Philosophical Perspectives on Paolo Stellino Philosophical Perspectives on Suicide Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein Paolo Stellino Nova Institute of Universidade Nova de Lisboa LISBOA, Portugal

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Tis Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Te registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface

According to Baruch Spinoza, “a free person thinks about less than anything, and his wisdom is a meditation not on death but on life” (, IV, 67). Writing a book on the philosophy of suicide does not necessarily mean to meditate on death. Tis is what I tried to explain— often with no success—to all those friends and colleagues that in recent years kept asking me why I had chosen to work on such a gloomy subject. Of course, I could have reminded them of Camus’ well-known opening words of Te Myth of Sisyphus: “Tere is but one truly serious philosophi- cal problem and that is suicide.” But the fact is that whereas I am not persuaded by Camus’ claim, I am truly convinced that meditating on suicide means, to a great extent, meditating on fundamental questions that directly concern life, not death. Among others, these questions are: How do we conceive our obligations to society, friends, and family? Which is the set of moral values according to which we choose to orien- tate our life? Which is the value that we give to our autonomy and free- dom? Is this value non-negotiable? And how do we conceive dignity? Is it a “property” that, in specifc situations, can be undermined or deteriorated? I began to take interest in these questions almost ffteen years ago when, almost accidentally, I attended a session of the seminar of the Bioethics Research Group of the University of Valencia. At the time, I was still a PhD student and the subject of my dissertation (on Nietzsche v vi Preface and Dostoevsky) had little to do with bioethics. Juan Carlos Siurana Aparisi, the director of the research group, drew my attention to the fact that Nietzsche’s stance on suicide was almost unexplored by bioethicists. I began looking for Nietzsche’s remarks on suicide in his writings and posthumous fragments. What struck me immediately was Nietzsche’s joyous and almost poetical conception of free death. Te possibility of conceiving death diferently, that is, as a festival was something new for me. I left Spain in 2010. At the time, I had two main concerns: to fnd a post-doc position and to work on the English translation of my disserta- tion. I temporarily set aside my interest on the topic of suicide and devoted myself completely to Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. It was an inter- national conference on Kant and Nietzsche, held in 2012 in Lisbon, that gave me the occasion to work again on the philosophy of suicide. From that moment, suicide has been, somewhat intermittently, one of my main topics of research. Te idea of writing this book occurred to me some years later, when I noticed that there was a fl rouge that linked Kant’s, Schopenhauer’s, Nietzsche’s, and Wittgenstein’s views of suicide. I motivate my choice to place these four philosophical perspectives on sui- cide side by side in the Introduction, so that there is no need to dwell on it here. Some chapters of this book are based on material previously published in P. Stellino, “Nietzsche on Suicide”, Nietzsche-Studien, 42 (2013): 151–177, and in P. Stellino, “Kant and Nietzsche on Suicide”, Philosophical Inquiry, 39/2 (2015): 79–104. Although in both cases I heavily reworked their content for this book, I would like to thank both journals for per- mission to revise and reuse these publications. My research particularly benefted from the works of three specialists on the philosophy of suicide: Margaret P. Battin, Héctor Wittwer, and Michael Cholbi. Wittwer’s book Selbsttötung als philosophisches Problem: Über die Rationalität und Moralität des Suizids particularly helped me at the initial stage of my research to understand the complexities of the dif- ferent arguments that are put forward in the debate concerning the ratio- nality and morality of suicide.

Lisbon Paolo Stellino 23 April 2020 Acknowledgements

I owe a great debt to the following friends and colleagues who read single chapters of this book and provided me with extremely valuable feedback: Roberta Pasquarè and Lorena Cebolla Sanahuja (chapter on Kant), Christopher Janaway and Vilmar Debona (chapter on Schopenhauer), Marta Faustino and Maria Cristina Fornari (chapter on Nietzsche), and Vicente Sanfélix Vidarte and Modesto Gómez Alonso (chapter on Wittgenstein). I am also most grateful to the anonymous reviewer for providing very useful critical and constructive comments on the entire manuscript. I would like to thank Brendan George and Lauriane Piette, from Palgrave Macmillan, and Charanya Manoharan, from Springer, for their help and support. I would also like to thank João Constâncio for kindly supporting my work since the frst day I arrived in Lisbon. I should also mention that this book would not have been possible without the sup- port of the Portuguese Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT). A part of this book was written during my stay in Montpellier. I would like to thank Pascal Nouvel for welcoming me at the Centre d’Éthique Contemporaine. A special thought goes to Nadia El Eter and Guillaume Bagnolini, who shared with me the daily routine at the Centre. A word of gratitude goes to all the friends who, inside and outside academia, near and far, have accompanied me during this journey. I can- not help mentioning Maria Cristina Fornari, Luca Lupo, and Pietro vii viii Acknowledgements

