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The Value of Suicide
The Value of Suicide
The Value of Suicide
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The Value of Suicide

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This book is not about the medical, psychological, psychiatric, sociological, statistical, or even theological aspects of suicide. It does not investigate the pathology of why some people kill themselves and it certainly does not attempt either to prevent or to encourage suicide. It is a book on the philosophy of suicide. It examines (1) the ontology of suicide, i.e., what suicide is from the perspective of being, and (2) the ethics of suicide, i.e., whether suicide ought to be morally permitted and what its effects in the world are when it is. In other words, it is about the "axiology," i.e., the "theory of the value" of suicide. Toward this end, it occasionally considers historical, biographical, and literary cases.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateDec 4, 2012
ISBN9781933237701
The Value of Suicide
Author

Eric v.d. Luft

Eric v.d. Luft earned his B.A. magna cum laude in philosophy and religion at Bowdoin College in 1974 and his Ph.D. in philosophy at Bryn Mawr College in 1985. From 1987 to 2006 he was Curator of Historical Collections at SUNY Upstate Medical University. He has taught at Villanova University, Syracuse University, Upstate Medical University, and the College of Saint Rose, and is listed in Who’s Who in America. Luft is the author, editor, or translator of over 600 publications in philosophy, religion, history, history of medicine, and nineteenth-century studies, including Hegel, Hinrichs, and Schleiermacher on Feeling and Reason in Religion: The Texts of Their 1821-22 Debate (1987); God, Evil, and Ethics: A Primer in the Philosophy of Religion (2004); A Socialist Manifesto (2007); Die at the Right Time: A Subjective Cultural History of the American Sixties (2009); and Ruminations: Selected Philosophical, Historical, and Ideological Papers (2010).

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    The Value of Suicide - Eric v.d. Luft

    The Value of Suicide

    Eric v.d. Luft

    Volume 4 of Dynamic Humanism: An Excursion in Practical Speculative Philosophy

    Published by Gegensatz Press at Smashwords

    ISBN 978-1-933237-70-1

    Copyright © 2013 by Eric v.d. Luft

    Smashwords Edition, License Notes

    This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or if it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

    All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in book reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, or by any means, without the prior written permission of the copyright holder.

    2013

    ~~~~

    Dedicated to the memory of Todd Beamer (1968-2001), who, by a strong act of free will, turned his involuntary certain death as a victim of impending mass murder into a courageous voluntary death and thus became a hero, preventing United Airlines Flight 93 from killing hundreds or perhaps even thousands in Washington, D.C., at the cost of only forty innocent lives.

    Let's roll!

    ~~~~

    Contents

    Preface

    I. Suicide as a Practical Philosophical Problem

    I.1. Philosophy vs. Sociology

    I.2. Relative Values

    I.3. A Provisional Definition

    II. Suicide as the Murder of an Object

    II.1. Murdering the State's Citizen

    II.2. Suicide in Japan

    II.3. Murdering God's Servant

    II.4. Stoic Psychology

    II.5. Disharmony in Dualism

    III. Suicide as the Annihilation of the Subject

    III.1. Spinoza vs. Kirillov vs. Schopenhauer

    III.2. Metaphysical Objections to Overcoming the Instinct for Self-Preservation

    III.3. Sylvia Plath: Escaping the Present, Fixing the Past, Preventing the Future

    IV. Bobby Sands, Elizabeth Bouvia, Socrates, Sydney Carton

    IV.1. Political Martyrdom

    IV.2. Suicide in Medical Contexts

    IV.3. Suicide to Preserve One's Moral Worth

    IV.4. Suicide to Create One's Moral Worth

    About the Author

    Preface

    The earliest version of this work was written in 1973 as my honors thesis in philosophy at Bowdoin College. Originally only article-length, Bowdoin allowed me, after my graduation in 1974, to expand it to book-length for its official deposit in the Hawthorne-Longfellow Library in 1976 as The Axiology of Suicide (Bowdoin Archives, Thesis 1974 L7, OCLC # 4250760). Now, almost forty years later, I find that its content has not diminished. Nor would I have expected it to have done so. This content, the philosophy of whether and under what circumstances life is worth living, has been a staple of Western philosophy ever since Plato wrote the Crito and the Phaedo.

