The Long Argument Against Suicide

Content Warning & Editorial Disclaimer

This essay contains extended discussion of suicide, self-harm, and related philosophical arguments. It includes historical, literary, and religious perspectives that some readers may find distressing.

If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts or feelings of hopelessness, we strongly advise that you do not read this article. Your wellbeing is important to us. Please reach out for immediate support:

• In Australia, contact Lifeline (13 11 14) or Beyond Blue (1300 22 4636).
• Outside Australia, find international helplines at findahelpline.com.

This piece is published for its philosophical and cultural reflection. It engages with ideas of death and meaning in a scholarly context, not as guidance or advice.

Clancy Martin is University of Missouri Curators’ Professor of Philosophy at UMKC. His many books include How to Sell, Bad Sex and How Not to Kill Yourself. A Guggenheim fellow and Thomas Jefferson Award winner, he has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, The Paris Review, Harper’s, The Atlantic, NOON and many other major magazines, journals and newspapers. He speaks and writes widely about suicide prevention. He has five children, is married to the writer Amie Barrodale, and lives in midtown Kansas City with his family and six feral cats.

Perhaps life is simply worth living for its own sake. In that case, there are few, if any good reasons for taking one’s own life.

But although the many good things we have in life may well be possible only because we are living, nevertheless we might worry that life itself is not always good, or that at least it is sometimes in conflict with other things that we value. In Friedrich Schiller’s well-known remark:

“Life is not the highest good of all.” ^[i]

Anyone who has sympathy with the idea that she’d rather die on her feet than live on her knees understands this view and shares it. Or with the soldier in the Humvee who throws herself on an IED to save the lives of three other soldiers: her devotion to her comrades and her ideal of moral duty outweighs the value of her own life. She commits suicide, yes, but we praise her for her act. And then there are the many cases in which we recognise that the value of a particular life has been fundamentally compromised, by intolerable and likely interminable suffering for example.

If we allow that there is a difference between the concepts of “a life” and “a life worth living,” then we have to admit that there are at least some lives not worth living. In that case, the individuals living those lives that are not worth living may want to do something about it.

One thing to do is to try to change your life. And of course, that is the usual solution we present to the suicidal person. We’ve all heard the platitude about suicide: It’s a permanent solution to a temporary problem. As with many other platitudes, there’s a lot of wisdom in this one. If one is willing to make such a radical change in one’s life as to end it, then surely there are some other, less radical changes one might try first, to see if they work. Because once you kill yourself, you no longer have the chance to make those attempts; and the fact that you are willing to kill yourself liberates you, in a funny way, to change any damn thing you please. As Linus says to Charlie Brown:

“There’s no problem so big or so complicated that it can’t be run away from!”

But if you yourself are the problem, then there is no running away, except by eliminating yourself. And it may well be that your life has become so complicated in one way or another that you really don’t feel up to the changes that you think are required of you. It’s just too hard, too painful.  As the eighteenth century French philosopher Mme de Staël (1766–1817) writes:

“Excess of misery gives birth to the idea of suicide, and this subject cannot be too thoroughly investigated: it involves the whole moral organisation of man.” ^[ii]

1: I don’t know about yours, but my life is not worth living

People in crisis email and text me every day expressing the wish to die, and once I get them past the most dangerous point, I’d guess nine out of ten use a version of this line of reasoning. Following Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, among many others, we might also call this the “goodbye, cruel world” argument.

Here is a nice version of it by the American philosopher Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899):

A man is on a burning ship, the crew and the rest of the passengers have escaped—gone in the lifeboats—and he is left alone. In the wide horizon there is no sail, no sign of help. He cannot swim. If he leaps into the sea he drowns, if he remains on the ship he burns….

Those who have answered me, those who insist that under no circumstances a man has the right to take his life, would say to this man on the deck, “Remain where you are. It is the desire of your loving, heavenly Father that you be clothed in flame — that you slowly roast — that your eyes be scorched to blindness and that you die insane with pain, your life is not your own, only the agony is yours.

I would say to this man: Do as you wish. If you prefer drowning to burning, leap into the sea. Between inevitable evils you have the right of choice. You can help no one, not even God, by allowing yourself to be burned, and you can injure no one, not even God, by choosing the easier death. ^[iii]

I like this argument because it doesn’t try to reason its way through any complicated sophistry to get where it’s going. It just admits: yes, this is my life, and yes, I don’t want it, it’s no good. As the Scottish philosopher David Hume famously writes in his essay on suicide: “I believe no man ever threw away life while it was worth keeping.” The idea is simple: I know that eventually I’m going to die anyway; between here and now I can reasonably foresee nothing but unhappiness, shame, and pain; better that I die now without suffering still more.

In some versions of this argument, we blame ourselves; in some, other people who are unfair in particular to us; in others, both ourselves and other people; in still others, the character of life itself, as we individually experience it, or as we have come to experience it over time.

Here is Seneca at his best. This is from Letter 70, “On the proper time to slip the cable,” Moral Letters to Lucilius (Letter 77, “On taking one’s own life,” is not nearly as compelling): 

As soon as there are many events in his life that give him trouble and disturb his peace of mind, he sets himself free. And this privilege is his, not only when the crisis is upon him, but as soon as Fortune seems to be playing him false; then he looks about carefully and sees whether he ought, or ought not, to end his life on that account. He holds that it makes no difference to him whether his taking-off be natural or self-inflicted, whether it comes later or earlier. He does not regard it with fear, as if it were a great loss; for no man can lose very much when but a driblet remains. It is not a question of dying earlier or later, but of dying well or ill. And dying well means escape from the danger of living ill.

Among the West African Yoruba tribe, the motive for suicide is especially important, and their view is similar to Seneca’s:

“When a man finds life burdensome, disgraceful, and perilous to him, and consequently commits suicide he is given great credit and honour.”

The Yoruba, however, go on to add a qualification:

“But when out of shame for a mean act he commits suicide, his corpse is considered abominable and cast into the bush unburied.”[iv]

Another compelling version of this argument (and a likely source for Seneca) comes to us from the Greek stoic philosopher Chrysippus (279–206 BC).^[v] He compares life to a gathering with friends, and notes that there are roughly speaking five good reasons for leaving life’s party:

Reasonable departures from life take place in the same five ways:
1) because a pressing matter turns up, as in the case of someone commanded by the Pythia to slit his throat to save his own city, on the brink of destruction; 
or 2) because tyrants rush in, forcing us to do shameful deeds or say forbidden things;
or 3) because a serious illness prevents the soul from using the body as an instrument for a long time;
…or 4) because of poverty, as Theognis says well: “…Escaping from poverty, it is necessary to…”;
or 5) because of dementedness.  For just as drunken stupor would break up a party there, so here too can one have oneself depart from life because of dementedness. ^[vi]  

Reason (3) is the sort we would normally associate with medical assistance in dying and is not our focus here. Reason (1) is a bit unlikely for us ordinary people in today’s world. But (2) and (4) are relevant for us: we might feel like we are in such a shameful situation that we cannot extricate ourselves from further humiliation and disgrace, and of course when it comes to poverty, everyone knows that money troubles will drive many of us to the thought of escape. As for (5), in some ways this is just what we are talking about: what kind of mental state is dementedness, and how are we best to contend with it? When I am at my most depressed and feeling suicidal, I think it’s fair to describe me as experiencing a kind of temporary dementia. It is importantly not, however, the kind of dementia from which I cannot expect to recover; I will recover, just as those who have drunk themselves into a stupor at the party will recover.

Both Chrysippus and Seneca are Stoics, and the Stoics generally insist that the value of life should be determined by the person whose life it is. This view becomes the dominant way of thinking about suicide in late Greek and Roman times, and suicide is generally viewed with tolerance—and, as we remarked above, actually seems to be quite popular with philosophers for a time.

But with the dawn of, and the eventual cultural and philosophical ascendance of Christianity, for a long time following the ancient period, suicide on any grounds is generally condemned by philosophers who are writing under the influence of two virulent opponents of suicide, St. Augustine (354–430) and St. Aquinas (1225–1274) (more on those two below). But as early as the sixteenth century, when, in the West, suicide is still viewed as among the most heinous of crimes, Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) gives us a version of the “my life sucks” argument, writing that: “pain and the fear of a worse death” are legitimate reasons for killing yourself, and goes on to add that

“God has given us leave enough [to kill ourselves] when He puts us in such a state that living is worse than dying.”

In some cases, we must agree that the person who kills herself has good cause to believe that nothing could be worse than her present situation—or at least, that her present situation is so intolerable that it is worth taking the risk. So, for example Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797) writes of his passage from Africa as a newly captured slave:

One day, when we had a smooth sea, and moderate wind, two of my wearied countrymen, who were chained together (I was near them at the time), preferring death to such a life of misery, somehow made through the nettings, and jumped into the sea; immediately another quite dejected fellow, who, on account of his illness, was suffered to be out of irons, also followed their example; and I believe many more would very soon have done the same, if they had not been prevented by the ship’s crew, who were instantly alarmed.[vii] 

Here I think few people if any would insist that the persons taking their own lives had made a mistake. I mention these examples because I do think they help us ask the right question: do we truly have cause to believe that there is no hope? If a person reasonably predicts a life in which the future offers only bad things, and that person doesn’t feel like her judgment is being misled by her current desperation, then we might have a case in which no one would protest the act of suicide.

But that raises the bar quite high. When I am feeling truly desperate, panicking, needing a way out, fantasising at every moment about the different ways I could do it—look at the knife, don’t look at the knife; look at the belt, don’t look at the belt; walk downtown to the building, don’t walk downtown to the building—I generally also can think about what someone else would say to me, which is: it has been like this before, it passed, you experienced good days again, you were grateful to be alive. And as long as I can imagine that, I am not being coerced by a tyrant who is making me slit my throat, and I am not a slave leaping over the edge of a ship into the sea. I am just working through some panic.

All this said, it’s important to remember, I think, that we should not judge the person who has killed herself solely on the grounds of escaping her own personal unbearable pain. As the contemporary philosopher Shelly Kagan among many others has pointed out, even today “suicide is looked upon with such a mixture of disdain, fear, and disapproval” ^[viii] that it is hard for us to remember to forgive the suicide, whatever her motivations.

As Voltaire ^[ix] pointed out—even though he disapproved of suicide and generally argued against it--in distant centuries, predating the Christian prohibition against suicide, we took a much kinder view of the suicide, including suicide justified merely as personal escape from pain than we do today. “The law of the Emperor Antoine, which was never revoked: ‘If your father or your brother not being accused of any crime kill himself, either to escape from grief, or through weariness of life, or through despair, or through mental derangement, his will shall be valid, or, if he die intestate his heirs shall succeed.’”^[x]

We might be a bit more like the ancient philosophers and recognise that whether or not the person who killed herself made a mistake, we can still insist that she was, like the rest of us, just in difficult circumstances, doing her best.

2: Life sucks, or, suicide is the lesser of two evils

When my students come to me to talk about the desire to take their own lives, they tend to offer one of two arguments. The first is the argument that we just considered, that there is something so wrong about themselves as people, or about their lives as they must live it that they can see no other way out. Normally they are in a state of anxiety, depression or even panic, and I can ask them questions about their lives that will help to open up ways forward, we can talk about strategies I have used in my own life when I was feeling the same way, and usually they can also be persuaded to get a real mental health professional involved or more actively involved.

But I also get a number of students, and a number of other people in crisis, who make a different argument, which is that there is something fundamentally wrong with life itself. If you look at the Reddit discussions of suicide—which I very much do not recommend doing, especially if you’re feeling psychologically vulnerable—you will see this argument made over and over again. It was the argument made by Phillipp Mainländer above. Even Leo Tolstoy, who was an opponent of suicide while offering one of the most brilliant case studies ever of a suicide in his masterpiece Anna Karenina, wrote: “If life is not infinite, it is quite simply absurd, it is not worth living, and we must rid ourselves of it as soon as possible by committing suicide.” ^[xi]

The literature on suicide is replete with this argument. It is I think the most common defence of suicide. Life is misery, and I’m going to die anyway, so let’s stop stalling. In his dialogue on suicide, Rousseau’s young advocate for suicide puts the argument this way: “One long endures a painful and doleful life before resigning oneself to relinquishing it; but once the weariness of living overcomes the horror of dying, then life is obviously a great evil, and one cannot too soon be freed from it.”^[xii] Yes, we are afraid to take our own lives, nevertheless it remains the reasonable thing to do.

It’s a line of argument that is closely related to the above (1) “my life is not worth living” and the below (4) “choose your own death” defences of suicide, but has a slightly different core insight. The core insight of the “my life is not worth living argument” is that there is something peculiarly wrong with me and my life, that I am in some crucial way no longer fit or in too much pain to live, while life might be just fine for other people. The core insight of the “choose your own death” defence seems to be that you’re going to die anyway, so, since it is in your power to do so, why not take the opportunity to die well. The core insight of this argument is that there is something wrong with life itself, or with human beings, or consciousness, or with the world as it is, that is beyond your power to change.

Lou Reed put the argument this way (arguing against it) in the song “Sweet Jane”:

“And there’s even some evil mothers / Well they’re gonna tell you that everything is just dirt / you know, that woman never really faint / And that villains always blink their eyes / And that, you, know, children are the only ones who blush / And that life is just to die.”

Andrea Dworkin gives this argument a particularly memorable and upsetting formulation in her 1999 essay “My Suicide”:

I want to live but I don’t know how. I don’t want more violence to my body, even by me.
But I can’t bear knowing what I know, in all regards. I ask God to forgive me. Please forgive me all my stupidities and cruelties. Please don’t let there be karma because I don’t want to have to do this again. Please take care of Paul and my cats. Please help the women. Please let me die now.[xiii]

I like Dworkin’s way of putting this argument for suicide in part because she shows how close this way of thinking is to the first argument we just considered. Read as a suicide note, this passage might lead us to think that for Dworkin herself life had become unliveable—she writes it in the context of how she is feeling immediately after realising that she has been raped while unconscious. But that it is in fact a larger indictment of life than just her own particular circumstances which comes down to the crucial observation: “I can’t bear knowing what I know, in all regards.” She has come to understand something about life, or about the world as it is, that makes living unbearable. The problem isn’t with Andrea Dworkin: the problem is with something outside of her. She still wants to live, but she finds herself in an intolerable place.

It is the observation often attributed to the Greek demigod Silenus: “Oh, wretched ephemeral race … why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon.” ^[xiv]

The often-dour Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran (1911-1995) writes: “Kill yourself because you are what you are, yes, but not because all humanity would spit in your face!” ^^[xv]^ Which is to say, look, maybe just being human at all is reason enough to kill yourself, but don’t do it for the sake of other people, don’t do it because (you think) they despise you (again, the defence of suicide we considered just above). One way of thinking of this observation of Cioran’s is actually weirdly life-affirming for the person who worries that she is despicable and so are all human beings: if you feel despised by these beings who are themselves despicable, well, maybe that’s not much cause for self-accusation. It would be one thing if you were despised by the kind of people who are good judges of character but other humans, on this line of reasoning, most certainly are not. In another quasi-paradoxical response to the “life sucks” argument he adds: “The refutation of suicide: is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?” ^[xvi] This is a charming if perhaps not entirely persuasive idea: that one should not kill oneself because somehow it’s too obvious. It’s a bit like Camus’s notion that we shouldn’t commit suicide because we can show scorn for the Gods that gave us such difficult lives.  

