Can It Be Right to Commit Suicide?

Nihilistic (from the Latin nihil, ‘nothing’) philosophers differ from existentialist philosophers in that they believe that a person cannot justify his life even by giving it an individual meaning. For nihilistic philosophers, nothing can have a meaning, not even suicide itself.

Interesting as this may all be, suicide is seldom the product of rational deliberation, the so-called ‘rational suicide’, but mostly an act of uncontrollable anguish and despair.

Around 1755, David Hume, who suffered from melancholy, published On Suicide and On the Immortality of the Soul in a book of essays entitled Five Dissertations. Unfortunately, pre-release copies of Five Dissertations stirred up such controversy that both essays had to be removed.

In On Suicide, Hume argues that, though only ‘one step’ could put an end to his misery, man dares not commit suicide because of ‘a vain fear lest he offend his Maker’. This, combined with his natural fear of death, makes it ‘all the more difficult for him to be free’. Hume proposes to ‘restore men to their native liberty’ by examining all the common arguments against suicide and demonstrating that suicide is ‘free from every imputation of guilt or blame’. 

According to Hume, God established the laws of nature and enabled all animals, including man, to make use of them by entrusting them with certain bodily and mental powers. Owing to this interaction between the laws of nature and the powers of animals, God has no need to be involved in the world: ‘…the providence of the Deity appears not immediately in any operation, but governs everything by those general and immutable laws, which have been established from the beginning of time.’

Given this state of affairs, man employs the powers with which he has been invested to provide as best as possible for his ‘ease, happiness, or preservation’. If this should bring him to commit suicide, then so be it: the interaction between the laws of nature and the powers of man clearly permit it, so why should it pose an exception? Thus, suicide is permissible even if one adopts a religious stance.

For Hume:

The life of man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster… I thank Providence, both for the good which I have already enjoyed, and for the power with which I am endowed of escaping the ill that threatens me.

Natural philosopher Pliny the Elder (23-79) goes one step further than Hume in his Natural History by regarding the ability to commit suicide as the one advantage that man possesses over God:

God cannot give himself death even if he wishes, but man can do so at any time he chooses.

A common argument against suicide is that it is selfish and harms the individuals and society that are left behind. For Hume, a person does no harm in committing suicide, but merely ceases to do good. Assuming that he is under some obligation to do good, this obligation comes to an end with death; and even if it does not, and he is under a perpetual obligation to do good, this should not come at the expense of greater harm to himself, that is, at the expense of prolonging a miserable existence for some ‘frivolous advantage that the public may perhaps receive’. In some cases, a person may have become a burden to society, and so may actually do most good by committing suicide. In such cases, says Hume, suicide is better than morally neutral. It is morally good.

Regardless of the morality or permissibility of committing suicide, suicide entails death, and so the question naturally arises as to whether death should or should not be feared. In his influential paper of 1970, tersely entitled Death, philosopher Thomas Nagel (born 1937) addresses precisely this question: if death is the permanent end of our existence, is it an evil?

Either death is an evil because it deprives us of life, or it is a mere blank because there is no one left to experience this deprivation. Thus, if death is an evil, this is not in virtue of any positive attribute that it has, but in virtue of what it deprives us from, namely, life. For Nagel, the bare experience of life is intrinsically valuable, regardless of the balance of its good and bad elements.

The longer we are alive, the more we ‘accumulate’ life. In contrast, death cannot be accumulated—it is not ‘an evil of which Shakespeare has so far received a larger portion than Proust’. Most people would not consider the temporary suspension of life as an evil, nor would they regard the long period before they were born as an evil. Therefore, if death is an evil this is not because it involves a period of non-existence, but because it deprives us of life. 

Nagel draws three objections to this view, but only so as to later counter them. First, it is doubtful whether anything can be an evil unless it actually causes displeasure. Second, in the case of death there is no subject left on whom to impute an evil. As long as we exist, we have not yet died; and once we have died, we no longer exist. So there seems to be no time at which the evil of death might occur. Third, if most people would not regard the long period before they were born as an evil, then why should they regard the period after they are dead any differently?

Nagel counters these three objections by arguing that the good or evil that befalls us depends on our history and possibilities rather than on our momentary state, such that an evil can befall us even if we are not here to experience it. For instance, if an intelligent person receives a head injury that reduces his mental condition to that of a contented infant, this should be considered a serious evil even if the person himself (in his current state) is oblivious to his fate.

