In phenomena, suicide refers to the act of auto-termination, wherein one's existence comes to and end, via one's own hand.
Overview
In c.290BC, Hegesias (c.330BC-260BC) (Ѻ), in his The Man Starving Himself to Death, argued, as cited by Cicero, argued that the idea of death should not be thought of as an evil thing because it deprives of us of good things, rather it is good, because it cuts off bad things; in this direction, Hegesias, supposedly, is the only philosopher, in the history of philosophy, to positively advocate suicide. (Ѻ)
In 1897, Emile Durkheim, penned his monograph Suicide, which is oft-cited for its social physics stylized content, said to be full of such language: for each people there was ‘a collective force of a determinate amount of energy, impelling men to self-destruction’ and such forces ‘determine behavior from without, just like physico-chemical forces’ and their strength can be measured ‘as one does the strength of electric currents.’ [1]
Quotes
The following are related quotes:
“Suicide is the greatest advantage given man in all the great drawbacks of life.”
— Pliny the elder (77AD), Natural History; cited by Jennifer Hecht (2004) in Doubt (pg. 154)
“I was profoundly unhappy. There was a footpath leading across the fields to New Southgate, and I used to go there alone to watch the sunset and contemplate suicide. I did not, however, commit suicide, because I wished to know more of mathematics.”
— Bertrand Russell (1888), age 16, autobiographical notes [2]
“This suicide must be ranked as one of the great tragedies in the history of science, made all the more ironic by the fact that the scientific world made a complete turnabout in the next few years and accepted the existence of atoms, following Perrin’s experiments on Brownian motion.”
— Stephen Brush (1964) on Boltzmann’s ironic death [3]
See also
● Founders of thermodynamics and suicide
References
1. Lukes, Steven. (1985). Emile Durkheim, his Life and Work: a Historical and Critical Study (pg. 35). Stanford University Press.
2. (a) Scharfstein, Ben-Ami. (1980). The Philosophers: Their Lives and Nature of Their Thought (pgs. 306-07). Oxford University Press.
(b) Dunham, William. (1991). Journey through Genius: the Great Theorems of Mathematics (pg. v). Penguin Books.
3. Brush, Stephen. (1964). “Translator’s Introduction”, in: Lectures on Gas Theory (by Ludwig Boltzmann). University of California Press, Berkeley.
External links
● Suicide – Wikipedia.
