Suicide and Philosophy

Hey y'all,

Nick is providing the topic for the next event. It is in response to another meetup group orbiting around philosophical concerns as they relate to psychotherapy, so we should have an interesting mix of attendees on this upcoming Tuesday. Here's Nick's introductory write-up to orient the discussion:

Suicide is certainly not something to be taken lightly, which anyone who has seen the process of one knows quite well. Over the past few months, I’ve had the privilege to attend a series of seminars with and by practicing clinical psychoanalytic therapists about just this topic. In these talks, I’ve heard a lot about the difficulties of preparing for and understanding the plights that a suicidal analysand or patient expresses, as well as the possibly even more difficult task of finding the proper responses. I was told that my presence in this series of discussions was, since I am not in any way a clinician and I don’t plan on having any patients any time soon, an effort towards having an outside voice from which to discuss this topic further. And, specifically, a philosophical one. I’m not entirely sure whether this discussion will be of use to our clinicians here, but I hope to at least fulfill the request for an outside perspective. And with that in mind, I’d like to make clear that it is, of course, the goal of the clinician facing their patient, in person and directly, to prevent the suicide regardless of type.

With that being said, I see the turn from a clinical discussion of suicide to a philosophical one as primarily hinging on the broadening of the question of what life is, from the singular focus on the life of the potentially suicidal patient, into the very general question of what life in the abstract is worth in and of itself. Camus famously positioned just this question at the core of what he saw as the only meaningful philosophical line of questioning, “is life worth living?”. There have been plenty of religious traditions and philosophers who have come down on the negative side of this question. It might just be exactly what binds all pessimistic schools of thought into that category. There is the natural argument that, since life invariably includes a great deal of suffering on a daily basis, and some argue that this suffering outweighs pleasure in both its frequency and intensity, life as a simple utilitarian equation is simply not worth the trouble. Schopenhauer’s particular phrasing was that life is a “uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness” (“On the Suffering of the World”). We can see a certain Buddhist logic at work in this sentiment, in addition to the utilitarian one, although the former might argue that life gains meaning in the pursuit of escaping samsara. Nonetheless, in both cases it is something best not done. And there are pessimist schools of thought advocating a total erasure of life as such for these same reasons.

There is an equally robust cohort of philosophers and traditions for which suicide is entirely anathema. Christian theology of course teaches suicide as a sin of self-murder, which fallen mankind does not have the jurisdiction to perform with any rectitude. Aristotle marks suicide when attempting to avoid struggle as cowardice. Kant writes that “suicide is in no circumstances permissible”. And these critiques of the suicidal rationale all tend to rest on either the irrationality of acting out of fear or simple avoidance, or the base irrationality of assigning to death (an abjectly unknown state of existence for us, the living) some sort of pleasure or peace or tranquility.

What I find to be the most interesting lines of inquiry down the question of suicide philosophically are in the more subjective or perspectivist schools of thought. I refer here to traditions, of which there are quite a few, in which suicide is in some cases entirely reprehensible, while being in other instances unquestionably permissible, even honorable, and potentially even more than that. This is a common pre-modern and pre-Christian (and non-European) perspective, but I am personally most familiar with the attitudes of the ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as the Japanese, and, of course, Nietzsche. There is a sense in the former two examples that suicide by a free person in reaction to serious and unavoidable dishonor, chronic pain, or a waning life is a perfectly reasonable and even laudable course of action. Empedocles threw himself into the mouth of a volcano at age 60 in order to become a god, according to legend. And although that legend may not be true, its persistence from those times suggests the predilections of the culture it was carried within. And of course we’re all aware to some degree of the Japanese practice of seppuku, a heavily formalized and ritualized manner of suicide that is contingent not just on the individual’s desire to die, but also on their having loyal participants in the ritual to cut off their head after they disembowel themselves.

I find this third set of attitudes on suicide’s moral quality, that it is multifarious and entirely dependent on its specific context, to be the most philosophically interesting. And I find it encapsulated quite nicely by Nietzsche when he writes in Zarathustra that “many die too late, and some die too early. Still the teaching sounds strange: ‘Die at the right time!’”. And I think he’s correct that this teaching does sound quite strange to us, but I think it most concretely frames the question of suicide in the light I mentioned above, that being a question of what life itself really is qualitatively, what it is worth, and why it should or should not be done depending on what it brings or bears down on the living person.

Some final questions I find myself thinking about ahead of our discussion: To what degree is suicide a single phenomenon at all? Can we have any confidence that to be dead is to be in a state lacking suffering? How might one possibly discern what a “correct” time to cease living might be? And how do we assess life if there is such a thing as correctness in its events? What exactly is one trying to “get” out of living, anyways?