Dying for Ideas

What do Socrates, Hypatia, Giordano Bruno, Thomas More, and Jan Patocka have in common? First, they were all faced one day with the most difficult of choices: stay faithful to your ideas and die or renounce them and stay alive. Second, they all chose to die. Their spectacular deaths have become not only an integral part of their biographies, but they are also inseparable from their work. A death for ideas is a piece of philosophical work in its own right; Socrates may have never written a line, but his death is one of the greatest philosophical best-sellers of all time. Dying for Ideas explores the limit-situation in which philosophers find themselves when the only means of persuasion they can use is their own dying bodies and the public spectacle of their death. Silenced by brute force, they cannot argue anymore and have to turn philosophy into bodily performance. The phenomenology of this unique situation is as fascinating as it has been neglected.In the manner of a dramatic narrative, the book tells the story of the philosopher's encounter with death as seen from several angles: the tradition of philosophy as a way of life; the body as the locus of fundamental human experiences; death of a classical philosophical topic; fear of death as a torturer of philosophical minds; finally, the philosophers' scapegoating and their live performance of a martyr's death, followed by apotheosis and disappearance into myth. While rooted in the history of philosophy, Dying for Ideas is an exercise in challenging and breaking disciplinary boundaries. This is a book about Socrates and Heidegger, but also about Gandhi's fasting unto death and self-immolation as political protest; about Girard and Passolini, and still about self-fashioning and the art of the essay; Boethius and Montaigne are discussed, and so are Bergman's Seventh Seal and Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilyich