Suicide is rational. It flows from reason. Suicide is reason that is sovereign unto itself.

For Zeno of Citium and the school of Stoics, logos as reason is the vital link between the individual and the cosmos. Logos establishes order and harmony within and between each, individual and cosmos. When life is out of balance — disintegrated and in discord — reason itself then dictates that it is time to die.

Diogenes Laertius observes that not everyone is reasonable. For the foolish, then, it is more appropriate to remain alive, even though they are miserable. Diogenes reasons that the foolish would be miserable in both life and death. And so they should simply remain where they are. Suicide is only for the rational.

In Biathanatos, John Donne responds to the natural-ethical-theological-political complex that denies the individual the power to decide his own fate. Donne writes:

No law is so primary and simple that it does not preconceive a reason upon which it was founded, and hardly any reason is too constant for circumstances to alter it. In that case, a private man is emperor over himself … He whose conscience, well-tempered and dispassionate, assures him that the reason of self-preservation ceases for him may also presume that the law ceases too, and may do what otherwise would be against the law.

The reasons for living change because reason itself changes in relation to life and death.

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Donne, Biathanatos, 17.

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The G is the funny thing about suicide in that what is verboten is also distinctly both A and OK by the self-same society.

Permitting suicide often begins with perplexion about having first condemned it. For is what is absolutely forbidden as self-murder, wonders one theologian who absolutely forbade it, not also permitted and even commanded? Does our holy scripture not tell the story of Samson calling upon the Lord in his moment of weakness and does the Lord not give Samson the final strength to bring the walls down upon him and his enemies? Is this not a case of divinely assisted suicide, which surely is the very best kind? And what about those nuns? Are some things, then, more important, more valuable, more imperative, more authorized than human life staying alive?

Recall the philosopher of pure and practical reason who condemns suicide categorically as the overthrow and the destruction of the very source of moral law in a human being (homo noumenon) by that human being, only in the next breath on the very next page of the story of categorically condemning suicide, to wonder about competing commands to the ethical self with even greater moral force under certain circumstances that should, of course, become universal moral law. And whence?, he wonders. That the very same faculty of moral law-giving might sometimes gives a law to suicide? That another faculty and authority steps in on occasion to override the universal and categorical with the particular and ethical commandment?

And of course in one dialogue the philosopher’s philosopher condemns suicides as desertion and in another dialogue the philosopher of the philosopher describes and then enacts the virtue and the imperative of suicide as standing guard over the integrity of truly loving wisdom as the highest and most noble affirmation of what human life truly means.

And so it is that suicide is absolutely and categorically forbidden and condemned unless it is permitted and praiseworthy such that the bidding from within to come and die is not so bad after all. Or, what is condemned by some societies is praised for others simply because now suicide plays a role in advancing the story of more and better human life, for us. Society calls this patriotism as self-sacrifice and medals are printed in honor of it. It is called martyrdom as the far far greater thing than merely living by truly dying. It is called protest in the face of tyranny and injustice and these stories become lore.

And now individual and society converge to align in that what suicide is meant toward a better tomorrow. Suicide to help rectify the human condition. Call it human hunger as the natural attitude of suicide so others might live. Suicide for the greater good according to our story. And society approves of that. Thanks, they say. And now the dividual individual is not so divided against itself and is claimed by society so that the me and the them are now the union of being us all together.