Kant on Suicide

Substack latest, with quotations from the forgotten Paul Ludwig Landsberg.

Comments

[Elliott]

Thanks for this post, Bill. The topic is very interesting and important.

To resolve the aporetic dyad, perhaps we should underscore the difference between autonomy of the will (in Kant’s sense) and what I’ll call ontological autonomy (in your sense).

For Kant, “A will’s autonomy is that property of it by which it is a law to itself.” (Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals; see here, p. 36 https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/kant1785.pdf )

Kant’s idea is that the autonomous will of a rational being is (a) free to legislate its own moral law (on the basis of reason) and act in accordance with it, and (b) free from all determining influences external to the will, including “external objects” such as one’s own desires and emotions, other persons, society, custom, etc. A heteronomous will “goes outside itself and looks for a law” (p.37) in some external object. The autonomous will is directed from inside itself; the heteronomous will is directed from outside itself.

*It’s important to note that (a) above is not a matter of arbitrariness, but rather of choice based on the deliverances of ideal practical reason, which are available to all rational beings.

What I called “ontological autonomy” concerns the idea you addressed that “God creates and sustains me moment by moment in every aspect of my being.” Ontological autonomy is the capacity to sustain oneself in existence from moment to moment. We lack ontological autonomy. We don’t sustain ourselves in this way.

How would our lack of ontological autonomy, given that God creates and sustains us moment to moment, preclude our autonomy of will? Why couldn’t God sustain from moment to moment our abilities to do (a) and (b) above? It seems that A’s sustaining B doesn’t entail A’s controlling B or causally determining B, unless by 'sustain' you mean something like causally determine.

With respect to human beings, perhaps God thinks along the following lines: “I am sustaining you from moment to moment, including your abilities to do (a) and (b). You are free to make your own moral choices. I advise and encourage you to make the morally right ones every time, and my advice is that of perfect reason, but I will not force you to do so. I am thus willing to sustain even your ability to make morally wrong free choices.”

[Elliott]

“Here, perhaps, is the key to our puzzle… The key is the need to suffer for purification. The fallen world is as it were a penal colony and we must serve our time. Suicide is jailbreak and for that reason never justified.

What I am suggesting is that if we read Kant's suicide doctrine in the light of Christianity it makes a certain amount of (paradoxical) sense, and that if one refuses to do this and reads it in a wholly secular light, then there is no justification for its exceptionless prohibition of suicide. I hope to test this thesis in further posts.”

It seems to me that, given what I wrote in the previous post, if we emphasize the will’s autonomy to choose based on the deliverances of reason, then assuming we can tie those deliverances to the idea of suffering for purification, we can understand Kant’s doctrine in a secular light, although this interpretation would be consistent with Christianity, since the deliverances of ideal reason could be construed in Christian terms as the deliverances of the Divine Logos – i.e., ideal reason itself.

We would thus have the same point described in both secular and Christian terms. The point is that suicide is prohibited without exception. The secular description concerns the autonomous will aligning itself with reason and thus choosing to suffer for moral purposes rather than commit suicide. The Christian description concerns the free decision to do what is reasonable, namely, align our wills with the will of God (the source of reason) and hence choose to suffer for moral purposes rather than commit suicide.

[Elliott]

Bill, you made the thought-provoking point that “Suicide is jailbreak and for that reason never justified.”

Interestingly, Socrates raises similar arguments against suicide at Phaedo 61e-62b.

“Then tell me, Socrates, why is suicide held not to be right? as I have certainly heard Philolaus affirm when he was staying with us at Thebes: and there are others who say the same, although none of them has ever made me understand him.”

…

“I admit the appearance of inconsistency,” replied Socrates, “but there may not be any real inconsistency after all in this. There is a doctrine uttered in secret that man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away; this doctrine appears to be a great one, which I do not quite understand. Yet I, too, believe that the gods are our guardians, and that we are a possession of theirs. Do you not agree?”

https://chs.harvard.edu/primary-source/plato-phaedo-sb/

[BV]

Good comments, Elliot. Thanks.

