Absurdity and Suicide
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide.
Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the
fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest- whether or not the world
has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories-comes
afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as
Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach
by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will
precede the definitive act. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they
call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.
If I ask myself how to judge that this question is more urgent than that, I
reply that one judges by the actions it entails. I have never seen anyone
die for the ontological argument. Galileo, who held a scientific truth of
great importance, abjured it with the greatest ease as soon as it
endangered his life. In a certain sense, he did right. That truth was not
worth the stake. Whether the earth or the sun revolves around the other is
a matter ofprofound indifference. To tell the truth, it is a futile
question. On the other hand, I see many people die because they judge that
life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the
ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a
reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore
conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions. How to
answer it? On all essential problems (I mean thereby those that run the
risk of leading to death or those that intensify the passion of living)
there are probably but two methods of thought: the method of La Palisse and
the method of Don Quixote. Solely the balance between evidence and lyricism
can allow us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity. In a subject
at once so humble and so heavy with emotion, the learned and classical
dialectic must yield, one can see, to a more modest attitude of mind
deriving at one and the same time from common sense and understand ng.
Suicide has never been dealt with except as a social phenomenon. On the
contrary, we are concerned here, at the outset, with the relationship
between individual thought and suicide. An act like this is prepared within
the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art. The man himself is
ignorant of it. One evening he pulls the trigger or jumps. Of an
apartment-building manager who had killed himself I was told that he had
lost his daughter five years before, that he had changed greatly since, and
that that experience had "undermined" him. A more exact word cannot be
imagined. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined. Society has but
little connection with such beginnings. The worm is in man's heart. That is
where it must be sought. One must follow and understand this fatal game
that leads from lucidity in the face of existence to flight from light.
Aber came ooh
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