In June, 2018, two relatively well-known people committed suicide: Kate Spade, famous in the world of fashion, and Anthony Bourdain, famous in the world of food and travel. They weren’t the first relatively famous people to take their own lives. Lists of suicides are long, and the people on them range from the famous to infamous and include those known only locally.
I haven’t taken a poll, but I believe the most common concept associated with suicide is angst. That’s what I hear when people discuss the subject. “She must have suffered from some hidden anxiety.” The term is at the center of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, and, though I’m not an expert on his meaning, I think he probably derived his use of the word from some innate fear, possibly one as simple as that which children experience in night terrors: “Mommy, there’s a tiger under my bed!” It is difficult for any of us to go through life without encountering, if only briefly, possibly in some feverish delirium, a sense of dread and anxiety brought on by a recognition (conscious or unconscious) of our finiteness. We can’t dismiss the feelings as insignificant because they come from a reality we all have to face: We live in a world of something, of things we can count, and we are destined for a no-thingness that I will call The Uncountable.
Heidegger’s philosophy also centers on the principle of “no-thingness” that he appears to associate with a withdrawal from the “world.” Again, I’m not a Heideggerian, but on the surface his philosophy seems to encapsulate some of the feelings and circumstances that suicides experience.
That the countable world of things is on our minds is not a new thought. From our buying a new car or rearranging furniture or sock drawers, we are immersed in the countable. It’s a point that William Wordsworth makes in “The World Is Too Much with Us”:
The world is too much with us; late and soon
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers…
Wordsworth goes on to say we’ve lost our connection with Nature, and he includes a line that seems appropriate here as he desires a condition that would give him:
…glimpses that would make me less forlorn…
Apparently, in a world that is “too much with us” we are steeped in anxiety and are “forlorn.” The countable world can’t hide that “innate” angst; it surfaces, mostly unexpectedly. When people who seem to have “everything” commit suicide, we seek an explanation in some “hidden personal troubles.” But, in truth, all of us have a common denominator that we hide: Anxiety, whatever its temporary cause, has an ultimate association with a dread of death. A world that is “too much with us” is one that has caused further anxieties: “How do I pay the bills?” “Who really loves me?” “What am I doing chasing wealth and fame?” “What if I lose my talent or long-practiced skills?” “What if I fail?” “When and where can I find a moment of rest and feeling of safety?”
Obviously, I can’t match here the volumes that have been written about suicide and the reasons people take their lives. The experts—made “expert” through studies of suicide notes and interviews with those contemplating or failing suicide—have weighed in on the subject. Nevertheless, I want to add a perspective I derived from a strange little report that just emerged, one that ties the rest of the animal world to the complex, angst-filled world of humans. Be warned that the following might seem a stretch because I base it not on a study of suicide, but rather on a study of bees and their ability to understand a mathematical concept.
Depending upon further research by others, experimenters’ findings come and go, and the finding that bees understand the concept of zero might just be one of those that “goes.” In the meantime, let’s make much of a discovery by Scarlett R. Howard, Aurore Avargues-Weber, Jair E. Garcia, Andrew D. Greentree, and Adrian G. Dyer.”*
Zero, nothing, nada, nil, not whatever, because of the whatin whatever. Anyway, it seems that bees, according to the experimenters, can be taught the concept of zero. And that amazes many (though some see possible errors in the experiment). Here are these tiny busybodies flitting from flower to flower to fill hexagonal storage cells we rob of honey for sweetening tea and toast, and we never knew that their tiny brains might be capable of some complex thinking or distinguishing.
Do we need to rethink the concept of intelligence? Maybe redefine instinct? Challenge our young to do better in math? Experiment with human understanding of zero? And what in the world that is too much with us does this have to do with suicide?
Can I show you a relationship among angst, zero, The Uncountable, Heidegger’s No-thingness, and suicide in a world that is “too much with us”?