One version of the “life sucks” argument thinks about the situation of the suicidal person as a kind of gamble she is making. As the English utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) writes: “If suicide is an act of insanity, so is voluntary entering into a military service―so is choosing what appears the least of any two evils.” ^[xvii] The person taking her own life on these grounds is not necessarily affirming that ending her life will also end her troubles, she may simply be willing to trade the evil she knows for something she doesn’t know. 

In making the “life sucks” argument she’s thinking: “nothing could be worse than this crap—or at least, I’m gambling that whatever comes next, if anything, it won’t be this bad. I am not indicted, and death is not particularly recommended, it’s just that life itself is no good, and death is the obvious and only alternative.” 

Of course, when we put it that way, the problem with the argument is immediately evident. As Hamlet observes:

“To die: to sleep; / no more; and by a sleep to say we end / the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks / that flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation / devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; / To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub: / For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / Must give us pause: there’s the respect that makes calamity of so long life…”.[xviii]

Hamlet had good reason to worry: we sometimes forget that the suicidal young man had already seen his father’s ghost, and been warned about the afterlife. Hamlet is both a suicide story and a ghost story.

The person who commits suicide may suppose that she knows something she doesn’t: namely, what happens when you die. If upon dying we go someplace better, or we simply vanish entirely, like we seem to do when deeply anaesthetised, then it may be that someone who is deeply unhappy and who expects life only to worsen, may reasonably choose to kill herself.

But of course, we don’t know what is going to happen—we are simply hoping, and what we are hoping for varies considerably from person to person. Now, that said, it’s not irrational to make certain gambles, and whenever we are gambling we are making a prediction about the unknown. The suicide’s gamble is that if there is another life, it can’t be as bad as this one, and anyway maybe there is no life after death. As Schopenhauer writes:

“as soon as the terrors of life reach the point at which they outweigh the terrors of death, a man will put an end to his life.” ^[xix]

Probably the best-known version of this argument is from Albert Camus: 

…killing yourself amounts to confessing. It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it. … confessing that it "is not worth the trouble." Living, naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures commanded by existence, for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognised, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.

This is also the version of the argument given by the philosopher David Benatar, whose views are often quoted to me (not always accurately) by my students, and whose work is sometimes said to have inspired Nic Pizzolatto when he created the nihilist police investigator Rust Cohle in True Detective ^[xx].

In Benatar’s formulation of Camus’s argument, we recognise that there are both cosmic and limited, terrestrial ways of thinking about the meaning of life. Viewed from a cosmic perspective, yes, of course, Camus is right, our lives are ridiculous, there is no profound reason for any one of us to live or to live in any particular way, and our suffering is indeed useless. As David Hume famously observed, “The life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.”^[xxi] Benatar takes the thought to its psychological conclusion, writing: “Even those who think that we ought not to yearn for the greater meaning that is unattainable must recognise the immense tragedy of beings who suffer such existential anxiety over their insignificance.” ^[xxii] Nevertheless, Benatar reminds us, we can find meaning in our small, ordinary, human ways. It is not meaningless to plant roses and tend for them. Even though it may not have grand cosmic significance, it is enough that you plant them simply because you love roses.

And this is of course also the conclusion Camus arrives at by the end of his essay. When he considers the Greek mythic character of Sisyphus, condemned eternally to roll his boulder up the mountain only to watch it roll down again, he nevertheless insists that we must imagine Sisyphus is happy, because “his rock is his thing”: he learns the lesson that he does not need cosmic significance in order to create genuine meaning for his own particular life. His suffering matters because it is his. Ultimately then life is not absurd so long as we don’t have absurdly egocentric expectations of it. Camus chooses Sisyphus as the hero that stands against suicide specifically because it was for the crime of repeatedly (and often quite sneakily) cheating death that the Gods condemned Sisyphus to an eternal life. In this way, Sisyphus also becomes a kind of funny, paradoxical hero for those of us, like me, who had the opposite problem, of death repeatedly (and often quite sneakily) evading us.

I should add before leaving this argument that a not uncommon motive for suicide is the belief that life itself is bad and so we should kill ourselves because death will result in something good, quite possibly a desirable afterlife. The Maya of Central America, for example, seem to have believed that those who hang themselves go to an eternally peaceful heaven, and it was claimed that many people killed themselves because of this belief. ^[xxiii] This is of course the justification for death by martyrdom in a variety of religious traditions, and more recently was sometimes used to motivate Japanese troops in the Kamikaze tradition. Early Christians like Ambrose and Tertullian argued that though suicide was in general prohibited, it may sometimes be justified in order to avoid evils like being raped, and may be praised as a form of martyrdom. In the Islamic tradition Mutahhari distinguished between suicide or self-murder, “the worst kind of death,” and shahadat, the reflective, carefully chosen sacrifice of life for the sake of a sacred cause: shahadat was “the only type of death which is higher, greater and holier than life itself.” 

Part of the centuries-long and contemporary Christian condemnation of suicide comes directly from the belief that suicide could result in a desirable afterlife, because the African philosopher Augustine of Hippo (354-430) was concerned to argue against the views of radical Christian sects like the Circumcellions who believed that one could avoid sin and quickly get to heaven by simply killing oneself. We see a more recent version of this kind of thinking in the 1978 mass suicide and suicide-murder of more than 900 followers orchestrated by the cult leader Jim Jones.

But the view is not restricted to people with particular, perhaps idiosyncratic religious views. This is how Jean-Étienne-Dominique Esquirol (1772-1840)--sometimes referred to as “the first psychiatrist” in our contemporary way of thinking about that science--characterises this defence of suicide, which he had observed in many of his patients: “However varied may be the motives and circumstances, which cause men to expose their lives, and to brave death, they almost always exalt the imagination, either on account of a good, more precious than life, or an evil more formidable than death.” ^[xxiv]

The philosopher Paul-Louis Landsberg goes still further:

“The act of suicide does not, to me, express despair, but rather a wild and misguided hope directed to the vast unknown kingdom on the other side of death.” ^[xxv]

In fact, the more you investigate anthropological accounts of suicide, the more you find suicide justified because of the belief that it may result in a desirable afterlife. The ancient Egyptians thought that committing suicide with one’s king would result in a heavenly abode; the Hindu practice of sati, or a wife killing herself upon the death of her husband, is also supposed to provide for her eternal happiness; among the North American indigenous Iglulik tribe, suicides were protected and joined the desirable Moon Spirit at death:

“People in danger can often hear him [The Moon Spirit] calling out: ‘Come, come to me! It is not painful to die. It is only a brief moment of dizziness. It does not hurt to kill yourself.’ Thus the moon sometimes calls, and it is thus also regarded more particularly as the protector of those perishing by accident or suicide…”. ^[xxvi]

It was also reported that the Iglulik believed that death by violence could have a purifying effect. Also among the Inuit tribe, it is reported: “All Inuit who have been good go to Koodleparmiung; that is, who have been kind to the poor and hungry—all who have been happy while living on this earth. Anyone who has been killed by accident, or who has committed suicide, certainly goes to the happy place.” ^[xxvii]

I mention these accounts not because I believe them to be accurate. On my own view, as I will discuss below, if there is an afterlife, it seems to me likely that the mental state of the person who dies will be profoundly important to the mental state of that person’s afterlife situation, so to die in fear and despair would, on this view, be the least desirable sort of death. But it’s also important for me to point out that these accounts do exist, because I am also going to be offering similar accounts arguing against suicide in the arguments to follow. 

Whatever the case—whether there’s a good life awaiting the suicide, a bad life, or no life at all—we are, as Hamlet points out, entering an undiscovered country, so we probably shouldn’t feel too confident about what waits for us one way or the other. 

3: It’s my party…

The many, many arguments for this view are simple, and not so much in favour of suicide as a wise choice as in defence of the suicide’s right to take her own life. This argument is generally made in opposition to the view that, as we shall see in an argument below, one’s life is somehow or other importantly not one’s own, or not entirely one’s own. When we say of a suicide, as people so often do—“How unspeakably selfish!”—we are presuming that there is at least some meaningful way in which we do not or did not have the right to take our own lives.

But if you can’t claim to own your own life, to what can you lay claim? When Americans and other contemporary liberal societies think of life as a fundamental human right—without which, of course, no other right could meaningfully exist—in what sense is that right substantial unless one has the right to one’s own life? But if I have the right to my own life, don’t I also have the right to end it? If not, what does the right to life really mean?

To say I have the right to life better not merely mean that I have the duty to live. That I have the right to free speech doesn’t mean I have the duty to speak. That I have the right to own a gun doesn’t mean that I have the duty to own a gun. That’s not the way rights and duties are supposed to work. To have a right means I have the protection of free choice in that particular domain, so long as I’m not interfering with someone else’s right. 

Arthur Schopenhauer’s succinct version of this argument is my own personal favourite:

“It is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.” ^[xxviii]

This argument is particularly powerful and relevant in the context of societies that generally agree that the individual at least has some rights, but not the right to end her own life. As Schopenhauer points out, if we are going to grant the individual any rights at all, we ought to grant her the right to live or die. It is also for this reason that I have difficulty understanding many of the arguments against medical assistance in dying. 

Of course, as with any right, this right should be exercised with due care, respect for the rights of others, and in the context of proper deliberation. Which is to say, we might well both insist with Schopenhauer on the right to one’s own life and person, and yet at the same time continue to argue about things like seventy-two-hour holds, appropriate regulations over how and when one takes one’s own life, etc. Because we do think, when it comes to the exercise of any of our rights, there are appropriate constraints that relate to the soundness of our decision making. If you live in a place where you have the right to bear arms, such as in Canada, in general we agree that you should be allowed to purchase a hunting rifle. Nevertheless, we will have relevant, sensible regulations that govern the exercise of that right, including your mental health, your criminal history, your age, possibly appropriate training, and other constraints of this kind. Similarly, if we want to be a society that guarantees the individual the right to her life, which includes the right to take her own life, we will want thoughtful laws and regulations governing the appropriate exercise of that right. 

Of this argument, Voltaire writes:

“The apostles of suicide tell us that it is quite allowable to quit one’s house when one is tired of it. Agreed, but most men would prefer sleeping in a mean house to lying in the open air.” ^[xxix]

That is to say: yes, of course, in an enlightened society we should have this right. But it emphatically does not follow from that right—and this is importantly relevant to discussions of medical assistance in dying, for example—that people will actually choose to exercise the right.

4: “The door is always open”

“Well, I have good news,” my lawyer told me. “We got what’s called deferred adjudication.”

“Great,” I said. “That’s exactly what we were hoping for, right?”

This was in 2006. A couple of months before I had been arrested in Overland Park, Kansas, when, during a blackout, I had rear-ended another car on the highway in bumper-to-bumper, five-mile-an-hour traffic. There was no damage done to the other car, but apparently in a panic over the possibility that the people I had hit would call the police and I would be arrested for driving under the influence, I quite reasonably drove off the highway onto the embankment, bursting two of the tires on my own car in the process, and then tried to make my getaway (missing the front and rear wheels on the passenger side of my Infiniti G20) on a nearby frontage road. Mercifully, I very quickly wound up in a ditch, and no one was harmed. I then tried running away on foot before the police finally caught me. “I’ve got a video of pretty much the whole thing on a CCTV camera,” my lawyer told me. “It’s actually really funny. You want to watch it? Might be therapeutic?”

“Uh, no,” I told him. 

“Yeah, it’s exactly what we were hoping for. No criminal charges, nothing like that. You lose your license for a while. And you have to do three days in prison. But it’s a minimum-security place down near Olathe. It’s no big deal, there will be lots of other people there just like you. It’s really pretty comfortable. You’ll do some group therapy, A.A., that sort of thing.”

He was right—it wasn’t that bad. But what made the experience fundamentally different than any of the other times I’ve been in jail or locked up in a psychiatric ward was one simple thing: you were free to leave. They actually showed you the door you could choose to leave from, and when you checked in to the prison they told you: “You can leave at any time. Of course be aware that as soon as you leave—and we have cameras and alarms, so we’ll know when you do—that a warrant will be issued for your arrest. But no one is going to stop you, and no one from this facility is going to chase you down. Some people make it all the way home. Some people get picked up on the highway. I’m not saying it’s a good idea,” the intake administrator informed me with a smile. “But you are free to do it.” 

I was never tempted to leave, while I was there, but the terrible, mind-crushing, almost unbearable claustrophobia that I suffer when constrained to stay in a jail or a psychiatric hospital was utterly gone. Because I was free to leave, I felt like I was choosing to be there. And that tiny attitudinal difference—which in some practical sense was no difference at all, the consequences would have been so dire if I had left that I would have been crazy to leave—was absolutely crucial.

This, of course, is the key intuition behind the Stoics’ best-known defence of the right to commit suicide, the “door is always open” argument. The first explicit mention of this argument is in the Western philosophical literature in one of Plato’s dialogues about the death of Socrates, Phaedo. There one of Socrates’s students Cebes asks Socrates why suicide is unlawful, and Socrates replies:

“There is a doctrine whispered in secret that man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away: this is a great mystery which I do not quite understand.” ^[xxx]

Socrates’ student Cebes then elaborates an argument which we will discuss in greater detail below, that human life really belongs to the Gods, from which it derives and in whose greater judgment we should trust. It is worth noting that Plato attributes the argument to Socrates’s student and not to Socrates. 

For the Stoic, the ability to commit suicide is the most fundamental and all but irrevocable expression of our freedom. Seneca puts his version of “the door is always open” argument this way:

“A wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can.”

As in Schiller’s observation in argument (1) above, life is not the highest value, there are other values that may well matter more, so when life and those other higher values come into conflict, one should simply step through the open door of death. 

As it was memorably sung by the band Blue Oyster Cult, for better or worse (I often worry that this song has romanticised the thought of suicide in many young minds, as it did in my own):

“Seasons don’t fear the reaper / nor do the wind, and the sun, and the rain / we can be like they are / come on baby / don’t fear the reaper.”

This is also the Scottish philosopher David Hume’s strongest argument in defence of suicide. He claims the possibility of committing suicide liberates us “from all danger of misery.” ^[xxxi] That is to say, so long as we know that we can kill ourselves, we know that there is an escape from pain entirely. In a way things can only get so bad, because if they do get so bad, we have a legitimate solution to the problem.

