Daily Advice 12.20.20

[readoldthings]

Seneca's conclusion to De Providentia is difficult and quite foreign to the modern reader. I was going to leave it out and go on to something else, but I feel like that would be cheating. We've come this far with Seneca; let's make it to the end.

Speaking on God's behalf, Seneca writes:

Above all, I have taken pains that nothing should keep you here against your will; the way out lies open. If you do not choose to fight, you may run away. Therefore of all things that I have deemed necessary for you, I have made nothing easier than dying. I have set life on a downward slope: if it is prolonged, only observe and you will see what a short and easy path leads to liberty. I have not imposed upon you at your exit the wearisome delay you had at entrance. Otherwise, if death came to a man as slowly as his birth, Fortune would have kept her great dominion over you. Let every season, every place, teach you how easy it is to renounce Nature and fling her gift back in her face. In the very presence of the altars and the solemn rites of sacrifice, while you pray for life, learn well concerning death. The fatted bodies of bulls fall from a paltry wound, and creatures of mighty strength are felled by one stroke of a man's hand; a tiny blade will sever the sutures of the neck, and when that joint, which binds together head and neck, is cut, the body's mighty mass crumples in a heap. No deep retreat conceals the soul, you need no knife at all to root it out, no deeply driven wound to find the vital parts; death lies near at hand. For these mortal strokes I have set no definite spot; anywhere you wish, the way is open. Even that which we call dying, the moment when the breath forsakes the body, is so brief that its fleetness cannot come within the ken. Whether the throat is strangled by a knot, or water stops the breathing, or the hard ground crushes in the skull of one falling headlong to its surface, or flame inhaled cuts off the course of respiration, be it what it may, the end is swift. Do you not blush for shame?  You dread so long what comes so quickly!

Yes, he's saying exactly what he seems to be saying. If it gets too bad, you can always kill yourself. Earlier on, he had praised the courage of Cato, who took his own life rather than fall into the hands of Juilius Caesar.

How do you react to this? 

My first instinct was simply to recoil, and shake my head at the horror of an earlier age.

After that I tried to argue with Seneca. Can suicide ever be right? No, I thought-- not if the duty to live is a higher moral duty. If God has given us a life, it's an act of impiety and ingratitude to refuse to see it to the end. It seemed to me that Seneca's earlier advice on bearing suffering was much better than this-- let us rather have the fortitude to bear the life we have been given, than to retreat like a coward into a death chosen rather by ourselves than by the gods.

We have a moral duty to see our lives to the end, and not to run away from suffering. By our suffering we may expiate our sins; we may train ourselves to endure; we may learn compassion for others who suffer; we may even offer our own pain as a sacrifice on others' behalf. By suicide we gain nothing.

I think that that probably is the right response. That said, I want to suggest that it is worth taking a moment-- just a moment-- and entering into Seneca's ideas on their own terms. Part of the point of reading these Old Things is that they are a repository of wisdom that we may need in these times. But the other point is less about the content of the Old Things than about their context. Whether it's Seneca or Aristotle, Louis de Montfort or Eliphas Levi, the authors that I post here all lived in different times, different places, and different cultures from ourselves. The result is that they were able to think thoughts that are unavailable to us on a day to day basis. If there is one thing that we as a culture desperately need, it's the ability to think other thoughts than those to which we have become habituated.

Do we need thoughts of suicide? Maybe not, but the very extremity of those thoughts may be work to jar something loose in our minds and open unexpected doors, when an easier thought could not have done so.

And so I repeat the suggestion: Take a moment and enter into Seneca's way of thinking. The way out lies open, and you can take it at any time. Don't fear what comes so quickly.

Comments

[temporaryreality]

Do you think his trajectory here is a rhetorical device? That he might be saying, "well, if after all I've said, you still insist your suffering is so great, then here's an option" - with the notion that being thus presented with the drastic and unthinkable one might pause and rethink and conclude that "no, it's not so bad that I can't go on, there must be some beauty or joy or blessing here"?

Maybe not, maybe he is just stating an option, but I wonder if this actually a well thought-out strategy to advance his argument.

[readoldthings]

Yes, but I also think he's being serious. Earlier in the essay he praises Cato for killing himself rather than submit to Julius Caesar.

