Alucard
Wizard
- Feb 8, 2019
- 606
After opening a topic on the concrete means to commit suicide without pain (which I hope will bear fruit), I propose to open a second one to share the philosophers' reflections - as well as ours - showing that life is not a duty and that it is absurd to condemn someone to live ; so, now that we have the medical means to die without pain, it is intolerable that these means are not available in pharmacy, accessible to all.
To begin, I propose an article I wrote on the subject. Here it is.
"Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus have shown - each in their own way - that life is absurd. "The absurd is the essential notion and the first truth," writes Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. "The absurd, finally, is one with the human condition," writes Sartre in Situations. This does not mean that we can not give meaning to our life, but that life has no meaning that pre-exists us, that is, that would have been defined for us before our birth: it has only the meaning we give it.
If life had an intrinsic meaning, in other words if it was not absurd, it would mean that the meaning would be imposed from outside and that we would not choose it: we would be subject to this meaning, which would be foolish. On the contrary, if life is absurd, then it belongs to us, since we choose the meaning we give it. The absurd is therefore the condition of our existential freedom: if it has scary aspects in that it deprives us of landmarks, it is above all the mark of our dignity.
If life had meaning, it would also imply that the sufferings we endure and the horrors of history are part of this meaning and are therefore legitimate: to deny the absurd is therefore an intellectual terrorism justifying the unjustifiable: if everything makes sense, so Nazism and Daesh too. To say that life has meaning is to resign oneself to the unacceptable. On the contrary, to say that it is absurd is to rebel against the fool and thus become aware of his moral responsibility: if life is unjust, then it becomes urgent to bring about justice through his actions. If God had a plan that wars, diseases and natural disasters served, and if this plan constituted the meaning of life, then that meaning would be morally intolerable, which is why Cioran writes in his Accuracy of Decomposition: "The life does not make sense, it can not have any. We should kill ourselves on the spot if an unexpected revelation persuades us to the contrary. Indeed, such a meaning would be absurd!
Once we understand that life is absurd, that it belongs to us, and that we are the only ones - we human beings - to be able to build meaning, it becomes absurd to prevent people from dying on the pretext that they do not have their life and they have to live for something other than themselves (God, society or family). If our life belongs to no one but ourselves (neither to God nor to doctors), as we have shown, then every human being, in the name of his dignity, must have the choice to live or not to live, that is to say to die when he decides. Far from being a "morbid" thought, it is rather an affirmation of life: only the freedom to die when it is decided makes it possible to live by choice, by a taste for life, and not by constraint. But the difference between living by choice and living by coercion is the same as that between a love story and a rape ... by choice in the first case, by force in the second case.
Therefore, when a person no longer wishes to live, because of an incurable disease or other factors, to help him die in dignity is our moral duty; to condemn it to live, on the contrary, is the most unjust and arbitrary cruelty (in the name of what to condemn to live?). This is our ambition : to allow everyone to die with dignity when life is no longer a joy ... to live worthily, ie by will and not by force, before death . That laws forbidding euthanasia show that we have not yet come out of barbarism and that religious obscurantism still reigns. But let us dare to be a little Hegelian: by our struggle, reason and freedom will eventually triumph over chaos."
So, let's expose our arguments against this aberrant and cruel society...
To begin, I propose an article I wrote on the subject. Here it is.
"Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus have shown - each in their own way - that life is absurd. "The absurd is the essential notion and the first truth," writes Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. "The absurd, finally, is one with the human condition," writes Sartre in Situations. This does not mean that we can not give meaning to our life, but that life has no meaning that pre-exists us, that is, that would have been defined for us before our birth: it has only the meaning we give it.
If life had an intrinsic meaning, in other words if it was not absurd, it would mean that the meaning would be imposed from outside and that we would not choose it: we would be subject to this meaning, which would be foolish. On the contrary, if life is absurd, then it belongs to us, since we choose the meaning we give it. The absurd is therefore the condition of our existential freedom: if it has scary aspects in that it deprives us of landmarks, it is above all the mark of our dignity.
If life had meaning, it would also imply that the sufferings we endure and the horrors of history are part of this meaning and are therefore legitimate: to deny the absurd is therefore an intellectual terrorism justifying the unjustifiable: if everything makes sense, so Nazism and Daesh too. To say that life has meaning is to resign oneself to the unacceptable. On the contrary, to say that it is absurd is to rebel against the fool and thus become aware of his moral responsibility: if life is unjust, then it becomes urgent to bring about justice through his actions. If God had a plan that wars, diseases and natural disasters served, and if this plan constituted the meaning of life, then that meaning would be morally intolerable, which is why Cioran writes in his Accuracy of Decomposition: "The life does not make sense, it can not have any. We should kill ourselves on the spot if an unexpected revelation persuades us to the contrary. Indeed, such a meaning would be absurd!
Once we understand that life is absurd, that it belongs to us, and that we are the only ones - we human beings - to be able to build meaning, it becomes absurd to prevent people from dying on the pretext that they do not have their life and they have to live for something other than themselves (God, society or family). If our life belongs to no one but ourselves (neither to God nor to doctors), as we have shown, then every human being, in the name of his dignity, must have the choice to live or not to live, that is to say to die when he decides. Far from being a "morbid" thought, it is rather an affirmation of life: only the freedom to die when it is decided makes it possible to live by choice, by a taste for life, and not by constraint. But the difference between living by choice and living by coercion is the same as that between a love story and a rape ... by choice in the first case, by force in the second case.
Therefore, when a person no longer wishes to live, because of an incurable disease or other factors, to help him die in dignity is our moral duty; to condemn it to live, on the contrary, is the most unjust and arbitrary cruelty (in the name of what to condemn to live?). This is our ambition : to allow everyone to die with dignity when life is no longer a joy ... to live worthily, ie by will and not by force, before death . That laws forbidding euthanasia show that we have not yet come out of barbarism and that religious obscurantism still reigns. But let us dare to be a little Hegelian: by our struggle, reason and freedom will eventually triumph over chaos."
So, let's expose our arguments against this aberrant and cruel society...
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