Yeah. That last thing I said. Apparently, many who involve themselves in destructive behavior don’t have a concept of zero, as in zero life. Or, maybe they do. There’s a report by the CDC that suicide rates have increased by more than 30% in 25 U.S. states.** (Only Nevada has shown a decrease in suicides, but don’t take that to mean much: Nevada had a high suicide rate) Let’s do the math for a moment:
Being alive = being-countably-alive = encountering angst, a common denominator of humans
Being dead = zero-being-alive = eliminating angst and a denominator of human existence
No doubt there are many reasons behind the desire of some to reach zero in this equation of life. Middle East suicide bombers believe that zero life on Earth earns some other quantifiable life, such as the commonly mentioned “eternity with seventy-two virgins.”*** Others, such as people lost in the anxiety caused by emotional and physical pain might seek to zero out the pain, either by engaging in unhealthful behaviors or suicide. You can probably enumerate other reasons for seeking zero life, of eliminating the anxieties associated with a world “too much with us” and a tiger under the bed.
But are all personal demises the same? Don’t bees sacrifice themselves for the sake of the hive? Do bees that sacrifice themselves for the hive do so with the thought, “Hey, count me in; I volunteer.” If their final act is altruistic, is it so because of a consciousness that we believe is now evident because bees can associate no-thingness and zero?
We could argue that the bee isn’t consciously choosing suicide, but rather acting from instinctive necessity, or necessary instinct. Zeroing out its life in defense of the hive is just a built-in mechanism evolution provided for maintenance of the species. We could also argue that nothing in the sub-human world equates to the complexity of human behavior. So, let’s say that there are categories of reasons for suicide.
First category: People who choose zero for some altruistic purpose, say soldiers who throw themselves on grenades to save others. They aren’t really choosing suicide as much as they are preserving the lives of others, very much like bees that sacrifice their lives for the hive. But the same argument might apply to people who believe that by killing themselves and taking others with them, they serve some greater purpose than their individual lives could serve through living, suicide bombers, for example. So, it seems that in the first category there can be distinctions, all depending upon one’s perspective that he or she can actually accept a self-chosen death as a positive act.
Second category: People for whom life has become a physical, emotional, or mental burden.**** They ostensibly “choose” to zero out the angst in their lives, but we can never know the exact reason, even if we discuss it with those who survive their attempts. Our incomplete understanding derives from our inability to know all the influences in anyone’s life—including our own. We might even argue that circumstances beyond their control and their conscious knowledge drove them to suicide, possibly hallucinations induced by drugs or an undetected brain disorder. If the latter, then there is no attributable responsibility.***** Suicide, we might argue, isn’t a matter of one’s acting irresponsibly, but rather of one’s having no responsibility. Suicide eliminates all in a world “too much with us,” including angst over all that is countable like episodes of physical or emotional pain.
We can’t know how many bees or humans have committed suicide or sacrificed their lives for others. If we have a rough estimate of humans, we’re at a tiny fraction of any estimate of the number of bees that have existed. We can’t even know the percentage of humans or bees that have killed themselves or offered their lives for some “greater” purpose, such as the preservation of other lives. And we can’t know the number of people who committed suicide because of angst that overwhelmed them like some addictive drug. Even in the CDC’s statistics, we could find some deaths dubiously attributed to suicide.
Note that in those two categories, you (I’m assuming) find a distinction “with meaning.” But note, also, that you distinguish among your distinctions. The soldier who throws himself or herself on a grenade to save fellow soldiers, or the policeman who offers his or her life to save hostages, reaches a noble zero, and the nobility of the act can even be recognized by the soldier’s enemies. The suicide bomber doesn’t have the potential for universal acceptance though those behind the act probably see it as heroic. Zero seems to have variable meanings when one zeroes out life for a cause.
Are there distinctions to be made with respect to those who would zero out life for physical, emotional, or mental reasons? Knowing how much pain anyone suffers is difficult for most of us, even the most empathetic, to understand, but we all know the angst that derives from The Uncountable and the anxiety that derives from a world that is “too much with us.”
I don’t know what reasons Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain—or any other suicide—had for taking their lives. I’ll never know. I could guess that they had a concept of zero and that it played a role in what they thought suicide would accomplish. As long as there are humans, there will be suicide because as long as there are beds, there will be imagined tigers lurking beneath them; angst is probably innate and is only masked by the world that is “too much with us.” We might not have a chance to stop suicides driven by fanaticism, but it might be possible to stop those that might occur because of a world that is “too much with us” and an innate angst. We just need to teach children just as we taught some bees the concept of zero in a positive way. “Come here, bend down, and look with me under the bed. There are zero tigers under the bed, and zero children have been devoured by them.”