[temporaryreality]

Not trying to belabor the point, but Cato's suicide (death for honor and principle, akin to samurai) seems to be of different category. But I've no horse in this race, so sure, Seneca's point that "the way out lies open" is certainly valid - after all, perhaps in his view, any death, freeing as it is, is acceptable. Indeed, death comes quickly and it could come more quickly yet! - and that seems to be key to understanding more about life.

[violetcabra]

If I may:

With no intention of being flippant in any portion of this comment, I do believe that Seneca ended his own life after Nero asked him to because of some sort of plot. Personally, I'm not sure how I feel about the ethics of suicide. I'm fairly certain I committed suicide in my past life out of sheer petulance, and certainly regardless of its ultimate veracity and actuality, I have regretted that choice very bitterly.

Still, I'm not sure what duty we have to live. This gets into complex metaphysics. Since I remember past lives, I feel that suicide is simply....just another way to die. Let's say someone dies of some other manner that arises out of some sort of misapprehension. Let's say that someone dies of a young age from a heart attack caused by repressed rage. Certainly, from my metaphysical vantage point, that person will eventually have to face that rage in a future life. Equally if someone consciously chooses to end their life I think they will have to face everything they refused to.

That said, I think that from the Classical ethical standpoint there's more virtue to the conscious choice of running away from life than unconsciously dying from what a person refuses to face. If I actively refuse to face something, that seems to me more virtuous than being unconscious of the whole thing with the same effect.

Basically, I don't resonate at all with Christian or even monist ethical assumptions of any ultimate value systems. These value systems might well be ultimately true, but they are sincerely opaque to me. So I imagine that suicide is just another way of dying and if one isn't equipped for ethical suffering in death --- and to be clear I perceive conscious suffering as a supremely but not _normatively applicable_ ethical act --- I think I do agree, broadly with Seneca's position. That said, I can't imagine _lauding anyone_ for suicide. that strikes me as frankly grotesque given my cultural traditions.

That is to say, with a sincere ambivalence, that I tend to _operatively_ agree with your reservations here, Steve. The only real distinction I have is the ease I enter into a sense of concord with Seneca's basic position, and a sense of incomprehension regarding the normative statement that "We have a moral duty to see our lives to the end, and not to run away from suffering." That statement _may be true_ but I'm sincerely unsure of its universal applicability, and so doubt its logical foundations. I agree that it is ideal to suffer ethically rather than take the easy way out, at least, for most people most of the time.

I post this in the spirit of discourse, as I find the ethical and philosophical subtleties that this brings up interesting in and of themselves. Again, I in no way mean to be flippant and merely intend to answer your question about my personal reaction.

[readoldthings]

This doesn't strike me as flippant at all, and I'm grateful for your thoughts.

My own thinking isn't that far from yours. Suicide strikes me as grotesque-- but then, suicide in my time and place has a very different meaning from that of Seneca's. In modern America, suicide is nearly always a desperate act by a person undergoing some kind of internal torment. I suppose the archetypal modern example is Kurt Cobain-- or maybe I'm showing my age. Given the sort of background we share, I'm sure you've lost friends to this sort of suicide, as I have.

What about a different type of suicide, such as Cato's? Would that feel different? Are there any modern examples of it? The only one that comes to mind is Salvador Allende. What if Donald Trump committed suicide on the White House lawn, rather than submit to Joe Biden?

Hmm. I'm now remembering the Buddhist monks who immolated themselves to protest the Vietnam War. Whatever else we can say about it, these sorts of suicides are different from suicides of despair; they feel different; they don't provoke-- in me, at least-- the same horror and revulsion.

In the end, I don't have a conclusion or an answer. I just want to think about the question.

[violetcabra]

Many thanks for your response, Steve! The comparison between Kurt Cobain --- or Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf --- and religiously devoted people who commit suicide as a coherent protest really does illuminate a vast and important spiritual difference which I can perceive but can't quite articulate. This difference strikes me as vastly important, though: a difference between avoidance and self-sacrifice, to put it very crudely. Likewise, I don't have a conclusion or answer and find thinking on the question helpful.

[readoldthings]

Actually, I think you've hit the nail on the head here:

"a difference between avoidance and self-sacrifice"

Some commit suicide to fight, others to run; therein lies all the difference.

