Rational Action

I received an e-mail last night which prompted a lot of thought. I responded like so, more or less (e-mail edited to remove comments about specific people):

Subject: Re: Hello boys and girls

As Camus said, “Suicide is the most important philosophical question.” He did a great job explaining why it’s the incorrect choice, and surely this explanation won’t compare…

The first thing I’d rule out would be killing yourself. It’s logically a bad choice because there is no turning back from it. You can always continue to live and then, if for some reason it becomes necessary, kill yourself. But not the other way around. (I don’t find that logic to be very satisfying but it was the most clear cut reason I could find to dissuade someone from suicide on the short term.)

I saw a very basic disparity between the suicidal mindset and my own. In it, the capacity to choose is a burden and the direction one takes is extremely constrained by outside forces. There seems to be a dread of the future, and an a lack of awareness of one’s power to influence the future.

I suppose by acknowledging this suicidal mindset, I was able to figure out my reasons for wanting to remain alive. This is the best I can do for you, so here it goes:

At the very core I feel that I am in control of my life and what I do. In fact, the idea that this could not be true frightens the hell out of me. When I look at the past I see how my choices shaped my direction, and that doesn’t seem to be changing. Even the constraints placed upon me — by myself, my parents, society — were ideas that I chose to accept, making a sort of rational decision. (e.g. I could choose to disobey rules, although I would then have to deal with certain consequences)

This feeling of control allows me to value the passing of time. Knowing that I decide where I go, there is a reason for me to continue down the path: I can take enjoyment out of making decisions, and furthermore, I know that in the future I will be able to make more of these decisions. I want to continue living because living implies decisionmaking; I want to continue that decisionmaking out of my enjoyment of it.

I suppose that is just the traditional existential hogwash. Or maybe I butchered it. But here I’m going to go out a bit more, with an associated reason that I continue living. It seems that I am always very excited for the future. I tend to build up the possibility of something very desirable happening in the short term, and that keeps me interested in staying alive for that time. So hope keeps me alive, sometimes. Very, very anti-existential. But I do wonder what would happen if I became unhappy and stopped thinking that in the future, things would get better.

Living out of hope isn’t a lot of fun. I would prefer to be able to focus on the present — on the decisionmaking/choices. Hope doesn’t really work, because when you stop having something to hope for, then at the extreme, you can stop wanting to live (On a minor level, it just makes you upset when you realize you were hoping for something and missed out on enjoying the time as it passed) However, someone who believed in the power of decisionmaking wouldn’t feel that way — he’d have control over whether things got better or worse. I wish (or hope. oops. espero que…) that I could give up hope, but I’m just not there yet.

I think that’s all I have to say right now. As you all can see by the use of conditional words, I’m not quite sure how I feel about all this. But I’m trying. Criticism, comments appreciated. I hope this gave you some ideas. I’m grateful for everyone who listened to me and I’m always, always, always willing to reciprocate.

Adam

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2003 at 10:03 pm and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.