There Is But One Truly Serious Philosophical Problem
As a species with the apparently rare gift of being able to contemplate life and death, being able to choose our own end should we desire it, we are endowed, unavoidably, with the problem of suicide.
”There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.” –Camus
Let’s start by acknowledging that it is a serious question, a serious problem. The answer is not simple. We cannot get away from this issue by blanket affirmations against suicide because it is cowardly or because it is hurtful to others. These things may be true, but they do not answer the question.
Those with the benefit of an airtight faith in some religion or creed that prohibits suicide may seem to escape the problem; but only because they never really address it. To eschew consideration of suicide because it is against the laws of a god or against the imperatives of a philosophical system is to have already given up the reigns of your own life to an outside authority. Rather than face the question yourself, it is side-stepped; in removing that one threat to your life, you have given up claim to that very life.
No, we must deal with the question head-on, on its own terms, for and by ourselves.
“Should I go on playing bridge and dining, going in the same old monotonous circle? It’s easy that way, but it’s a sort of suicide, too.” –Antoinette Perry
We must recognize that there are multiple forms of suicide. You can release your claim to life by means of a rope, a gun, a tall building, or a bottle of pills. But you can also do it by more mundane means: by letting your life get stuck in a loop of repeated, shallow days, like a skipping record stuck on a boring track. In letting your future days become mere faded copies of your past days, you may not physiologically die, but you certainly cease to live. Some methods of suicide are just slower and less deliberate than others, but in that way perhaps they smack even more of cowardice.
We must take care not to assume that by shunning suicide we have thus chosen life. To truly choose life, having faced the ultimate question, is an action, whereas to merely not die is an inaction.
So we see that the question is not whether or not to cease eating and breathing. The question is whether or not to do something beyond mere eating and breathing. That is the choice we face; that is the problem of suicide, the fundamental question of philosophy: can my life be something more than that of a bacteria or tree or hollow zombie of a man? If the answer to that question is negative, then suicide is nothing more than the redistribution of molecules, or as Georg Lichtenberg put it:
“Here take back the stuff that I am, nature, knead it back into the dough of being, make of me a bush, a cloud, whatever you will, even a man, only no longer make me.”
There are plenty of other shapes my molecules could take, and there are plenty of other people both now and to come. If my life is no different from the rest of them, why care about my life, why value it? Life in general, life as a phenomenon, will go on without me; and if I am gone, there will be others to take my place. If we have no active reason to want to be around, then we may as well give back our body’s dough to nature.
So what is the answer to the question of suicide? It’s not a yes or a no, but a why. And it won’t be the same for every person; indeed it couldn’t be, for when we truly face the question ourselves, we face our own personal question. But maybe the act, the wholehearted, soul-shivering act of facing the question, naked in front of it, can paradoxically bring meaning into a life, whatever that meaning may be. For some, serious contemplations of suicide may be a much-needed jolt out of the shallow complacency of a redundant life.
“Anyone desperate enough for suicide should be desperate enough to go to creative extremes to solve problems: elope at midnight, stow away on the boat to New Zealand and start over, do whatever they always wanted to do but were afraid to try.” –Richard Bach
Great post. To find significance in living, knowing one’s mortality, is to be a human being.
“We are alienated if we either experience our lives as meaningless or ourselves as worthless, or else are capable of sustaining a sense of meaning and self-worth only with the help of illusions about ourselves or our condition” (Allen Wood, “Karl Marx”)
And self-immolation need not be that of the body. And it may be that what I seek in pain and alienation is “my” oblivion, as a separated and forever lonely entity, without knowing it.
“Thus the search for meaning amidst the debris of the much-vaunted human hopes and dreams and schemes has come to its timely end. With the end of both ‘I’ and ‘me’, the distance or separation between both ‘I’ and ‘me’ and these sense organs – and thus the external world – disappears. To be living as the senses is to live a clear and clean awareness – apperception – a pure consciousness experience of the world as-it-is. Because there is no ‘I’ as a thinker (a little person inside one’s head) or a ‘me’ as a feeler (a little person in one’s heart) – to have sensations happen to them, I am the sensations. The entire affective faculty vanishes … blind nature’s software package of instinctual passions is deleted. There is nothing except the series of sensations which happen … not happening to an ‘I’ or a ‘me’ but just happening … moment by moment … one after another. To live life as these sensations, as distinct from having them, engenders the most astonishing sense of freedom and magic. Consequently, I am living in peace and tranquillity; a meaningful peace and tranquillity. Life is intrinsically purposeful, the reason for existence lies openly all around. Being in this very air I live in, I am constantly aware of it; I breathe it in and out; I see it, I hear it, I taste it, I smell it, I touch it, all of the time. It never goes away – nor has it ever been away – it was just that ‘I’/‘me’ was standing in the way of the meaning of life being apparent.
Life is not a vale of tears.” (Richard, http://www.actualfreedom.com.au/richard/articles/aprecisofactualfreedom.htm )
Comment by Harmanjit Singh — April 21, 2009 @ 5:45 am
[…] A strangely inspiring article comes out of this philosophical look at suicide—that problem with which our species has been ‘gifted’. It feels like a call-to-action for your life. We must recognize that there are multiple forms of suicide. You can release your claim to life by means of a rope, a gun, a tall building, or a bottle of pills. But you can also do it by more mundane means: by letting your life get stuck in a loop of repeated, shallow days, like a skipping record stuck on a boring track. In letting your future days become mere faded copies of your past days, you may not physiologically die, but you certainly cease to live. Some methods of suicide are just slower and less deliberate than others, but in that way perhaps they smack even more of cowardice. […]
Pingback by Suicide: The One Truly Serious Philosophical Problem » Lone Gunman — April 22, 2009 @ 3:39 am
I live in New Zealand, and I’d like to stow away on a boat to start over somewhere else. But then again, Richard Bach had a thing about seagulls, so I guess he’d like it here.
Comment by LL — April 22, 2009 @ 6:43 am
[…] a great post this morning from a blog called ‘Strange Loops’. I’m always tentative in writing […]
Pingback by Is Suicide Painless? « The Amateur’s Guide To Life — April 22, 2009 @ 2:00 pm
Inspiring article. I like it a great deal but there’s a typo that drives me crazy every time I see it. Sadly, it appears increasingly common these days.
…given up the reigns of your own life
reigns -> reins
Comment by lxz — April 22, 2009 @ 10:26 pm
Excellent post! I’ve experienced that paradoxical renewal of meaning that you write about, and you articulated its causes beautifully. I also appreciate the reminder about not letting life slip into a slow suicide. Thanks for writing this.
Comment by Mary — May 3, 2009 @ 6:13 pm
Wow. That’s maybe the greatest blog post I have ever read, and for sure the best commentary on suicide I’ve ever seen.
Among other things, anyone considering suicide or stuck in a pointless cycle should read it.
Comment by SpGNo — May 12, 2009 @ 3:43 am
@ Number one, indeed, it is not so much the question of IF life is worth living, but rather, is there anyone there to live it?
Comment by Nihilizo — November 4, 2009 @ 1:54 am
Just wanted to take the opportunity to quote Jacob Bernoulli(1654-1705) who discovered the properties of self-reproduction in equiangular spirals.
“Eadem mutata resurgo”
Translated -”I shall arise the same, though changed”, something he later had engraved on his tomb-stone together with a representation of equiangular curve =)
Comment by Alex — June 12, 2010 @ 5:15 am