Intercepting the post

Dear Epiphenomenos,

Forgive my intrusion, but your friend, Eraunetes had left your letter lying open open his table while I was visiting.  Ever the rude one, I couldn’t help but be caught by the subject of your letter.  And so, while Eraunetes was off searching for some references to help with an answer, I read it.  Terribly rude of me, I know, but that’s the thing with letters, one never really knows where they might end up.

I will not take up too much of your time with such a presumptuous letter, but I wanted to ask a question of you.  Or, in truth, reply to one of your questions.  Perhaps it is because I may be something of a pagan, but it seemed to me that your questioning of the relation between theology and philosophy is the very gesture of philosophy, second only to questioning the role and purpose of philosophy itself, which follows fast upon the heels of your first query.

Perhaps you are right.  There is too much recollection of former glories, as you say.  If the Queen and her Handmaiden, (but which is which, or are we dealing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern here?) both only manifest themselves as memory of past days, this hardly extricates us from the problem.  For we can no more enquire into the purpose of those two tasks – separable or not – than enquire into the purpose of our purposive remembering of them.

Perhaps a dose of forgetfulness is required.  We remember too much.  But can we choose what we forget?

Forgive the ridiculous temerity of this letter.

Your friendly correspondent,

Grammates

Filed under: Philosophy, memory , Letters, Philosophy

Desperately atheist lives

In an epilogue to The Book of Dead Philosophers, Simon Critchley (not a Christian, by the way), makes the following interesting comment:

Christianity is about nothing other than getting ready to die.  It is rigorous training for death, a kind of death in life that places little value on longevity.  Christianity, in the hands of a Paul, an Augustine or a Luther, is a way of becoming reconciled to the brevity of human life and giving up the desire for wealth, worldly goods and temporal power.  Nothing is more inimical [hostile, unfriendly] to most people who call themselves Christians than true Christianity.  This is because they are actually leading quietly desperate atheist lives bounded by a desire for longevity and a terror of annihilation.  (p.280)

Filed under: Philosophy, books, quotations , Christianity, death, Philosophy, Simon Critchley, The Book of Dead Philosophers

Philosophies of life and death

I’ve been reading Simon Critchley’s The Book of Dead Philosophers.  It’s quite fun, and worth a read.  Almost like reading blog posts really – short entries, witty, not too much mention of actual philosophies, more a focus on the wierd, wonderful or ordinary ways that they die.

A quick search shows the book was pretty widely reviewed (though lots of the reviews are pretty rubbish, just flimsy endorsements.  Some even get facts from the book wrong).  There is something that catches our attention in the philosophical attitude to death.  Interestingly Critchley devotes some space to Christian views of death, and he seems to admire Paul, Origen, particularly Augustine, and others for their attitude to death and grief. Surprisingly, perhaps, Critchley, himself the unbeliever, upbraids contemporary Christians for not being nearly so rigorous in their thinking.

Critchley comments in an interview at the last Sydney Writer’s Festval:

And so on the one hand the Epicurean Socratic Senecan idea of death as an ideal of solitary facing of death in calm, I think is enormously compelling, but it doesn’t face up to this question of grief and the way grief leaves us undone, and I want to say that the self is something which is done and undone in this experience of grief, and we carry those that we grieve over in us, but as memories, as things which in a sense we cannot fully capture. There’s a deep problem with grief and mourning in the philosophical tradition. So for that I go into, if you like Christianity and other spiritual traditions.

I saw him give a lecture while he was here, at Sydney University, where he looked at Oscar Wilde and the faith of the faithless, and I think this is where he is heading here.  Borrowing, as it were, Christian attitudes, without the faith.  Interesting project.

This is not intended to be a review, just a few notes.  But check out the interview at the SWF, and the review in the Guardian.

Filed under: Philosophy, books , Augustine, books, Christianity, death, Humour, momento mori, Philosophy, Simon Critchley, The Book of Dead Philosophers