Robin Williams passed away yesterday by act of suicide. He was a man who brought a lot of people a lot of happiness through the art of acting. I’ll always remember him particularly as the voice of the Genie in Aladdin and as Mrs. Doubtfire.
One should wonder what makes a human being want to take his own life. How does one get put in a place where when given the choice between living and not living, he chooses not living? What causes one to see not living as a superior state to living?
It seems to me that for not living to be preferable one must be in a state of suffering. We all have things that we like in life – values – but for death to be preferable the suffering or disvalue of life has to overwhelm the values. But what kind of suffering might be great enough to overwhelm our values and make us want to quit altogether?
One answer is by extrinsic suffering. We see this in the world, where as an alternative to pain one takes his own life. Perhaps you have a disease that eats you from the inside. Or perhaps you’re on Death Row in the middle ages, and the method of execution is especially agonizing. It seems to me that most of us have a point of physical suffering beyond which death is preferable – that eventually we want to be put out of our misery.
This doesn’t account for the high rates of modern day developed world suicides, and it certainly can’t be understood in light of Robin Williams’ wealth. There must be another kind of suffering.
Intrinsic suffering is internal torture. It is suffering in the mind. It is the mind split against itself in contradiction of its being. When our minds are fragmented, experience becomes empty of meaning. What used to bring us joy dissipates into the emptiness. To escape meaninglessness, the act of suicide is undertaken.
Regarding suicide as the result of meaninglessness, I’m always reminded of David Foster Wallace’s famous, “this is water” speech. The gist: power of interpretation exists prior to experience, so choose how to look at things.
The only thing that is Capital T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it… You get to decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.
This is postmodernism in a nutshell, and he heralds it as the deep truth of a liberal arts education – it’s all a matter of interpretation. What he misses is that recognizing interpretation is not the end of philosophy, but the beginning. The next question is the doorway into epistemology – How do I know? Is there any absolute that transcends personal interpretation?
David Foster Wallace of course committed suicide back in 2008.