Gori. In particular, I shared with Pietro all the ups and downs of the academic life as well as the experience of building a new life in a new country with our respective families. Finally, I am deeply thankful to my family for their constant support, and to Audrey for her love and for sharing her life with me (despite the fact that I am a philosopher). E lucevan le stelle… Contents

1 Introduction: Bringing Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein Together 1 References 9

2 : The Moral Duty of Self-­Preservation 11 2.1 Contextualizing Kant’s Prohibition of Suicide 11 2.2 Arguments from the Lectures on Ethics 23 2.3 Arguments from the Published Writings 40 2.4 Concluding Remarks 64 References 66

3 : The Metaphysical Futility of Suicide 71 3.1 Schopenhauer’s Critique of Religious and Philosophical Arguments against Suicide 78 3.2 Schopenhauer’s Metaphysical Worldview 90 3.3 Te Futility of Suicide 100 3.4 Concluding Remarks 117 References 118

ix x Contents

4 : A Free Death at the Right Time 123 4.1 Voluntary versus Involuntary Death 131 4.2 Free Death and Quick Death 143 4.3 Meaninglessness and Suicide 155 4.4 Concluding Remarks 173 References 174

5 Ludwig Wittgenstein: Suicide as the Elementary Sin 179 5.1 Te Sources 189 5.2 Wittgenstein’s View of Ethics 199 5.3 Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Suicide 208 5.4 Concluding Remarks 221 References 223

6 Conclusion: What Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein Can Teach Us About Suicide 227 References 240

Index 243 About the author

Paolo Stellino is Researcher at the Nova Institute of Philosophy, New University of Lisbon, Portugal. His main felds of research interest are the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy, ethics, and phi- losophy of cinema. He has published many articles in international peer-­ reviewed journals and has authored several book chapters. He is the author of the book Nietzsche and Dostoevsky: On the Verge of (2015).

xi Abbreviations

Kant References to Kant’s writings are cited according to the volume and page number of the Academy Edition (Kants gesammelte Schriften). A Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View CPR Critique of Pure Reason [1781 cited as A/1787 cited as B] CPrR Critique of Practical Reason LE Lectures on Ethics G Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals MM Te Metaphysics of Morals NF Notes and Fragments R within the Boundaries of Mere Reason

Schopenhauer References to Schopenhauer’s writings are cited according to the follow- ing abbreviations and the page number of the editions listed in the bibliography.

BM On the Basis of Morals MR Manuscript Remains in Four Volumes PP (I & II) Parerga and Paralipomena WWR (I & II) Te World as Will and Representation

xiii xiv Abbreviations

Nietzsche References to Nietzsche’s works are cited by abbreviation, chapter (when applicable) and section number. For the sake of brevity, the chapter might be identifed only by a key word (for instance, Clever instead of Why I Am so Clever). Nietzsche’s posthumous fragments are cited by year, group, and fragment number according to the standard Colli and Montinari edition. Nietzsche’s letters are quoted using the symbol # plus the stan- dard reference number of the letter.

A Te Anti-Christ BGE Beyond Good and Evil BT Te Birth of Tragedy EH Ecce Homo GM On the Genealogy of Morality GS Te Gay Science HH Human, All Too Human HL On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life L Letters NW Nietzsche contra Wagner PF Posthumous Fragments SE Schopenhauer as Educator TI Twilight of the Idols WS Te Wanderer and His Shadow Z Tus Spoke Zarathustra

Wittgenstein Quotes from the Tractatus are cited by reference to the number of the section. Quotes from the Notebooks and the Geheime Tagebücher are cited by reference to the day of the entry.

CV Culture and Value GT Geheime Tagebücher. 1914–1916 LE Lecture on Ethics NB Notebooks. 1914–1916 TLP Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus