Enlightened Final Thoughts

BRIDGEMAN IMAGES HEAVEN BOUND 'The Apotheosis of Jean-Jacques Rousseau' (1794) by Hubert Robert.AT THE END of Shakespeare's “Hamlet” (ca. 1600), the titular prince delivers these dying words: “The rest is silence.” Joanna Stalnaker, a professor of French at Columbia University, adopts this line as the title of her fascinating book about 18th-century philosophers facing death, examining how Enlightenment thinkers—David Hume, the Comte de Buffon, Denis Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire and more—wrote philosophically as they approached their deathbeds. Did they flinch from their earlier arguments and beliefs? Did they address the void, into which they were about to disappear, with renewed creativity?The philosopher and historian Hume (1711-76) wrote “My Own Life” in 1776 when he was dying of abdominal cancer, intending the essay as his funeral oration and as the preface to his collected works. “My Own Life,” Ms. Stalnaker argues, is far from being Hume's pitch for literary immortality. Instead, he had already begun to rehearse his own death by writing about himself in the past tense: “To conclude historically with my own character. I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself...).” Ms. Stalnaker concludes that Hume was “unflinching in envisaging the possible destruction of his literary and philosophical legacy.” He knew that his readers would decide whether his writing would be consigned to oblivion or not.In the years before the naturalist Buffon (1707-88) died, he published his final work, “Natural History of Minerals,” in five volumes. Ms. Stalnaker argues that these books, the last in the 36-volume “Natural History,” are too often overlooked: “It was here that Buffon offered his final reflections on his life and practice as a naturalist, and it was here that his lifetime of thinking about death crystallized around the motif of the fossil.”