our ordinary world only in the complete absence of all data which I would call parts of my body.
It is not known whether Schlick was able to empirically verify this remark.
Lukács was buried in Budapest with Communist Party honours after regaining political favour in Hungary in the 1960s. However, he had narrowly escaped execution in 1956 when he was minister of culture in the government of Imre Nagy. Thereby hangs a darkly funny story.
Lukács was not a great admirer of the work of Franz Kafka, whom he declared to be “idealist” and a bad example of decadent aesthetic modernism. Lukács advocated an aesthetic realism that rejected the Kafkaesque world of Angst and alienation where isolated individuals were arrested for unknown crimes, submitted to absurd trials and condemned without reason.
After the Soviet tanks moved into Budapest to crush the Hungarian uprising, Nagy was executed and Lukács was arrested in the middle of the night and thrown into a military lorry along with other government officials. The lorry then disappeared into the obscurity of the countryside for an appointment with an unknown but probably unsavoury fate.
Lukács was taken to a vast castle in Transylvania and wasn't told whether he was going to be freed or permanently detained. So the story goes, Lukács turned to one of the other detained ministers and said, “So, Kafka was a realist after all.”
The bleak beauty of this joke is that in this perilous situation, Lukács ironizes himself. The humour consists in the fact that Lukács finds himself ridiculous because reality has conspired to bring about a situation that directly contradicts his aesthetic judgement, something which he admits willingly. True humour consists in laughing at oneself.
In 1919, Lukács experienced something close to a religious conversion to Bolshevism and participated in the short-lived communist government of Béla Kun in Hungary. Six years earlier, in 1913, Rosenzweig had experienced a conversion of a rather different kind. During the night of 7 July, during intense discussion with his friend Rosenstock, Rosenzweig decided to convert to Christianity. However, he declared that he “could turn Christian only qua Jew” and attended synagogue in Berlin until the time of baptism. During the Yom Kippur service on 11 October, however, he underwent a religious experience that led him to recommit to Judaism. The precise nature of this experience is not known, although Rosenzweig said some years later that if he had become Christian he would have left himself behind. “The life of the Jew,” he writes,
must precisely not lead him out of himself, he must rather live his way even deeper into himself.
After serving in an anti-aircraft gun unit in the German army on the Balkan front during the First World War, Rosenzweig began to write his masterpiece, The Star of Redemption, on army postcards (it should be remembered that Wittgenstein wrote the first draft of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus on the Russian and Italian fronts in 1917–18).
Violently rejecting his earlier attachment to Hegel, Rosenzweig begins The Star of Redemption by claiming that
Philosophy takes it upon itself to throw off the fear of things earthly, to rob death of its poisonous sting.
From Thales’ attempt to grasp the principle behind the whole of reality (“all is water”), through to Hegel's idea of Absolute Knowing, philosophy has attempted to know the whole and thereby deny the singular reality of death. For the philosopher, death is nothing because we have an understanding of reality in its entirety. As such, for Rosenzweig, philosophy is a disavowal of death and “it plugs up its ears before the cry of terrorized humanity.” By contrast, Rosenzweig argues that we have to learn to walk humbly with God and look at all things from the standpoint of redemption. “Life becomes immortal,” Rosenzweig writes, “in redemption's eternal hymn of praise.” It is only in this way that we are able to walk, in the final words of The Star of Redemption, “INTO LIFE.”
Rosenzweig was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 1922 (the same degenerative disease that afflicts Stephen Hawking). In his final years, Rosenzweig could only communicate by his wife reciting letters of the alphabet until he asked her to stop and she would guess at the intended word. His final words, written in this laborious manner, were an unfinished sentence that reads,
And now it comes, the point of all points, which the Lord has truly revealed to me in my sleep, the point of all points for which there …
Apparently, the writing was interrupted by a doctor's visit. Rosenzweig died during the night.
Wittgenstein's ignorance of significant stretches of the history of philosophy was legendary. Sadly, it has licensed a similar ignorance amongst many of his followers, who lack his brilliance. In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, we find a possibly unwitting echo of Epicurus’ view of death:
Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the same way in which our visual field has no limits.
In the next proposition, slightly closer to Lucretius, Wittgenstein adds, “Is some riddle solved by my surviving for ever?”
A few days before his death, just after his sixty-second birthday, Wittgenstein amplified this remark in a comment to his friend Maurice Drury:
Isn't it curious that, although I know I have not long to live, I never find myself thinking about a “future life.” All my interest is still on this life and the writing I am still able to do.
Wittgenstein was writing philosophy until the end and experiencing an eternity that was not haunted by the prospect of annihilation or the afterlife. After he had been diagnosed with terminal cancer, news that he apparently greeted with much relief, Wittgenstein moved in with Dr. and Mrs. Bevan. He remarked to the latter that “I am going to work now as I have never worked before.” In the remaining two months of his life he wrote the entire second half of the manuscript that was published as On Certainty. The last fragment of On Certainty is dated 27 April, the day before his death.
