177. - Suicide

Summary

“Suicide” rarely comes up in Spinoza’s works, though the concept crops up at E4p18s: “that those that kill themselves are weak-minded and completely conquered by external causes contrary to their nature.” The concept is also found at E2p49s: “just as I also do not know how highly we should esteem one who hangs himself, or children, fools, and madmen,” and in Ep23, Spinoza’s letter to Willem van Blijenbergh: “Then I say (whether I grant free will or not) that if anyone sees that he can live better on the gallows than at his own table, he would act very foolishly if he did not go hang himself.” A longer passage in E4p20s deals with Seneca’s self-destruction when he was “forced by the command of a Tyrant … to open his veins, i.e., he desires to avoid a greater evil by [submitting to] a lesser.” That scholium concludes with “But that a man should, from the necessity of his own nature, strive not to exist, or to be changed into another form, is as impossible as that something should come from nothing” (E4p20s).