Discussion The Taboo of Suicide: A Philosophical Review (Article)

[Aergia]

Came across this article I'd saved in my notes (incidentally, years before I personally experienced suicidal ideation) and I'm not sure if it's been posted here before so I figured I'd share it—

The Taboo of Suicide: A Philosophical Review - Areo

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. —Albert…View Post

areomagazine.com

Some highlights:

As Benatar points out, "After all, it is very likely that the high value we attach to life is at least significantly influenced by a brute biological life drive, a strong instinct of self-preservation that is pre-rational, shared with other animals, and then, in the case of humans, rationalized." We may exist and undergo life's frustrations, not for intelligible reasons, but out of a pre-rational yet rationalized obedience to the taskmaster that is life. We should replace you should live because with you must, full stop.

How can I be said to live life authentically if I simply cannot choose otherwise? To have the real possibility of choosing otherwise, of suicide, grants authenticity to one's leap of faith in living. Death is possible at any moment and yet we can choose to live.

Maybe one reason why suicide is often seen as a tragedy is because it pierces the bubble of our shared self-perpetuating reality—our grand illusion—that life is worth living.

The flip side of suicide—the denial of death, i.e. the desire to construct a symbolic life that will reach beyond one's fleshly life (e.g. to be remembered for this or that)—has been interpreted by Ernest Becker as the genesis of human destructiveness.

As William James put it, "If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will."