    The present version, retitled The Value of Suicide so as to be less highfalutin, is a thorough rewriting of the 1976 work. Neither an update nor an expansion, it is rather a clarification and restating of key points, with a few new examples, e.g., the case of Elizabeth Bouvia (pronounced boo-VAY).

    This book is not about the medical, psychological, psychiatric, sociological, statistical, or even theological aspects of suicide. It does not investigate the pathology of why some people kill themselves and it certainly does not attempt either to prevent or to encourage suicide. It is a book on the philosophy of suicide. It examines (1) the ontology of suicide, i.e., what suicide is from the perspective of being, and (2) the ethics of suicide, i.e., whether suicide ought to be morally permitted and what its effects in the world are when it is. In other words, it is about the axiology, i.e., the theory of the value of suicide. Toward this end, it occasionally considers historical, biographical, and literary cases. In order to show more accurately the history of the concept of suicide, it makes liberal use of citations. All translations of cited passages herein are my own unless otherwise indicated.

    Several such philosophical studies, notably Camille Schuwer's La signification métaphysique de suicide (Paris: Aubier, 1949); Felix Hammer's Selbsttötung philosophisch gesehen (Düsseldorf: Patmos, 1975); and Nadine Heinkel's 2010 Heidelberg University thesis, Suizid als philosophisches Problem (Norderstedt: GRIN, 2011), have been done in other languages, but I am not aware of any in English besides this one. Perhaps the closest is Jonathan Glover's Causing Death and Saving Lives (Harmondsworth, England: Pelican, 1977). I am grateful to Toby Vargrim for bringing Glover to my attention.

    (For those who may be interested in the historical, psychological, sociological, or other non-philosophical aspects of suicide, I strongly recommend George Howe Colt, November of the Soul: The Enigma of Suicide [New York: Scribner, 2006], a broadly conceived, meticulously researched, and clearly written book which complements mine in many ways, accurately and thoughtfully covering most of the pertinent topics. For a book which runs the gamut of arguments for and against tolerating suicide, see Contemporary Perspectives on Rational Suicide, edited by James L. Werth, Jr. [Philadelphia: Brunner/Mazel, 1999], in which not only philosophers and theologians, but also sociologists, social workers, health care workers, counselors, lawyers, psychologists, teachers, and suicide attempt survivors debate the issue.)

    Suicide is a complex, variegated phenomenon with a philosophy more extensive than is generally recognized. It can be regarded either as the murder of an object, i.e., killing one of the state’s citizens, killing one of God’s creatures, or a spirit killing its own body; or as the annihilation of a subject, i.e., a person simply withdrawing forever from participation in the world by choosing to vanish from existence. Accordingly, Albert Camus wrote that it is the only philosophical question.

    The main point of this book is to argue that suicide ought not automatically to be seen as an expression of despair, but that some people have non-despondent, creative, altruistic, unselfish, or advantageous reasons for doing themselves in. The ancients knew this. Our culture has lost this insight in the meantime. I want to recover it. The reason that I want to recover it is because I believe that a proper respect for suicide as a constant option strengthens the individual both morally and psychologically, as I hope the following will show.

    I.

    Suicide as a Practical Philosophical Problem

    If Camus is right to say at the beginning of The Myth of Sisyphus that there is only one truly serious problem, suicide, and that to address this problem goes to the heart of philosophy (Il n'y a qu'un problème vraiment sérieux: c'est le suicide. Juger que la vie vaut ou ne vaut pas la peine d'être vécue, c'est répondre à la question fondamentale de la philosophie), then the present work is quintessentially philosophical. Insofar as it seeks to answer the question of whether life is worth living, it is as radical as Camus could have wished. It does not seek to answer the question, Should suicide be committed? This is a normative question. Rather, given that its focus is axiological, i.e., concerned with the theory of value, it asks, What is the value of suicide? as well as some corollary questions such as What specific benefits may self-killers expect, either while dying or posthumously? and What specific benefits may their survivors expect? and Does society ever benefit by any citizen's suicide? and If so, what benefits? The axiological question is not even the Why? which would naturally follow the affirmatively answered normative question; nor is it the "Why not? of the negatively answered normative question. The axiological question has just one goal, not to either prohibit or advocate, condemn or promote, but, through historical and phenomenological analysis, to determine what, besides the merely factitious physical death of an individual, suicide may reasonably be expected to accomplish, and whether any such accomplishments could possibly be gained for this individual, survivors, or society in any other way than by this death.