In a longer defence of the argument, here is Seneca again in Letter 70, “On the proper time to slip the cable,” from his Moral Letters to Lucilius:

“A man may hope for anything while he has life.” This may be true; but life is not to be purchased at any price. No matter how great or how well assured certain rewards may be, I shall not strive to attain them at the price of a shameful confession of weakness. Shall I reflect that Fortune has all power over one who lives, rather than reflect that she has no power over one who knows how to die?

Must I await the cruelty either of disease or of man, when I can depart through the midst of torture, and shake off my troubles? This is the one reason why we cannot complain of life: it keeps no one against his will. Humanity is well situated, because no man is unhappy except by his own fault. Live, if you so desire; if not, you may return to the place whence you came.

He also makes this very powerful argument, which perhaps is false:

“Every man ought to make his life acceptable to others besides himself, but his death to himself alone. The best form of death is the one we like.” And continues: “…Men are foolish who reflect thus: ‘One person will say that my conduct was not brave enough; another, that I was too headstrong; a third, that a particular kind of death would have betokened more spirit.’ What you should really reflect is: ‘I have under consideration a purpose with which the talk of men has no concern!’ Your sole aim should be to escape from Fortune as speedily as possible; otherwise, there will be no lack of persons who will think ill of what you have done.”

This argument presumes calm in the face of calamity, presumes reason, even fearlessness. The qualification that the suicidally-inclined person “looks about carefully” is the key, and how many people are in a position to look about carefully when she or he is thinking about self-destruction? Normally, when we are in such straits, our mental situation is one of carelessness, dismay, distress, and extreme pain. Paul-Louis Landsberg gets it exactly right when he writes, in a point exactly the opposite of the Stoics:

“It is the failure of all other means which, in the majority of cases, leads to suicide; it is the universal experience of powerlessness.”

We should also notice that this argument can go one of two ways. One version of “the door is always open” argument is in fact a kind of argument against suicide. I almost always use a variation of this argument on myself when I am thinking of suicide (and it has often worked on me, though not always), and I frequently mention it when people come to me to discuss a suicidal desire. 

The idea is a bit like the A.A. suggestion to “take a drink tomorrow”: Look, you are always free to take a drink, but maybe you can wait until tomorrow? Or, in the suicide version: Look, if things really do get worse, as you fear, or if you can’t take it anymore, tomorrow you can kill yourself. The door is always open. But knowing that, knowing that the door is always open, that you are not trapped here, maybe you could wait another day? Just one day. As E. M. Cioran puts the argument:

“When people come to me saying they want to kill themselves, I tell them: ‘What’s your rush? You can kill yourself any time you like. So calm down. Suicide is a positive act.’ And they do calm down.” ^[xxxii]

There is also the terrifying worry, here, which everyone who has attempted suicide knows, that one will so badly injure oneself in the course of a suicide attempt that we will effectively close the door. The Canadian novelist Nelly Arcan (1973-2009), who died by hanging herself after at least one previous suicide attempt, discusses this problem in her final novel, Paradis, Clef en main—translated in English as Exit--whose narrator is a woman left physically incapacitated by a failed suicide attempt.

About the “door is always open” argument the characteristically sarcastic Voltaire remarks: “it is allowable to do for ourselves what it is noble to do for others. All that is advanced by Plutarch, by Seneca, by Montaigne, and by fifty other philosophers, in favour of suicide is sufficiently known; it is a hackneyed topic—a worn-out commonplace.” ^[xxxiii] Since it is sometimes noble to help another end her life—say, a soldier in terrible pain on the battlefield, who will die in short order but in ghastly misery—then clearly, Voltaire thinks, we are allowed to end our own lives. The argument is not complicated, on his account, but neither is it particularly sophisticated. It simply reiterates what we’d already said in argument (2) above: our lives are our own, we should be allowed to do with them as we please.

Voltaire’s sarcasm aside, I do think this argument is one of the most important contributions made by the philosophers to our thinking about suicide. And yet, powerful though “the door is always open” argument is, it does consistently have this kind of double-meaning in the literature, such that it makes both an argument for choosing your own death and, because you can, going on living until you are absolutely certain that dying is the best thing to do.

When considering this argument E. M. Cioran, for example, writes: “Consolation by a possible suicide widens into infinite space this realm where we are suffering.What greater wealth than the suicide which each of us bears within himself?” ^[xxxiv] Which is again an argument both for the right to suicide and an argument against it, because there is only one way, practically speaking, to give up that wealth, which is to kill yourself. 

So maybe the point of “the door is always open” argument really is like my weekend in prison with the DUI crew in Olathe, Kansas: Yes, the door is always open; yes, feel liberated, knowing that you can always walk through it; yes, breathe easier, know that there is no longer cause for panic; and yes, freely choose to stay where you are.

5: A Noble End

Part of the strength of “the door is always open” argument is that one gets to choose one’s own death.  The idea of choosing one’s own death is a powerful one, as is the worry about bungling your death. The ancient Greeks and Romans generally tended to think that knowing when best to die was wise, and that suicide could therefore be not merely justifiable, but in fact praiseworthy, even noble.

In Anthony and Cleopatra Shakespeare writes, in the voice of Cleopatra before she kills herself: “And then, what’s brave, what’s noble, / Let’s do it after the high Roman fashion, / And make death proud to take us.” On the Greek and Roman way of thinking it was often viewed as cowardice not to take your own life—a surprising turn for us today, who so often attack suicide as an example of the worst kind of cowardice. 

The notion of a noble or heroic death by suicide is found throughout world cultures. The argument is in the Stoics, in the Christian martyrs, and in some ways in the literature on medical assistance in dying (one argument in favour of medical assistance in dying is that it may relieve the psychological and financial burden on one’s loved ones of a slow death). There’s a certain kind of superficial plausibility to the idea: if most of us dread death and tremble to think of the day that it will come, it takes a special kind of courage to take control of one’s own death, to face the fear and embrace it, rather than simply hiding from it or fearfully waiting for it. 

At a minimum we can agree that suicide must sometimes be an example of a morally forgivable and perhaps praiseworthy rather than blameworthy act. I’ve always been persuaded by Schopenhauer, when he writes:

Think of the impression that would be made upon you by the news that someone you know had committed the crime, say, of murder or theft, or been guilty of some act of cruelty or deception; and compare it with your feelings when you hear that he has met a voluntary death. While in the one case a lively sense of indignation and extreme resentment will be aroused, and you will call loudly for punishment or revenge, in the other you will be moved to grief and sympathy; and mingled with your thoughts will be admiration for his courage, rather than the moral disapproval which follows upon a wicked action. ^[xxxv]

While one might feel like a coward in taking one’s own life, it also does take courage to do it. And to pursue the point: what if Cleopatra is right, what if there are times when one ought honourably to take one’s own life, head held high, rather than suffer a life of shame? 

So, for example the Greek hero Ajax, in the play of the same name by Sophocles (497–406 BC), upon realising that he is defeated and confronting the fact that in a fit of madness he has just slaughtered a number of helpless cattle, mistaking them for his enemies, says to himself:

Some scheme let me devise
Which may prove to my aged sire that I,
His son, at least by nature am no coward.
For ‘tis base for a man to crave long life
Who endures never-varying misery.
What joy can be in day that follows day,
Bringing us close then snatching us from death?
As of no worth would I esteem that man
Who warms himself with unsubstantial hopes.
Nobly to live, or else nobly to die
Befits proud birth. There is no more to say.

We see the same notion adopted by the Samurai caste in Japan, as in The Beginner’s Book of Bushido by Daidoji Yuzan (1639-1720), where we are admonished not to bungle the one death that we have. ^[xxxvi] The ancient Japanese seem to have considered at least three kinds of suicide justifiable, and generally honourable: shinju, or love suicide, normally committed when the love is forbidden or one believes that a happier moment in life is unattainable than that being provided by the love; junshi, or committing suicide upon the death of one’s lord, eventually banned in Japan, in 1663; and of course seppuku, the suicide of the warrior, the samurai.

On Yuzan’s view, since we will only die once, we should take particular care to die well, which means exercising one’s free will and judgment on the nature of one’s death. Of course, as with Seneca’s argument in (4) above, Yuzan’s point cuts both ways: a hasty, thoughtless, or fearful suicide would also be considered the bungling of that death. 

Among some American Indigenous tribes we find the view that death by suicide may be the bravest death of all.  There are also many accounts among Indigenous North Americans of suicidal people achieving nobility in their deaths by saving the suicide attempt for an attack on an enemy tribe, thus ending their own unhappy lives while bringing benefit to their people. ^[xxxvii]

The Gros-Ventre tribe of Montana, for example, claim that one who is suicidal will “sing the brave song” while circling camp and then sought death at any opportunity. These men were considered to be extraordinarily brave in battle, and were also viewed as unusually desirable to women.

The most daring men in battle were said to have been those who wished to die. Men who were grieving over the loss of loved ones were believed to have been especially prone to this indirect method of suicide. Others took this way of gloriously ending their lives out of a sense of pique, or in order to vindicate their honour. In this latter case it was customary for a man who had something discreditable to account for, either on his own part or on the part of some member of his family, to publicly announce that he was about to die by singing the “brave-song” or “death-song” as he rode around the camp circle. This indicated that he would seek the earliest opportunity of losing his life at the hands of the enemy while accomplishing some particularly outstanding war deed. ^[xxxviii]

In our own day, as familiar, ordinary and likable a hero as Harry Potter commits suicide on the grounds of “a noble end,” when he freely goes to Voldemort to die, as does his mentor Professor Dumbledore before him, when he arranges his own execution by Snape. These are suicides that are both done to benefit others.

But these cases of suicide, done specifically for the benefit of others rather than oneself, introduce a distinction that we should make when thinking about the “noble end” arguments in defence of suicide. There are suicides done solely for the benefit of others; those done solely for one’s own benefit; and then what is probably the more common case, those done for one’s own benefit which, so one persuades oneself, may also benefit the people around the suicide. The suicidally-inclined, when she is at her worst, may well think, as I have often done, that the world and her loved ones would be better off without her, and that the pain she would inflict on them by killing herself is further proof that they would be better off without such a loathsome creature as her in their lives. ^[xxxix]  As Kay Redfield Jamison writes of her own suicide attempt in her masterful study of suicide, Night Falls Fast: “I knew my life to be a shambles and I believed—incontestably—that my family, friends, and patients would be better off without me.” ^[xl]    

But even a person who genuinely believes that others would be better off without her, in that desperate moment of paradoxical circular reasoning and self-justification, doesn’t really believe that she is killing herself for the purpose of benefiting others; she knows that she does it for herself, and supposes that the harm done to others is much less than they might suppose, because at last they are rid of her. I should immediately add that this way of thinking, though understandable, and though I have myself indulged in it more than once, is grossly mistaken. 

There are suicides that are genuinely committed to benefit others, like the soldier who throws herself on an IED to protect the lives of her friends in the Humvee; or the Buddhist monk who burns herself alive to protest a war (perhaps, as Thich Nhat Hanh argued to Martin Luther King Jr., such suicides aren’t really suicides at all, as death is an afterthought, an unfortunate but unavoidable consequence, it is the statement of protest that is intended, not the death) ^[xli]; or the mother who starves herself to death so that her child may eat and live. These cases of suicide are worthy of more discussion, but they are not the ones we are investigating here; the case of a suicide as a “noble death,” for our purposes, is one who chooses death when she does because she sees that this kind of death offers her the opportunity for a good end, a death that benefits her, even though it required her to take her own life to achieve that end. 

In the history of human thinking about suicide even Gods have killed themselves. The Aztec god Quetzalcoatl, the god of wind, air and learning, who was one of the central deities who collaborated in the creation of the human race, burns himself alive, out of noble motives. ^[xlii] 

Pliny the Younger (62-113), writes of the death of Arria, one of history’s most famous suicides:

“It was indeed a splendid deed of hers to unsheathe the sword, to plunge it into her breast, then to draw it out and offer it to her husband, with the words which will live forever and seem to have been more than mortal, ‘Paetus, it does not hurt.’” ^[xliii]

And here is an account of the suicide of the third Emperor of Tenochtitlan (roughly, modern-day Mexico City), Chimalpopocatzin (1397-1427):

In this cage, they had Chimalpopoca imprisoned and sad, giving him ounces to eat, and seeing himself there and knowing that they had to take him from the cage to give him a cruel and rigorous death, he arranged to kill himself; and so he hanged himself in that jail where he was; considering a better death the one that his hands could give him than the one that he might receive from his enemies, as it was he triumphing over himself rather than his enemy triumphing over him, as Cleopatra and other valiant and strong pagan captains did, who because of being strong, carried out similar deeds in order not to see themselves in foreign hands, with shame and diminished valour and greatness. ^[xliv]

Finally, there is the interesting idea among some North Americans Indigenous peoples that the nobility of suicide comes from the willingness to relinquish one’s life when your grip on reality has become unstable. The notion here seems to be that in losing the desire to live you also lose the ability to benefit the people around you, so the praiseworthy thing is to end your life. (This view is so close to my own view when I have been at my worst that I almost hesitate to mention it.)

The Ojibwa, for example, have the concept of the windigo. In becoming suicidal, you likely have become what was called “a windigo”—you have changed mentally in a fundamental way. Once a person becomes a windigo, we are told, she has “an undisputed right to dispose of herself as she chose.” 

Now to be fair, becoming a windigo seems to have had more symptoms than merely the desire to die. In one account we have of a woman who feared she was becoming a windigo, she claimed that she was considering attacking others, and the people around her “looked like beavers.” ^[xlv] That said, for the Ojibwa the choice of suicide was a noble one for a windigo, and they are one of the few cultures we know of who explicitly recommend suicide on psychiatric grounds.  

When I think of the noble death argument, I often think of Yukio Mishima (1925-1970), perhaps the most celebrated Japanese writer of the twentieth century. Mishima was obsessed with suicide all of his life, and committed seppuku after he and four friends attempted and failed at a kind of misconceived coup d’etat by taking a hostage at Japan’s military headquarters. Mishima seems to have known all along that the plot would fail, and was quite possibly looking for a justification for suicide that would be appropriately noble. His lover at the time, Masakatsu Morita, also committed seppuku.

But what strikes me is not the strange and almost absurd drama of Mishima’s death, but this poem, often considered his jinsei or death poem:

A small night storm blows
Saying ‘falling is the essence of a flower’
Preceding those who hesitate

It’s clear that Mishima understood the hesitation of the suicidal person, but also that he believed in a kind of inevitability of his own suicide—a small night storm blowing—and I think he hoped that he might give his death the kind of essential, beautiful quality we imagine when we think of the falling of a flower.

Before leaving this “noble death” argument in defence of suicide, I want to stress how unusual I take these cases to be. If you are sincerely thinking that your own death would benefit the people that you love, I would like to ask you, before seriously considering taking your life, to ask those loved ones if they feel that way. You could ask them even in your mind, and I think you would realise that no, they don’t want you to do it. But better yet, if you can, ask them in person. 

