Phenomenological Notes on the Will to Self-Destruction

by Joe E. Dees

    This paper's purpose is to study the internal structure of an emotion which has no name.  We seem somehow reluctant to name this emotion or to signify this particular attitude concerning the world even though its manifestation in act, suicide, is an all too common occurrence.  Perhaps we do not wish to name this emotion for fear that such a concession would impose meaning upon what we would prefer to consider irrational and meaningless; however this is to be in bad faith concerning a 'corner' of pur selves which we deny, but which nevertheless disturbs us.  Simply because it disturbs us is a prime reason why such a phenomenological perusal should be undertaken.
    We shall herein use the guidelines given by Jean-Paul Sartre (in THE EMOTIONS: OUTLINE OF A THEORY) and contemplate the phenomenon of the will to self-destruction "insofar as it is significative".  This is possible while still remaining within the realm of phenomenology because the internal structure of an emotion, the thing-in-itself, is nothing other than its signification.  Emotions having no corporeality, they are themselves only insofar as they appear to us to be.  Thus, "we shall try to place ourselves on the grounds of signification and to treat emotion as a phenomenon" (Sartre, ibid.).  The particular phenomenon to be studied here, the will to self-destruction, will be treated in this fashion.
    It is seen therefore that we may implement the phenomenological method in order to study this attitude towards the world by inquiring into the reasons typically given for committing the suicidal act, or, in other words, studying the significations the act held or holds for those who have seriously manifested suicidal inclinations.  The act itself, being external, is NOT the issue here; the internal structure of the emotion or world-attitude which precipitates the act IS.
    An incomplete synopsis of reasons for their actions given by those who have attempted suicide by communications made within suicide notes includes: the rejection by or inability to support loved ones, a revolt against their determination by society or individuals within society, fear of insanity, senility, disease, dishonor, or infirmity or a handicap or of assuming responsibility, for revenge against or benefit to others, for recognition of personal or societal problems, or to avoid death or torture at the hands of others.  Any emotion tries to invoke the external world, and the changes the suicidal individual wishes to make in that world are well documented.  But these are changes to some other state or process of affairs; what is the internal structure of the emotion FROM WHICH the attempt to change the world  is made?
    Perhaps by contemplating what is ESSENTIALLY intended, we may arrive at an understanding of the ESSENCE of the intention.
    A Being-in-the-World (Dasein) contemplating suicide is taking the view towards the world that its negation is to be subjectively preferred to its continued appearance.  This implies that to the suicidal Dasein, the present appearance of the world is unsatisfactory, and that the dasein perceives itself as unable to change the world for the better in the future, and is willing to negate the Becoming of the self in order to negate the Being-of-the-World.  Obviously, that portion of the Dasein's ambient world which is imbued by the Dasein with primary subjective signification, or the Dasein's life project, must be involved.  Internally, this project is presented to the Dasein by the Dasein itself; it is an appropriation of the meaning which we're born into, modified by individual intentionality for-itself.  Therefore we identify our intentionality with the project intended, as the manifestation of that intentionality in act.  Thus, our projects becomes reified in act and we manifest ourselves through our projects.  The publicness of the anonymous One is the synthesis of all projects generally agreed upon as having succeeded in the aims of those whose projects they represent.  These aims are to make the generally accepted project and the personally appropriated project one and the same project, and that one the individual Dasein's own.  The individual project also changes as we do; not quantitatively, but qualitatively, as the evolution of successive adumbrations of the majority or dominance of our emotional interpenetrative states.
    On these bases, our projects are related to ourselves in lived time, and we perceive the flow of lived time through the becoming of our projects.  As our consciousness is consciousnesss of, so is this intentionality directed towards the intended, and signifies itself on the basis of the worldly reification of its project becoming in duration.
    This project may be an idea (such as freedom) or a career (accountant) or another person or persons (spouse and/or children usually) or a combination of these, but during any time, a Dasein is committed to a project by the Dasein's style of Being-in-the-World.  One may only relinquish a project in favor of another project, or, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty observed in THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF PERCEPTION, my freedom "is never without an accomplice, and its power of perpetually tearing itself away finds its fulcrum in my universal commitment to the world."  Why do some Daseins appropriate the project of negating the world through negating the self (and thus non-relating the two) rather than changing the world through their projects?  It would seem that the latter aim of changing the world through the Dasein's project had been previously and unsuccessfully attempted.
    In this case, what would be the result if the Dasein perceives that the difficulties involved in the reification of this project become insurmountable obstacles rather than surmountable means?
    When the Dasein cannot realize the Dasein's own existential signification, when the dasein has a pripori committed its contingent Being to a project lucidly seen a posteriori as unattainable, when one's desires are seen as impossible to realize, what does one do instead?  Does the Dasein still have a subjective reason for continued existence?
    Not until a new project or a modification of the existing project is embraced.  The reason for the Dasein's existence, its own subjective signification, has been lost, and the dasein must create for itself just such another signification.  But is this an easy task?