This is one of the great frustrations for me in Christian moral philosophy generally, by the way. While a few blanket prohibitions might make sense, I can't see making a habit of them. It's a demand for standardization in a world of particulars.

[ehu]

Just dropping in to express my sincere thanks for your posting these thought-provoking quotes and comments, and for this particular discussion -- a topic that I have wrestled with in the past, coning to similar conclusions as you just expressed re: Christian moral philosophy. In particular, equating continuation of the embodied physical life at all costs with some kind of ethical superiority has been a notion I have found hard to accept.

FWIW, I also read Seneca's argument as, at least in part, a kind of double-dog-dare-you with an implicit "or do you have what it takes to endure the suffering?"

[readoldthings]

Thank you!

I agree re. Christian morality of course. Whether it's sex or death, one size rarely fits all. Worse, trying to enforce absurd blanket ethical prescriptions in the name of God just has the effect of leading people to reject both ethics and God.

[sdi]

Thanks for this, I appreciate Seneca's words on the topic. I'm really late to the party here—it's been a difficult few days weeks months—but I always appreciated Don Marquis' take on it, too.

For context, this is said as someone who considers suicide favorably (with caveats, granted) and wonders why people are so hostile to it. (I haven't taken that way out myself—despite much longing and several "close calls" in the past—as I've by now made promises that forbid it and I don't want the karma of a promise-breaker. As an aside, I've always wondered if I look forward to death because my natal eighth house [the house of death and legacies]—both astrologically and geomantically—is easily my strongest house by a vast margin, the only remote contender being my ninth house [the house of spirituality], and my natal earthly houses [dealing with practical, day-to-day affairs] all being quite difficult. Still, "good things come to those who wait.")

[readoldthings]

I did a chart once for someone who has had multiple suicide attempts. Their 8th house had Mars parked right on the cusp, making a trine to the house ruler, which was itself in the 12th house and in Aries, and so under Mars's rulership. A few degrees after Mars in the 8th house were Saturn and Uranus, tightly conjunct one another. That is to say, I suspect your interpretation is correct!

[sdi]

Huh, so that's interesting. My eighth house ruler is a powerful Mars who is trine a couple planets in Scorpio in the eighth (one of which is a similarly powerful Pluto). I think we have a working hypothesis relating Mars, the eighth, and suicide!

[readoldthings]

Definitely. I'll keep it in mind for future chart analysis.

[readoldthings]

Very quickly:

Hunter S. Thompson has Mars in the 8th house, strong in Scorpio. Diginified by a trine to the Sun in Cancer and a sextile to Jupiter in Capricorn. Saturn retrograde on the Ascendant.

Kurt Cobain has no planets in the 8th house. Venus in the 7th opposes r. Uranus on the Ascendant, lending some credence to conspiracy theories around his death. 8th house is in Aries and so ruled by Mars in Scorpio.

Robin Williams has Mars in the 8th house, in Fall (Cancer), conjunct Uranus, square Jupiter in Aries, square Neptune in Libra, sextile Venus in Virgo (Fall).

Sylvia Plath does not have Mars in the 8th house. She does have mutual reception between the Sun in the 8th house in Scorpio and Mars in the sixth house in Leo, and therefore, mutual reception between the Sun and Mars. The cusp of her 8th house is in Libra; Venus is in Fall in Virgo but otherwise diginified by trine to Saturn and sextile to Uranus.

I think we can tentatively conclude that some involvement of Mars and Scorpio in the 8th house does seem to portend suicide.

How about some non-suicides?

Winston Churchill's 8th house is in Aries. Mars is in his first house, in Detriment in Libra, loosely conjunct Jupiter. The Moon's North node and a retrograde Neptune sit on his 8th house cusp.

George H.W. Bush's 8th house is in Pisces. Neptune in Leo, distantly conjunct the first house cusp. Aquarius is on the 8th house cusp, square to his Sun. Mars is right on the cusp of the 7th house, in Aquarius. One imagines that Barbara wore the pants in that family.

Leonard Nimoy's 8th house is in Gemini. Mercury is in Aries, conjunct Uranus, square Jupiter. Scorpio is rising in his chart and Mars is in the last degree of Cancer in the 9th house.

Tentative conclusion stands.

[sdi]

Fascinating. I looked around and found this database of almost a thousand horoscopes for people who committed suicide, which may be of interest for further research!