It’s a tall order and also a risky move, I grant you. One of my dearest friends, one of the people I most love and admire in the world, was once asked by her partner and the father of one of her children if he should kill himself, and she told him she thought that he should, and less than an hour later he shot himself dead. Of course, she regrets the decision, which was made in rage—and she didn’t expect him to follow through with it. And I completely understand where she was coming from—some of the people I help with suicidal ideation have written to me so many times about being on the brink of an attempt that it’s easy to start to develop caretaker fatigue. After the eighty-eighth WhatsApp message from an Iraqi thirty-something poet and computer programmer in Sweden telling me that “today is the day, goodbye Clancy, you’ve been no help at all” (I get a lot of variants of this, though this example is based on a real recent case), one is tempted to be…unsympathetic.

But I think the vast majority of people will find that their acquaintances, neighbours, friends and loved ones do not want them to die, and that the noble choice, the difficult choice, is to try in small, simple ways to slowly reorder one’s life such that we can both enjoy our lives and be proud of the lives we have created.

At one point a young poet in some difficulty and depression wrote to Rainer Maria Rilke for guidance, and Rilke advised him of the simple rule that I think provides a good general guide to what is noble: do what is most difficult. It’s not an absolute moral principle, of course—one can come up with counterexamples so quickly—but it might be a decent rule-of-thumb.

There’s also a poem by Rilke that I try to re-read when I am feeling most desperate (sometimes I can manage to do so, sometimes I can’t): The Archaic Torso of Apollo. I try to remind myself, when I am considering ending it all, of that poem’s final line:

“for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.”

Which also reminds me of the idea that David Foster Wallace puts forth as the great spiritual challenge in his speech This Is Water: that just staying conscious of your own humanity and conscious of the fact that there are other humans struggling around you is enough for nobility. “It is unimaginably hard to do this,” he says, “to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.”^[xlvi]

If I can do that, maybe I can feel a little less ashamed, if not exactly noble. If the alternative is death—ignoble or otherwise—why not keep on striving for a noble life? 

But I also grant that sometimes it’s so damn hard, and all this is said by a person who has given up on himself repeatedly, so please don’t take my moralising too seriously. I mostly just wanted to say that, for my part, even when in the depths of confusion and depression I thought I was helping others by killing myself, I still knew that I was not seeking a noble death. 

Now let’s proceed to some famous and often useful philosophical arguments that suicide is almost always unwise.

6: The sanctity of life

This argument is simple. It begins with the premise that taking human life is wrong, or sometimes the refined premise that taking an innocent human life is wrong. (This latter premise allows for taking the lives of those guilty of certain crimes.) The second premise is that the life of the suicide is a human life, or also, is an innocent human life. The conclusion is that taking your own life is wrong. “If it’s always wrong to kill people, well, you’re a people too, so you’d better not kill yourself.” 

There are religious and nonreligious, or at least less religious, variants of this argument. It’s a common argument in the Abrahamic tradition (which includes Judaism, Christianity and Islam), perhaps advanced so often in part because of the sometimes confusing fact that there is no specific prohibition against suicide in the Old or New Testament, and in the Old Testament in particular there are a number of suicides ^[xlvii]. (If scripture were clear on the fact that we aren’t allowed to kill ourselves, then philosophers who subscribe to the truth of that scripture wouldn’t have to argue about it as much as they do.) But there is a clear prohibition against killing, so, it is reasoned, that presumably extends to the killing of oneself. 

So St. Augustine argues straightforwardly (here quoted in St. Thomas Aquinas): “…in Book I of The City of God: ‘We understand the commandment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ to pertain to man.  Kill no other man, nor yourself; for he who kills himself kills another man.’ ” ^[xlviii] And Ya’qub al-Qirqisani (890-960), a chronicler of Jewish religious law (at this time Jewish religious law is being heavily influenced by the rise of Islam), in his “On Suicide” from The Book of Lighthouses and Watchtowers, argues that suicide is never permissible, because of the Old Testament injunction against shedding blood. “Thou shalt not kill” covers all cases: “there is no difference between him who kills himself and him who kills someone else.” ^[xlix] 

We might worry about this argument that the act of suicide is importantly not analogous with the crime of murder. At least one of the reasons we think murder is wrong is that the murderer takes the life of a person who still wants that life. The suicide of course takes the life of someone who doesn’t want that life. And there are many other possible disanalogies between the two acts, most obviously that it is one thing to take what belongs to me, and quite another to take what belongs to you. So even if we grant Augustine and al-Qirqisani that the prohibition against taking human life is absolute—in which case, we’d better not take lives in war, or in punishment for crimes, or in defence of the greater good—their explicit comparison of suicide with murder is muddying the waters. 

We can nevertheless make sense of the argument against suicide on the view that life is sacred. As I sit here at my desk in the garage, on a clear, cold, fall day, thinking about this argument, my labradoodle Simha wanders in and sits down on the concrete floor beside me. I think, imagine my horror and disgust if someone killed Simha. Maybe she was barking too much, or they just don’t like dogs. Part of my disgust of course is directed at the person who took her life. But another part of it, the horror part, is at the thought of extinguishing that which makes her Simha.

If anything is sacred, we might feel—I certainly tend to feel—then life must be sacred. Which is not to say that there are no circumstances under which it can be taken, but that at least those circumstances must be very compelling. It had better be, so to speak, the last choice, not the first. And in my own case so often I simply default to suicide. It’s not the first choice, but it comes up surprisingly quickly, and I think in part because I suppose that my own life is less sacred even than my dog’s. But that can’t be right. Even if we don’t want to say that my life is more sacred than Simha’s, we will surely insist that my life is just as sacred as hers. And yet I have a tendency to treat it as a purely instrumental thing, only as good or bad as it serves me—but it is not distinguishable from me. It cannot be the instrument, because it is what makes doing possible. If there is anything sacred in the world I am living in, it must in some sense start with the possibility of my living at all. So, in some sense if I am willing to kill myself, I am at the same time annihilating any possibility of goodness—and after all, if there is an afterlife, I’m not escaping, but if there is no afterlife, I have for my purposes annihilated the whole universe.

Would I be willing to do that? Suppose some scientist, seeing my mental suffering, my anxiety and my depression, took pity on me and brought me to her lab in the basement of MIT. We walked past the pale graduate students typing away on their computers until we reached some brightly lit laboratory where a beaming, sun-tanned scientist unveiled a bright blue box with a gold button on top, and the label: All Possible Universes-Destroying Machine. She then explained to me that not only this universe but any possible universe, including those universes that contained all possible afterlives for me, would be instantly annihilated as soon as I pushed the button. Not only would my suffering would end, but the suffering of everyone would instantly end. All future misery and unhappiness would be eliminated. All I had to do was push the button.

Needless to say, I wouldn’t push that button, no matter how dark my despair, and I’d also be damn good and sure to unplug (and perhaps even destroy) the machine before leaving the lab. But if that’s true, what am I committing myself to? 

On this line of reasoning some people have argued that in fact suicide is even more blameworthy than murder.[l] In what is one of the most quoted versions of the sanctity of life argument, the writer and philosopher G. K. Chesterton argues:

"Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world." ^[li]

The central and memorable idea in this argument—that when I die, in some important sense all of existence dies, as far as I am concerned—is also made by E. M. Cioran, when he writes: “With each of us, everything vanishes, everything stops forever. What an advantage, what an abuse! Without the least effort on our part, we own the universe, we drag it into our own disappearance. No doubt about it, dying is immoral…”. ^[lii]

Cioran of course points out what Chesterton omits: that it’s not just in suicide that the world is erased, but in dying. On Chesterton’s argument all of us ought to be outraged at the thought of dying at all, and perhaps even more outraged at unnecessary deaths caused by accidents or natural disasters that might be attributed, if we are theists like Chesterton, to the activity of an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-benevolent (but are such deaths possible out of benevolence?) God.

And Ludwig Wittgenstein, who wrestled with the thought of suicide his entire life, put a similar version of the sanctity of life argument this way in his notebooks: “If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin.” ^[liii] 

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) defends a version of the sanctity of life argument with the idea, also advanced in St. Augustine, that suicide is self-contradictory: because you need life in order to take life, it’s somehow fundamentally illogical to take life. Like the mythical Ouroboros, the suicide consumes himself, but he can’t very well consume himself because he needs himself in order to do the consuming. 

“It is, therefore,” Kant writes, “obvious that the body constitutes a part of ourselves. If a man destroys his body, and so his life, he does it by the use of his will, which is itself destroyed in the process. But to use the power of a free will for its own destruction is self-contradictory. If freedom is the condition of life it cannot be employed to abolish life and so to destroy and abolish itself.   To use life for its own destruction, to use life for producing lifelessness, is self-contradictory.” ^[liv]

Even philosophers who are defenders of Kant are not quite sure about the logic of this one—it’s tricky to know whether this argument works. One thing I can say with confidence, however, is that it is unlikely to persuade anyone who is suicidal that she ought not kill herself.

There is an argument related to this one which may well be the source of Kant’s idea, and which is I think a bit more plausible and persuasive. It occurs in a variety of philosophers, but I think St. Aquinas’s formulation of it is the nicest: “because everything loves itself, it is thus proper for everything to keep itself in being and resist decay as far as it can.  Therefore, to kill oneself is contrary to natural inclination, and contrary to the charity according to which everyone ought to love himself.  Hence self-killing is always a mortal sin, inasmuch as it stands against natural law and charity.” ^[lv] Another, later version of this runs that “Against Suicide the most substantial Argument they bring, is from the first Law of Nature, Self-preservation, imprinted in all mankind, and indeed on every sensible Creature.” ^[lvi]

There is something to this kind of self-contradiction, I think, namely, that I am killing myself to get out of pain or some other kind of suffering, but in doing so I am effectively demanding that I am the kind of thing that deserves to be free of pain and suffering. And if I am indeed the kind of thing that deserves to be free of pain and suffering, mightn’t I also therefore be the kind of thing that ought to go on living? In which case I can say to the universe, I am f-cking sick and tired of all of this misery, I deserve better! And if that means telling a lot of people and a career and maybe even the people I love most, to go f-ck themselves—forgive my language—that might yet be more reasonable and justified than taking my own life.

7: It’s not your life to take

These are the arguments we have already approached when discussing argument 3 above, the “It’s my life, I can do with it as I please” line of reasoning. 

Often this argument is that you did not give yourself life, so you are not in a position rightfully to take it. You cannot justifiably dispose of what is not truly your own.

Normally it is either God, or Nature, or Society which has given you your life, and so it is powers like these that should decide when and how your life will end. So for example the West African LoDagaa tribe believed that a suicide may be done from honourable motives—they particularly mention the justifiable motive of grief, especially the extreme grief that a parent may have at the loss of a child or a husband at the loss of a wife—but is nevertheless a sin against society and against the earth, so it should be prevented. ^[lvii]

A version of the same argument is made by Abu Hayyan al-Tawdhi (923-1023) in his Borrowed Lights: On Suicide. For al-Tawdhi, our lives are not something we own, but rather an opportunity provided to us—a bit like a friend lending you part of her field so that you can grow crops on it—and so we are not in a position to destroy that which we do not possess.  This was also the view of the African Ewe tribe, who believed that suicide was always wrong because your life belonged to the king, who provided all of society with the possibility of its being. ^[lviii]

Thomas Aquinas is probably the ablest advocate of this argument against suicide in the Western tradition. He writes that suicide is wrong

“because life is a gift divinely given to man, and subject to the power of Him ‘who kills and makes to live.’  Therefore, he who deprives himself of life sins against God, just as he who kills another’s slave sins against the slave’s master, and just as he sins who arrogates to himself power over something not committed to him.  To God alone belongs the power over death and life, according to Deuteronomy xxxii: ‘I kill and I make to live.’“ ^[lix]

But even if you don’t grant that your life is owed to God, Aquinas continues, recalling Aristotle as he so often does, nevertheless suicide is wrong: “because everything that is a part belongs to a whole, every man is part of a community, and as such is of the community.  Therefore, he who kills himself injures the community, as is proven by the Philosopher [Aristotle] in his Ethics, Book V.” ^[lx]

For his part, David Hume replies to Aristotle and Aquinas’s argument by pointing out that:

“A man, who retires from life, does no harm to society. He only ceases to do good; which, if it be an injury, is of the lowest kind.” ^[lxi] That is, it may well be my responsibility, as a good citizen of my University, to sit on certain committees, and if I fail to sit on those committees I am not doing good which I might otherwise at least try to do; nevertheless, my absence from those committees will not do very much if any harm (and in fact may be considered a benefit by many of my colleagues). ^[lxii]

That it is not your life to take is also the reason against suicide given by John Adams (1662–1720):

“You did not create this life so it is not yours to destroy; you have asked the state to protect your life but now you give yourself the authority to destroy it; the fiercest punishment the state can give is death, but by committing suicide we take all fear from this punishment (asserting disorder); any argument that can be made against the morality of murder can also be made against suicide, and perhaps even more so.” ^[lxiii]

As a fierce and lifelong opponent of the death penalty, this argument always makes me laugh a little: if the suicide is wreaking havoc with the state’s ability to kill its prisoners, as Adams argues, this almost counts as an argument in favour of suicide.

Even if it’s not a question of where and how your life originated or is maintained, when one takes one’s own life there may be important duties to others that one can no longer satisfy. So for example Eduard von Hartmann writes: 

In the suicide and in the ascetic the self-denial is as little deserving of admiration as in the sick person who, to escape the prospect of a perpetual toothache, reasonably prefers the painful drawing of the tooth.  In both cases there is only well-calculated egoism without any ethical value; rather an egoism that in all such situations of life is immoral, save when the possibility of fulfilling one’s duties to one’s relatives and society is entirely cut off… ^[lxiv]

This is an echo of Aristotle’s argument against suicide, which is that in killing ourselves we are not necessarily wronging ourselves but wronging the state.[lxv] (To which argument Cesare Beccaria wittily replied: the suicide harms the state less than an emigrant, since the suicide leaves property and family behind.)

Maybe the most interesting version of this argument comes from the great nineteenth century German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831). This argument has a bit of the aroma of Kant’s “suicide is a self-contradiction” argument, but is I think much more interesting. This argument also had an impact on the Hegelian philosopher Karl Marx’s thinking about suicide, though Marx seems to have been fundamentally sympathetic to the case of the suicidal person, and in a reversal of this argument blames society for her self-destruction. 

Hegel writes:

“Since personality is something directly present, the comprehensive totality of one’s outer activity, the life, is not external to it. Thus, the disposal or sacrifice of life is not the manifestation of one’s personality so much as the very opposite. Hence I have no right to relinquish my life.” ^[lxvi] 

This is to say, I cannot as a person choose to take my life, because what I am as a person is constituted by all the things that are my life, most obviously of course my own family and society. My “choice” is an expression of my “personality,” but my personality is just an expression of that has made me who I am. So, like Socrates when he is confronted by Euthyphro with the opportunity to save his life by defying the law—and insists he does not have the right to do so, since the law has made him who he is—so we do not have the right to choose to take away something that is not really ours in the first place. Not only is in weirdly self-contradictory, it’s like a kind of theft. 

