Abstract
Since at least Socrates, reflection on human mortality has been central in philosophy. It has been taken as virtually axiomatic that death is the worst that can befall us and that if we are not to die ignominiously we must prepare ourselves for death. Hence it is that philosophy has long seen itself as telling us that we should seek to develop the kind of attitude toward death that allows us to do that. Indeed, philosophy has often seen itself as a form of this preparation: the act of philosophizing, so the thought goes, is itself a kind of dying, since it involves a withdrawal of the thinking self from world and body, and thus mirrors or models death in some way. At another level, philosophy might help with preparing us for death by offering concrete suggestions for thinking about it less fearfully. Socrates, Plato, Seneca, Lucretius, Montaigne, Spinoza, Heidegger, and countless others repeat this sense of the relation between philosophy and death, inflected in numerous different forms and styles.
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Notes
Levi, Se questo è un uomo (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), 48. All translations from Levi in this chapter are mine.
An English translation is available by Stuart Woolf in If This Is a Man and The Truce, intr. Paul Bailey (London: Abacus, 1988). The quotation above is on p. 61 of Woolf’s translation. Hereinafter, I provide in footnotes the page number of quotations or references, first from the Italian text, then from this English translation. Interestingly, one of the few philosophers explicitly to make the same point as Levi is Hannah Arendt: “There exist many things considerably worse than death, and the S.S. saw to it that none of them was ever very far from their victims’ minds and imagination.”
Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006), 12.
Levi, I sommersi e i salvati (Turin: Einaudi, 2003), 88.
An English translation is available by Raymond Rosenthal, The Drowned and the Saved, intr. Paul Bailey (London: Abacus, 1993). I follow the same practice for quotations and references from this text as that indicated above, in footnote 1, for Se questo è un uomo. The reference on p. 88 of the Italian text is to be found on p. 88 of the English translation.
Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt, 1976), 451.
Bruce Chatwin, “The Morality of Things,” in Anatomy of Restlessness (London: Picador, 1996), 170–86.
Antonio Di Meo, Primo Levi e la scienza come metafora (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2011), especially ch. 4, emphasizes Levi’s extreme sensitivity to odors, which provides a hint as to the importance of disgust in his thinking, since the experience of disgust is deeply connected with the invasive nature of taste and smell. Di Meo also emphasizes Levi’s strongly corporeal relation with the world, quoting him as saying: “I often have the impression of thinking more with my hands than with my brain” (77).
Martha Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 89.
For reflections on this issue in the context of a writer whose work bears, in the relevant respects, close family resemblances to Levi’s, see W. G. Sebald, “The Law of Ignominy: Authority, Messianism and Exile in The Castle,” in On Kafka: Semi-Centenary Perspectives, ed. Franz Kuna (London: Paul Elek, 1976), 44–45.
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 378.
John Gray, The Silence of Animals (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2014), 163.
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© 2016 Christopher Hamilton
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Hamilton, C. (2016). Humanity, Animality, and Philosophy in Primo Levi. In: Vuohelainen, M., Chapman, A. (eds) Interpreting Primo Levi. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137435576_6
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