Is Suicide a rational decision?

schopenhauer felt it was surrendering to the will to life.

I don't suppose my funk is particularly dangerous at the moment.

love can be suicide?

I was simulataneously rereading Attali, and he says that composition is to "make an ever-possible suicide the only possible form of death and the production of life" that is to take life and death inside yourself.

And then i remembered in The Possessed by Dostoyevsky how Kirilov killed himself in order to assert the hightest existential right, to establish his free will. But then, this was meant to be a joke against existentialists, so i was told.

i'm not sure if this helps. personally, i always find it useful to recontextualize questions and ideas. In someways, strange answers or new questions can appear.

Andre Breton also said that just at those moments when he had given up on life, he would notice the way the light hit a tile on the grimy floor, and he would fall in love all over again. i'm not sure that compulsion and decision are ever separable.

rationalism is abt communal not private judgement (which is not to say that any given community, big or small, has helpful access to the rational at any given time - just that a decision which is preceded by pushing people way or shutting them out is likely to be less rather than more rational)

upon reflection, maybe you are onto something here. is suicide *social* or *individual*? "Social" meaning that it is an act that is he product of interaction with others, [not in the Jonestown sense of the word] OR is it really the "only truly individual act?"

yeah me too. Also add walking in front of that car.

My only recurring dream is where I fall from a building onto the street. I fell off my bed a couple of times after this dream.

I've never seriously considered it.

everything any of us do is social except maybe this guy:

http://www.riverbendnelligen.com/images/tomneale.jpg

individuals retain access to rationality by having a strong enough grounding in the social values they left behind

Believe that suicide is mainly individual, as tis only the person involved that can decide whether (or not) to go through with it (whether by drowning, slitting wrists, etc). Yes, Waco proved it can also be a group act---but it was mainly each person's decision to take the poison/give it to the children (if I remember right).

No matter how tough things have gotten (at times), I never considered it as an option. It is too final: no changing your mind, if you are successful. Enough things will happen to me in my life, without my doing it to myself. Purely selfish too: what about family/friends left behind to suffer your loss?

if that guy wants to survive on his desert island, then that means he wants to return to society - his judgments about what he has to do to NOT die are socially directed

this reasoning doesn't work if no one will be affected or suffer loss, though...

(I want to say someting here but am feeling inadequate to the task.)

I think (and this is almost the opposite of what mark s is saying) that it's very hard for an observer to decide whether or not someone's decision to commit suicide is rational. For instance, I don't think the fact that a particular period of pain is most likely going to end is enough reason to say it's irrational to solve the problem by killing yourself. People always say it's a "permanent solution to a temporary problem" but even if that is true (and I think it's overly dogmatic to insist that it's always true), I don't see where that would make suicide irrational.

As for bravery, I am always happy to see the commonplace notion that suicide is "the coward's way out" argued against, but I think it's a pretty pointless scale on which to judge it.

That's more of a quasi-empirical question then. There should be literature on the subject. Clearly it's sometimes impulsive and sometimes planned out and thought about over a long period of time (or for that matter sometimes probably a matter of both: planning and consideration, followed by impulsive action).

I hope that you don't think there have to be no emotions involved in order for it to be rational. Rationality for emotional creatures would include taking emotions into consideration in some way or other.

(x-post w/ mouse.)

Because one isn't privvy to the other person's life as they experience it.

Jess, I like having you around.

what i have been wondering, more than if suicide is rational or not (since as demonstrated above this merely forces us to debate endlessly what "rational" means) but whether suicide is always to be interpreted as the result of a lack.

is it possible for a fulfilled, sane, emotionally stable, even happy (or at least relatively content) person to commit suicide? can someone fulfill all these requirement and still decide that life is not worth living? again, this is not a question of whether it is rational to do so (and who cares if it is?) but whether it's even possible for this situation to come about.

perhaps this comes down to: what are the criteria that anyone could set for the relative worth of their own life? what makes my life worth living? how do i arrive at an answer to this question?

are we always forced in a self-referential feedback loop in reponse to this? is there anything else but that feedback loop?