For my part, I have to admit that when I am not in acute mental pain or general despair, these arguments pull some weight with me. I do feel like my life is not entirely my own. I remember when talking to Andrew Solomon about suicide, he remarked that, “once I had children, I knew I was closing off certain possibilities.” What he meant, of course, was that his life was no longer entirely his own to dispose of: it now belonged not only to him, but to his children as well. But if we are willing to extend that notion of indebtedness to our children—as I agree we should—what about our parents, who gave us life? Our mothers, who risked their own lives in giving birth to us?

Think of all of the people who have contributed to the possibility of our being here. It’s not just that I am in debt to those people, which is also true, but that my life is interwoven with theirs in such a way that it seems so immorally arrogant of me to think of taking my own life.

That said, I don’t think we should use this—or any of these arguments—to judge, blame or condemn others who have tried to, may try to, or did take their own lives. These arguments are presented only with the hope of helping someone to see that her or his life may be more valuable and important than that person might otherwise believe.

8: It is braver to live, and especially to live for our loved ones

Which leads directly to the next point. As the peerless Lauryn Hill writes:

“you said you’d die for me / why won’t you live for me?” ^[lxvii]

The most common and nasty accusation levelled against suicide, I think, is the claim that it is cowardly. As the German philosopher Paul-Louis Landsberg remarks, “It is very customary to find all suicides condemned as cowards.” And he goes on to add: 

“This is a typically bourgeois argument which I find ridiculous. How can we describe as cowardly the way of dying chosen by Cato, or Hannibal, or Brutus, or Mithridates, or Seneca or Napoleon?  There are certainly far more people who do not kill themselves out of cowardice.”[lxviii]

Now the question is not: is it always cowardly to kill oneself? I think Landsberg is exactly right: it’s obviously not always cowardly to take your own life, and indeed in the course of history it may often have been the case that it was the bravest thing to do. Our question here is whether there may be a still braver thing to do, which is to go on living?

Seneca, who, as we know, is perhaps the most vigorous defender of the moral legitimacy of suicide in the recorded history of the subject, nevertheless argues in Letter 78, “On the Healing Power of the Mind”:

“I often entertained the impulse of ending my life then and there; but the thought of my kind old father kept me back. For I reflected, not how bravely I had the power to die, but how little power he had to bear bravely the loss of me. And so I commanded myself to live. For sometimes it is an act of bravery even to live.” ^[lxix]

Or as Rousseau famously and a bit more pointedly puts the same argument: “If there is one person on earth who has loved you enough not to wish to survive you, and whose happiness is incomplete without yours, do you think you owe her nothing?” ^[lxx] 

We have to be particularly careful with this argument, because a person who kills herself in order to escape from her suffering is probably highly aware of the debts she has to others. When Isaac Watts (1674-1748) writes, for example,

“If it be so hard to you to bear a little poverty, shame, sorrow, reproach, etc. that you will die rather than bear it, why will you entail these on your kindred and on those who love you best?” ^[lxxi] he’s not telling the suicidal person anything that she hasn’t already thought about.

But maybe some arguments are best just so far as they give us pause. If I can think, when I am at my worst, that now I have an opportunity to be a tiny bit better than I was a moment before, just by pausing, just by having the courage not to do the thing I most want to do, that alone may be all we need to take from the “it’s braver to live” argument. Simply to recognise in the midst of our despair, anguish and self-loathing that there is something good about us—we have found the courage to go on living!

There is a victory in refusing to die when you most want to die. It may not entirely make rational sense, but I see a kind of emotional heroism in refusing to die even though there are all these reasons one can see in that moment to kill oneself. “Things will be still worse when I didn’t kill myself, and so I continue to refuse to do it!” This sounds a bit like Camus’s argument about Sisyphus and scorn of the Gods. When Camus writes that

“there is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn,” there’s not so much a reasoning here as a deep intuitive respect for naked courage, courage that has no justification other than itself; courage that looks an awful lot like stubbornness, certainly, but might inspire respect nevertheless.

For a long time I didn’t understand the famous lines that Dylan Thomas writes to his dying father:

“Do not go gentle into that good night. / Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

I even thought there was something morally offensive about the poem, though I still loved it: if his father has lived a good and long live, hasn’t he earned a peaceful death? Don’t we want to imagine that there could be a good time to die, when death could be welcomed as a friend? But when I think about Camus’s argument and the idea that there is courage in refusing to kill oneself even when you feel like you have no good reason to live, Thomas’s poem has an emotional logic that appeals to me. It’s like there’s something too fundamentally important about being alive, as you, yourself, to let it go without being pissed off about it. “I see you want me to go—maybe even life itself is ready to get rid of me. But I refuse to go! For that very reason I refuse to go!”

I have to remember, when it is me that is the heaviest thing that I carry, when it is me that I want to throw away, to finally be rid of, that it is also still me carrying that weight. I’m still doing something worth doing. So there is still hope for me, even when the pain of being me is burning my eyes, when I just want to cry until everything disappears. F-ck You, Pain! I’m still here.

Another aspect of this argument worth remembering is that, by living, we set an example for others. My psychiatrist Grace Ketterman once advised me that I shouldn’t decide to go on living because my children needed me. She told me they’d get over it, they’d survive without me, they’d be ok being raised by their mom. “The reason you shouldn’t kill yourself,” she went on, “is think of the example you’re setting for them.” 

As the physician Forbes Winslow (1810-1874) argued: “the intellect says, ‘Commit suicide, and escape from a world of wretchedness and woe;’ the moral principle says,  ‘Live; it is your duty to bear with resignation the afflictions that overwhelm you; let the moral influence of your example be reflected in the characters of those by whom you are surrounded.’” ^[lxxii] 

This is the point of the bravery argument. To say something is brave is not to say that it will be easy, or that we will want to do it; it is not to say that victory will be achieved—we might spend years bravely striving for something and yet fail to do it; it is not even to say that it is necessarily the best choice for you. When the nurse gives her life in brave sacrifice treating patients with the coronavirus or, in a particularly complicated case, when an emergency room doctor, also fighting the pandemic, works so hard struggling to help others that she finally takes her own life in exhaustion, ^[lxxiii] we don’t know that it was the right thing for them as people. Nevertheless, we will say of their fight to help others that it was courageous. 

The fight to stay alive, for the suicidal person, is courageous not only in the struggle, but also because one often does it out of the love and respect for others, and may do it in the hope of providing an example of courage to others. 

Do I fear that, in having attempted suicide, I have provided a bad example to my children and my students? Yes, I very much fear that. Do I hope that, by being alive today and writing and talking about my struggle with suicide, that they will choose to go on struggling with life, even when at times it will be so difficult and painful to continue? Yes, I very much hope that. 

I don’t think of myself as a brave person. On the contrary. But maybe just staying alive every day, no matter the struggle, is a brave thing to do.

9: Don’t bungle your death

The Neoplatonist philosopher Plotinus (204–270 AD) writes:

“But when a man contrives the dissolution of the body, it is he that has used violence and torn himself away, not the body that has let the Soul slip from it. And in losing the bond he has not been without passion; there has been revolt or grief or anger, movements which it is unlawful to indulge.” 

This is similar to one of the Buddhist arguments against suicide, which concerns the state of the mind at death. If it is true that the mind dissipates faster than the body, then, of course, there’s nothing to worry about—and in fact that’s the goal of many suicides. Suicide is intended as flipping the switch that turns off the mind.

But if, as most Buddhists believe, the mind doesn’t cease to exist with the death of the physical body, then the manner in which we die is important. Then it’s a bit like going to the airport, or arriving in a foreign country. There are challenges enough at the airport or upon first arriving in a foreign country for someone who is calm, steady, confident; but if you arrive in a panic, fearful, disoriented, wild, you are much more likely to get into trouble in a hurry. Even if you are going someplace pleasant, making the trip in an upset frame of mind will make the trip much more difficult, and if, as the Buddhist believes, your mind actually dictates the circumstances of your travel—if the experience you have between lives is an expression of your state of mind, like the nightmare of a frightened person sleeping—then beginning the process in a tormented way will make the journey miserable. As Matthieu Ricard writes,

“Suicide solves nothing at all, it only shifts the problem to another state of consciousness.” ^[lxxiv]

This argument can cut both ways, of course. In some Buddhist traditions, especially among the Pure Land Buddhist school as it is practised in Japan, one who commits suicide to leave extremely unpleasant conditions here on earth may do so successfully so long as her intention is a good one and her mind is at peace. According to this tradition, as Carl Becker writes:

“There is nothing intrinsically wrong with taking one’s own life, if not done in hate, anger or fear. Equanimity or preparedness of mind is the main issue… The important consideration here is not whether the body lives or dies, but whether the mind can remain at peace and in harmony with itself.” ^[lxxv]

The argument applies only to cases of violent suicide, committed in emotional turmoil, and doesn’t apply to a reasoned death. On Plotinus’s way of thinking, it is not that suicide as such is bad, but that suicide as a means of passionately and violently ending physical life is a bad idea.

For me this is an important recognition. Many thinkers argue that suicide is always wrong—and to be sure, it may make it easier to deter others from suicide if you have a one-size-fits-all policy. Those who believe that suicide will result in a terrifying afterlife, as we’ll see below, tend to advocate the "suicide is always wrong" approach. 

But if we will allow that the motivations for suicide and the corresponding state of mind of the person who is considering suicide are part of our analysis of the desire and plan to die, we can have a more nuanced view. 

Here the literature on medical assistance in dying is helpful.  In the case of Linda Fleming, for example, the first documented patient to die with medical assistance in the state of Washington, she specifically stated that maintenance of a healthy state of mind was part of her motivation for her suicide: “I am a very spiritual person, and it was very important to me to be conscious, clear-minded and alert at the time of my death. The powerful pain medications were making it difficult to maintain the state of mind I wanted to have at my death.” ^[lxxvi] So yes, Linda committed suicide, but no, she didn’t commit it in a way that most of us would think was somehow fundamentally misguided. Most of us would say she had a good death rather than a bad one, that she importantly didn’t mismanage or bungle her own death.

Obviously it is difficult to gauge what a person’s state of mind is, particularly if that person is in extreme distress, or is inclined to mislead others about her state of mind. ^[lxxvii] And it is unusual to want to die if you are not in some kind of distress. So this criterion of intention may not be especially helpful to an outside observer of the suicidal person.

But for a person who is herself contemplating suicide, I think the question, “Am I in my right mind as I do this?” can be helpful. Of course, when we are angry or in despair we are unlikely to want to ask ourselves this question. Think how often you’ve lost your temper with someone, knowing it was a bad idea as you did it but not giving a damn. The person who is so desperate that she is sitting in the bathtub with a kitchen knife in her hand is in no better state to pause and consider, “Wait, am I thinking this through?”

Before she went into the kitchen to get the knife, before she took the last of her Seconal and started running the bath, before she took off her clothes to get in the tub, hands a bit overloaded with the knife, her wine and her phone—or worse yet, not bringing her phone—she made a decision at some point, she said, "F-ck it". She thought,

"Tonight’s the night. And at that point, if she is anything like me, she may have been in a position to say, But wait. Am I really thinking this through? Or am I confused by my misery? Can I wait five minutes, or make a phone call, or go for a walk, or do anything to give myself a little room to calm down? After all, if I take a walk and in fifteen minutes I still see with clarity that this is the right thing to do, the tub will still be there and the knife will still be there."

If you’re anything like me, if you even manage to say to yourself, “I still see with clarity that this is the right thing to do,” you’re going to get a little laugh out of it, and then you might be off the hook. If you can make yourself laugh a little, you’ll probably have the energy and self-irony to make it one more day, which, for most of us, is all you have to do.

Another way that suicide might bungle our death is by making permanent something awful or unfair in our lives that otherwise need not be. Consider some harm which you didn’t deserve—this can be the very hardest to take. Being misunderstood and judged badly are principle reasons for suicide offered both by our Egyptian thinker and by Qu Yuan. But there is one way to all but guarantee that this will be the final opinion on you, which is to kill yourself. When you interrupt your life in the middle of some unjust accusation against you, any chance of you living to see that injustice corrected, and any possibility of you yourself acting to correct the injustice, is over. This is one of the reasons that the biblical character of Job goes on living when his wife suggests that he kill himself.  He doesn’t do it, even though he considers himself to be suffering through the most grievous forms of injustice, because he has a kind of conviction that so long as he goes on living, things will change.

It may be that the question of whether or not one is bungling one’s death by suicide comes down to the intention behind the act. If you are killing yourself for sound and defensible reasons, we might incline to say that this was a justifiable death, a good death. But if you are killing yourself out of panic or fear, we might say that this is cause for rethinking the attempt to take your own life. Among African sub-Saharan tribes, as among American indigenous tribes, and in the Japanese tradition, it is often believed that the motive for the suicide is more important than the act itself. So there are honourable suicides and dishonourable suicides, good deaths and bad deaths, depending upon whether or not one’s motivation was praiseworthy. ^[lxxviii]

Voltaire writes, contrasting the people of his own day with the Romans (who, he believed, might have committed suicide with good reasons):

We, too, kill ourselves, but it is when we have lost our money, or in the very rare excess of foolish passion for an unworthy object. I have known women kill themselves for the most stupid men imaginable. And sometimes we kill ourselves when we are in bad health, which action is a real weakness. Disgust with our own existence, weariness of ourselves is a malady which is likewise a cause of suicide. The remedy is a little exercise, music, hunting, the play…The man who, in a fit of melancholy, kills himself today, would have wished to live had he waited a week. ^[lxxix]

I will return to this argument later, when I consider the possibility of a good death for myself. But to me the basic intuition here is one of the most convincing in this line-up on arguments: we can imagine both a good death and a bad one, and in the vast majority of circumstances when we are considering taking our own lives, it is a bad death that will be the result. “That your dying be no blasphemy against humankind and the earth, my friends,” Friedrich Nietzsche writes, in the “On Free Death” section of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

“In your dying, your spirit and your virtue should still glow like a sunset around the earth: else your dying turned out badly.” ^[lxxx]

If there is no afterlife, we only get one life and one death, and it would be good to have both go as well as possible. And if there is an afterlife, we might be particularly concerned that the transition to the next life be less terrifying and violent rather than more so.

10: Suicide means a terrible afterlife

Which brings us to one of the most common arguments against suicide: that suicide leads to a bad afterlife. This is a popular view. We find it throughout human history and culture. ^[lxxxi]  That said, as we noted above, one also finds in many different cultures and throughout history the view that suicide results in a good afterlife, so when it comes to these arguments—and especially given the lack of hard evidence--perhaps we should, like the Ancient sceptics, suppose that the scales are balanced, and suspend judgment on the whole matter.

