Wednesday 3 October 2018

John Kaag on Suicide


When I first read John Kaag’s essay on the value of life and the option of suicide I thought ‘this is his depression talking’.
is life worth living
Even the beautiful Brooklyn Bridge is changed into a humming windharp of misery. In that typical American way of starting an essay with a personal anecdote; are they taught this in school, J.K. at the entrance to the walkway of the bridge sees a little hand painted notice - ‘life is worth living’. That gets him going and allows him to call William James and David Hume as witnesses. The first offers as an indication of education in higher seriousness the occasional contemplation of suicide. In Hume’s intellectual frolic suicide is held to be a matter for the individual since "self-murder should not be regarded as illegal or immoral since it hurt(s) no one other than the perpetrator, and in many cases might alleviate great suffering”.
Hume on Suicide

The circumjacent devastation caused by suicide is well known and the thought that it would make no difference to anyone but the individual contemplating it is a sign of being dangerously suicidal. John Kaag alone on the bridge finds the choice of ending it all a continuous pragmatic resource. He tells us of William James - " James’s posthumous writings reveal a deep respect for the grim thinker’s (Schopenhauer) willingness to stare clear-eyed into the gloom of human existence”.

Kaag looking down is reminded of a suicide:

I almost always think about Steve Rose, a young black psychology graduate who threw himself off the William James Hall at Harvard University in 2014.

What does being a young black man have to do with it unless the metaphorical imputation is that he was pushed off by an old white man? As a tie in to the James theme it’s obtuse. Indicative of this blankness is the view that those who hold that life has an ultimate value cause the fatal jump.

The rest of this essay is essentially maundering waffle with an abundance of hedging locutions including two ‘I suspects’. Gratings of the great maybe.



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