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Originally Posted by Sethomas
So this morning I was reading through Spinoza's Ethics for the first time, and one thing that caught my eye was his insistence that suicide can only happen by external influence, exemplias gratias bereavement or shame. He flat-out said that it's impossible for the mind to wish for non-existence according to its own nature.
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That's interesting. What were Spinoza's and Augustine's thoughts on madness? I'm talking about big-time craziness. Whereas the notion of depression as disease is probably relatively new, madness has been around since forever, and they must've noticed it. Is it somehow tied in with their notions of evil? Would they say that someone who is mad could commit suicide, even if that act is unencumbered by "external influence"?
There's also a bit of ambiguity about what is meant by "mind". I wonder if they believed that only an irrational person could wish to commit suicide, or that the only time a rational person could rationally commit suicide is because of grave "external influences". I think it's fairly rational to say "gee, I might as well kill myself before this black plague consumes me in a couple of days, to avoid the horrible pain associated with dying."
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