2025 Readings 46

 I'm happy that the Northshire Bookstore put up the new New York Review Books carousel, because it has introduced me to some works that I would not have normally stumbled across (thus, it achieved its goal). Last night I finished Antonio De Benedetto's The Suicides. I don't know if I loved it, but I liked it a lot, and it's one of those books that you know, while you're reading it, that there's a world just beyond what you're understanding and that another reading is required/desired. It's the story of a reporter and his small crew who are investigating a series of suicides, which may or may not be connected. Along the way it turns into a brief discussion of what different thinkers over the centuries have thought about suicide. These are usually delivered by Bibi, an assistant to the unnamed reporter. For example:

REJECTERS

Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Dante, Luther, Calvin, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Napoleon . . .

Albert Camus: "From the absurd, I derive three consequences: my rebellion, my freedom, my passion. Through no more than the play of consciousness, I transform what was an inspiration to death into a rule for living: and I reject suicide."

Kant: "Suicide is abominable because God forbids it. God forbids it because it is abominable."

Jaime Balmes: "The fundamental reason for the immorality of suicide is that man thereby disturbs the natural order, destroying a thing over which has has no dominion. We merely have usufruct of life,  we do not own it; it has been granted to us to eat of the fruits of the tree but with suicide we take the liberty of cutting it down."

ACCEPTERS

Confucius, Buddha, Diogenes, Seneca, Montaigne, Voltaire, Rousseau, Hegel, Nietzsche . . .

Hegesias of Cyrene, in this philosophical school in Alexandria, encouraged suicide among his disciples. With some success.

The Stoics were defenders of man's free will and prescribed suicide as the remedy for any woe.

Schopenhauer: "There is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person."

Nietzsche: "One should live in such a way that one may have the will to di at the right time." "Suicide as ordinary mode of death, with the suicide the new pride of mankind; he fixes the moment of his own death and makes a celebration out of dying." "The thought of suicide is a great consolation . . ." "Let there be no regret; suicide is quicker."

As I'm sure I've discussed here before, there has never been a time when I seriously considered suicide. I feel sorrow when anyone commits suicide, but I don't think that they will pay some price in an afterworld for that decision. Maybe that's vanity on my part for assuming that I understand what's going to happen after death, but I guess I would argue that anyone who is sure they know that suicides will suffer some torment because of their deeds, basing their decision on ancient and textually problematic religious documents, is guilty of the same vanity. No one can know the pain of another, we can only try and alleviate it.