Dying of Laughter?

Ronald Mendoza-de Jesús (bio)
University of Southern California

A review of Bradatan, Costica. Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers. Bloomsbury, 2015.

What kind of book is Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers? Although in Costica Bradatan characterizes his book its opening pages as “an exercise in an as yet uncharted ontology: the ontology of ironical existence,” those who might expect a phenomenological or even deconstructive inquiry into the ontological status of irony, existence and, above all, their coming together, will be disappointed (4, my emphasis). As its subtitle, The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers, suggests, Dying for Ideas inscribes itself within a doxographical tradition that extends back to Diogenes Laertius’s Vitæ philosophorum—a genre better suited to the narration of anecdotes about the lives of philosophers than to the construction of any theory of being. Indeed, given Bradatan’s endorsement of Pierre Hadot’s call to rethink philosophy as an “art of living,” the ontology that could be read out of Dying for Ideas would be an ontology that understands being directly from the ways in which philosophers have lead their lives philosophically (26).

Although such calls to return to a more “practical” understanding of philosophy as a “way of life” have become commonplace in recent years, Bradatan’s contribution to this recent turn in philosophy could be located in his characterization of philosophical praxis as coinciding with a form of existence that would be constituted by irony. And if, for Bradatan, the philosopher’s life is “ironical existence at its best”—thus providing the exemplary being that the task of sketching out an ontology of ironical existence requires—this most excellent form of irony can only be gleaned, in turn, from the ways in which exemplary philosophers, such as Socrates or Thomas More, died for their ideas (200). This explains why it would be somewhat misleading to characterize Bradatan’s book as a doxography. For Bradatan clearly intends for his book to exceed the purview of the merely anecdotal and move into the terrain of the more dignified genre of philosophical hagiography, if not even of martyr passions:

Human beings have been dying “for a cause” for as long as they have been around. They have died for God or for their fellow-humans, for ideas or ideals, for things real or imaginary, reasonable or utopian. Of all the possible varieties of voluntary death, the book you’ve started to read is about philosophers who die for the sake of their philosophy.(4)

If philosophy is ultimately an “art of living,” and if death constitutes the “culmination” of life, then it stands to reason that the death of those philosophers who not only thought philosophically about death but actually died for their philosophical ideas may have something interesting to tell us about the philosophical status of existence, of death, and of irony. Unfortunately, Bradatan’s book not only fails to make a convincing case for granting this privilege to philosophy’s martyrs, but also does not tell a compelling story about their martyrdom, taking these deaths as an occasion to rehearse unexamined ideas that are philosophically bankrupt.

Bradatan structures his philosopher’s hagiography around the metaphor of the “layers” of death. This choice of metaphor is never interrogated or justified, and Bradatan himself admits that talking of death as having “layers” may be an “oversimplification” (40). Although he suggests that there could be multiple layers of death, his book only focuses on two, which are simply distinguished as “the first” and “the second” layers, and which also provide the titles of the book’s second and fourth chapters—which together constitute almost half of the entire volume. As their numerical ordering suggests, the movement between these two layers is progressive. Inverting the typical platonic schema, the book goes from the abstraction of the first layer to the concretion of the second, where the first layer of death presents us with the abstract or theoretical encounter with finitude that characterizes the lives of those philosophers who, as it were, have no skin in the game of life and death because they have not been condemned to die for their ideas. When the second layer of death is reached, “death can no longer be a ‘topic,’ there cannot be anything abstract about it. On the contrary, this layer of death is entangled with one’s flesh; it occupies one’s living body inch by inch” (126). This sequence accounts for the tight, if a bit predictable, structure of the book, which takes us from an examination of philosophers who have written about death as a theoretical issue to a rewriting of the lives and deeds of philosophers who, in dying for their ideas, have actually performed a good, philosophical death.

