Notes on Suicide
Ensaio de Simon Critchley sobre o suicídio, seguido de Of Suicide, de David Hume. As citações guardadas daqui aparecem abaixo.
138 notas · última:
by the time Donne’s book was reissued in a second edition in 1700, it ‘had become the manifesto of the free-thinker’s right to die’.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
By definition, the fear of death cannot be based in experience as no one experiences death twice, as it were. Nor can the fear of death be ascribed to our natural, material constitution. Therefore, Radicati goes on, the fear of death has been imposed on humankind by, ‘Ambitious Men, who, not contenting themselves with the State of Equality which Nature had given them, took it into their heads to thirst for Dominion over others.’
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
But allowing, that our obligations to do good were perpetual, they have certainly some bounds. I am not obliged to do a small good to society, at the expence of a great harm to myself. Why then should I prolong a miserable existence, because of some frivolous advantage, which the public may, perhaps, receive from me?
Citação de David Hume reunida por Simon Critchley em Notes on Suicide (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Before shooting himself, a man wrote the following on a piece of cardboard, ‘Live fast, live well, die handsomely.’
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
back. I consider him one of the casualties of the Recession and when I read of the fat bonuses the banksters award themselves, I shake with rage that they have continued to prosper while people like my brother lost all hope and people like me lost a loved one.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Augustine and then refined by Thomas Aquinas, life, for the Christian, is something given – a datum – over which we have the right of use, usus, but not governance, dominion, which can only be the prerogative of God. To kill oneself is to exercise dominion over one’s life and to assume the power that is only possessed by the deity. This is why suicide is a sin. A true Christian must battle with pain and fight on like a soldier.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
As paradoxical as it might sound, the decision to end one’s life is a requirement of life in order to escape a life of indignity and incarceration, the life of the concentration camp.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
As Freud writes elsewhere, hate is older…
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Are suicidal patterns of behaviour best explained organically in terms of neurobiology and, even, serotonin levels? Is suicidality even an inheritable condition within, say, certain families and communities?
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Any full understanding of suicide requires, at the very least, the cultivation of a much longer and broader view of suicidal behaviour across as wide a historical and cultural sweep as possible, along with the richest possible sociological data.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Another religious argument is that suicide is prohibited because life is a gift from God. To kill oneself is to refuse that gift. But this becomes muddled if one thinks about it for a moment: if life is a gift from God, then what exactly is a gift? A gift is something one gives to another person. After the act of giving, the gift belongs to its recipient. By definition, the giver of the gift no longer has possession of the gift once it is given. So, if the prohibition against suicide is based on the idea that life is a gift from God, then life appears to be a gift with many strings attached, which entails that it is no longer a gift. Namely, a gift that we cannot reject is not a gift. In order to be a gift, life has to be capable of being refused, thrown away, re-gifted to someone else, re-sold for money or given away. If life is a gift from God, then God must allow for the possibility of suicide as the rejection of that gift.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
Again, suppose a malefactor justly condemned to a shameful death; can any reason be imagined, why he may not anticipate his punishment, and save himself all the anguish of thinking on its dreadful approaches? He invades the business of providence no more than the magistrate did, who ordered his execution; and his voluntary death is equally advantageous to society, by ridding it of a pernicious member.
Citação de David Hume reunida por Simon Critchley em Notes on Suicide (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
a requirement of life is here – and not only here – the demand to escape a life lacking in dignity, humanity, and freedom. And so death becomes life, just as from the moment of birth life is already a process of dying. And now negation all at once becomes something, even if good for nothing. Logic and dialectic fail in tragicomic agreement. What counts is the option of the subject.
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015), em que ele cita outro autor.
A hair, a fly, an insect is able to destroy this mighty being, whose life is of such importance. Is it an absurdity to suppose, that human prudence may lawfully dispose of what depends on such insignificant causes?
Citação de David Hume reunida por Simon Critchley em Notes on Suicide (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
a book called the Traité des trois imposteurs (Treatise of the Three Imposters), also known as L’Esprit de Spinosa (The Spirit of Spinoza). Written in French and published an-onymously in the Netherlands probably in the 1690s, the Traité is perhaps the most dangerous heretical text of the eighteenth century. It embodies the radical inheritance of the Enlightenment, evident in Spinoza and Hobbes
Passagem de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015).
One considerable advantage, that arises from philosophy, consists in the sovereign antidote, which it affords to superstition and false religion. All other remedies against that pestilent distemper are vain, or, at least, uncertain.
Trecho de Notes on Suicide, de Simon Critchley, publicado em 2015 pela Fitzcarraldo Editions. No livro, a passagem se situa no ensaio filosófico sobre o suicídio.
In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus's overriding argument is that suicide is not a legitimate response to the absurd. What is required is artistic creation in the face of the absurd. As Nietzsche would have put it, we need art in order not to die from the truth.
Passagem de Simon Critchley em Notes on Suicide, livro publicado em 2015 pela Fitzcarraldo Editions. O trecho situa Camus e Nietzsche no argumento do autor sobre o suicídio.
when sound philosophy has once gained possession of the mind, superstition is effectually excluded; and one may safely affirm, that her triumph over this enemy is more compleat than over most of the vices and imperfections, incident to human nature. Love or anger, ambition or avarice, have their root in the temper and affections, which the soundest reason is scarce ever able fully to correct.
Passagem de Simon Critchley em *Notes on Suicide*, livro publicado em 2015 pela Fitzcarraldo Editions, em Londres; a autoria está estabelecida pela fonte fornecida.