The Death of Philosophers
Philosophy is preparation for death, so said Socrates, the Greek philosopher par excellence, a martyr to the cause, executed by the state in 399 BC for corrupting the youth. According to his pupil Plato, who recorded the scene of his death in the Phaedo, when friends snuck into his prison cell to help him escape into exile, Socrates refused to go. He argued that it is not death we should avoid, but living an immoral life. Escaping would be wrong because it would go against the judgment and will of the state, which has authority over its citizens as parents have over their children.
The next day, he drank hemlock, walked around until he felt its effects taking hold, and lay down to pass on. His friends wept all around him, you can see the scene depicted in the images above. Before he lay down, he told them that he would need to rest before continuing his search for wisdom in the afterlife, where his interlocutors would be the likes of Hesiod and Homer — a whole new ball game.
Aristotle is rumored to have accidentally poisoned himself with aconite, although the true story of his death may be less dramatic. He always suffered from poor digestion and may have died of unspecified stomach problems at an altogether appropriate age. Having learned from Plato and Socrates’ experiences, he never went up against the state. He went along to get along, and stamped a role model for the philosopher as a conformist, an empiricist, pragmatic to a fault. No wonder he had stomach problems. I imagine him running around in the afterlife wearing khakis and telling Zeus bad dad jokes.
The death of Empedocles, the phusikoi (or natural philosopher) who first named the four elements in the Pre-Socratic quest for the-stuff-of-which-all-things-are-made, is the most spectacular of all. He ended his life by jumping into the crater of Mount Etna, a volcano in Sicily. This dramatic act was supposedly meant to prove his divine nature; he believed that by jumping into the volcano, he would transform into an immortal god. Thus he returned to the bowels of the earth where gods were known to reside, and to his rightful place in the pantheon.
His trickster friend Heraclitus was also a fan of fire, but he wasn’t about to jump into a volcano. Instead, he opted for a more grounded method — literally — by covering himself in cow dung. He was under the mistaken impression that this could cure his dropsy, an antiquated term describing the body’s unwelcome tendency to retain fluid, effectively turning him into a human water balloon. Unfortunately, this misadventure in ancient medicine proved fatal. His death reminds us that the chaos of the universe spares no one, not even the philosophers who dedicate their lives to looking deeply into its secrets and paradoxes.
René Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, supposedly met his end after catching pneumonia. This unfortunate turn of events was spurred by his patron, Queen Christina of Sweden, who insisted on receiving lessons in mathematics and philosophy at the ungodly hour of 5 am. Descartes, a man of leisure accustomed to greeting the day at 11 am, found himself at the mercy of the early morning chill, a drastic change that allegedly led to the pneumonia responsible for his demise.
(I once shared this tale with my 8 am Modern Philosophy class at a prestigious college not becuase they were complaining about the early start — these overachievers wouldn’t have complained — but to send a subtle, if somewhat passive-aggressive message during a department chair’s observation. Venturing into the depths of philosophy at such an hour could quite literally be the death of you. And that is the most salient thing I have learned from Descartes.)
Yet, there’s a twist in the tale of Descartes’ demise. It turns out that his death may not have been at the hands of a woman (an amazing! brilliant! philosopher-in-her-own-right!), but rather due to a more sinister cause. Rumors long whisper that Descartes was actually poisoned by a Catholic priest who gave him a communion wafer laced with arsenic. This drastic measure was allegedly taken after Descartes voiced opinions that were deemed heretical. So, in a plot twist worthy of a philosophical thriller, the very foundation of rational thought may have been undermined not by debate or illness, but by a betrayal of trust over matters of faith.
Another philosopher who went up against the church, openly flaunting his atheism, is David Hume. Renowned for his jovial disposition, this stout Scottish thinker passed away peacefully in his bed, encircled by loved ones, maintaining his cheerful spirit to the end, all while devoid of religious consolation. Throughout his life, many speculated that he would abandon his atheistic stance in his final moments, seeking divine forgiveness. Bets were even wagered on this dramatic turn of repentance. Yet, Hume remained steadfast in his beliefs, never veering from his skeptical path. His unwavering stance has undeniably enriched philosophy, leaving a legacy that celebrates the value of questioning everything.