In the opening chapter, “Philosophy as Self-fashioning,” Bradatan takes as his guiding example Montaigne’s understanding of his own self as the product of the performative force of his Essais (37). Although Montaigne did not die for his ideas, the performative force of his writings is grounded in his relentless confrontation with mortality. For Bradatan, Montaigne mastered death by looking at it in the eye and finding in its abyss “all he needed to know about himself” (38). As such, Montaigne exemplifies the way in which a philosophical self can assert itself only by turning death into its source of constancy. In this way, the first chapter lays the foundation for the book by proposing a conception of philosophical existence that coincides with the domestication of mortality. This domestication can only be achieved through a series of performances that enable philosophers to measure themselves against the imminent danger of death and enlist death to the cause of a philosophical life, becoming the basis on which the possibility that existence may have any meaning at all is secured.

After establishing, with the help of Montaigne, a conception of philosophy that locates in the philosopher’s confrontation with death the sole source of the validity and authenticity of any philosophy, the second chapter turns to the “first layer” of death, focusing on the ways in which philosophers, artists, and writers who were not themselves under the threat of a death sentence conceived of death in what Bradatan calls a “naive” and “abstract” way (40, 83). Bradatan uses Edgar Munch’s Self-Portrait with Skeleton Arm and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal to show how artists present our mortality as enabling us to lead a more authentic and meaningful life. The counterpoint to these artistic examples of a philosophically meaningful life is provided by Bradatan’s engagement with Tolstoi’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, which takes up a suggestion made in a footnote of Martin Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), in which Heidegger refers to Tolstoi’s novel as an illustration of inauthentic death, that is, death experienced under the aegis of das Man or “the they.”

Although Bradatan’s readings of Munch, Bergman, and Tolstoi are interesting and entertaining, his engagement with the philosophical approaches to death in Heidegger and Paul Landsberg lacks philosophical rigor. First of all, Bradatan makes a mistake about Heidegger’s thinking about death in Sein und Zeit that merits being discussed at some length, because it is symptomatic of what I find most problematic about his understanding of philosophy, irony and death. Bradatan claims that Heidegger relies on a “metaphor” to “liken human life to a process of ripening,” in which “the riper we become the closer to death we are” (57). Although Heidegger does use the “metaphor” of a fruit in §48 of Sein und Zeit, Bradatan misconstrues the gist of Heidegger’s argument. For Heidegger draws this analogy to make the exact opposite point, that is, to insist on the ontological difference between the way in which a fruit’s ripening unfolds as a progressive movement towards its end (Ende) and the way of being-towards-the-end that characterizes Dasein’s “relation” to death. Whereas the fruit’s end coincides with its fulfillment or completion (Vollendung), this cannot be affirmed of Dasein. For, as Heidegger states, “even unfulfilled Dasein ends” (235). Dasein’s ending does not and cannot take the form of any process of organic maturation in which the death of Dasein would also coincide with its completion. The incompleteness of human existence is such that death, far from being the coming to completion of Dasein, is instead the removal of even that very incompleteness which human life is: death, as Heidegger states, “means the possibility of the measureless impossibility of existence” (251). Furthermore, to the extent that Dasein’s proper way of being-towards-death is bound up in the disclosure of death as the possibility of an impossibility that knows no limit, it follows that any attempts to “domesticate death”—the fundamental goal that structures Dying for Ideas, for which a certain reading of Montaigne (no doubt a domesticating reading) provides the blueprint—would amount to a futile rejection of the very possibility of experiencing human mortality (Bradatan 40).

In turning the death of Dasein into a sort of organic process, Bradatan not only makes a mistake; he also reveals the extent to which his own understanding of what philosophy ought to be coincides with the elimination of the philosophical claims of a radical understanding of finitude. This much is confirmed by his discussion of Landsberg’s Essai sur l’éxperience de la mort which, for Bradatan, provides a corrective to Heidegger’s death-centered philosophy. A German Jew who converted to Catholicism and a former student of Heidegger, Landsberg came to reject Heidegger’s characterization of human life as finite in favor of an understanding of death that, according to Bradatan, sees in it only a step towards the human person’s infinite “self-realization:” “If Montaigne thinks that, to render death less savage, we have to make it our guest, and Heidegger that, far from being death’s host, we are its hostage, Landsberg sees death’s visit as our greatest opportunity. Death is here only to take us elsewhere” (71). In refuting Heidegger’s “philosophy of death,” Landsberg relies on the authority of Jesus, who revealed “a spiritual realm inaccessible to death” (Landsberg, qtd. in Bradatan 73), and on the Christian mystics, whom Bradatan describes as “God’s traffickers,” who “routinely smuggle bits of eternity into our corrupted world, keeping it on eternal-life support, as it were” (Bradatan 73). Although it is clear that Bradatan prefers Landsberg to Heidegger, the specifically philosophical reasons that justify such preference are difficult to ascertain—unless approaching the enigma of death on the basis of the Christian dogma of the resurrection is to be counted as a philosophical argument.