I accept your distinction between autonomy of the will and ontological autonomy. It seems that we can have the former without the latter. We cannot have the latter because we are creatures, but we must have the former because we are created to be libertarianly free.

But what I am getting at is different -- if I am thinking clearly. I wrote: "We are ends in ourselves, which implies that it is wrong for anyone, including God, to treat us as mere means; yet we are God's property and for this reason not morally justified in disposing of ourselves."

Respect for persons rules out chattel slavery; we cannot therefore be God's property. If suicide is in every case immoral, then it cannot be because we are God's property.

[BV]

Elliot,

Your second comment may indeed resolve the difficulty.

In any case, Kant comes across to me as a Christian philosopher. "The crooked timber of humanity" was not crooked when it came from the hand of the Maker; we made it crooked; Kant seems to be presupposing Original Sin. He philosophizes within the Judeo-Xian narrative. Plato on the other hand anticipates Xianity as is suggested by the quotation you reproduce in your third comment.

[Elliott]

Bill,

Kant also strikes me as a broadly Christian philosopher, although in his distinctive way. I’m glad to hear you say so; you understand Kant’s work thoroughly.

It seems to me that Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Mere Reason is an attempt to show that there is a core aspect of religion which is both reasonable and moral and that Xianity in its pure form is a paradigm case of historical religion that matches the requirements of core rational religion. These are not matters of knowledge but instead of rationally acceptable belief and hope. Concerning religion, Kant asks: “What may I hope?”

But Kant is unlike many Christian philosophers today who seem motivated primarily by Christian apologetics. (I don’t mean to disparage religious apologetics. I think this enterprise is important. But I believe it’s fundamentally different from philosophy.) In any case, Kant’s primary goal in Religion seemed to be to obtain the truth about morality and religion, whatever the truth is, rather than to defend Xian doctrine. When I read Religion, it looks to me that Kant is not assuming the truth of Xianity and then trying to use the tools of philosophy to defend it, as an apologist would do. Rather, he is investigating the rationality and moral significance of religious belief in a manner consistent with his critical project and concluding that there is a non-superstitious core of religion that is both rationally and morally acceptable, and that Xianity in its pure form, as delivered by its founder, is a paradigm case of historical religion that matches the elements of the core. (Other religions might also have some points that match the core.) However, in its institutional development, Xianity has accumulated some non-essential and outright superstitious “fetishes” and practices of “priestcraft.”

[Elliott]

Also, I agree that Plato anticipates Xianity. For example, near the end of Republic Book II, he has Socrates argue that God is good and thus not the cause of evil. Socrates later says that God is “in every way perfect.” (I’m not aware of anyone before Socrates/Plato recognizing these points.) In this way, Socrates/Plato anticipate the Christian conception of God and a Christian-like answer to the problem of evil.

“Then God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not of most things that occur to men. For few are the goods of human life, and many are the evils, and the good is to be attributed to God alone; of the evils the causes are to be sought elsewhere, and not in him.”

http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.3.ii.html

By the way, you might enjoy the paper linked below, Suicide in Phaedo, which I found and read yesterday. The author, Werner, contends that Socrates/Plato did not take seriously the argument that we are possessions of God. No good God would own us and treat us as mere things he possesses for his use. Plato mentions this argument only as a preliminary hook to appeal to less sophisticated readers inclined to think of divine-human relations in this way. But Werner argues that Socrates/Plato did take seriously the argument that we are prisoners and ought not to escape via suicide. Werner suggests that Plato meant to propose that our prison sentence is for purifying purposes; committing suicide is a premature and, therefore, unjustified termination of the process of philosophical purification.

The claim that our imprisonment purifies us is consistent with your suggestion in the Substack article. You wrote: “The key is the need to suffer for purification. The fallen world is as it were a penal colony and we must serve our time. Suicide is jailbreak and for that reason never justified.”

If this life is a vale of soul-making, leaving it prematurely would be like dropping out of school before learning what should be learned.

https://philarchive.org/archive/WERSIT