The rest is silence Enlightened final thoughts

The rest is silence’: Enlightened final thoughts
Story by Ruth Scurr •


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.

‘The Apotheosis of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’ (1794) by Hubert Robert.
© Bridgeman Images

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.” Buffon believed that through the natural aging process we are all slowly turning into fossils: “The skin dries out, wrinkles form little by little, the hair turns white, the teeth fall out, the face loses its shape, the body becomes stooped.”

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It was from Buffon, Ms. Stalnaker explains, that the encyclopedist Diderot (1713-84) adopted the idea that death is not “a singular, catastrophic event, but a gradual process.” Following Buffon, Diderot posited three levels of life: the life of the entire animal, the life of each of its organs and the life of the molecule. As he approached his own death, Diderot dared to hope that the molecules that formed his body might eventually be reunited with those of his lover Sophie Volland: “Those who have loved each other during their lives and who have themselves buried next to each other are perhaps not as crazy as we think. Perhaps their ashes press up against each other, are mixed together and reunite.”

Rousseau (1712-78) withdrew from the literary world long before his death. Technically, his final work was the unfinished “Reveries of a Solitary Walker” (posthumously published in 1782), a series of autobiographical meditations not written for publication. Rousseau had already published a number of self-proclaimed final works: the novel “Emile” (1762), his “Confessions” (1782) and his follow-up attempt at self-justification, “Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques” (ca. 1780). As Ms. Stalnaker points out, he was “a writer who proclaimed a series of last works, but whose actual last work defies easy categorization as a philosophical or literary testament.” Rousseau’s unfinished, unstructured “Reveries” resembles the herbarium in which he gathered a botanical record of his daily walks. Ms. Stalnaker notes that in his “Reveries” Rousseau refers repeatedly to “ces feuilles”; the French word can be translated as either pages or leaves.

Rousseau’s enemy, the philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778), wrote more formally as he sensed himself close to death. His final poem, posthumously referred to as “Farewell to Life” (1778), begins, “farewell I go into this land / from which never returned my late father. / forever farewell my friends / who will miss me hardly at all.” Ms. Stalnaker argues that the poem is the fullest expression of the influence that Voltaire’s friend the Marquise du Deffand had upon his thinking about death.

Deffand (1696-1780) was one of the best-known salon hostesses of her day. She did not think of herself as a philosopher, but she corresponded with Voltaire for decades (after she went blind, she employed an assistant to help her write). She is one of the dedicatees of Ms. Stalnaker’s book because she had “a singularly clear-eyed view of what it meant to die as a nonbeliever.” When Deffand was asked to contribute her letters to Voltaire to a posthumous edition of his correspondence, she refused; she did not want to give posterity “any occasion for myself to be spoken of.” Of all the figures Ms. Stalnaker discusses, Deffand was the most stalwart in facing oblivion—she was a childless woman who had published nothing.

The epilogue focuses on the final writings of Madame Roland, who was guillotined in 1793. Unlike the other writers in “The Rest is Silence,” Roland (b. 1754) lived to see the French Revolution. She “renounced her philosophical incredulity in the face of death” and expressed “full confidence in the afterlife in her last writings.”



Roland had grown up reading the philosophes and was influenced by Diderot and Rousseau, among others. When she was in prison during the Reign of Terror, she wrote her “Memoirs” (1795), modeled on Rousseau’s “Confessions.” She was confident that her words would survive her. She intended them “to cement her status as a sacrificial figure in the image of Socrates,” Ms. Stalnaker writes. In a final, unsent letter, addressed to Maximilien Robespierre, she wrote, “speak; it is something to know one’s fate, and with a soul like mine, one is capable of envisaging it.”

A casualty of the upheavals of the French Revolution, Roland is a dramatic counterexample to the other figures in Ms. Stalnaker’s original and beautifully written book. “The Rest Is Silence” captures “the twilight moment of Enlightenment philosophy” when forward-looking male philosophers were forced, at the end of their natural lives, to abandon their ties to the future and face the prospect of nothingness, as Deffand had always done. Impressed by Hume’s “My Own Life,” Deffand wrote: “Aren’t you pleased with his simplicity? With his courage in facing his death, with his gentleness, with his gaiety? I would have accorded him much more esteem if I had known how well he would know how to die.”

Ms. Scurr is the author of “Napoleon: A Life Told in Gardens and Shadows.”