Nevertheless, there are some great stories from the “terrible afterlife” arguments about suicide, and some are weirdly persuasive to me, so I’d like to discuss a few of them here.

My own favourite story from the “terrible afterlife” view comes from the Navajo American indigenous tribe, who claim that the suicide, like certain murderers, is doomed to wander the earth in a kind of half-life, with a self-destructive weapon in hand. “The spirit of a suicide must continually carry the lethal implement in the afterworld.”^[lxxxii] Because the violent person still holds her or his knife, axe or rope, it is difficult, maybe impossible for the person to make any friends in the next life, because they frighten everyone off on approach. Also, for this reason, suicides who hanged themselves from trees would choose the smallest possible tree, so that they wouldn’t suffer the impossible burden of having to drag around forever some giant oak or elm. ^[lxxxiii]  (Please see the end of this chapter for a short appendix of some other interesting indigenous American versions of the “bad afterlife” view.) 

But the view is certainly not restricted to the distant past or to cultural traditions foreign to contemporary ways of thinking. Following on the “bad death” argument we have just been discussing, the psychoanalyst and philosopher Carl Jung (1875-1961 AD), for example, worries about suicide for the reason that it is the wrong way to enter into what may be a further stage of existence. He thinks that we should avoid suicide at all costs, while admitting that it is an ‘unreasonable’ attitude.  “The reason for such an ‘unreasonable’ attitude with me is that I am not at all sure what will happen to me after death.  I have good reasons to assume that things are not finished with death…I shall therefore hang on as long as it is humanly possible and I try to avoid all forgone conclusions, considering seriously the hints I got as to the post mortem events.” (Letter to Mrs. N., 19 November 1955).  Jung suggests that he has seen a glimpse of the afterlife, and it has served in part as a warning against suicide.

Here is what Madame de Staël writes, in a similar spirit: “Besides, how can we be assured that suicide will deliver us from the evils which pursue us? What certainty can atheists have of annihilation, or philosophers, of the mode of existence which nature has reserved for them?” And she goes on, echoing the Buddhist worry that the anguished death of the suicide may result in a bad afterlife: “If the soul survives death, will not the sentiment which filled it entirely, whatever may be its nature, still make a part of it?” ^[lxxxiv] 

Now we should say emphatically: when it comes to our discussion of the afterlife, none of us can really be claiming to make arguments. The closest we come to argument is along the lines of what both Socrates and Hamlet remark, and which I have mentioned above: that we don’t know what will happen when we die. Many of us or most of us assume that we know, but we simply don’t. It could be that any form of death, including suicide, results immediately in a glorious and eternal happiness. It could also be that it results in some hellish condemnation. It could be that we are reincarnated over and over and over again. Or it could be that death is simply the end.

It frustrates me when people assume (usually, with absolute confidence) that death is simply the end of consciousness, that there is no longer any relevant form of existence when we die. It may well be the case. But we don’t know that with any more certainty than we do that something quite different happens. And we show a strange kind of historical and cultural arrogance and naivete when we simply dismiss the views on the subject of so many societies and thinkers from the past.

When Socrates’s friends and students are suffering over the fact of his impending death, before he drinks the hemlock that ends his life, he consoles them:

For I am quite ready to admit, Simmias and Cebes, that I ought to be grieved at death, if I were not persuaded in the first place that I am going to other gods who are wise and good (of which I am as certain as I can be of any such matters), and secondly (though I am not so sure of this last) to men departed, better than those whom I leave behind; and therefore I do not grieve as I might have done, for I have good hope that there is yet something remaining for the dead, and as has been said of old, some far better thing for the good than for the evil.

Of course Socrates is committing suicide, just as Seneca did after him—and it is frequently speculated that Socrates was Seneca’s inspiration—because he is being compelled to do so by the state. So here Socrates certainly isn’t saying that suicide will result in a bad death; in fact, quite the opposite. Elsewhere in the text he suggests that suicide for the wrong motives is morally undesirable, but even there he doesn’t say that it will result in a bad afterlife.

The Roman poet Virgil (70 BC–19 BC) gives us an account of the afterlife of the suicide that will prove very influential (this is Dryden’s translation):

“The next in place, and punishment, are they / who prodigally throw their souls away– / Fools, who repining at their wretched state, / and loathing anxious life, suborn their fate; / With late repentance now they would retrieve / The bodies they forsook, and wish to live.” ^[lxxxv]

In Dante’s Inferno, a fictional Virgil shows Dante the forest in the seventh circle of hell where the souls of suicides are trapped within trees and preyed upon by harpies, famously illustrated by William Blake in his print “The Wood of the Self-Murderers.”

Among Buddhists, the prevailing contemporary view seems to be that suicide is wrong and leads to rebirth in hell, because it wastes a precious human life and destroys something which has Buddha nature. On this view, the suicide will suffer in hell for a long time, and then will eventually be reborn. That said, as late as the 13^th century, among Japanese Buddhists the general view was that probably most motivations for and acts of suicide are mistaken (and as such could lead one to a worse rebirth, or rebirth in a terrible place such as a hell realm), but the simple act of suicide itself didn’t necessarily plunge you directly into hell. There were causes of suicide that may well lead to desirable rebirths. The first Japanese Buddhist monk who has the modern view—the “if you kill yourself, it’s a ticket straight to hell” view--seems to be the 14^th century philosopher Jitsunyo Ninkū. ^[lxxxvi]

I was recently emailing about the questions of what happens to the suicide when she dies with Jim Lowrey, a friend of mine who is a lifelong Buddhist practitioner and author of a terrific book about the great twentieth century Tibetan Buddhist philosopher Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.  He reminded me of the story, told in his book, of when a friend of his, also a serious Buddhist practitioner, took his own life. 

At their friend Tom’s funeral, Trungpa Rinpoche turned to one of his other students, who was suffering terribly over the loss, and said: “Don’t worry, it’s no big deal. At the same time, it’s not going to be easy for him. If you commit suicide, you will have problems in the bardo. Because of that act of aggression, a person could be stuck in limbo for a long time.” And then sometime later in the funeral Trungpa Rinpoche remarked to another one of his grieving students: “Just about now, Tom is discovering that he didn’t get out of anything.” ^[lxxxvii] According to Trungpa Rinpoche, strictly speaking suicide is impossible, because the mind that you are trying to eliminate is by its nature indestructible.

Perhaps we are thinking, of our present condition: “Nothing could be worse than this.” For most of us even a little exercise of the imagination can conjure up states that are much worse than even the most anguished present circumstances; and if not, then that too may well be a reason to go on living, because if it is truly the case that nothing could be worse than this, then the next moment, the next hour, the next day, all that the future holds by definition will at least be marginally better than what you are presently experiencing. “But I just want to curl up in a ball! Don’t I deserve at least that much! I don’t have the energy! I just want to not-exist!” But what if that option simply isn’t available? At least, it might be too optimistic to assume that one has that option. It could be that the one guaranteed way to make our truly unhappy circumstances even that much more miserable is to “take the easy way out,” which we discover is neither easy nor an exit.

Thinking this way does make me feel a bit panicky and claustrophobic. I do like the Stoic idea that “the door is always open” for this very reason. But again, I am here hoping for reasons not necessarily to decide a suicidal person’s mind one way or the other, but to give her pause. In my reading of Hamlet’s soliloquy about suicide, the fact that his uncertainty about what may be on the other side of death causes him to waver is one source of the irresolution which disturbs him so much, is on the contrary a very good thing, and a consequence of the highly reflective and sensitive person he is. 

The ancient Greeks had many different views about the afterlife: that there is no afterlife, but just death, and that the mind will perish even faster than the body; that we are reincarnated, over and over again, perhaps towards perfection and liberation or perhaps endlessly; that there is a heaven and a hell; that there is a kind of endless limbo, neither life nor really death, but a sort of listless half-life; and permutations and combinations of these views. But my personal favourite is the one associated with the Greek god Dionysus in the Orphic tradition (sometimes called Zagreus or “the first Dionysus”: there are probably as many different ancient Greek versions of Dionysus as there are different versions of the afterlife). The Orphic version of Dionysus is a kind of mediator between the lands of the living and the lands of the dead, and guides the process of reincarnation. But what I like best about this myth is the way he represents the idea of immortality, with his death in the fall, during the harvest, as winter approaches, and his rebirth as a baby with the new plants in the spring. 

If I am willing to entertain the possibility that something like my mind continues after my physical body dies, I find it reassuring to look at my garden. So many of my plants die back to the ground in winter and look like they will be dead forever. But when they return in April and May they come back the same as the year before or, sometimes, larger, and more abundant, flowering where they hadn’t flowered before. It seems so improbable and is amazing and almost mystical to watch.

11: Life has a task for you

I was recently discussing her master’s thesis on suicide with a graduate student of mine, and she wrote: “Personal experience. I’d be so pissed at myself if I were dead right now. Haha.” ^[lxxxviii] This is a subtle but very important philosophical point that also has, of course, a great deal of intuitive commonsense appeal. We can imagine a life that includes a suicide, and we can place that suicide at some point along the timeline of that life, and then say to ourselves, Oh, but look at all the good things that came after that point on the timeline. All of those would be lost if we place the suicide there. And no matter where we place the point, unless we are thoroughgoing pessimists or in a state of serious decline, we will once again say, Oh yes, that was still too soon. Even if there is a lot of suffering that was to be avoided that way, most of us will recognise points on that timeline that we want to be sure have the opportunity to occur, and particularly so if those points are things we are doing that we consider importantly worth doing, things that only we could have done, or things that we would do to help others. 

The Kashmiri Buddhist philosopher Nagasena (approximately 150 BC) put it simply to King Menander the First in Milinda Pañha: “One could do good, so should not commit suicide.” ^[lxxxix]

Clancy successfully commits suicide at age twenty in Miami, pushing himself off the top of a hotel during a crack comedown? None of those children are born, none of those marriages or love affairs happen, none of those friendships are made, none of those books are written. Clancy successfully commit suicide at age 42 by hanging himself in the closet, at age 45 by slashing his wrists and overdosing in the bathtub, at age 48 by hanging himself in the basement? His fourth child is never born, he never helps those students to graduate school and law school, he never volunteers to teach in prison, he never straightens out his finances or really comes to terms with his addictions, he never gives himself the chance to succeed at marriage, he never writes an essay on suicide that may be the first thing he’s written that may actually help a few people, he never learns to garden, never sees the pandemic of 2020.

And this way of thinking still has not included, crucially, possible harms that may be caused by the suicide itself, new chains of cause and effect that create damages to others. Rousseau wrote:

“So you are entitled to cease to live? What I would like to know is whether you have even begun?  What!  Were you placed on earth to do nothing here?...Find me that righteous man who boasts he has lived enough. …do not burn your house down to avoid the bother of putting it in order.” ^[xc] 

 Rousseau goes on to add: “Every time you are tempted to exit it, say to yourself: ‘Let me do one more good deed before I die.’  Then go find someone needy to assist, someone unfortunate to console, someone oppressed to defend.  Reconcile me with the wretched who are too intimidated to approach me; do not fear to squander either my purse or my influence: help yourself; exhaust my fortune, make me rich.  If this consideration holds you back today, it will hold you back again tomorrow, the day after tomorrow, your whole life long.” 

Mme de Staël, who is always sympathetic to the plight of the suicidal person, adds: “And had this man, who wished to die, no country? Could he not have fought for it? Was there no noble or perilous enterprise in which he might have set a glorious example? What is it that he has given?” ^[xci]

And here is Carl Jung’s version of the argument, in a letter to an old man who has written to him for advice about death:

The idea of suicide, understandable as it is, does not seem commendable to me.  We live in order to attain the greatest possible amount of spiritual development and self-awareness.  As long as life is possible, even if only in a minimal degree, you should hang on to it, in order to scoop it up for the purpose of conscious development.  To interrupt life before its time is to bring to a standstill an experiment which we have not set up.

The Islamic mystic thinker Al Ghazali (1056-1111) has a view much like Carl Jung’s: “But one should observe the correct measure and not forsake everything of the world and not seek everything of the world and know for what purpose things in the world were created and observe each thing according to the purpose for the sake of which it was created.” ^[xcii] That is to say, the purpose of your life is not death, so don’t suppose that in seeking your own death you will have somehow completed your life. You will, on the contrary, have failed to find the meaning that your life may otherwise have revealed.

But perhaps the most powerful version of the “life has a task for you” argument is given by the great American philosopher and psychologist William James (1842-1910 AD). In a way I think he also offers the most humane version of the argument. Despite being a wealthy and successful Harvard professor, James was constantly beset by depression, worsened by the early death of one of his children, and he wrestled with the thought of suicide all of his life. Allow me to quote him at length:

If you surrender to the nightmare view and crown the evil edifice by your own suicide, you have indeed made a picture totally black. Pessimism, completed by your act, is true beyond a doubt, so far as your world goes. Your mistrust of life has removed whatever worth your own enduring existence might have given to it; and now, throughout the whole sphere of possible influence of that existence, the mistrust has proved itself to have had divining power. But suppose, on the other hand, that instead of giving way to the nightmare view you cling to it that this world is not the ultimatum. Suppose you find yourself a very well-spring, as Wordsworth says, of—

“Zeal, and the virtue to exist by faith
As soldiers live by courage; as, by strength
Of heart, the sailor fights with roaring seas.”

Suppose, however thickly evils crowd upon you, that your unconquerable subjectivity proves to be their match, and that you find a more wonderful joy than any passive pleasure can bring in trusting ever in the larger whole. Have you not now made life worth living on these terms? What sort of a thing would life really be, with your qualities ready for a tussle with it, if it only brought fair weather and gave these higher faculties of yours no scope? Please remember that optimism and pessimism are definitions of the world, and that our own reactions on the world, small as they are in bulk, and necessarily help to determine the definition. They may even be the decisive elements in determining the definition. ^[xciii]

Yes, life is incredibly hard, and even harder to make sense of. But the effort to make sense of it justifies the difficulty, and may in fact be a kind of solution to the difficulty. On this account, the only way to fail completely at life, really, is to kill yourself.  

Paul-Louis Landsberg (1901-1944 AD), the philosophy professor who died in a Nazi concentration camp in Oranienberg, Germany, makes an argument similar to James’s. He agrees with James that much of life is suffering, and that we learn from suffering, and so, to discard one’s life is to discard one’s suffering. It’s not so much that you waste your life in killing yourself as that you waste your suffering. ^[xciv]

I like this idea of wasting suffering very much. Why waste all this suffering by throwing it away? As Keats, who understood something about the desire for suicide, wrote in one of his letters: “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?” ^[xcv] Unless suffering is just pointless—which, looking at my own life, it has rarely been—then of course he’s right, when I kill myself all that suffering comes to nothing, unless the lesson is just the suicide—and I don’t think that’s the lesson. The good parts of me, the parts I value and might actually recommend to someone else, mostly came to me from suffering, including my limited ability to love and care for others, my limited ability to listen and to be honest, my limited ability and limited willingness to help someone else, or to be a good friend. All that has come from suffering, and without suffering, what an egomaniacal asshole I would surely be. 

