Suicide is release from the human condition.
In Death and Western Thought, Jacques Choron notes that Aeschylus praises death as a cure for life’s misery.” In the tragedy Hyppolytus, Euripides writes: “The life of man is all misery and trouble and there is nowhere salvation and peace. Surely there is a better, a blissful existence, but it is hidden in the mists and darkness.” He continues: “So we cling desperately to the deceptive splendors of this world only because we know nothing of another life.”[1] Hamlet might echo this sentiment.
Plato reports in the Apology that when sentenced to death, Socrates proceeds to instruct Athens:
Let us reflect in this way … that there is good hope that death is a blessing, for it is one of two things: either the dead are nothing and have no perception of anything, or it is, as we are told, a change and a relocating for the soul from here to another place. If it is complete lack of perception, like a dreamless sleep, then death would be a great advantage … for all eternity would then seem to be no more than a single night. If, on the other hand, death is a change from here to another place, and what we are told is true and all who have died are there, what greater blessing could there be, gentlemen of the jury?[2]
For Socrates believes he would be in the company of Hesiod and Homer and Ajax and Odysseus and Sisyphus. In the Phaedo, Socrates elaborates on the blessing of death as eternal life. For the “soul reasons best when none of these senses troubles it, neither hearing nor sight, nor pain nor pleasure …”[3] Death is merely the soul unencumbered and released from the body and the world.
Diogenes of Sinope views suicide as a liberation from divine or civic control, as rebellion against both nature and super-nature. [4] For Seneca, suicide is freedom over Nature’s decree. “Just as I choose a ship to sail in or a house to live in, so I choose a death for my passage from life.” “A man’s life should satisfy other people as well, his death only himself, and whatever sort he likes is best.”
So, if the soul “craves the sword or the noose or some potion that constricts the veins, on with it, let it break the chain of slavery.”[5]
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[1] Choron, Death and Western Thought.
[2] Apology 40c–41a
[3] Phaedo 65c
[4] Droge and Tabor, 26.
[5] Seneca, Essays and Letters, 204.
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