    Although we suspend or bracket the normative question in favor of dealing directly with the axiological question, we make no effort to eliminate the normative question from discussion. Indeed, to do so would be impossible, since, historically, both questions are tangled together in philosophical and literary writings about suicide. Hence, our policy on the normative question will be, whenever warranted, to mention it, refer to it, allude to it, or suggest it, but not to try to answer it, as we will try to answer the axiological question. To answer the normative question without discussing the axiological question, as many uncritical souls indoctrinated in the ways of conservative religion are likely to do, is possible, though not very useful; but to answer the axiological question without discussing the normative question is impossible. So, let us leave it at that, and continue.

    In The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle alludes to nearly every possible aspect of the philosophical problem of suicide. The story concerns a woman whose face has been disfigured through an attack by a lion:

    "We had risen to go, but there was something in the woman's voice which arrested Holmes' attention. He turned swiftly upon her.

    "'Your life is not your own,' he said. 'Keep your hands off it.'

    "'What use is it to anyone?'

    "'How can you tell? The example of patient suffering is in itself the most precious of all lessons to an impatient world.'

    "The woman's answer was a terrible one. She raised her veil and stepped forward into the light.

    "'I wonder if you would bear it,' she said.

    It was horrible. No words can describe the framework of a face when the face itself is gone. Two living and beautiful brown eyes looking sadly out from that grisly ruin did but make the view more awful.

    The basic question raised here, and the basic question concerning all suicide, is that of the autonomy of the individual. Is one's life one's own or not? If not one's own, then whose is it? If one's life is not one's own, then suicide is the murder of one of the state's citizens or one of God's servants. But what do we mean by one's own? For now, and risking circular reasoning, let us stipulate that one's life is one's own if and only if that one has the natural or legal right to dispose of it sinlessly, guiltlessly, freely, and voluntarily, without coercion either way. In such a case, suicide would not be murder, but only the annihilation of the agent, a disintegration, not a dualistic act. The paradigm of such a death is that of Fedor Dostoevskii's character, Alexei Kirillov, as we shall see below in Chapter III.

    Responding to Holmes's denial of her autonomy, the veiled woman asks the peremptory, secular utilitarian question. Holmes gives her the submissive, Christian utilitarian answer. This exchange raises again the question of a self-killer's relation to any survivors and to God. In considering suicide, she is not contemplative like Socrates, but despondent, and probably does not really want to die, but rather just wants sympathy or even pity, which Holmes and Watson duly give her. We might think her a Stoic for braving her affliction so well, but in classical times a true Stoic could well have committed suicide to escape from such a fate. Epictetus, a Greek slave in Rome and later a freedman, writes in Discourses, I, 24: ... remember that the door is open. Do not be a greater coward than the children, but do as they do. Children, when things do not please them, say, 'I will not play any more'; so, when things seem to you to reach that point, just say, 'I will not play any more,' and so depart, instead of staying to make moan (The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers, edited by Whitney J. Oates [New York: Modern Library 1957], p. 266). Epictetus's advice here does not necessarily refer to suicide, although it is usually taken as such. His analogy to children does not seem to serve his argument well. Indeed it could almost be an argument for the other side, that quitting is unworthy or childish behavior. Marcus Aurelius is more to the point in Meditations, VIII, 47:

    If you are pained by any external thing, it is not this thing that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it. And it is in your power to wipe out this judgment now. But if anything in your own disposition gives you pain, who hinders you from correcting your opinion? And even if you are pained because you are not doing some particular thing which seems to you to be right, why do you not rather act than complain? - But some insuperable obstacle is in the way. - Do not be grieved then, for the cause of its not being done depends not on you. - But it is not worthwhile to live, if this cannot be done. - Take your departure then from life contentedly, just as he dies who is in full activity, and well pleased too with the things which are obstacles. (Oates, p. 550; translation modified)