The death of Walter Benjamin is among the most tragic events in the history of 20th-century philosophy. In stark contrast to his contemporaries — Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, who successfully immigrated to America following the rise of Nazism in Europe and forged connections with The New School for Social Research in New York City — Benjamin’s fate took a darker turn, as he tragically never managed to escape the European continent. Devastated by the news that the Gestapo had obliterated his library back in Germany, and haunted by the fear of being captured and sent to a Nazi concentration camp, he is believed to have taken his own life with a morphine overdose in the small Catalan town of Port Bou, where he is now buried.
Benjamin had faced detention, and a subsequent release, in the French port town of Marseille as he sought passage on a freighter to Ceylon. So he chose to navigate the Pyrenees by foot instead, in an effort to dodge patrols along the French-Spanish border. Upon his arrival in Spain, a hotel owner’s betrayal led him to believe that his extradition to the Nazis was imminent. Trapped by a closed border, he found himself in a desperate situation and made an unthinkable decision to end his life. Yet, fate delivered a harsh blow when the border was reopened the day following his death. Had Benjamin endured just one more day, he might have seen through the completion of his Arcades Project, potentially reshaping the landscape of intellectual thought. The loss of what could have been remains a source of deep sorrow.
While the prevailing belief is that Benjamin chose to end his own life to avoid extradition, alternative theories have emerged. Some reports suggest that Benjamin, known for his Marxist ideologies, may have been targeted and killed by Stalinist agents. But Stuart Jeffries, in his review of “Grand Hotel Abyss,” mentions this theory after describing Benjamin’s suicide on the Spanish-French border. He suggests that the idea Benjamin was murdered by Stalinist agents is a bizarre and distracting speculation, ultimately dismissing it due to the improbability that Stalin would have been disturbed enough by Benjamin’s writings to order his assassination.
Karl Marx, the revolutionary socialist thinker whose ideas would go on to shape the course of world politics and philosophy, passed away on March 14, 1883, at the age of 64. His death was the culmination of a long struggle with bronchitis and pleurisy, conditions exacerbated by a lifetime of arduous intellectual labor and the hardships of living in exile due to his political beliefs. Despite his immense influence on modern political thought, Marx spent his final years in poverty, largely unrecognized and often struggling to provide for his family.
At the time of his death, Marx had been living in London, a city that had been his home for the latter half of his life. London offered him the anonymity and relative safety needed to continue his work, but it also subjected him to the privations of a life without financial security. His situation was so dire that Friedrich Engels, his lifelong friend and collaborator, often provided financial assistance to keep Marx and his family afloat.
Marx was buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery, initially in an unassuming grave with only a modest headstone to mark his resting place. It wasn’t until 1954 that a larger monument, featuring a bust of Marx and inscribed with the last line of The Communist Manifesto — “Workers of All Lands Unite” — was erected to commemorate his grave.
Gilles Deleuze, a towering figure in post-structuralist philosophy, met a tragic end in 1995 when he leapt from the window of his apartment in Paris. His decision to take his own life came after a prolonged battle with severe respiratory issues; Deleuze had been suffering for years, a situation compounded by the loss of a lung and a debilitating decline in his ability to communicate, both verbally and in writing.
He was known to have said that studying Philosophy would drive you mad, and yet Deleuze’s suicide, while deeply tragic, seems utterly rational. His choice to end his suffering can be seen as a final assertion of autonomy, a last act of resistance against an existence that had become intolerable. It did not come as a complete surprise to those who knew of his deteriorating health and personal struggles. It was not the action of a philosopher driven to madness.
Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most provocative and influential philosophers of the 19th century, met a tragic end that starkly contrasts with the intellectual vigor of his earlier life. Nietzsche’s health began to deteriorate dramatically in 1889, when he suffered a mental breakdown in Turin, Italy, allegedly after witnessing a horse being whipped. This event marked the beginning of his decline, and he spent the last decade of his life in a state of incapacitated madness, under the care of his mother and then his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. During this period, Nietzsche was unable to continue his philosophical work, his once-prodigious output reduced to nonsensical letters and writings.
On August 25, 1900, in Weimar, Germany, at the age of 55, he succumbed to his insanity, dementia, and syphilis (referred to as “underlying health conditions” in polite society), at which point, so the joke goes, God said: “Nietzsche is dead.”
