Percy, Heidegger, and Being-towards-death
I'm not sure of the name of the girl in class who related Percy's discussion of suicide to being-towards-death, but I'm glad she brought it up because I hadn't really connected the two ideas, I think mostly because I have been so focused on both Percy's and Heidegger's critique of modern philisophical thought and its making human beings' being like that of any other being, as does the "objectifying" stance of science.
Percy suggests suicide as a cure for the depressed self, and I think know that, if you connect it to Heidegger, it's like the serious entertaining of suicide as an option to cure depression makes death "objectively present" for ME, rather than something that befalls some other person, as is indicated by the they's "one dies." When death can be a real choice, when "to be or not to be becomes a true choice," "this one" dies; I die; death is no longer tranquillized. By contemplating suicide, I've already faced the fact that at some point I will cease to be, and any serious entertaining of suicide will probably not result in my fleeing the possibility of death or "covering it over." Therefore, the ex-suicide is "face to face with the possibility to be itself," and can live authentically. However, Percy knows that death is not the complete end, being-towards-death is more like being-towards-eternity. In light of the knowledge that I will die, and in light of the knowledge that my death could take place at any moment, I should make choices with the understanding that I am developing a self which when it becomes "whole" will be before God. So the ex-suicide, for Percy, chooses to live but also is now free to consider the "preposterous eventuality that news did come from the God of the Cosmos, who took pity on your rediculous plight and entered the space and time of your insignificant planet to tell you something."
posted by jon mmMMmm @ 7:06 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Hey jon, i dont know if you know me, i think we may have met briefly, im a friend of heather and kristins. Anyways, this post intrigued me...however, there is a certain power centre connected with suicide that is not discussed? or am i missing that? seems to me that suicide is the ultimate grasp at power of a disempowered individual, over themselves. any thoughts?
hey yes that's probably true, in the way that suicide is basically the only thing a depressed person thinks he can do.
What I was talking about though is not the person who commits suicide, but the person who entertains the thought of it seriously. By seriously contemplating the fact that he can kill himself, and end all anxiety, stress, depression and all, he can from there move on to actually thinking about why he has chosen to live rather than to commit suicide. In that way he becomes an "ex-suicide," somebody who has thought about it but chose life instead, and this in a way releases the anxiety and depression felt because this person knows that he goes to work in the morning because he doesn't have to, he finishes an assignment at school because he chooses to "be" there. Also, when somebody contemplates suicide he automatically faces the fact that he will die some day, and rather than flee from that fact and distract himself from it, he can acknowledge it and really think about who's having a say in who he is becoming, who's making his choices (he or others), and how this is going to affect who he is when he meets God. All choices become important then and to live passively and just "be" as a stone just "is" (as many people choose to do) gives way to this "inauthentic" life in which the person just feels alienated from everything and depressed.
Basically it's about not "tranquillizing" death and making it a non-issue for the individual, because once it becomes an issue, self-reflection becomes important and so people actually think about life and who they are.
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