    Although Aurelius here discusses primarily moral, not physical, ailments, this passage is relevant to the veiled woman's situation. His Protagorean standpoint, namely, that externals themselves do not and cannot directly affect or afflict us, but rather that whatever affects or afflicts us is whatever we may think of these externals, including even our own physical bodies, corresponds with her strong mind in choosing to bear her woes and live. It also tends to refute, avant la lettre, Baruch Spinoza's claim in Ethics, IV, Prop. XVIII, Scholium (translated by R.H.M. Elwes), that suicides are weak-minded, and are overcome by external causes repugnant to their nature. For Spinoza, it is not the mind itself which overcomes the conatus in suo esse perseverare (impulse to persist in one's own being), i.e., the natural will to live, usually called just the conatus, but rather it is the externals themselves, acting through the mind. For Aurelius, it is the mind alone which does the overcoming. Nevertheless, his word insuperable (i.e., valentius, literally strong, vigorous) seems to support Spinoza, but not when we consider whether or not anything strong, vigorous, or insuperable is still an opinion of the mind. In fact, Aurelius does not refute Spinoza, insofar as his insuperable obstacles are not externals, but only mental fabrications to which the mind's exercise of its own subjectivity has given entity status. Would Aurelius's self-killer then be deluded? We may doubt that Aurelius would go so far as to say so, yet some degree of delusion is always possible whenever we think about anything, whether we are thinking for ourselves or following the direction of another. An opinion is a very real thing for the person who holds it. Any perceiving subject, not only a potential self-killer, is always susceptible to becoming deluded by such a reified opinion. The more strongly held the opinion, the more likely the delusion. By asserting that it is in your power to wipe out this judgment now, Aurelius supports the idea that suicide is the annihilation or disappearance of a subject rather than the murder or elimination of an object. In any case, for Aurelius, suicide is not blameworthy.

    Aurelius, like most Stoics and over against the Epicureans and other atomists, was a body/soul dualist. The body is, of course, entirely earthly, but in Meditations, V, 19, he says: Things themselves touch not the soul, not in the least degree; nor have they admission to the soul, nor can they turn or move the soul; but the soul turns and moves itself alone, and whatever judgments it may think proper to make, it makes for itself of the things which present themselves to it (Oates, p. 522; translation modified). This supports his prefigured refutation of Spinoza and suggests the purity and immortality of the soul qua mind. Insofar as the body dies while the soul lives on, it is the soul which is important. This argument is in Plato, Seneca, and throughout classical literature. Moreover, even though it originated with pagans, it persisted strongly into the New Testament and the writings of the Christian Church Fathers. Aurelius continues it in Meditations, V, 29:

    As you intend to live when you have gone out, so it is in your power to live here. But if men do not permit you, then get away out of life, yet so as if you were suffering no harm. The house is smoky, and I quit it. Why do you think that this is any trouble? But so long as nothing of the kind drives me out, I remain, am free, and no man shall hinder me from doing what I choose; and I choose to do what is according to the nature of the rational and social animal. (Oates, p. 523; translation modified)

    Some of William Shakespeare's characters echo the idea that we should die willingly and on our own terms when others do not permit us to live. Brutus says in Julius Caesar, V, v, 22-25: Thou seest the world, Volumnius, how it goes; / Our enemies have beat us to the pit. / It is more worthy to leap in ourselves / Than tarry till they push us. Nevertheless, Volumnius refuses to hold Brutus's sword for Brutus to run on, declaring in line 29: That's not an office for a friend, my lord. Strato (lines 44-57) has no such scruples, and accedes to allow Brutus to die unconquered, thereby freeing Brutus from temporal bondage. Earlier (V, iii, 37-48) Cassius had granted Pindarus temporal freedom just as Pindarus had granted Cassius eternal freedom.

