Philosophy is not only a discourse, but a search for wisdom that must really lead to practice. Wisdom is a particular knowledge that helps us to live our life and our death. Since death is the last act of life it is still to be lived. What matters for a wise person is not just to live and die, but to live and die well.
Suicide as an Insane Act
Suicide is widely condemned by philosophers. For Kant, killing oneself is an immoral act for three reasons: 1) it contravenes the universal moral law by taking one’s life, 2) it suppresses the subject of morality, 3) it attacks human freedom, that is, the autonomy of the person who expresses himself in the moral act. “To destroy the subject of morality in his own person is tantamount to obliterating from the world, as far as he can, the very existence of morality itself; but morality is, nevertheless, an end in itself. Accordingly, to dispose of oneself as a mere means to some end of one’s own liking is to degrade the humanity in one’s person (homonoumenon), which, after all, was entrusted to man (homophaenomenon) to preserve”.
It can certainly be argued that he who kills himself gives himself his own law, but this autonomy which should found human dignity is affirmed in the suicidal act only to be denied. Besides, is the law we obey really that of reason? Furthermore, until death has occurred, it cannot be said that life has more evil than good. It is therefore impossible to rely on such a calculation to justify the decision to kill oneself. If philosophy condemns suicide, it is because it is not only an error but also an illusion. Lack of logic and decision made purely on impulses make suicide, for most philosophies, an act contrary to reason.
The existentialists, often using different reasoning, have severely condemned suicide. Sartre condemns it because death no longer leaves room for consciousness, Heidegger condemns it because consciousness no longer makes room for death. But in both cases, suicide presents itself as the destruction of what constitutes the very meaning of existence.
Sartre saw the incompatibility of suicide with any project [20]. By destroying the possibility of life, suicide destroys what allows consciousness to constitute the meaning of existence. Suicide, therefore, is an absurd act and a total alienation. For Heidegger, death is a dimension of existence: human person is a being unto death. To become aware of this is to grasp what makes the core of my person and what calls me to an authentic existence. Suicide then denies our authentic existence as it prevents us from existing as beings unto death.
The prohibition of suicide has the protection of life and of the society for its end. Society refuses to accept suicide as the right of an individual because the common good prevails over particular interests. Suicide weakens society; it is a way of abandoning one’s responsibilities, of deserting one’s position. From this point of view, suicide is an anti-social act par excellence.
Factors conducive to suicide
The first is undoubtedly linked to the rise of individualist ideology. First of all, the individual no longer understands self-appropriation in the sense of self-knowledge but in the sense of self-ownership. So that there is no longer any harm to society when I lay my hand on me. This is the basis of a claim of right to suicide. The individual becomes the absolute subject by posing himself as the author of his death which he has to invent. But isn’t it dangerous to think of autonomy as independence and the subject’s freedom as freedom from constraint? Has not the modern constitution of the subject under the cover of a definitive liberation from all normative authority led this same subject to a subtle and unnoticed subjugation to itself?
Secondly, it also seems that the desire for absolute happiness without any struggle have the perverse effect of leading to a certain fragility of man. Faced with the various traumas of existence, everyone expects a miraculous solution to all problems in life. Finally, technology today allows escape into a playful and virtual universe of computer-assisted video games. The impact of this culture of Virtualities and simulation is that it makes us live in the element of exteriority and superficiality, and that we can oppose a culture of interiority and depth. It literally puts us outside of ourselves and transforms us into a lost image in the flow of images, disseminated by the various networks. There is a manifest dissolution of the person, dissolution in space and speed, which causes a certain intoxication and suggests that suicide could bring the same kind of ecstasy.
Individualism which gives human person absolute power over himself, desire for unlimited happiness and a culture of exteriority which in fact portrays life as death, are conducive factors to suicide. At least they combine to create a nebula around suicide which mitigates its gravity. Suicide thus becomes normalized. This normalization results precisely from a lack of knowing how to die which is only one aspect of an the most precious art of living.
Learning how to die
For Plato, philosophy is all about learning to die. He recommended philosophers to prepare to die by practising symbolic death. It is a question of detaching oneself from the body, purifying oneself from the desires for material world, and separating reason from senses. It is necessary to die symbolically to a certain kind of life to access a new form of life. It is because philosophers know how to die that they know how to live. For Plato, the meditation on death is properly a work of mourning because it includes the depreciation of material life and the reinvestment of desire on the only object that can satisfy the soul: Ideas. Grief is the lifeblood of a real life, an exercise in conversion and attention to what really matters. The seriousness of mourning brings out from the person what matters or is really worth while making die in it what is mortal. he can only be the victim of resentment. Undoubtedly, to see death less as a solution, it would be necessary to know how to die.
Montaigne makes a famous assertion, namely “to philosophize is to learn to die”. He teaches us that finitude is an irreducible component of life: each of us is mortal. But this experience of the inevitability of death must not give despair to human person. The thought of death must, on the contrary, disappear from the landscape of consciousness. Don’t think about death it will happen anyway. Learning to die is the first step. Once this truth is integrated, human person can become joyful and free again.
Thus, philosophizing comes down to understanding this lesson: to philosophize is to understand and accept death and not think about it anymore. Montaigne says, “I never saw any poor (person) among my neighbours think with what face and promise he should pass over his last hour; nature teaches him not to think of death till he is dying”. And Montaigne concludes that, in essence, wisdom consists in enjoying oneself: “It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully”.
We should not confuse life with a morbid obsession with mastery of life, which often leads us to end our life for fear of death. I will gladly follow Montaigne who says, “I want us to be doing things, prolonging life’s duties as much as we can. I want death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it nor the unfinished gardening”.
Prof Nishant A. Irudayadason
Jnana-Deepa Vidyapeeth
Pune 411014