There's a great line in The Moviegoer: "If it wasn't for suicide I would kill myself."

he's just acting as if everything can be determined by reason, though. i don't think suicide in general is something like that, i'm not sure what it is but i think it's too big a thing to try to squeeze into a category with fairly narrow bounds like "rational."

Heidegger, for one, gets around this by suggesting that we always sort of fall back into life even when we try to detach ourselves (which is not, of course, always voluntary), which would mean that suicide is (much as i said about Schopenhauer way upthread) a kind of embrace of life, and not so much its denial (which of course explains why schopenhauer of all people was anti-suicide). anyway that is kind of what i take you mean when you ask why embrace death! so i agree, as do Heidegger and Schopenhauer (tho schop argues for something much more extreme than suicide).

that risk tho, of falling into suicide or an embrace of death, is what intriques me.

A strangely inspiring novel in that regard is the exceptionally bleak Journey To the End of the Night, wherein the main character Bardamu all-too-clearly believes life is horrible and the world is a callous, cruel place. But he keeps on going, with the despair of the world almost as his fuel in a way, as if to say "I'm not going to off myself just because of this horrible planet and these horrible people."

That's just me, since obviously many people brighter and more well-spoken and more successful than myself have removed themselves from the game for reasons perfectly inexplicable to us but perfectly rational to them.

* the only things that make me, me, are the things that surround me - my job; the way other people treat me; the things I do or don't do in my spare time, etc, etc. If all that was stripped away, there'd be nothing at all. I don't *have* a "personality" in the normal sense; inside me it just feels like there's a gap where there should be one.

(or use much paper or ink)

I feel that it can be a perfectly rational decision to choose to die. It just depends on your circumstances and my circumstances don't allow it.

"People don't notice me much" is another thing. I'm the person who people always forget about. When I had RL friends I saw regularly, I'd always be the one who they didn't think to call to invite out to places. Now, when people I work with - and get along well with - are arranging to do stuff outside work, I'm the colleague who they "forget" to invite.

Wouldn't that apply to everybody?

Yes, it is a rational decision. So far, I have decided to stick around, but I see plenty of reasons why at some point I will take control of my own life and end it as I see fit.

Sorry if that seems a downer!

I think about death fairly regularly because the concept of life is so weird and whenever I think of how I might die, it just gives me the creeps. I'd much prefer to do it myself in a prepared and dignified fashion, rather than being splattered to bits or something.

because I know death is the end and even if my life's shitty... i prefer that over nothingness, sth i'm not used to. does that make sense?

(xpost)

Reviving for this article: The Suicide Epidemic

The article eventually feels reductionist, but it's worth reading if you're following the changing demographics.

I would tend to think that suicide is individual, at least in terms of arriving at the decision to kill oneself. I'm not quite sure where the breakdown between rational/irrational occurs. What makes a decision rational or irrational? Proper adherence to the laws of logic? Freedom from any emotional component? If the former, then I see no reason why suicide, or any other "individual" decision cannot be rational. If the latter, well, then, no decision made by a human being can ever be fully rational, can it?
― mouse, Sunday, November 23, 2003 4:12 PM (9 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

a lot of the comments here are interesting but in making generalizations don't seem aware of their cultural specificity and don't account for the range of human experience.

suicide is not always or even mostly a solitary act, throughout history there are and have been societies were there are certain quasi-ritualized forms of collective suicide. think of the shinjû or seppuku in japanese culture (yes, these have become literary archetypes but they are also social rituals).

nature of suicide in a culture undoubtedly related to nature of belief systems, not to mention how they are embedded in social mores and hierarchies

no less true today than ever i would think

The thread title seems to misunderstand the nature and uses of rationality.

First, decisions which are based on incomplete or flawed data, and therefore can be proved to be objectively wrong by someone using more complete data, can still be called rational decisions, because they were arrived at using rational thought processes. This doesn't make them correct or desirable.

Second, deliberate human actions cannot be seperated from values and motives, neither of which can be derived purely from objective reasoning. Because suicide is a human action, based in judgements of value and requiring a motive, it will always include irrational elements, however rationally one approaches it.

I agree with that. I also think suicide is the wrong choice for most people. Depression, for instance, has a high recovery rate.