    This entire Aurelian passage is closely related to that of Epictetus in Discourses, I, 25:

    It is for you to compare these estimates; only do nothing in the spirit of one burdened and afflicted, who believes himself in evil case; for no one compels you to this. Suppose someone has made the room smoke. If the smoke is moderate, I will stay; if excessive, I go out; for one must remember and hold fast to this, that the door is open. (Oates, p. 267; translation modified)

    Is not smoke, even metaphorically, an external obstacle? Yes, but it is Epictetus's perception and opinion of it, not the obstacle itself, which induces him to go or stay. Something which is excessive for one person may be moderate for another. Nevertheless, we should investigate the idea of externals - smoke - as cause of a person's actions, i.e., cause in the strict sense of having a necessary billiard ball effect on whoever is in the room. Is this human agent really autonomous? Is this smoke analogy why Paul Tillich seems to suggest in The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale, 1970), p. 12, that perhaps the only truly free person is one who commits suicide for absolutely no reason? But can there be such a person? Camus's Sisyphus? Dostoevskii's Kirillov? Tillich writes:

    The anxiety of fate and death controls the lives even of those who have lost the will to live. This shows that the Stoic recommendation of suicide is not directed to those who are conquered by life but to those who have conquered life, are able both to live and to die, and can choose freely between them. Suicide as an escape, dictated by fear, contradicts the Stoic courage to be.

    And Epictetus continues:

    I dwell in Gyara; but this seems to me a very smoky room indeed, and I depart where no one shall hinder me from dwelling; for that dwelling is open to every man. And beyond the last inner tunic, which is this poor body of mine, no one has any authority over me at all. (Oates, pp. 267-268; translation modified)

    Again, the seems to me indicates subjective perception and decision, not causality or even causal influence. Externals may affect the body, but the soul is not, and cannot be, so affected. If the free soul finds itself hindered or imprisoned by the body, then the soul may dispose of the body at will. The motif of Epictetus's Discourses, I, 24, offers an interesting twist to the question of whether one's body belongs to God or to oneself: The emperor's servant's body really belongs to the emperor, so the servant willingly leaves it behind for the emperor, just as he leaves behind the oars when he disembarks from a ship or leaves behind the bed when he is done sleeping at an inn (Oates, p. 265). The servant's soul remains his alone, and we presume that it is free to return his body to the gods at any time as a free and perfect gift. This is a far cry from Dante, Inferno, XIII, 103-108 (translated by Dorothy L. Sayers):

    "We [the suicides] shall take our flight, when all souls take their flight,

    To seek our spoils, but not to be rearrayed,

    For the spoils of the spoiler cannot be his by right;

    "Here shall we drag them, to this gloomy glade;

    Here shall they hang, each body evermore

    Borne on the thorn of its own self-slaughtering shade."

    Following established medieval Christian doctrine, Dante consigns the souls of suicides to inhabit trees in hell forever, where they are defenseless against any harm any passerby might inflict on them. The metaphor is that they are their own gallows. He says that, because self-killers willingly threw their bodies away, they do not deserve to recover them intact at the Last Judgment when God will reunite all other bodies with their respective souls. Dante, as a good Christian at the height of the Age of Faith, believed that we, our bodies, our souls, our very selves, all belong entirely to God, and that any action we perform upon anything is ipso facto performed upon a gift from God, and therefore shows either reverence or scorn for God. God commands that we may not in any way do harm to that which is not our own. But nothing is our own. Therefore, we may not do harm to anything at all, especially not to ourselves, our most precious and most divine gift.

    Epictetus, Aurelius, and most other Stoics were writing in either a pre-Christian or an anti-Christian universe, but what is often overlooked is that, because Stoicism, Platonism, Hellenism, et al., were dominant during the birth of Christianity, thus Christianity, even though it opposed them, still owed much to them. For example, the anti-suicide doctrine which is taken for granted in modern Christianity was actually a rather late development, certainly post-Constantinian and probably post-Augustinian. Suicide is in fact integrally Christian! The present Christian argument against it commits the fallacy of ad verecundiam, appeal to authority, i.e., the authority of Augustine, who sought to purge Stoic elements from the rapidly self-establishing central Church. But in original Christianity, suicide was basic. Killing oneself for whatever reason began to acquire general disfavor in the West only after Augustine condemned it in The City of God in the fifth century.

