Dead head

GRAVE REVIEWS Critchley says happiness depends on how well you accept your own mortality.

Photograph: John Simmons

Sitting in his office at the New School, professor and author Simon Critchley is laying out the crux of his latest book. “To learn how to die is to learn how to live—that’s the argument in a nutshell,” the 48-year-old writer says with enthusiasm and a British accent (he was raised in Liverpool). “It seems odd, but if you don’t accept mortality, life becomes meaningless—a flat line.”

He’s talking about The Book of Dead Philosophers, an anecdotal and brainy work composed of brief introductory essays followed by 190 chronologically organized profiles—ranging from one sentence to a few pages—that describe how eminent thinkers through the ages have shed their mortal coils. That might sound like a morbid dose of memento mori wisdom—or, worse, a grim gimmick. But Critchley, an author who’s stylistically limber enough to write studies of Heidegger and essays for Harper’s, tackles his latest topic with dry wit, lively prose and an eye for awkwardness (in these pages, death, like life, can be messy).

Some figures face their final moments with Zen-like sangfroid (Freud, who died of cancer, would say to his friends: “Goodbye; you may never see me again”). Other scenarios cast death as a brush with utter absurdity. We encounter Plato, who died of a lice infection; Hypathia, murdered by a mob of Christians who removed her skin with oyster shells; Roland Barthes, who was hit by a dry-cleaning truck while crossing the street; David Hume, an atheist who died after being badgered by John Boswell to admit the possibility of an afterlife (his response: “’Tis possible that a piece of coal, put upon the fire, will not burn”); and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who collided with a Great Dane on a Paris street and died from a resulting head wound two years later.

The book, Critchley admits, is a “messy and plural ragbag,” but from these examples we might learn something about facing our own demise. And according to the author, most contemporary Americans are in desperate need of a crash course. “We’re in very bad shape, living in a culture where death is considered obscene and shuffled away,” he says of our era of plastic surgery and faraway warfare. “We can talk endlessly about sex and your right to have an orgasm and your right to whatever, but we can’t talk about death, and without that we are enslaved by our fear. Happiness is an illusion.”

The goal, Critchley says, is to live in the present. “I think we live chronically future lives,” he says. “We’re endlessly deferring gratification, or we’re complaining about the past.” Acknowledging our death, the author suggests, might convince us to live in the now. This is a running theme in The Book of Dead Philosophers, where we find Ludwig Wittgenstein having a revelation on the Eastern Front. “Yesterday I was shot at,” the philosopher effused. “I was scared! I was afraid of death. I now have such a desire to live.” When TONY mentions this anecdote to Critchley, he responds with zeal and a hint of gossip. “Yes! He was enormously excited,” he says. “I mean, it’s true, Wittgenstein’s excitement at being in the company of younger men is a long story, but he surely thought that having his life on the line was the moment he finally learned to live and to philosophize.” (For more on Wittgenstein, see Reviews.)

Critchley himself seems like a carpe diem sort of guy: He wrote The Book of Dead Philosophers at the tail end of a three-month fellowship at the Getty Research Center in Los Angeles. “I finished my work on Rousseau in a month, and then was stuck in L.A., going out of my mind with boredom. But the Getty and UCLA had these wonderful libraries, so I decided to research and write this book.”

Living in the present, overcoming the past: You could glean this message from a New Age huckster like The Power of Now author Eckhart Tolle. What differentiates Critchley is his intelligence, capacity for emotional variation (his entry on Jacques Derrida, who remained terrified of death, is distinctly melancholy) and sense of pleasure. “What I loathe is how boring and self-satisfied most popular philosophy is,” he says. “My aim was to both gossip and take my subjects seriously, to spice it up a bit.”

Throughout the interview, the author tosses out ideas—about humor, art during war (Wittgenstein, he points out, wrote his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while in the trenches) and sentimentality (“it’s engineered to allow people to be vague and run away from what’s really important”). It seems like he could write on a number of topics, but for now, he’s focusing on grief. “The question I don’t really deal with in the new book, which for me is a key question, is how we deal with the deaths of those we love.” Whatever form that study takes, readers can expect Critchley to handle mourning with droll and well-honed prose, transforming another potentially bummer topic into a pop-philosophy gem.

The Book of Dead Philosophers (Vintage, $15.95 paperback) is out now. Critchley reads Mar 6 at McNally Jackson.

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