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Mr. Alvarez begins the third chapter, titled “Feelings”, with his conclusions from the last chapter on the inscrutable underpinnings of the act of suicide. Although he pleasantly allows for the possibility that the Roman stoics may have had the culture that made such cold calculation possible, Alvarez clearly dismisses the idea of the rational suicide.
Personally, I disagree with this position. I regard it as part of the dark mystery of suicide that a person can coolly consider his life circumstances and his prospects and conclude that suicide is his best option and then act upon it. I am not saying that most suicides are of this nature, nor even very many of them, but I doubt that it is so incredibly rare a phenomenon among the suicides as Mr. Alvarez would have us believe.
In any case, in this excerpt, Alvarez gives us the example of John Robeck for the idea that rational suicides are truly bizarre.
_ _ _
In 1735 John Robeck, a Swedish philosopher living in Germany, completed a long stoic defense of suicide as a just, right and desirable act; he then carefully put his principles into practice by giving away his property and drowning himself in the Weser. His death was the sensation of the day. It provoked Voltaire to comment through one of the characters in Candide: “... I have seen a prodigious number of people who hold their existence in execration, but I have only seen a dozen who voluntarily put an end to their misery: three Negroes, four Englishmen, four Genevois, and a German professor called Robeck.” Even for Voltaire, the supreme rationalist, a purely rational suicide was something prodigious and slightly grotesque, like a comet or a two-headed sheep.
-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”
Personally, I disagree with this position. I regard it as part of the dark mystery of suicide that a person can coolly consider his life circumstances and his prospects and conclude that suicide is his best option and then act upon it. I am not saying that most suicides are of this nature, nor even very many of them, but I doubt that it is so incredibly rare a phenomenon among the suicides as Mr. Alvarez would have us believe.
In any case, in this excerpt, Alvarez gives us the example of John Robeck for the idea that rational suicides are truly bizarre.
_ _ _
In 1735 John Robeck, a Swedish philosopher living in Germany, completed a long stoic defense of suicide as a just, right and desirable act; he then carefully put his principles into practice by giving away his property and drowning himself in the Weser. His death was the sensation of the day. It provoked Voltaire to comment through one of the characters in Candide: “... I have seen a prodigious number of people who hold their existence in execration, but I have only seen a dozen who voluntarily put an end to their misery: three Negroes, four Englishmen, four Genevois, and a German professor called Robeck.” Even for Voltaire, the supreme rationalist, a purely rational suicide was something prodigious and slightly grotesque, like a comet or a two-headed sheep.
-- A. Alvarez, “The Savage God”