Wait! I’m not finished; I have to add a point. Bees and people share existence, but neither self-created. So, all beings with whatever level of consciousness they embody, find themselves already existing. There’s no “before” that anyone can verify for his own existence. One either exists or one doesn’t. And that applies to humans of various kinds of belief systems, including those who claim to have no belief. I find it interesting that both believers and atheists operate on very similar grounds when it comes to maintaining or zeroing out existence. No one makes “existence.” Everyone finds himself already “in existence.” Again, there are only two choices 1) stay in existence as long as one can and 2) hurry a departure from a world that is too much with us. Live with quantities or zero them.
If Heidegger thought to paraphrase Descartes, he might have written, “I have angst; therefore, I am.” And if angst is associated with the quantifiable and qualifiable “thingness of the world too much with us,” then the ultimate way to eliminate angst is by leaving the Countable for the Uncountable.
Believers believe in a personal Source of Existence for the universe, God or gods. Atheists don’t “believe” in a personal Source and look for some pre-existence process in quantum fields to explain how the countable came to be. For the latter, existence simply “is,” making it either the Eternal Now or a countable 13.8 billion years old. In either case, both believers and nonbelievers speak of “existence” and recognize it as both qualifiable and quantifiable. We qualify it in our many adjectives: Kate Spade was “RICH AND FAMOUS.” Anthony Bourdain was “RICH AND FAMOUS.” Both lived an existence that others perceived to be “DIFFERENT” from that of the poor commoner. But we impose qualifiers, whereas, in the matter of the ultimate quantifier, we see some objective countable number: You, for example, are a certain number of years old. Your existence is measurable, and it doesn’t matter whether or not you believe in a Source of Existence. There will be two dates on your tombstone, just as there are two dates on every tombstone, in most instances, neither date is a chosen one. The beginning date is not a choice. In the instances of suicides, the second date is a matter of choice. For those who “die naturally” (from age, accident, disease), the quantifying stops rather unexpectedly.
So, no one gets a choice between becoming part of a world that is not only too much with us, but also one filled with angst and ending the quantities and the associated angst. It took hundreds of thousands of years until humans incorporated the concept of zero into math. That seems strange if we consider that bees probably understood the concept since before the demise of the dinosaurs, possibly as long ago as 130 million years. But maybe bees don’t have any angst—at least that’s our common thinking. How could they? How could they be as intelligent and self-aware as we are. Aren’t we “super self-aware” in comparison to all other life-forms? Aren’t we always aware that we exist and that we will sometime not exist as we now exist?
So, it seems that there are two ways to come by an understanding of zero. Bees get theirs through the absence of something measurable, and johnny-come-lately, we also have acquired such an understanding.****** We seem to have derived our understanding through angst and the notion that not just the quantifiable world, but also existence itself can be zeroed out. Most likely—but there’s no way to know—bees don’t wake up at night worrying whether or not there’s a tiger under the hive, so they don’t suffer angst. That means that the only way they sacrifice their lives—their existence—is in the service of others.
Given that we have no quantifiable evidence that we get to re-enter existence should we decide to exit it, taking a life because of angst or anxiety about a world too much with us zeroes out the only opportunity to experience existence. Because such existence is finite, the logical approach would be to consider that this life isn’t practice, regardless of how much angst besets us, how much anxiety we experience. Maybe the heart of human existence, the very thing we should focus on for its own sake, is angst. It underlies our experience with existence from our earliest period of consciousness, from the very first moment we discovered that zero is not only possible, but also inevitable.
*Numerical Ordering of Zero in Honey Bees, Science, 08 Jun 2018, Vol. 360, Issue 6393, pp. 1124-1126. DOI: 10.1126/science.aar4975 at http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6393/1124
** https://www.newstimes.com/technology/businessinsider/article/The-CDC-just-released-staggering-data-on-the-rise-12977196.php
***All named, by the way, Sister Mary Milk of Magnesia
****See the difficulty in classifying? When death by fire was certain for people in the World Trade Towers, they chose an alternate death by jumping. It was a split-second decision and might have been more motivated by escaping one kind of death, rather than by actually “choosing” another.