The third chapter, “Philosophy in the Flesh,” provides a transition between the first and the second layers of death by focusing on the body of the “martyr-philosopher,” and specifically on the ways in which martyrdom, as a process of “dematerialization,” requires the transcendence of the body: “Since our embodied selves are designed to maintain and preserve life, philosophers ‘dying for ideas,’ to be successful, have to transcend their embodiment” (110, 87). Focusing on the “martyrdom” of figures like Hypatia, Giordano Bruno, Simone Weil, Jan Patočka and Mahatma Gandhi, Bradatan’s interest in this chapter is supposedly to develop a “hermeneutic able to make sense of a unique rhetoric: that of the dying flesh,” telling us, at the end of the chapter, that he has “looked closely at the philosopher’s body in the process of withering away, seeking to transcribe what it had to say. I’ve read its gestures and written down the message. I’ve listened to its silence, and especially to its being silenced. I’ve charted the flesh that lies between the two layers of death” (124). As this passage makes clear, the underlying tone of this chapter is evangelical; here the Platonist and crypto-Christian tendencies already present in the first two chapters of the book take center stage. And yet, because the chapter basically boils down to a series of statements praising these larger than life figures for their stoic confrontation with their death sentences, for their ways of commanding power over others through their bodily practices, or for their displays of integrity in times of extreme hardship, it is hard to see what new message—let alone what specifically philosophical message—was inscribed in these dying bodies that only Bradatan, armed with a hermeneutics that is nowhere even schematically developed, has been able to interpret. Though he claims to have “charted” these dying bodies, what he brings back to us from his foray into this supposed terra incognita is a repetition of those aspects of the Christian worldview that justify Nietzsche’s characterization of Christianity as “Platonism for the masses.” Under the weight of a traditional theological philosophy, a book that promised to rethink philosophy as an embodied performance becomes another repetition of the Platonic denunciation of the flesh.

The last two chapters, “The Second Layer” and “The Making of a Martyr-Philosopher,” focus on the imprisonment and eventual martyrdom of Socrates, Boethius, and Thomas More. Having examined the role that bodily transcendence plays in philosophical and non-philosophical martyrdoms in chapter three, Bradatan spends most of chapter four retracing the ways in which these philosopher-martyrs turned their very philosophizing into an attempt to fashion for themselves an authentic self by welcoming resolutely their impending and unjust death. Although chapter four promises to finally take us to the layer of death in which mortality is no longer a theoretical abstraction, it is in chapter five that Bradatan ties together all the threads that he had been weaving since the beginning of his book. One such thread is the relation between death and narrative which, introduced at the very beginning of the book, is fleshed out in greater detail in the context of Bradatan’s “meta-reflections” on the conditions that are required in order to produce a philosophical martyr. Throughout the book, Bradatan argues that death, as the limit of existence, is the only source of finality and certainty in our lives and therefore plays an essential role in enabling life to be narratable. But the relationship between death and narrative extends beyond the single trajectory of a life or a biography, since one of the conditions of possibility for the production of a philosopher-martyr is the witnessing agency of a doxographer or a hagiographer who will write his or her story. Bradatan uses the term montatore (Italian for film editor) to refer to what the biographer of the philosopher-martyr does to his or her life story: she or he must “incinerate all the irrelevant details, the embarrassing little facts, and blushing moments, and preserve only that which can fit into a legible story” (169). In this way, Bradatan not only gives his reader examples of the exemplarily dangerous lives of those philosophers who have died for their ideas, he also puts his own book forward as a kind of manual for becoming a montatore of the foundational philosophers of our choosing. It is telling, however, that what has to be sacrificed for the sake of aggrandizing the sacred nature of these philosophical lives is the very truth of these lives themselves. His willingness to “incinerate the details” for the sake of producing a cohesive narrative that intensifies the myth of these lives reveals the extent to which Bradatan understands both the history of philosophy and the philosophy of history as the continuous unfolding of one monumental sacrifice, from Socrates onward. He may deserve praise for the honesty with which he endorses editorializing the truth for the sake of aggrandizing philosophy’s aura, but Bradatan’s boldness does not compensate for the fact that he never asks whether philosophy (or, indeed, humanity) actually needs more epic stories of our great ancestors. In fact, Bradatan’s book reinforces the logic of sacrifice that is part and parcel of western philosophy since at least Plato, according to which the ritualized killing of life provides a way of accessing a form of spiritual life that lies beyond the reach of death. By endorsing this logic of sacrifice, Bradatan’s “ontology” ironically requires that more philosophers be placed under a death sentence, if only so that those who are not yet subjected to capital punishment can continue to have material for their stories.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Bradatan ends his book with a postscript, “To Die Laughing,” in which he depicts philosophical existence as the apotheosis of ironic existence, which emerges when the philosopher, confronting his impending death, laughs at the entire cosmos:

