One of the oldest definitions of philosophy is “to learn how to die”. Presupposing no final answer, it captures the essence of philosophy itself. It suggests that the problem of death is the problem to which all problems must ultimately answer. This was true for the writer Elias Canetti, who declared himself “a mortal enemy of death,” and for whom learning how to die meant generating arguments against it. A partisan of the living, the incomprehensibility of non-existence was something he loathed and he appointed himself its chief antagonist. If Socrates went to his death tranquilly, Canetti went to his with a bitter fist.
His contempt for death was, by his own admission: “my ‘Cogito ergo sum’. I hate death, therefore I am”. It is the subject that animated and informed all of his intellectual activity, which was considerable––less in terms of works published than in extent and exhaustiveness. The bulk of his output includes a three-volume memoir (approaching 1000 pages)––The Tongue Set Free, The Torch in the Ear, The Play of the Eyes; a novel, a book on Kafka, three plays, and the work for which he is best known, the one that won him the Nobel Prize in 1981, Crowds and Power. But much of Canetti’s writing took the form of what he called Aufzeichnungen, a dry, near-bureaucratic term which translates to something like “notes” or “things written down”. A compulsive diarist, his method was one of “incessant recording,” for which “Nothing was suppressed”. His stated aim was to think about everything, “to learn everything” and “to take everything seriously”. To think about everything, one must therefore confront nothing.
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