*****Even in an argument that the overdose suicide was a personal choice, one has to allow that the responsibility to first try a drug isn’t the same as irresponsible behavior driven by an addiction to that drug.
******Thanks go to some people in India centuries ago.
I haven’t taken a poll, but I believe the most common concept associated with suicide is angst. That’s what I hear when people discuss the subject. “She must have suffered from some hidden anxiety.” The term is at the center of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, and, though I’m not an expert on his meaning, I think he probably derived his use of the word from some innate fear, possibly one as simple as that which children experience in night terrors: “Mommy, there’s a tiger under my bed!” It is difficult for any of us to go through life without encountering, if only briefly, possibly in some feverish delirium, a sense of dread and anxiety brought on by a recognition (conscious or unconscious) of our finiteness. We can’t dismiss the feelings as insignificant because they come from a reality we all have to face: We live in a world of something, of things we can count, and we are destined for a no-thingness that I will call The Uncountable.
Heidegger’s philosophy also centers on the principle of “no-thingness” that he appears to associate with a withdrawal from the “world.” Again, I’m not a Heideggerian, but on the surface his philosophy seems to encapsulate some of the feelings and circumstances that suicides experience.
That the countable world of things is on our minds is not a new thought. From our buying a new car or rearranging furniture or sock drawers, we are immersed in the countable. It’s a point that William Wordsworth makes in “The World Is Too Much with Us”:
The world is too much with us; late and soon
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers…
Wordsworth goes on to say we’ve lost our connection with Nature, and he includes a line that seems appropriate here as he desires a condition that would give him:
…glimpses that would make me less forlorn…
Apparently, in a world that is “too much with us” we are steeped in anxiety and are “forlorn.” The countable world can’t hide that “innate” angst; it surfaces, mostly unexpectedly. When people who seem to have “everything” commit suicide, we seek an explanation in some “hidden personal troubles.” But, in truth, all of us have a common denominator that we hide: Anxiety, whatever its temporary cause, has an ultimate association with a dread of death. A world that is “too much with us” is one that has caused further anxieties: “How do I pay the bills?” “Who really loves me?” “What am I doing chasing wealth and fame?” “What if I lose my talent or long-practiced skills?” “What if I fail?” “When and where can I find a moment of rest and feeling of safety?”
Obviously, I can’t match here the volumes that have been written about suicide and the reasons people take their lives. The experts—made “expert” through studies of suicide notes and interviews with those contemplating or failing suicide—have weighed in on the subject. Nevertheless, I want to add a perspective I derived from a strange little report that just emerged, one that ties the rest of the animal world to the complex, angst-filled world of humans. Be warned that the following might seem a stretch because I base it not on a study of suicide, but rather on a study of bees and their ability to understand a mathematical concept.
Depending upon further research by others, experimenters’ findings come and go, and the finding that bees understand the concept of zero might just be one of those that “goes.” In the meantime, let’s make much of a discovery by Scarlett R. Howard, Aurore Avargues-Weber, Jair E. Garcia, Andrew D. Greentree, and Adrian G. Dyer.”*
Zero, nothing, nada, nil, not whatever, because of the whatin whatever. Anyway, it seems that bees, according to the experimenters, can be taught the concept of zero. And that amazes many (though some see possible errors in the experiment). Here are these tiny busybodies flitting from flower to flower to fill hexagonal storage cells we rob of honey for sweetening tea and toast, and we never knew that their tiny brains might be capable of some complex thinking or distinguishing.
Do we need to rethink the concept of intelligence? Maybe redefine instinct? Challenge our young to do better in math? Experiment with human understanding of zero? And what in the world that is too much with us does this have to do with suicide?
Can I show you a relationship among angst, zero, The Uncountable, Heidegger’s No-thingness, and suicide in a world that is “too much with us”?
Yeah. That last thing I said. Apparently, many who involve themselves in destructive behavior don’t have a concept of zero, as in zero life. Or, maybe they do. There’s a report by the CDC that suicide rates have increased by more than 30% in 25 U.S. states.** (Only Nevada has shown a decrease in suicides, but don’t take that to mean much: Nevada had a high suicide rate) Let’s do the math for a moment:
Being alive = being-countably-alive = encountering angst, a common denominator of humans
Being dead = zero-being-alive = eliminating angst and a denominator of human existence
No doubt there are many reasons behind the desire of some to reach zero in this equation of life. Middle East suicide bombers believe that zero life on Earth earns some other quantifiable life, such as the commonly mentioned “eternity with seventy-two virgins.”*** Others, such as people lost in the anxiety caused by emotional and physical pain might seek to zero out the pain, either by engaging in unhealthful behaviors or suicide. You can probably enumerate other reasons for seeking zero life, of eliminating the anxieties associated with a world “too much with us” and a tiger under the bed.
But are all personal demises the same? Don’t bees sacrifice themselves for the sake of the hive? Do bees that sacrifice themselves for the hive do so with the thought, “Hey, count me in; I volunteer.” If their final act is altruistic, is it so because of a consciousness that we believe is now evident because bees can associate no-thingness and zero?
We could argue that the bee isn’t consciously choosing suicide, but rather acting from instinctive necessity, or necessary instinct. Zeroing out its life in defense of the hive is just a built-in mechanism evolution provided for maintenance of the species. We could also argue that nothing in the sub-human world equates to the complexity of human behavior. So, let’s say that there are categories of reasons for suicide.
First category: People who choose zero for some altruistic purpose, say soldiers who throw themselves on grenades to save others. They aren’t really choosing suicide as much as they are preserving the lives of others, very much like bees that sacrifice their lives for the hive. But the same argument might apply to people who believe that by killing themselves and taking others with them, they serve some greater purpose than their individual lives could serve through living, suicide bombers, for example. So, it seems that in the first category there can be distinctions, all depending upon one’s perspective that he or she can actually accept a self-chosen death as a positive act.
Second category: People for whom life has become a physical, emotional, or mental burden.**** They ostensibly “choose” to zero out the angst in their lives, but we can never know the exact reason, even if we discuss it with those who survive their attempts. Our incomplete understanding derives from our inability to know all the influences in anyone’s life—including our own. We might even argue that circumstances beyond their control and their conscious knowledge drove them to suicide, possibly hallucinations induced by drugs or an undetected brain disorder. If the latter, then there is no attributable responsibility.***** Suicide, we might argue, isn’t a matter of one’s acting irresponsibly, but rather of one’s having no responsibility. Suicide eliminates all in a world “too much with us,” including angst over all that is countable like episodes of physical or emotional pain.
We can’t know how many bees or humans have committed suicide or sacrificed their lives for others. If we have a rough estimate of humans, we’re at a tiny fraction of any estimate of the number of bees that have existed. We can’t even know the percentage of humans or bees that have killed themselves or offered their lives for some “greater” purpose, such as the preservation of other lives. And we can’t know the number of people who committed suicide because of angst that overwhelmed them like some addictive drug. Even in the CDC’s statistics, we could find some deaths dubiously attributed to suicide.
Note that in those two categories, you (I’m assuming) find a distinction “with meaning.” But note, also, that you distinguish among your distinctions. The soldier who throws himself or herself on a grenade to save fellow soldiers, or the policeman who offers his or her life to save hostages, reaches a noble zero, and the nobility of the act can even be recognized by the soldier’s enemies. The suicide bomber doesn’t have the potential for universal acceptance though those behind the act probably see it as heroic. Zero seems to have variable meanings when one zeroes out life for a cause.
Are there distinctions to be made with respect to those who would zero out life for physical, emotional, or mental reasons? Knowing how much pain anyone suffers is difficult for most of us, even the most empathetic, to understand, but we all know the angst that derives from The Uncountable and the anxiety that derives from a world that is “too much with us.”
I don’t know what reasons Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain—or any other suicide—had for taking their lives. I’ll never know. I could guess that they had a concept of zero and that it played a role in what they thought suicide would accomplish. As long as there are humans, there will be suicide because as long as there are beds, there will be imagined tigers lurking beneath them; angst is probably innate and is only masked by the world that is “too much with us.” We might not have a chance to stop suicides driven by fanaticism, but it might be possible to stop those that might occur because of a world that is “too much with us” and an innate angst. We just need to teach children just as we taught some bees the concept of zero in a positive way. “Come here, bend down, and look with me under the bed. There are zero tigers under the bed, and zero children have been devoured by them.”