Thus, if the three objections are invalid, it is essentially because they ignore the direction of time.

Even though we cannot survive our death, we can still suffer evil; and even though we do not exist during the time before our birth and the time after our death, the time after our death is time of which we have been deprived, time in which we could have carried on enjoying the good of living.

The question remains as to whether the non-realization of further life is an absolute evil, or whether this depends on what can naturally be hoped for: the death of Keats at 24 is commonly regarded as tragic, but that of Tolstoy at 82 (even though he died of pneumonia in a hitherto obscure train station) is not.

‘The trouble,’ says Nagel, ‘is that life familiarizes us with the goods of which death deprives us… Death, no matter how inevitable, is an abrupt cancellation of indefinitely extensive goods.’ 

‘To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing’.

he question of suffering – its ‘why?’ – brings us on the quest for suffering’s meaning. We want to know the cause, the reason, the purpose, the point. There is, of course, physical pain in the animal world but the human person suffers in a unique way. The Book of Job in the Old Testament is a story of an old man who loses all his possessions, his children and finally he himself is affected by a serious illness. Three friends tell him he must have done something wrong.

Suffering is a punishment for a crime committed. They justify the moral meaning of suffering. Suffering, so, is a justified evil but just Job challenges this presumption, this identification of suffering with punishment for sin. Surely it is not true that all suffering is a consequence of a moral fault? There are no reasons for Job’s suffering in the existential vacuum. In this Biblical text the why of suffering is seen as a test. Suffering is seen as being redemptive, as bringing forth goodness. Its why is located in the sublimity of the divine Love (as well as in Its justice).

Suffering, thus interpreted, is seen through the order of love – love is the answer to the question of the meaning of suffering. This is a religious answer, where Original Sin is seen as the cause and death as the cure – and  I confess I cannot give any other reason but that doesn’t mean there must be only a religious solution.

Each man must carry his own cross. Yes. Each man endures his own crucifixion. Death is the dissolution of the psychophysical personality of man. The soul, believers assert, survives and subsists in separated form from the body. The spirit as such can never suffer or be sick. We suffer in mind and body but not in spirit. This is Frankl’s psychiatric credo.

Behind the illness the person remains intact. Suffering ceases in the eschatological perspective of salvation (Christ, the Man of Sorrows, assumed sufferings into His very Self), as did the Suffering Servant in the Book of Isaiah. The Passion details the arrest, the humiliation, the blows, the scourging, the crowning with thorns, the mocking, the carrying the Cross, the crucifixion, the agony, the dying. Each of us has his private Garden of Gethsemane and Golgotha.

From his prison the great Irish playwright, Oscar Wilde, wrote: ‘Where there is suffering there is holy ground’. Meaningful suffering is suffering for the sake of, for example, a sacrifice. In suffering the person becomes perceptive of values and the world becomes opaque to an other-worldly dimension. Wilde continues: ‘I used to live entirely for pleasure. I shunned sorrow and suffering of every kind.  I hated both. I resolved to ignore them as far as possible, to treat them … as modes of imperfection. … They had no place in my philosophy. During the last few months I have … been able to comprehend some of the lessons hidden in the heart of pain. … Out of Sorrow have the worlds been built, and at the birth of a child or a star there is pain’. Those who love a lot suffer much.

All suffering is separation, estrangement, alienation as well as engendering deep insight and possibly profound change. In Christian terms the Passion leads to the Paschal Mystery; in more secular terms we can say Resurrection succeeds Crucifixion. Suffering is a trial, a burden to which humanity is subjected.

Suffering can strengthen us as we shoulder it with hope that it doesn’t have the last word, that it will not deprive us of our dignity, for in suffering we find our soul. Think in the Christian Story of the presence of the Mother throughout – from the secret conversation with an angel to the Cross of Crucifixion – from Bethlehem to Calvary; and the consoling presence too of the Beloved Disciple, the one Jesus loved most. Think of Mary’s Presence and Compassion at Her Son’s Passion. It is every mother’s; it is every mother’s son. Suffering has salvific significance seen against this archetypal backdrop. Suffering endured contains with itself the call to courage and moral maturity. The meaning of suffering is not discovered at the merely human level but against a transtemporal dimension of ultimate meaning.