*** Welcome to piglix ***

Philosophy of suicide


In ethics and other branches of philosophy, suicide poses difficult questions, answered differently by various philosophers. The French essayist, novelist, and playwright Albert Camus (1913-1960) began his philosophical essay The Myth of Sisyphus with the famous line "There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide" (French: Il n'y a qu'un problème philosophique vraiment sérieux : c'est le suicide).

There are arguments in favor of allowing an individual to choose between life and suicide. Those in favor of suicide as a personal choice reject the thought that suicide is always or usually irrational, but is instead a solution to real problems; a line of last resort that can legitimately be taken when the alternative is considered worse. They believe that no being should be made to suffer unnecessarily, and suicide provides an escape from suffering.

Herodotus wrote: "When life is so burdensome, death has become for man a sought-after refuge". Schopenhauer affirmed: "They tell us that suicide is the greatest act of cowardice... 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."

Schopenhauer's main work, The World as Will and Representation, occasionally uses the act in its examples. He denied that suicide was immoral and saw it as one's right to take one's life. In an allegory, he compared ending one's life, when subject to great suffering, to waking up from sleep when experiencing a terrible nightmare. However, most suicides were seen as an act of the will, as it takes place when one denies life's pains, and is thus different from ascetic renunciation of the will, which denies life's pleasures.

According to Schopenhauer, moral freedom — the highest ethical aim — is to be obtained only by a denial of the will to live. Far from being a denial, suicide is an emphatic assertion of this will. For it is in fleeing from the pleasures, not from the sufferings of life, that this denial consists. When a man destroys his existence as an individual, he is not by any means destroying his will to live. On the contrary, he would like to live if he could do so with satisfaction to himself; if he could assert his will against the power of circumstance; but circumstance is too strong for him.


...
Wikipedia

...