ccf (02/18/83)
I, too, faced a situation similar to that described by Lady Enid. In the not too distant past, a depressed acquaintance spoke to me of "going away"; fortunately I was able to tell him that, since death is just the possibility of the impossibility of every way of comporting oneself toward anything, it is ONLY INDIRECTLY (perfectly simply) the possibility of no longer existing. Thinking about states of being is always tautological, I explained, because states of being are always nothing other than themselves, and hence without thinkable predicates. As a result, thinking liquidates itself, and dignity, for its own sake, transforms this THEORETICAL lack into the dictate of something that must be accepted without question. In this way, I told him, the lifeblood is sucked out of the merely existant, out of just that weakness which cannot be reduced to its pure concept, but rather cleaves to a non-conceptual substratum. But this PURE TAUTOLOGY which propagates a concept while at the same time refusing to define it, mechanically repeating it without real meaning, is intelligence in the form of VIOLENCE. And this, I said, is your mistake: in your insistence on having a concern, you are equating ESSENCE with the MOST BRUTAL FACT OF ALL. This failure is just your mind's violent incapacity to capture what it wants to think about. And although I have not seen him again, he seemed satisfied with this advice at the time, and I'm very happy to pass it along to the concerned readers of this newsgroup. *<--- chuck --->* cbosgd!ccf BTL Columbus
mcewan (02/23/83)
#R:cbosgd:-313900:uiucdcs:22100005:000:84 uiucdcs!mcewan Feb 22 22:39:00 1983 He probably died of boredom shortly afterward and thus didn't need to kill himself.