    In The Savage God (New York: Bantam, 1973), pp. 49-51, Alfred Alvarez is very clear that suicide is not naturally alien to Christianity, as well as on the point that early Christians, coveting martyrdom as a quick ticket to heaven, would often do things like kicking Roman officials on the shins in order to secure, not only their own summary deaths, but also the eternal damnation of the Romans who thus shed Christian blood. So prevalent was such activity that the Roman consuls were constantly perplexed about what to do with unruly hordes of Christians begging for martyrdom or manipulating themselves into it (Alvarez, pp. 64-71).

    When investigating the roots of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, it is always best to scrutinize the Bible first, as does Jacques Choron in Suicide (New York: Scribner's, 1972), pp. 13-14, rather than consult the Church Fathers:

    "Since belief in a happy afterlife is clearly suicide-promoting, it may be partly because the Old Testament contains no promise of immortality that one finds only six suicides recorded there. They are Abimelech (Judges 9:54), Samson (Judges 16:28-31), Saul (I Samuel 31:1-6), Saul's armor bearer (Chronicles 10), Achitophel (II Samuel 17:23), and Zimri (I Kings 16:9 [sic]). However, the infrequency of suicide among the Jews of the Old Testament period was more a result of their strong attachment to life and their positive attitude toward the world. ... An even more important factor was their limitless trust in God's wisdom and justice and his care for his people. In spite of all Job's suffering, he resisted the temptation of suicide (Job 2:9-10). For these reasons those who did commit suicide were considered insane or at least temporarily deranged, and no sanctions were taken against suicides. Their bodies were not desecrated, and they were not refused the usual funeral rites." (italics added)

    It may also be that suicide never even occurred to them as a possibility. They were, after all, a very earthy people, as their literary images and metaphors show, not imaginative or speculative like the Greeks. Furthermore, a happy afterlife does not necessarily promote suicide, but only if such eternal happiness is assured regardless of how a person may die, even if by self-killing. In post-Augustinian Christianity, only those who wait for death as long and as patiently as possible are even eligible for a happy afterlife, while a tormenting afterlife perforce awaits those who commit suicide or otherwise rush into death. But this Augustinian idea is not biblical.

    To examine the biblical suicides: Judges 9:53-54 does not depict a real suicide at all; God killed Abimelech, as we read in 9:56. 1 Chronicles 10 is nearly a copy of 1 Samuel 31, with the added commentary in 10:13-14 that God killed Saul. In Judges 16:25-31, God gave Samson superhuman strength in response to his kamikaze-like wish in 16:30, and Samson was honored posthumously as a military hero because his voluntary death took so many of the enemy with him. Similarly, 2 Samuel 17:23 shows that Achitophel, like the Japanese suicides, was honorably buried. In 1 Kings 16:18-19 (which Choron mistakenly identifies as 16:9), we see suicide used as a gesture of repentance, with official condemnation of Zimri's other deeds, but not of his voluntary, penitent death.

    This penitence motif carries over into the New Testament. It is present in Matthew 27:3-5, which reports the suicide of Judas with no condemnation of his self-killing. Judas's hanging appears in no other Gospel.

    Samuel Terrien's exegesis of and commentary on Job in The Interpreter's Bible (Nashville: Abingdon, 1954), vol. 3, p. 924, avows that suicide requires caring. Apathetic people do not kill themselves:

    "He did not try to take his life, perhaps because he had reached a state of complete despair. 'When a man attempts suicide, it means he cares about something. He cares whether he's alive or dead. ... But real despair means there is no hope, no door, no escape. ... We never try to commit suicide in that circle of hell, which is lowest of all. It is as if we were already dead, rotting, yet still suffering.' (William Seabrook, Asylum [New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1935], p. 195.) On the other hand, it may be that Job, like most ancient Semites, did not consider at all the idea of bringing death upon himself; and that he kept silence because a remnant of faith prevented him, not from despair, but from a desperate act. He faced death but he did not hasten its coming."

    Also in The Interpreter's Bible, John C. Schroeder in vol. 2, pp. 1039-1040, makes the death of Saul appear to be virtually identical to that of Shakespeare's Brutus or - nearer the mark - Cassius:

    "Saul's suicide was inevitable, not because he was a coward, but because he had obviously reached the very peak of self-consciousness. From the moment that life began to present difficulties for him, he had thought of them not as challenges to be met but as troubles to be avoided. The spotlight of his awareness focused more and more sharply upon himself. ... Every experience was measured in terms of what it did to him. As he faced death, he could think only that his enemies would make cruel sport of him. He had no will to live, because he could define living only in terms of his own existence. ...

