It has been justly observed, we think, that this second letter is feebler than the first, and that Rousseau displayed more talent in justifying suicide than in combating it; at any rate, the following peroration will always be considered an admirable passage to quote:
“Listen to me, thou foolish youth: thou art dear to me, I pity thy errors. If thou hast at the bottom of thy heart the least feeling of virtue left, come to me, let me teach thee to love life. Every time thou shalt be tempted to put an end to it, say to thyself: ‘Let me do one more good deed before I die!’ Then go and seek some poverty to relieve, some misfortune to console, some oppressed wretch to protect. If this contemplation does not stop thee to-day, it will stop thee to-morrow, or the day after, or perhaps for the rest of thy life. If it does not stop thee, go then and die; for thou art not worthy to live.”
Suicide may be considered from three different standpoints, which are all three involved and blended in the preceding discussion:
1. Suicide is a transgression of our duty toward other men (inasmuch as, however miserable, one can always render some service to others).
2. Suicide is contrary to our duties toward God (inasmuch as man abandons thereby, without being relieved of it, the post intrusted to him in this world).
3. Finally—and this is for us here the essential point—suicide is a violation of the duty of man toward himself; as, all other considerations set aside, he is bound to self-preservation as a moral personality, and has no right whatsoever upon himself.
Kant’s discussion.—Kant is, of all philosophers, the one who most insisted on this latter view of the matter, and developed it with the greatest force.
“It seems absurd,” he says, “that man could do himself injury.” (Volenti non fit injuria.[90]) Thus did the stoic regard it as a prerogative of the sage, to be able, quietly and of his own free will, to step out of this life as he would out of a room full of smoke. But this very courage, this strength of soul which enables us to brave death, revealing to us a something man prizes more than life, should have been to him [the stoic] all the greater incentive not to destroy in himself a being endowed with a faculty so great, so superior to all the most powerful of sensuous motives, and consequently not to deprive himself of life.
Man cannot abdicate his personality as long as there are duties for him, consequently as long as he lives; and there is contradiction in granting him the right of freeing himself from all obligation—that is to say, acting as freely as if he had no need of any kind of permission. To annihilate in one’s own person the subject of morality, is to extirpate from the world as much as possible the existence of morality itself; it is disposing of one’s self as of an instrument, for a simply arbitrary end; it is lowering humanity in one’s own person.
134. Résumé of the discussion on suicide.—From the above point of view the sophisms of Saint-Preux in J. J. Rousseau are easily controverted. I can cut my arm off, you say; why can I not destroy my body?—But in destroying a withered or mortified arm, I nowise injure the human personality, which remains within me entire; and, on the contrary, I deliver the moral personality within me of a physical trouble which deprives it of its liberty.