Stoic Philosophy: A Note on Suicide

A Note on Suicide

Stoic teachings about suicide, though relatively clear, have, from ancient times to the present, perplexed students of the subject because of an apparent tension in the Stoic position. On the one hand, the Stoics seem to have been opposed to suicide because, like Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo, they held that each of us is appointed to his post in life by divine authority, and must not leave it until summoned. On the other hand, according to our information, both the first two leaders of the school, Zeno and Cleanthes, committed suicide, and leading Stoics explicitly taught that one may commit suicide to avoid intolerable situations, as Seneca did when the alternative for him was death at the hands of the sadistic Nero.

To understand the Stoics’ position on this subject the best place to begin is with an examination of the figure of the “smoky room” often used by them (see Epictetus, Discourses, I, xxv, 81ff.; IV, x, 27; Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, V, 29). The point is that if one wants to remain in a room, but it gets very smoky, there is no use in complaining. One has a choice: one can either remain, put up with the smoke, and quit complaining; or one can leave the room because it is no longer worth staying. Every alternative course of action has costs and benefits. A rational person will consider these and make his choice on that basis without uselessly bemoaning the losses incurred in pursuing the better alternative.

So far the figure suggests merely prudential considerations concerning costs and benefits to oneself, and the Stoics, perhaps as a propaedeutic, did address themselves to these considerations to suggest more rational behavior to persons who will only consider them. According to the Stoics these are, of course, not the only, or even the primary, considerations; but even for them they are proper grounds for deciding between the proegmena and the apoproegmena. Still, there are larger concerns for a member of the community of rational beings to take into account; his duties will outweigh purely private matters.

These principles do not in themselves determine when suicide is permitted, or even incumbent on, a person, and when not. As always, judgment is necessary. It appears, therefore, that if one is terminally ill or seriously and incurably disabled, and nothing else that will adversely affect others comes into play, one is permitted to commit suicide, but not to complain, for, as the Stoics liked to say, “the door is open.” Nice questions arise when one’s condition or situation is so miserable that it seems to him not possible for him to carry out his duties. Then suicide may present itself as a temptation; but each person must decide for himself whether he is forsaking his duties under difficult circumstances or it will be impossible for him to carry them out. In all of this the Stoics ignored, as most of us do in discussing the same subject, the extreme circumstances of one who is prevented from suicide by restraint and force-feeding. But there is, perhaps, little advice that one can usefully give to such an unfortunate.