Off-Topic

Professor of Philosophy Costica Bradatan has an interesting essay in the New York Times "The Stone" on "philosophy as an art of dying." We're not talking batik here; Bradatan examines the famous death of a few famous philosophers, centering on the most famous of all -- Socrates. Bradatan posits, "Perhaps that to be a philosopher means more than just being ready to 'suffer' death, to accept it passively at some indefinite point in time; it may also require one to provoke his own death, to meet it somehow mid-way." Undeterred by the seriousness of the subject, I dashed off a comment, which at this writing has not been published. Here ya go:

Dying is just half of the job; the other half is weaving a good narrative of martyrdom and finding an audience for it.
-- Costica Bradatan

Quite right. Of course most people's favorite martyr-philosopher is the Jesus character of the gospels. The narrations are superb! I don't think there's any question but that the story of Jesus's death, particularly as told by the author of Mark, who wrote the first gospel (no, really, it wasn't Matthew!), is based in part on Plato's narration of Socrates' death. 

But I should say my favorite martyr-philosopher's death was that of the Roman Seneca (the Younger). Philosophers & theologians of the day were much enamored of the idea of the "noble death." In the Socratic tradition, Cynic and Stoic philosophers began to see political martyrdom as a sort of bona fide for philosophers.  Persecution and execution, they reasoned, were proofs that the victim had sought justice and was righteous to the end.  Persecution was a badge of honor.  Martyrdom became the equivalent of a Ph.D. in philosophy. Using this "logic," a person didn’t even have to be very smart or very thoughtful to become a philosopher. Seneca saw the athletes' and gladiators' suffering and deaths as moral triumphs: a "reward [that] is not a garland or palm or a trumpeter ... but rather virtue, steadfastness of soul, and a peace that is won for all time...."

 Seneca also saw brotherly love as an incentive for a noble death.  Here he is in De beneficiis [7.12]:

But my end of friendship is to have one dearer to me than myself, and for the saving of whose life I would cheerfully lay down my own....

If you think that sounds an awful lot like a saying by the subject of the later-written gospels, you'd be right. (See John 15:13.) Presuming Seneca wrote "Hercules at Oeta" (scholars debate the authorship), he also wrote a play which not only extolled the noble death but also hypothesized that a resurrection might ensue if the dying philosopher were noble enough.

So how did Seneca himself die? In 65 C.E., Seneca earned his badge of courage in a personal tragicomedy.  The Roman Emperor Nero, whom Seneca had taught and counseled, accused Seneca of conspiring to kill him. Nero ordered Seneca to commit suicide. Eager to oblige, Seneca first tried slitting his wrists, but that didn’t kill him. Then he drank hemlock a la Socrates. That didn’t work, either. He finally succumbed in what may have been the original accidental hot-tub death: He jumped into a hot pool in an attempt to make the blood from his slit wrists flow faster, but instead he suffocated from the hot steam rising from the pool.

Noble deaths really are not that good an idea. Or else Seneca needed a better narrator than I.