Philosophy of Death

Peter Sloterdijk opens his Art of Philosophy (9-10) with a summary of the “epistemic suspended animation” that philosophy has traditionally demanded from its practitioners:

“My aim is to show why the idea that the thinking person has to be a kind of dead person on holiday is inseparable from the ancient European culture of rationality, particularly classical, Platonic-inspired philosophy.” This, he claims, is written into the fabric of Socratic idealism, according to which “only the dead enjoy the privilege of looking at the truths of the afterlife ‘autoptically,’ as if face to face.” This doesn’t  mean that the philosophers lack beating hearts, but that they have “cast off their bodies and apparently become pure intellects or impersonal thinking souls.” This comes into post-Cartesian thought as an emphasis on method: “what we call method is not merely the scientific path to things but also the approach to a state of near-death, a cognition-enhancing condition.”

This implies that “the once-lauded ars moriendi, the art of dying that the Stoics of antiquity and some mystical theologians of the late Middle Ages regarded as a supreme ethical discipline, does not imply that heroism became part of the sphere of contemplative life as much as we might assume. Rather, it is a key chapter of epistemology. Given the Platonic assumption that the eternal and immortal can only be recognized by their like, the quest for our own personal capacity to perceive this is of the utmost importance. Its success defines the possibility of true theory as the ancients understood it. If we failed to activate such a capacity for perceiving the everlasting in our lifetime, we would give up hope of valid, lasting knowledge. If we possess this kind of capacity, however, we should try to ensure that we use it as early as possible. This would be equivalent to trying to die “in advance,” not so as to be dead for longer but to reveal our latent capacity for immortality while remaining trapped in our mortal shell.” 

Metaphysics, he argues, ultimately comes to “something like ‘epistemo-thanatological.’”