So will I really throw away this present suffering? And if there is more suffering to come—as I suppose there must be, though I’m afraid of it—well, maybe that suffering, too, will make me a person who is somewhat less repugnant to himself, who fails less as a person rather than more as a person—and after all, so many of my failures took place during carefree and careless times of my life. (Is that true, though? Or is it rather that my failures were actually the consequence of trying to escape suffering in the wrong way—or maybe from trying to escape suffering at all?) 

Viewed this way, the suffering is the very thing that keeps me from killing myself! Now that’s an interesting way of turning the usual argument in favour of suicide completely on its head. This is how Dostoevsky sees it, according to Julia Kristeva: “...was suffering, then, a barrier against suicide and against death?” ^[xcvi] What if the only task is just to stay alive?

 We should also not forget to notice that maybe, in killing ourselves, we are just missing out. That is, by committing suicide, especially because you don’t know what the future holds—though you think you do, you really don’t—you are missing your chance at all kinds of good things that were otherwise coming your way. Which reminds me of the way Adrienne Rich articulates the “life has a task for you” argument in a poem she wrote to her husband, a few years after his death by suicide in 1970:

Next year it would have been 20 years
and you are wastefully dead
who might have made the leap
we talked, too late, of making

which I live now
not as a leap
but a succession of brief, amazing movements

each one making possible the next.

12. Suicide won’t get you what you want 

St. Augustine (354-430) is the first to offer many of the arguments against suicide that will also be advocated by later thinkers, including the idea that only suicides sanctioned by God are justified (in order to account for the suicides in the Old Testament); that suicide may be a morally legitimate means of escaping rape (Augustine insists that the raped are not judged by God, only the rapist); that the suicide effectively divides himself into two people, the murderous part and the coerced part; that, contra Seneca and others, it is never strength or greatness of soul that leads a person to commit suicide, but “rather proof of a feeble mind, to be unable to bear either the pains of bodily servitude or the foolish opinion of the vulgar”; that we cannot get to Heaven in a hurry or avoid sin through suicide because the suicide is always the worse sin; and that the suicide kills himself in seeking relief, therefore supposing that he will not go on living, but this is a grievous error. ^[xcvii]

But for our purposes here, Augustine particularly says: “So if you will to escape from unhappiness, cherish your will to exist. For if you will more and more to exist, you will approach him who exists in the highest degree.” That is to say, what the suicidal person seeks is an escape from her unhappiness, and by implication what she much prefers is the opposite state, happiness. But to avoid unhappiness and to seek happiness is to seek God, on Augustine’s account, and the way we seek God is not through annihilation but existence, and maximally existing. This is a line of argument that must have influenced both James and Dostoevsky in their notion that the living of life, suffering and all, is the best way to find the meaning of life. 

Augustine continues, in a line of attack that recalls some of the logic of the sanctity of life argument that one cannot reasonably choose nonexistence, because it is nothing, and you cannot reasonably choose that which does not exist. To choose you have to be choosing something, to choose nothing is the same as not to choose at all. (It’s a nonsense decision.)

And then, the great kicker:

…someone who believes that after death he will not exist is driven by his unbearable troubles to desire death with all his heart; he chooses death and takes hold of it. His opinion is completely false, but his feeling is simply a natural desire for peace. And something that has peace is not nothing; indeed, it is greater than something that is restless. For restlessness generates one conflicting passion after another, whereas peace has the constancy that is the most conspicuous characteristic of Being. So the will’s desire for death is not a desire for nonexistence but a desire for peace. When someone wrongly believes that he will not exist, he desires by nature to be at peace; that is, he desires to exist in a higher degree. ^[xcviii]

It’s a very interesting and weirdly persuasive idea, that desiring peace is desiring to exist in a higher degree, which makes me think that of course I won’t get peace through suicide, because it always takes work to get peace of mind, peace of anything, it’s never easy, it’s never simple. 

I don’t think Augustine takes the motivation of mere escape seriously enough—that is, even if we are going out of the frying pan and into the fire (as he thinks the suicide is doing), sometimes nevertheless we just can’t take the frying pan anymore. But I still think there is something to this desiring peace and peace is a higher state of being business, it has some kind of plausibility to me, and it acknowledges the psychological truth that the suicide feels a legitimate, even praiseworthy desire for peace.

Which makes me want to ask myself: what do you think might possibly bring you some peace? Rather than: what’s the quickest way out of this war? Because the quickest way to end a war is not necessarily the best way to create an enduring peace. 

Wittgenstein also has a version of this argument, which he makes in a letter to a friend, while himself struggling with the thought of suicide: “Surely one cannot will one’s own destruction, and anybody who has visualised what is in practice involved in the act of suicide knows that suicide is always a rushing of one’s own defences.  But nothing is worse than to be forced to take oneself by surprise.” ^[xcix] Andrea Dworkin makes the same observation about rushing one’s own defences in her essay “My Suicide”: “If you want to kill yourself, though, you have to strike while the iron is hot. Every delay leads back to life. Every hesitation pulls you back.”^[c] Again, if peace is the goal, what’s all this haste about? We know that we are rushing ourselves—and yet precisely what we are wanting to escape is all this rushing. We know that we are making a panicked decision—and yet precisely what we want to escape is the panic.

Paul Tillich has a particularly interesting version of this argument:

The experience, therefore, that suicide is no way of escaping guilt must be understood in terms of the qualitative character of the moral demand, and of the qualitative character of its rejection. Guilt and condemnation are qualitatively, not quantitatively, infinite. They have an infinite weight and cannot be removed by a finite act of ontic self-negation. This makes despair desperate, that is, inescapable… This frustrates the suicidal trends in emptiness and meaninglessness. One is aware of their futility. ^[ci]

Or as Wittgenstein puts it in a journal note, more succinctly if not necessarily less cryptically:

“Despair has no end & suicide does not end it, unless one puts an end to it by pulling oneself together.” ^[cii]

What is meant here is not so mysterious as it sounds, and is much more important than we might suppose if we get caught up in the philosophical terminology. The idea is simply that anxiety, despair, the worst forms of mental suffering, are not experienced anytime other than right now. That’s part of what makes them so overwhelming and it’s also why arguments against them can feel so utterly pointless. When you are in such despair that you can’t even think from one moment to the next, it’s not the guilt and anxiety of the past that is killing you, and it’s not even the fear of the future that’s making you want to escape by killing yourself, it is the very anguish of being you, right this very instant, that is making you want to howl with pain. That’s why Tillich says it’s qualitatively, not quantitatively, infinite: it’s not like you’re adding up all of your past pain or anticipating your future pain to get you to this moment. It is the absolutely unbearable quality of this very moment that has brought you to the brink. 

That’s also why, for example, thinking of my own past relationship with suicide, I would stand in the bathroom with my pistol in my mouth and stare at myself in the mirror. In every instant I was again willing myself to pull the trigger and in every instant I was again unable to do it. All of my life, my anguish and the possibility of my death at every instant was there, in each of those instants, hanging in the balance. Killing myself then wouldn’t have liberated me from despair; it would have eternally confirmed the final fact of my despair, from which otherwise, eventually, at least for a time, I was free.

Of course that doesn’t mean the despair won’t come back, and all of the trouble won’t come back; indeed it has, and no doubt will again. It’s true, suicide would not have given me what I wanted—freedom from despair—but what life has given since that time, has certainly been a complicated mix of things. As Yiyun Li writes:

“…I have to live my own cautionary tale. Some people seek victory in that tale, others escape, yet others peace. I still do not know what I want from mine, but one hopes that to accept not knowing, for the time being, is better than to accept nothing.” ^[ciii]

Does life still have a task for me? Or, all these arguments be damned, would suicide actually get me what I want? I accept not knowing, which I hope, as Yiyun Li writes, is better than accepting nothing. 

Maybe it’s much simpler than any of these arguments make it out to be. I think of one more observation I love from Yiyun Li, who is fifty-three as I write this (born November 4^th, 1972), and still going strong:

“One has made it this far; perhaps this is enough of a reason to journey on.” ^[civ]

[i] Quoted in Amery, On Suicide, p. 14.

[ii] Madame de Staël, Reflections on Suicide, in George Combe, The Constitution of Man, Considered in Relation to External Objects, Alexandrian edition. Columbus, OH: J & H Miller, n.d., second half of volume, pp. 99-112.

[iii] Of course, the case as used by Ingersoll specifically attacks those who argue against suicide on the grounds that God does not want us to kill ourselves. Ingersoll wants to show that suicide is not a sin, and is following arguments earlier used by David Hume and others to contend that a just and loving God would not want us to suffer pointlessly. Robert G. Ingersoll, “Is Suicide a Sin? Colonel Ingersoll’s Reply to His Critics,” in The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll. New York: Dresden Publishing Co., C. P. Farrell, 1895, 1903, Vol. 7, pp. 388-408. Also available from the Secular Web Library.

[iv] “Yoruba Laws and Customs: Suicide,” from A. K. Ajisafe, The Laws and Customs of the Yoruba People, London: Routledge; Lagos: C.M.S. Bookshop, 1924, preface; p. 32.

[v] We are not certain that Chrysippus himself is the source, it may have been one of his students.

[vi] Ioannes ab Arnim, ed., Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, Vol. 3, paragraph 768, Stuttgart: B. G. Teubner, 1903, pp. 190-191, tr. Yukio Kachi.

[vii]Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. Available online at Project Gutenberg #15399.

[viii] Shelly Kagan, Death, Yale, 2012, p. 318.

[ix] When thinking of Voltaire, whose views are influential in this chapter, I like to remember what Akutagawa wrote about him in the autobiographical story “The Life of a Stupid Man”: “At twenty-nine, life no longer held any brightness for him, but Voltaire supplied him with manmade wings.” Akutagawa, Penguin, 2006, p. 193.

[x] William F. Fleming, ed. and tr., Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary. Paris, London, New York, Chicago: E. R. DuMont, 1901. Entry “Cato: On Suicide, and the Abbe St. Cyran’s Book Legitimating Suicide,” vol. III, pp. 19-33. Here Voltaire, who generally argues against and even good-naturedly mocks suicide, points out that criminal and civil punishments on people who commit suicide are unjust.

[xi] [Citation Incomplete]. In his Confessions.

[xii] Rousseau, Julie, [Citation Incomplete]

[xiii] A. Dworkin, Last Days at Hot Slit, p. 393.

[xiv] As quoted in Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, [Citation Incomplete]

[xv] The Trouble With Being Born, p. 95.

[xvi] Cioran, Emile M. All gall is divided: the aphorisms of a legendary iconoclast. Simon and Schuster, 2012. Of this passage the contemporary philosopher Simon Critchley writes, in his wonderful Notes on Suicide (Fitzcarraldo, London, 2015): “I find something grimly reassuring and even fortifying in what we might call ‘the inelegant refutation of suicide…’ For as long as we are in possession of the powers of reflection and basic motility skills, we own the weapon with which we can assert our freedom and end our days, should we wish for such a consummation. But this does not entail that we should use that weapon. Not at all. That would be far too optimistic an act. Nothing would be saved by our suicide. Why not calm down and enjoy the world’s melancholy spectacle that spreads out so capaciously and delightfully before us?” (p. 73).

[xvii] Principles of Judicial Procedure, Ch. VIII, “Judicial Application,” in John Bowring, ed., The Works of Jeremy Bentham (1838–1843), facsimile edition, New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1962, vol. 1, pp. 479-480; vol. 2, p. 41. Quotation in biographical note from Ross Harrison, Bentham, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983, p. 1.

[xviii] William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3 Scene 1.

[xix] “On Suicide,” in Studies in Pessimism: A Series of Essays, tr. T. Bailey Saunders. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1893, pp. 43-50.

[xx] To be fair to Nic Pizzolatto, he doubtless had many philosophical sources for the wonderful treatment of nihilism he offers in the words of his character Rust Cohle.

[xxi] As quoted in Alvarez, The Savage God, p. 194.

[xxii] Benatar, The Human Predicament, p. 63.

[xxiii] There was also a “Goddess of the Gallows,” named Ixtab. “Thus there were many who for slight reasons of sadness, troubles, or sickness hanged themselves in order to escape and to go and rest in their heaven where they said the goddess of the gallows, whom they called Ixtab, came to take them.” In “Ixtab: Goddess of the Gallows,” from A. R. Pagden, ed. and tr., The Maya: Diego de Landa’s Account of the Affairs of Yucatán (Chicago: J. Philip O’Hara, 1975, p. 95; quotation in introduction, p. 16).

[xxiv] Jean-Étienne-Dominique Esquirol, Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity, tr. E. K. Hunt. Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1845, pp. 253-317.

[xxv] Landsberg, [Citation Incomplete]

[xxvi] Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos (Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24) (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929): 73-74.

[xxvii] Captain Charles Francis Hall, Life with the Eskimaux, (Expedition 1860-1862) (London: Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, 1865).

[xxviii] “On Suicide,” in Studies in Pessimism: A Series of Essays, tr. T. Bailey Saunders. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1893, pp. 43-50.

[xxix] William F. Fleming, ed. and tr., Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary. Paris, London, New York, Chicago: E. R. DuMont, 1901. Entry “Cato: On Suicide, and the Abbe St. Cyran’s Book Legitimating Suicide,” vol. III, pp. 19-33.

[xxx] Plato, Phaedo, 59-64.

[xxxi] David Hume, Of Suicide (1757), manuscript in the National Library of Scotland with corrections in Hume’s own hand, text provided by Tom L. Beauchamp.

[xxxii] Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, [Citation Incomplete] (Cioran, Emile M. The trouble with being born. Simon and Schuster, 2013.)

[xxxiii] William F. Fleming, ed. and tr., Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary. Paris, London, New York, Chicago: E. R. DuMont, 1901. Entry “Cato: On Suicide, and the Abbe St. Cyran’s Book Legitimating Suicide,” vol. III, pp. 19-33.

[xxxiv] E. M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay, p. 36.

[xxxv] On Suicide,” in Studies in Pessimism: A Series of Essays, tr. T. Bailey Saunders. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1893, pp. 43-50.

[xxxvi]A. L. Sadler, tr., The Beginner’s Book of Bushido. Tokyo: Kokusai Bunka Shinkokai, the Society for International Cultural Relations, 1941, pp. 3-5, 50-53, 74-79.

[xxxvii] [Citation Incomplete] Aztecs etc.

[xxxviii] Two Twists in Battle,” from Karl N. Llewellyn and E. Adamson Hoebel, The Cheyenne Way: Conflict and Case Law in Primitive Jurisprudence. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1941, pp. 3-6, 158—165.