There is a story of Wittgenstein visiting the philosopher G. E. Moore in 1944 after Moore had suffered a stroke during a trip to the USA. Under instructions from his doctor, Moore's wife insisted that his friends limit their visits to an hour and a half. Wittgenstein was the only person to resent this rule, claiming that a discussion should not be broken off until it had reached its proper end. Furthermore, Wittgenstein added, if Moore did expire during such discussion, then that would be a very decent way to die, “with his boots on.”
Wittgenstein died with his boots on. He had developed a friendship with Mrs. Bevan; they would go to the pub together every evening at six o'clock where she would drink port and Wittgenstein would empty his glass into an aspidistra plant. She presented him with an electric blanket on his birthday and said, “Many happy returns.” Wittgenstein replied, staring back at her, “There will be no returns.”
Mrs. Bevan stayed with Wittgenstein during the last night and when she told him that his friends would be visiting the next day, he said to her, “Tell them I've had a wonderful life.”
Peculiarly, Wittgenstein was given a Catholic funeral in Cambridge. Although very far from being Catholic, there is no doubt that, as Ray Monk claims, Wittgenstein led a devoutly religious life. Wittgenstein's life and death resemble those of a saint for our time. It is defined by austerity, frugality, inner torment, a deeply troubled relation to sexuality, and utter ethical earnestness.
Wittgenstein put himself into situations of reckless danger during the First World War, and was delighted when he was assigned to a fighting unit on the Russian front, volunteering for the most dangerous job of occupying the observation post. He showed remarkable courage in combat and was rapidly promoted. When Wittgenstein was first shot at by Russian soldiers in the Carpathian Mountains, he declared,
Yesterday I was shot at. I was scared! I was afraid of death. I now have such a desire to live.
By contrast, Heidegger served during the final year of the war in a meteorological unit, first in Berlin and later on the Marne, engaged in the dangerous business of weather forecasting. However, like Lukács and Rosenzweig, Heidegger also underwent some sort of conversion through the events of the First World War, breaking with what he called “the dogmatic system of Catholicism.” After 1919, when appointed Husserl's assistant at the University of Freiburg in south-west Germany, he began a stunningly original series of lectures and seminars that culminated in the completion of Being and Time in 1926. At the centre of this book is a highly influential meditation on death.
Despite its length and legendary difficulty, the basic idea of Being and Time is extremely simple: being is time. That is, what it means for a human being to be is to exist temporally in the stretch between birth and death. Being is time and time is finite; it comes to an end with our death. Therefore, if we want to understand what it means to be an authentic human being, then it is essential that we constantly project our lives onto the horizon of our death, what Heidegger calls “being-towards-death.” Crudely stated, for thinkers like Paul, Augustine, Luther and Kierkegaard, it is through the relation to God that the self finds itself. For Heidegger, the question of God's existence or non-existence has no philosophical relevance. The self can only become what it truly is through the confrontation with death, by making a meaning out of our finitude. If our being is finite, then what it means to be human consists in grasping this finitude, in “becoming who one is” in a phrase of Nietzsche's that Heidegger liked to cite.
Despite its baroque linguistic garb, Heidegger's analysis of being-towards-death is exceptionally direct and powerful. However, it is open to the following objection. Heidegger argues that the only authentic death is one's own. To die for another person, he writes, would simply be to “sacrifice oneself.” To that extent, for Heidegger, the deaths of others are secondary to my death, which is primary. In my view (this criticism is first advanced by Edith Stein and Emmanuel Lev-inas), such a conception of death is both false and morally pernicious. On the contrary, I think that death comes into our world through the deaths of others, whether as close as a parent, partner or child or as far as the unknown victim of a distant famine or war. The relation to death is not first and foremost my own fear for my own demise, but my sense of being undone by the experience of grief and mourning.
Also, there is a surprisingly traditional humanism at work in Heidegger's approach to death. In his view, only human beings die, whereas plants and animals simply perish. I can't speak with any expertise about the death of plants, but empirical research would certainly seem to show that the higher mammals—dolphins, elephants, but also cats and dogs—also have an experience of mortality, of both their own and of those around them. We are not the only creatures in the universe who are touched by the sentiment of mortality.
In the winter of 1975, when Heidegger had turned eighty-six, his friend Heinrich Petzet visited him for the last time. As Petzet was about to leave, Heidegger raised his hand and said, “Yes, Petzet, the end is now drawing near.” After a refreshing night's sleep on 26 May 1976, Heidegger fell asleep again and died.