    The paradoxical thing about suicide is that men turn to it when they can think of nothing but themselves. Suicide is the ultimate of self-consciousness. Nothing exists for the man but himself, and when this happens there is no reason for him to exist either. ... Suicide is the only answer men have found when selfishness has reached its zenith. The very universe rebukes selfishness by revealing that its purest distillation is lethal poison."

    If this is true, then, by becoming more self-aware, Saul became less Judaic, less a member of that Gemeinschaft (in Ferdinand Tönnies's sense of Gemeinschaft = monistic or unified community vs. Gesellschaft = pluralistic society or association), i.e., more of an individual. But whatever his reasons or motives, his countrymen rescued his body and gave it a decent burial. John Donne, the Anglican clergyman who wrote in his seventeenth Meditation, any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, nevertheless also wrote the first coherent English-language defense of suicide, Biathanatos (New York: Facsimile Text Society, 1930), which states (p. 135) that David put to death the man who held Saul's sword while he fell on it. But Donne's interpretation is dubious because there is no mention of a second for Saul in 1 Samuel 31:4, as seems to be implied in 2 Samuel 1:14-16. David's action here may be the only condemnation of suicide in the whole Bible, and it is not even directly to the point.

    If indeed, as Schroeder suggests above, the incidence of suicide increases proportionately as the self-consciousness of individuality increases, we could see this as a reason for so much suicide among the early Christians, who were each concerned only with delivering their own individual souls from suffering. In courting martyrdom as they did, they each sought to save only their own particular souls alone, no one else's. Only those who chose to remain alive were concerned with others' souls, and they worked to convert and encourage others to suicide, each for their own sakes.

    Accordingly, it is no surprise that among the greatest individualists we find also some of the very strongest advocates of free death. Friedrich Nietzsche, for example, one of the most ardent individualists of all time, harks back to Epictetus when he writes in Beyond Good and Evil, 157, The thought of suicide is a great comfort, by means of which we can get through many a bad night, and in The Gay Science, 131, that Christianity has made a horrid corruption of noble Stoic suicide:

    Christianity used the monstrous craving for suicide that existed at the time of its origin as a lever to increase its own power. It left remaining only two forms of suicide, dressed them up with the highest dignity and the highest hopes, and forbade all other forms in a frightful way. But martyrdom and the slow self-disembodying of ascetism were permitted.

    Nowhere does Nietzsche criticize martyrdom as such, but he is often severely critical of asceticism. For example, in Thus Spake Zarathustra, I, 9, Of the Preachers of Death, he assails Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu ascetics, but especially Arthur Schopenhauer. Surprisingly enough, there is some affinity between Schopenhauer and early Christianity, as Schopenhauer suggests in The World as Will and Representation, translated by E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1966), vol. 2, p. 616:

    The ascetic tendency is certainly unmistakable in genuine and original Christianity, as it was developed in the writings of the Church Fathers from the kernel of the New Testament; this tendency is the highest point to which everything strives upwards. We find, as its principal teaching, the recommendation of genuine and pure celibacy (that first and most important step in the denial of the will-to-live) already expressed in the New Testament.

    This interpretation of Christianity is clearly anti-Augustinian. Nevertheless, Schopenhauer seems to agree with Augustine when he says on p. 617 that celibacy and virginity are set up as the higher inspiration of Christianity, by which one enters into the ranks of the elect. Obviously, if all Christians followed these ideals or celibacy and virginity, then what would be achieved would not be Christianity's goal of universal love, but rather Schopenhauer's own goal of universal withering away out of existence. This extinction of life is not what Augustine wants. Indeed, universal extinction is a Buddhist prospect of nirvana. Yet a pre-Augustinian Christian, influenced by Hellenistic and Stoic values, could easily have confused asceticism, martyrdom, and suicide with one another, and could have prized all three equally as constituting the one perfect means to salvation. Active personal salvation for early Christians, passive universal annihilation for Schopenhauer

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