[xxxix] As Mme de Staël writes: “Some people pretend, that there are circumstances in which, feeling ourselves a burden upon others, we may make a duty of ridding them of the encumbrance.” In Madame de Staël, Reflections on Suicide, in George Combe, The Constitution of Man, Considered in Relation to External Objects, Alexandrian edition. Columbus, OH: J & H Miller, n.d., second half of volume, pp. 99-112.

[xl] Jamison, p. 292.

[xli] Hanh, Thich Nhat. "In Search of the Enemy of Man." Fellowship 31.9 (1965): 6.)

[xlii] Codex Chimalpopoca, 1570.

[xliii]Pliny the Younger. “To Calpurnius Macer,” Book VI, Letter 24. Pliny: Letters and Panegyricus, tr. Betty Radice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969, p. 455. Online at www.gutenberg.org.

[xliv] “Chimalpopoca’s Victory in Death,” from Juan de Torquemada, Monarquia Indiana, 3rd edition, vol. 1 (Mexico: Editorial Salvador Chavez Hayhoe, 1943, pp. 123-26), tr. Carolyn Morrow.

[xlv] Ojibwa: “Mrs. Cochran Becoming a Windigo,” from R. Landes, Ojibwa Sociology. Columbia University Contributions to Anthropology, vol. 29, New York: Columbia University, 1937, p. 105, and R. Landes, The Ojibwa of Canada, in M. Mead, ed., Cooperaton and Competition among Primitive People, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1937, p. 101.

[xlvi] David Foster Wallace, This is Water.

[xlvii] Schopenhauer derides the sanctity of life argument, writing: “As far as I know, none but the votaries of monotheistic, that is to say, Jewish religions, look upon suicide as a crime. This is all the more striking, inasmuch as neither in the Old nor in the New Testament is there to be found any prohibition or positive disapproval of it; so that religious teachers are forced to base their condemnation of suicide on philosophical grounds of their own invention. These are so very bad that writers of this kind endeavour to make up for the weakness of their arguments by the strong terms in which they express their abhorrence of the practice; in other words, they declaim against it. They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice; that only a madman could be guilty of it; and other insipidities of the same kind; or else they make the nonsensical remark that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.” In Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Suicide,” in Studies in Pessimism: A Series of Essays, tr. T. Bailey Saunders. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1893, pp. 43-50. [Citation Incomplete]

[xlviii] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 2a2ae, question 64, article 5, tr. Michael Rudick. Quotation in introduction from Angelico Ferrua, S[ancti] Thomae Aquinas vitae fontes praecipuae (Alba, IT: Edizioni domenicane, 1968, p. 318).

[xlix] Ya’qub al-Qirqisani, “On Suicide” from The Book of Lighthouses and Watchtowers, ed. and tr. Leon Nemoy, The Journal of Biblical Literature,  Philadelphia: vol. 57, no. 4, December 1938, pp. 414-420.

[l] The view that suicide is in fact a worse crime than murder is quite common in the Christian literature on suicide. It was first argued in the Christian tradition by Lactantius (c. 240-c.320). “For if a homicide is guilty because he is a destroyer of man, he who puts himself to death is under the same guilt, because he puts to death a man. Yea, that crime may be considered to be greater, the punishment of which belongs to God alone. For as we did not come into this life of our own accord; so, on the other hand, we can only withdraw from this habitation of the body which has been appointed for us to keep, by the command of Him who placed us in this body that we may inhabit it, until He orders us to depart from it…”. Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, Book III, chs. 18–19. Trans. Rev. William Fletcher. In The Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7. Buffalo: 1886; New York 1899–1900. Available online at Christian Classic Ethereal Library.

[li] G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Chapter 5.

[lii] The Problem with Being Born, p. 99.

[liii] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916,  eds. G. H. von Wright and G.E. M. Anscombe, tr. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1961), p. 91e.

[liv] Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, Tr. Louis Infield. New York: Harper & Row, 1978, pp. 147-157.

[lv] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 2a2ae, question 64, article 5, tr. Michael Rudick. Quotation in introduction from Angelico Ferrua, S[ancti] Thomae Aquinas vitae fontes praecipuae (Alba, IT: Edizioni domenicane, 1968, p. 318).

[lvi] Charles Gildon (1665-1724), from The Miscellaneous Works of Charles Blount. Full work available online through HathiTrust The Miscellaneous Works of Charles Blount, Esq (London?, 1695)

[lvii] “Restraining the Bereaved to Prevent Suicide,” from Jack Goody, Death, Property and the Ancestors. A Study of the Mortuary Customs of the LoDagaa of West Africa, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962, pp. 86-88. 90-92, 94-96, 183-185.

[lviii] “The Criminality of Suicide,” from A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa; their religion, manners, customs, laws, languages, &c. [originally published in 1890]. Reprint: Chicago: Benin Press, Ltd., 1965, p. 224.

[lix] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 2a2ae, question 64, article 5, tr. Michael Rudick. Quotation in introduction from Angelico Ferrua, S[ancti] Thomae Aquinas vitae fontes praecipuae (Alba, IT: Edizioni domenicane, 1968, p. 318).

[lx] Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 2a2ae, question 64, article 5, tr. Michael Rudick.

[lxi] David Hume, Of Suicide (1757), manuscript in the National Library of Scotland with corrections in Hume’s own hand, text provided by Tom L. Beauchamp, and quoted in the Ethics of Suicide Digital Archive.

[lxii] The analogy is not perfect, of course, because my employment at the University contractually requires me to perform service for the University. That said, committee work is only one kind of service, and there are many other kids that I can do in lieu of committee work.

[lxiii] John Adams, An Essay Concerning Self-Murther wherein is endeavour’d to prove that it is unlawful according to natural principles: with some considerations upon what is pretended from the said principles, by the author of a treatise intituled, Biathanatos, and others. London: Printed for Tho. Bennet, at the Half-Moon, in St. Paul’s Church-Yard, 1700, pp. 23-30, 94-130, spelling modernised.

[lxiv] Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, tr. William Chatterton Coupland, Vol III. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co., 1893, pp. 98-100.

[lxv] Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea, Book III, vii. 5-13, 1115a-1116a; Book V, xi, 1138a, ed. and tr. W. D. Ross. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1925, pp. 155-163, 317-319.

[lxvi] Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Paragraph 70 and Addition, tr. S. W. Dyde. London: George Bell and Sons, 1896, p. 76.

[lxvii] Thanks to Carol Hay for calling my attention to this lyric from Lauryn Hill’s song [Citation Incomplete]

[lxviii] Paul-Louis Landsberg, The Experience of Death and The Moral Problem of Suicide, tr. Cynthia Rowland. (New York: Philosophical Library), 1953, pp. 65-97.

[lxix] Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, Letter 78, tr. Richard M. Gummere, New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920, Vol. 2, pp. 169–199.

[lxx] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Heloise [Citation Incomplete]

[lxxi] Isaac Watts, A Defense Against the Temptation to Self-Murther, London: Printed for J. Clark, R. Hett, E. Matthews, and R. Ford, 1726.

[lxxii] Forbes Winslow, The Anatomy of Suicide, Ch. 16, “Can Suicide Be Prevented by Legislative Enactments?—Influence of Moral Instruction.” London: Henry Renshaw, 1840, pp. 36-44, 334-339.

[lxxiii] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/03/opinion/coronavirus-doctors-mental-health.html

[lxxiv] Jean-Francois Revel and Matthieu Ricard, The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life (New York, Schocken Books, 1998), p. 238.

[lxxv] Carl B. Becker, Breaking the Circle, pp. 136-137.

[lxxvi]William Yardley, “First Death for Washington Assisted Suicide Law,” The New York Times, May 22^nd, 2009. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/23/us/23suicide.html

[lxxvii] This has been part of the difficulty for countries which allow psychiatric distress to count as a form of the extreme suffering necessary to provide the legal grounds for justified euthanasia. Cf. “When unbearable suffering incites psychiatric patients to request euthanasia,” in The British Journal of Psychiatry, Br J Psychiatry. 2017 Oct; 211(4): 238–245.  doi: 10.1192/bjp.bp.117.199331 The authors of this study point out that at least some of these cases are requesting euthanasia due to poverty or unbearable debt—as we have seen, a familiar cause of suicidal thinking,—that poverty should be recognised for the societal problem that it is, and that “Euthanasia should never be seen (or used) as a means of resolving societal failures.” Forms of euthanasia have of course been used in societies dealing with problems of extreme material scarcity, such as the northern Indigenous tribes of Canada and other Arctic cultures, who often justified suicide and euthanasia particularly among the old because of their inability to contribute to the material needs of the tribe. Cf. E. W. Hawkes, The Labrador Eskimo (Canada Department of Mines, Geological Survey, Memoir 91, Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1916): 117-18, 136-37. It should also be noted that this practice usually involved the willing cooperation of the person who was to die: “the act [of euthanasia] is usually done in accordance with the wishes of the persons concerned and is thought to be a proof of devotion…”. [ibid.]

[lxxviii] “under certain circumstances, the action of taking one’s own life was considered as honourable and acclaimed as praiseworthy; e.g. to kill oneself in war by taking poison, or sitting on a keg of gunpowder to which a light was applied, rather than fall into the hands of the enemy or return home to tell of a defeat; to take one’s own life in order to accompany a beloved masters or mistress to the land of the spirits; and finally, those especially interesting cases, where a man commits suicide to wipe out what he considers his dishonour and because he cannot stand the ridicule of his companions. Suicide was considered a sin when it was carried out to avoid the consequences of some wrongful deed, or when, after investigation, it was not possible to ascribe any motive for the act.” From “Law and Constitution: A Suicide’s Trial,” from Capt. R. S. Rattray, Ashanti Law and Constitution, Kumasi: Basel Mission Book Depot, and London: Oxford University Press, 1929, pp. 294, 299-302 [field date 1921ff.].

[lxxix] William F. Fleming, ed. and tr., Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary. Paris, London, New York, Chicago: E. R. DuMont, 1901. Entry “Cato: On Suicide, and the Abbe St. Cyran’s Book Legitimating Suicide,” vol. III, pp. 19-33.

[lxxx] Nietzsche, TSZ, in The Portable Nietzsche, p. 185.

[lxxxi] The view that the suicide is doomed to a horrible afterlife is common among peoples from Alaskan and other American indigenous tribes all the way to Subsaharan Africa. The deeper one goes into the anthropological literature on the history of suicide, the more often one finds the view that the soul of the suicide lives on, but in some deeply undesirable way. The Subsaharan Dogon tribe for example claims that “…souls of certain deceased are essentially condemned to wander in the bush; they become evil beings, or dyabu, whose vital force cannot be perpetuated in a nani respondent.” This includes people who commit suicide among others. A person who commits suicide may also bring other supernatural troubles to the tribe. Dogon: “Suicide as Contagious: The Risk of Nyama,” from Solange de Ganay, Dogon Mottoes, HRAF; some footnotes interpolated; selection title and commentary from Germaine Dieterlen, The Souls of the Dogons, tr. Sherri L. Granka, HRAF (Paris 1941; New Haven, CT: 2000). Similarly the Ashanti tribe says that: “The spirit of the suicide became a saman twetwe, a ghost wandering about in search of its head, for it was debarred from entering the Samandow (land of spirits) until the expiration of its destined time upon earth, which it had itself wrongfully curtailed. Moreover, when eventually reincarnated, it would return to this world as a tofo sasa—the spirit of one who had died an unholy death—with a cruel and murderous nature which would lead it again to meet a similar end in its next incarnation.”

“Law and Constitution: A Suicide’s Trial,” from Capt. R. S. Rattray, Ashanti Law and Constitution, Kumasi: Basel Mission Book Depot, and London: Oxford University Press, 1929, pp. 294, 299-302 [field date 1921ff.].

[lxxxii] [Citation Incomplete] see appendix below.

[lxxxiii] [Citation Incomplete] See below.

[lxxxiv] Madame de Staël, Reflections on Suicide, in George Combe, The Constitution of Man, Considered in Relation to External Objects, Alexandrian edition. Columbus, OH: J & H Miller, n.d., second half of volume, pp. 99-112.

[lxxxv] Aeneis, lib. vi. v. 434 et seq., tr. Dryden

[lxxxvi] Thanks to Tatyana Kostochka for this information.

[lxxxvii] Taming Untameable Beings, p. 202-203.

[lxxxviii] Mansi Vashisth, March 15, 2021. WhatsApp message.

[lxxxix] [Citation Incomplete] source info

[xc] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New Heloise: Letters of Two Lovers Who Live in a Small Town at the Foot of the Alps, in The Collected Writings of Rousseau, vol. 6, trs. Philip Steward and Jean Vaché. Hanover and London: Dartmouth College; University Press of New England, 1997, letters 21 and 22, pp. 310-323. “Avoiding the bother” of putting one’s house in order seems also to be part of what Plato has in mind when he accuses the suicide, in Laws, of being guilty of sloth.

[xci] Madame de Staël, Reflections on Suicide, in George Combe, The Constitution of Man, Considered in Relation to External Objects, Alexandrian edition. Columbus, OH: J & H Miller, n.d., second half of volume, pp. 99-112.

[xcii] Al-Ghazali, The Revival of the Religious Sciences. Book 26 from Al-Ghazali, Al-Ghazali’s Ihya’ulum al-Din (Revitalization of the Sciences of Religion), abridged by Abd el Salam Haroun, rev. and tr. Dr. Ahmad A. Zidan, Vol. 1, Cairo: Islamic Inc. Publishing and Distribution, 1997, pp. 394-397.

[xciii] “Is Life Worth Living?” from The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York, London, and Bombay: Longmans Green, 1896, 1899, pp. 32-62.

[xciv] Paul-Louis Landsberg, The Experience of Death and The Moral Problem of Suicide, tr. Cynthia Rowland. (New York: Philosophical Library), 1953, pp. 65-97.

[xcv] From 1819. As quoted in Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, Harvard University Press, 1972, p.166.

[xcvi] Julia Kristeva, “On the melancholic imaginary,” Winter 1987.

[xcvii] Augustine, The City of God, Book I, ch. 17–27, tr. Rev. Marcus Dods.From A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, ed. Philip Schaff, Vol. II: St. Augustine’s City of God and Christian Doctrine, Edinburg: T & T Clark, Edinburgh, n.d. Available online from the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. On Free Choice of the Will, tr. Thomas Williams, Book III, sections 6–8, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1993, pp. 83–87.

[xcviii]  On Free Choice of the Will, tr. Thomas Williams, Book III, sections 6–8, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1993, pp. 83–87.

[xcix] Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, with a Memoir, tr. L. Furtmuller (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1967, no pagination, letter no. 33.

[c] Hot Slit, p. 386.

[ci] Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), pp. 54-57.

[cii] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein: Public and Private Occasions, ed. & trans. James C Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, Lanham, Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, pp. 125-7.

[ciii] Li, Dear Friend… p. 81.

[civ] Li, Dear Friend, p. 21