Suicide is freedom. It is liberty.

In post-World War II Japan, Yukio Mishima writes: “the positive form of hara-kiri is not a sign of defeat, as it is in the West, but the ultimate expression of free-will.” For Mishima, this “[p]urity of action is the purity of subjectivity.”[1]

Seneca establishes suicide as the noblest demonstration of choice and liberation. “It is the great man who not only orders his own death but contrives it.”[2] Suicide is death not as a phenomenon but as an act. It entails dying well. Suicide is not merely for the noble. Suicide is ennobling.

In his essay “Of Suicide,” Hume writes: “Tho death alone can put a full period to his misery, he dares not fly to his refuge but still prolongs his miserable existence, from a vain fear, lest he offend his maker…” Suicide is the overcoming of superstition and fear: the horror of death, feeble courage, natural timidity.

Suicide, Hume writes, “restores men to their native liberty.” He then endeavors to show that “That action may be free from every imputation of guilt or blame; according to the sentiments of the ancient philosophers.”[3]

Schopenhauer understands that life is suffering, comprised of “need and distress,” “misfortune” and “endless affliction.” Thus, in the essay, “On Suicide,” he writes: “we hear that suicide is the most cowardly of acts, that only a madman would commit it, and similar insipidies; or the senseless assertion that suicide is ‘wrong,’ though it is obvious that there is nothing in the world a man has a more incontestable right to than his own life and person.”[4]

< § >

—
[1] Yukio Mishima, The Way of the Samurai.
[2] Seneca, Letters, 207.
[3] David Hume, “Of Suicide,” in Essays, 579-80.
[4] Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Suicide,” in Essays and Aphorisms.

—

The B on your BINGO card is the conflict of self against the selfsame that is simultaneously cherished and reviled as a human being as an individual. But what then is an individual? For man hath no dividual being, declares the poet, which, by way of word-building, is entirely true. For what suicide is in stories of suicide is nothing less than difference and dividuality down the middle with the individual suicide being both perpetrator and victim, innocence and guilt, knowledge and ignorance, murderer and murdered.

And so what suicide is means sussing out which from what so as categorically to identify and differentiate and condemn the self that kills from the self that is killed and all that that entails within the whole and complete idea of suicide as an individual human being within our society and species, now as dividual individual such that both are completely and singularly dead. Call this sussing the proper syntax of suicide as the word printed in blood (parole e sangue, which sounds like ordering off the pasta menu at Olive Garden), translated from and set alongside self-murder and self-assassination and self-slaughter und selbstmord et homicide de soi meme et suicidium cetera et cetera et cetera.