The philosophers’ laughing at existence at the very moment of their departure from it must be their most significant feat—the ultimate philosophical masquerade. And what is such laughter if not the best possible way to act out your final philosophical insight — the notion, that is, that you were made in mockery and your life is a cosmic joke? …. Ironical existence at its best. That’s how you can preserve some dignity in the comedy of being in which, unasked, you have been cast to play.(199–200)

This is Bradatan at his most Nietzschean: the Platonic-Christian conceptual matrix that guides Dying for Ideas until this point vanishes when the philosopher is, at the end, forced to confront the ontological comedy that is existence, in which “life is a cosmic joke.” Unlike other kinds of martyrs who die in the name of a god or for the sake of political or religious causes, philosophers who have died voluntarily—and for philosophical reasons—are not shielded from the painful realization that existence itself is meaningless and that the promise of the afterlife is a mere anesthetic contraption, meant to prevent them from collapsing in the face of an existential horror vacui. And yet, even at this point, Bradatan manages to save the possibility of turning this joke into a source of meaning by identifying in the philosopher’s laughter the possibility of mastering even this comedy that life and death are. If the philosophical way of life is the most ironic, the “best” example of such irony is therefore provided by the philosopher who, in laughing at life at the moment of death, laughs at death itself and is able to master it, to “trick the trickster” (200).

Can the irony of life and death—the realization that death does not grant meaning to life but renders it meaningless—be mastered by the philosopher’s hyper-ironic laughter? Bradatan believes that this is the case, though I am not so sure. At any rate, nowhere in the book will the reader find a justification for this belief in the power of philosophical irony to rescue the “dignity” of philosophers’ lives and deaths. Indeed, although Bradatan states at the beginning and at the end of his book that the underlying goal of his project is to chart the terra incognita of this “ontology of ironical existence,” there is no serious attempt in Dying for Ideas to come to terms with the philosophical stakes of Bradatan’s project. This project is undermined by the very impossibility of experiencing one’s own death and therefore of knowing it, so that the goal of charting an ontology of this terra incognita ought to be drastically reformulated, if not abandoned. If absolute irony is only on the side of death—since the only thing the philosopher can do to death is ultimately to laugh at death’s laughter—it stands to reason that the irony of existence has very little to do with the possibility of finding any form of meaning or dignity in death. Existence would be ironic to the extent that death is the “permanent parabasis,” as Friedrich Schlegel puts it, that interrupts any attempt to settle on the meaning of existence, keeping it open until the very end, and thus never fully known.

Instead of confronting these questions, Dying for Ideas takes its readers on the equivalent of a philosophical via cruxis, a barely secularized procession that celebrates the deeds of the great men (and the occasional women) whose sacrifice founded the tradition of philosophy that Bradatan wants to champion. As I read Bradatan’s book, I could not but hope for the end of so much sacrifice—for the chance of a philosophical story with a different beginning, and perhaps no foreseeable ending.

Works Cited

• Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by Joan Stambaugh and edited by Dennis Schmidt. SUNY Press, 2010.