What is the world's shortest book? Answer: What I Learned from Heidegger, by Rudolf Carnap. Don't worry, I'm only joking. In 1932, Carnap wrote an infamous and influential critique of Heidegger, called “The Overcoming of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language.” He claimed that Heidegger's propositions were nonsensical because they were neither logically valid, nor empirically verifiable. Views such as Heidegger's may well give expression to an attitude towards life but, in Carnap's view, they are shot through with pseudo-philosophy and metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. The expression of such an attitude towards life has no right to a home in philosophy, but is better expressed in literature or music. Carnap writes, sarcastically, “Metaphysicians are musicians without musical ability.”
For Carnap, science can say all that can be said and potentially leaves no question unanswered. Science is also cumulative and there is progress in knowledge. Carnap thought that philosophy could and should be modelled on this idea of science and therefore although the history of philosophy (let alone the history of philosophers) might be an interesting curiosity, it is entirely secondary to the scientific activity of philosophy. Wittgenstein can be said to have exerted a vast influence on philosophy in Britain after his death. But through the agency of students like Quine, Carnap can be said to have been a massive force in shaping professional philosophy in the USA after the Second World War. Perhaps this is what accounts for American philosophy's infatuation with science and its isolation from the arts and humanities.
Although this is not widely known, as well as being a philosopher of logic and science, Carnap was a lifelong socialist humanist. He initially turned down the offer of a chair at UCLA because it would have obliged him to sign a McCarthyite loyalty oath.
Shortly before his death, Carnap visited imprisoned Mexican philosophers in Mexico City in a show of solidarity and he was very active in anti-racist politics. The last photograph of Carnap shows him attending the discussion of a black peace organization in Los Angeles. His was the only white face in the group. Carnap lived just below where I am writing, in a secluded home in the Santa Monica hills. His wife, Ina, committed suicide in 1964 and Carnap died at the age of seventy-nine after a brief but severe illness.
Another story of conversion, this time with a tragic ending. Edith Stein was born into an orthodox Jewish family before becoming an atheist in 1904. She was a brilliant student of philosophy and Husserl appointed her as his assistant when he took the chair in Freiburg in 1916. This was no easy task as Husserl was a particularly chaotic thinker and wrote in Gabelsberger shorthand, which was hard to decipher and even harder to edit. Stein took the opposite path to Heidegger: he began as a Catholic and a Thomist before losing his faith; she began as an atheist and converted to Catholicism and even translated Aquinas. In an appendix to her posthumously published major philosophical work, Finite and Eternal Being, she criticizes Heidegger's conception of being-towards-death. As Alasdair MacIntyre puts it in his book on Stein,
We learn what it is to anticipate our own deaths from those others whose anticipation of their deaths we have in some significant way shared.
One evening, when staying with friends in the summer of 1921, Stein was left alone in the house. She took down the autobiography of St. Theresa of Avila and was unable to stop reading until the end. She immediately decided that she had to convert to Catholicism and enter Theresa's Carmelite order in Cologne. On 31 December 1938, Stein crossed the border into Holland to escape Nazi persecution of so-called “non-Aryans.” However, in 1942, after the Dutch bishops published a condemnation of Nazi anti-Semitism, Hitler ordered that all non-Aryan Roman Catholics be arrested. She was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where she died in the gas chamber with her sister, Rosa, who was also a convert. Survivors of the death camp testified that Stein acted with great compassion to other sufferers.
Pope John Paul II (who was also, lest it be forgotten, a phenomenologist) canonized her on 11 October 1998.
After the Nazis came to power in 1933, Benjamin left Berlin for Paris, where he worked on his massive and unfinished Arcades Project. This was a study of the commodification of nineteenth-century bourgeois life seen through the lens of the Paris arcades of glass-roofed shops.
When France fell to the Germans in 1940, Benjamin headed south in the hope of leaving for the USA via Spain. Having crossed a wild part of the Pyrenees with a group of refugees, Benjamin arrived at Portbou on the French-Spanish border. The exact order of events after this point is unclear, but Benjamin appears to have committed suicide with morphine pills at the Hotel de Francia on the night of 27–28 September. Some say that the chief of police told Benjamin that he would be handed over to the Gestapo. As a Jew, a friend of Brecht and Adorno and a public critic of Nazism, it was clear that he would not be treated with mercy. Hannah Arendt crossed the French–Spanish border a few weeks later at exactly the same spot, and when in New York she gave Adorno a copy of what might be the last text that Benjamin wrote, “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” This extraordinarily powerful, if enigmatic, text finishes with the following words:
We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future was turned into homogenous, empty time. For every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter.
It is only by cultivating remembrance that one might turn away from the illusory and finally ideological obsession with the future, which is always a brighter future made possible by scientific and technological progress and ensuring eternal human happiness. On the contrary, Benjamin insists that the angel of history faces backwards. It is only looking at the past, by brushing history against the grain, that we can keep alive what Benjamin calls “a weak messianic power.” This weak power, this hope against hope, is the possibility that at each and every moment of time a revolutionary transformation might be brought about. In Benjamin, messianic Judaism and a revolutionary Marxism fuse together in a desperately apocalyptic vision.