[net.suicide] Advice for Lady Enid

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.