The Perils of Philosophy

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The Perils of Philosophy

By Ray Tabler

If asked to list dangerous professions, I might choose lumberjack, crab boat crewman, or maybe alligator wrestler. Way down that list, probably not on it at all, would be philosopher. As it turns out, though, philosophers live dangerously. And they die that way too.

The most salient indicator of this is the surprising tendency for philosophers to die violently. Sitting around and pondering, while sedentary and perhaps a cause of obesity and eventual heart disease, is not usually considered hazardous. However, that is apparently not the case. If you happen to search Wikipedia for “deaths of philosophers” you will find an entire page (entry?) on the subject. Why does Wikipedia have a page about the deaths of philosophers? I don’t know. It’s the internet. No matter what you want to know about, somebody has a website all about it.

If you peruse this Wikipedia page, you will notice a disturbing amount of violent death. Socrates was forced to drink poison for stirring up the young people of Athens. Good thing Elvis or the Beatles didn’t sideline in pondering. Who knows what would have happened to them. Empedocles jumped into a volcano. Isocrates starved himself to death (he was upset with current events, 338 BC). Anaxarchus was pounded to death by pestles in a large vessel, as if he were a giant sprig of cilantro. Lucretius killed himself after drinking a love potion. Seneca also killed himself to keep the Roman emperor Nero from coming up with a more colorful way for him to die. Boethius, Abraham ibn Daud, Jan Hus, Thomas More, Girolamo Maggi, Giordano Bruno, Lucilio Vanini, Algernon Sidney, Gustav Shpet, Kurt Grelling and Dietrich Bonhoeffer were all executed by a wide range of authorities.

Hypatia (a rare female philosopher) was beaten to death by an angry mob. Maybe there haven’t been that many woman philosophers because they have more sense than to sit around all day pondering. Or maybe they just didn’t have the time, being too busy cooking, cleaning, changing diapers, and generally picking up after absent-minded philosophers.

Uriel da Costa and Pythagoras also met their ends from angry mobs. Pythagoras was a combination philosopher and mathematician, of right triangle fame. He started an entire religion based upon mathematics. His followers were even told who to marry from calculations of a today-unknown nature, sort of an ancient computer dating service. The story is that Pythagoras almost got away from the mob, but they cornered him next to a bean field. Pythagoras hated beans and refused to cross the field, even though it meant his death. I’m not sure I believe that story. But, he was pretty strange dude so I can’t dismiss it out of hand. (Update: I’ve since learned that Pythagoras didn’t hate beans. His philosophy held that beans contain the souls of reincarnated people. Or something like that. Either way, a bean field sealed his fate.)

There has been a disproportionate amount of suicide among philosophers, but the method of suicide for philosophers is typically out of the box. Empedocles (volcano) and Isocrates (starved himself to death), and Lucretius (love potion number nine) have already been mentioned. Diogenes of Sinope held his breath until he died after he had eaten a bad octopus (or maybe been bitten by a dog, reports vary). Zeno of Citium also died from refusing to breathe after he broke his toe. Presumably, the addition of a location to their names is to distinguish them from other famous ancient Greeks named Diogenes or Zeno, although “the nimrod who decided to stop breathing for no good reason” would have done the job just as well. The list of philosopher suicides goes on (and on), but it gets a bit tedious.

A number of philosophers were dispatched by one-on-one violence. Siger of Brabant was killed by his clerk, with a pen no less. Moritz Schlick was shot by a student of his, who was either insane, disagreed on a point of philosophy, or was a rival for the affections of a woman, depending on who you believe. Although, I suppose all three could be true at once. Gandhi was shot by someone who didn’t share his views on non-violence. Richard Montague was strangled after a wild party.

Some philosophers didn’t meet violent ends, maybe not even most did. Friedrich Nietzsche went insane, and then died of several strokes. Epicurus died (painfully, but philosophically) of kidney stones. And then there is my personal favorite, Chrysippus. Who, is reported to have died of laughter, after he got his donkey drunk on wine and the inebriated beast tried, unsuccessfully to eat figs. Now, I will admit that a donkey so drunk it can’t even manage to munch a few figs would be pretty darn funny. But, it has been my experience that people don’t start feeding animals alcoholic beverages until they’ve consumed a fair amount of alcohol themselves. So, there may have been more than a giggle fit to blame for Chrysippus’s fate.

Plato either died at a wedding feast or listening as a young Thracian girl played the flute. Both would’ve been pleasant ways to go, and it’s not unusual for the details of ancient events to be in doubt. Besides being separated from the ancient world by a dark age, the fall of several empires, numerous crusades and a jihad or two, all that we know about that time is because random people happened to jot it down on a roll of papyrus now and then. There were no public libraries to safeguard the legacy of the past. (Well there was the great library at Alexandria, but that burned to the ground at least three times.) Some of the records were burned, and some just didn’t get copied over once the original roll got too old. One scholar estimates that only one percent of ancient works survive. That number has been disputed, but even if the actual figure is ten percent, or even fifty percent, that’s still a staggering, tragic loss. Euripides wrote over ninety plays; we have eighteen today. Sappho wrote nine books of poetry, of which only one poem survives in its entirety. The works of some ancient authors is only known to us by what others wrote about them. What a horrific fate for any writer to contemplate, the only thing left of you are the words of literary and drama critics. It sounds like the mission statement for a special room in hell.

Well, there you have it. Philosophy sounds like a cushy gig, sitting around and thinking about life, the universe, and important matters. But, I wouldn’t sell a life insurance policy to a philosopher. It’s not the safest job.

END.

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