    There are three ways in which this project may be lost:  within the intention behind the project (a posteriori seen as meaningless), within the means by which the project is attained (seen as ineffectual), and in the project itslef (seen as redundant, unrealizeable, realizeable only through one's own death, or finished).  These three encompass essentially all the resons stated previously; however, these three within themselves share a common theme - that of the realization  of fundamental self-contradiction.  The Dasein's project is not Becoming; time for the project (and therefore for the Dasein) is standing still.  The future being cut off, the past is dwelled upon and thus the Dasein faces its own contingency.
    We would not intentionally choose a meaningless, redundant or impossible project; therefore we did not choose such a project from a position of absolute knowledge or understanding.  However, as the project progresses, previously unseen fallacies inherent in the project's realization become revealed to us.  But we choose all of our projects from a position of Becoming, and there is always the contingency (since we can't choose from a position of Being) that they will subsequently be negated or denied; we may be committed, but we are always unsure.  However, if we cannot choose with freedom and still be absolutely certain of reifying our choices and preserving their subjective meaning withoput possessing absolute knowledge, and if, as is the definitional case, absolute knowledge is forever denied us, then the dilemma and self-contradiction rears its ugly head; we are conscious but unfree, and our very Sinngebung (meaning-giving) is denied.  Here lived time not only stops (boredom), but is seen as having ceased irrevocably, beyond our ability to re-engage it (helplessness and hopelessness).  In short, our boredom has been realized:  we have become objects shorn of the power of self-signification.  Freedom being unattainable, the contradiction is resolved by the denial of self-consciousness and world-consciousness by the self, by rendering ourselfves into henceforth unconscious objects.  This denial, in act, is suicide.  It is embraced because all future possible projects are interpreted in the light of abandoned past projects; that once we commit to them and attempt their worldly reification, the sad knowledge we will obtain will be the same; and thus we come to look upon both the world and upon ourselves in these helpless, hopeless, useless terms, and absolute committment to a future project, or to a future which only has meaning insofar as we and our projects become reified, is impossible, and the committment itself is a priori seen as devoid of meaning and of subjectivity.  Carl Rogers (in THE END OF HOPE, edited by Kobler and Stotland)remarked upon the case of a suicide that she "seems to have been dealt with as an object."
    Secondly, suicide may be signified as the only means of reifying one's project, and therefore the only means of attaining freedom, as in arthur Miller's DEATH OF A SALESMAN, where Willy Loman kills himself to assure his family economic independence through the payment of his life insurance policy.  Here also one is conscious but unfree, and commits suicide to become "free and clear", for "twenty thousand - that is something one can feel with the hand, it is there", and besides, is it better or braver to "stand here the rest of my life ringing up zero?"
    The third situation involving the Dasein and its project is if the project is seen as finished.  When the retirement watch is accepted, the family's solvency is assured, what is there left to do, or to become?  One's project is finished, yet one still lives.  The expression of intentionality has been lost and once again the Dasein is conscious but unfree.  Its project no longer Becoming but Being, and the Dasein being self-identified with its project, it follows its project into Being and finishes itself.
    In each of these three states-of-affairs, the same themes emerge:  of the Dasein's apprehension of itself as a self-conscious object, of the lack of any possibility for future self-signification, and of the perception of the irrevocable cessation of Becoming (of lived time).
    Albert Camus, in THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS, addresses himself to the second of these themes thusly:
    "In a sense, and as in melodrama, killing yourself amounts to confessing.  It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it...merely confessing that life is 'nor worth the troubel'.  Living, naturally, is never easy.  You continue making the same gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the forst of which is habit.  Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering."
It was also in this vein that Schopenhauer advocated the choice of suicide or monasticism.
    The magical act of suicide is also seen as acting upon the world but not the self.  We subjects have no more idea of being a thing-in-itself alone than a rock can have of becoming us.  Therefore we do not take our own deaths seriously, but in bad faith, as if by leaving this world our subjectivities will be thrown into another, more favorable world, and thus not only survive, but, relatively, prosper.  This anticipation od the assumption of a new project in new surroundings beckons to the irrational within us.  These surroundings are viewed by Kirilov in Dostoyevsky's THE DEVILS as Godhood.  A synopsis of Kirilov's reasoning is as follows:
    "(1) the human condition is torn between a radical contingency and an irreparable need for the absolute; (2) the only way of defeating contingency is to kill onself because by doing so man becomes master of his life and death; (3) in the fraction of an instant when he completes his act, man escapes contingency and touches the Absolute: he becomes God." 
    One might also add that dual correlatively opposite absolutes are simultaneously obtained; Godhood anf thinghood, each no longer chained by contingency, and the nonsubject and the absolute subject momentarily coincide.  Here the self would still be the self, at least on one of the poles, but an absolute rather than a contingent one, and the poles collapse into a seamless unity.
    But what of the world?  This is what the suicide beleves he has really killed.  "The suicide, when he dies, kills not one person, but many (genocide).  To kill oneself is to kill everything that there is, the world and all other persons" (Charles Willian Wahl, SUICIDE AS A MAGICAL ACT: CLUES TO SUICIDE, edited by Edwin S. Sheldon and Norman L. Farerow).
    The poet A. E. Housman put it best:

Good creatures, do you love your lives
And have you ears for sense?
Here is a knofe, like other knives
That cost me eighteen pence.
I need but stick it in my heart
And down will come the sky
And all foundations will depart
And all you folks will die.

    Conscious but unfree, the Dasein decides to free its contingent being from the determination of existence, so that Being-in-the-world is no longer limited by the very facticity of the Being-of-the-World.  Nonrelational as death is, the Dasein tacitly assumes the continuance of its subjectivity unbound by contingency as the result of the contemplated act, and the destruction of the objectifying object world.  This paradoxically frees the self by means of intentionality; one is free not to be and nevertheless still conscious, and the Dasein forsees one final victory in becoming Being.  This victory is the anticipation that the instant one dies, the self experiences self-conscious subject becoming unconscious object.  The two are opposites between themselves but identical within themselves, and no duration separates the two.  The dasein's life is not seen as being lost and the act is envisioned as a magical way of answering the unanswerable, of making all obstacles disappear forever without further subjective sacrifice.  This is seen as the final solution, for the transition away from the world is seen as irreversible and total; the retrieval of Lazarus appears to us incredible and devoid of the reality that would truly terrify the serious suicide.
    Philosophically, the question of whether or not to continue one's own existence is seen by Camus (in the MYTH OF SISYPHUS) as the first question to be answered:
    "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 afterwords.  These are games; one must first answer.  And if it is true, as Nietszche 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."
    But should one give this question an absolute answer from the depths of human contingency?  The attempt is a confusion of the two.  Dasein may fear death and face this fear in act, but this fear of death is merely a reflection of existential boredom and anguish in the face of contingency.  Therefore, the existential death wish is inauthentic, confusing the sign (death) with its subjective signification.  Rather than meeting the fear of death in act, Dasein meets death itself in act, and rather than return from this facing with renewed power and committment, Dasein returns not at all.
    One must, as Kierkegaard urged, meet dread and boredom in act with a commitment to the world rather than a negation of it.  The more one refuses to do so, the harder it seems to change.  However, it would also behoove one to keep the parameters of one's project open to evolution, elaboration and modification, for the Dasein is only as resilient as the Dasein's project is flexible.  The inauthentic choice of not choosing is otherwise terminally realized in the last choice; the self-contradictory choice to choose no more (terminal bad faith).

   

My thoughts on suicide: We have no right to tell others when or how they will die. That is a choice that should be left to the respective person, without the interference of external authorities.

My thoughts on life-after-death: I am skeptical, I prefer secular incentives for moral behavior since those are more effective (only one percent of the prison population are atheists/agnostics). I personally don't think that the CoV should take a stance on the life-after-death issue.