Wait! I’m not finished; I have to add a point. Bees and people share existence, but neither self-created. So, all beings with whatever level of consciousness they embody, find themselves already existing. There’s no “before” that anyone can verify for his own existence. One either exists or one doesn’t. And that applies to humans of various kinds of belief systems, including those who claim to have no belief. I find it interesting that both believers and atheists operate on very similar grounds when it comes to maintaining or zeroing out existence. No one makes “existence.” Everyone finds himself already “in existence.” Again, there are only two choices 1) stay in existence as long as one can and 2) hurry a departure from a world that is too much with us. Live with quantities or zero them.
If Heidegger thought to paraphrase Descartes, he might have written, “I have angst; therefore, I am.” And if angst is associated with the quantifiable and qualifiable “thingness of the world too much with us,” then the ultimate way to eliminate angst is by leaving the Countable for the Uncountable.
Believers believe in a personal Source of Existence for the universe, God or gods. Atheists don’t “believe” in a personal Source and look for some pre-existence process in quantum fields to explain how the countable came to be. For the latter, existence simply “is,” making it either the Eternal Now or a countable 13.8 billion years old. In either case, both believers and nonbelievers speak of “existence” and recognize it as both qualifiable and quantifiable. We qualify it in our many adjectives: Kate Spade was “RICH AND FAMOUS.” Anthony Bourdain was “RICH AND FAMOUS.” Both lived an existence that others perceived to be “DIFFERENT” from that of the poor commoner. But we impose qualifiers, whereas, in the matter of the ultimate quantifier, we see some objective countable number: You, for example, are a certain number of years old. Your existence is measurable, and it doesn’t matter whether or not you believe in a Source of Existence. There will be two dates on your tombstone, just as there are two dates on every tombstone, in most instances, neither date is a chosen one. The beginning date is not a choice. In the instances of suicides, the second date is a matter of choice. For those who “die naturally” (from age, accident, disease), the quantifying stops rather unexpectedly.
So, no one gets a choice between becoming part of a world that is not only too much with us, but also one filled with angst and ending the quantities and the associated angst. It took hundreds of thousands of years until humans incorporated the concept of zero into math. That seems strange if we consider that bees probably understood the concept since before the demise of the dinosaurs, possibly as long ago as 130 million years. But maybe bees don’t have any angst—at least that’s our common thinking. How could they? How could they be as intelligent and self-aware as we are. Aren’t we “super self-aware” in comparison to all other life-forms? Aren’t we always aware that we exist and that we will sometime not exist as we now exist?
So, it seems that there are two ways to come by an understanding of zero. Bees get theirs through the absence of something measurable, and johnny-come-lately, we also have acquired such an understanding.****** We seem to have derived our understanding through angst and the notion that not just the quantifiable world, but also existence itself can be zeroed out. Most likely—but there’s no way to know—bees don’t wake up at night worrying whether or not there’s a tiger under the hive, so they don’t suffer angst. That means that the only way they sacrifice their lives—their existence—is in the service of others.
Given that we have no quantifiable evidence that we get to re-enter existence should we decide to exit it, taking a life because of angst or anxiety about a world too much with us zeroes out the only opportunity to experience existence. Because such existence is finite, the logical approach would be to consider that this life isn’t practice, regardless of how much angst besets us, how much anxiety we experience. Maybe the heart of human existence, the very thing we should focus on for its own sake, is angst. It underlies our experience with existence from our earliest period of consciousness, from the very first moment we discovered that zero is not only possible, but also inevitable.
*Numerical Ordering of Zero in Honey Bees, Science, 08 Jun 2018, Vol. 360, Issue 6393, pp. 1124-1126. DOI: 10.1126/science.aar4975 at http://science.sciencemag.org/content/360/6393/1124
** https://www.newstimes.com/technology/businessinsider/article/The-CDC-just-released-staggering-data-on-the-rise-12977196.php
***All named, by the way, Sister Mary Milk of Magnesia
****See the difficulty in classifying? When death by fire was certain for people in the World Trade Towers, they chose an alternate death by jumping. It was a split-second decision and might have been more motivated by escaping one kind of death, rather than by actually “choosing” another.
*****Even in an argument that the overdose suicide was a personal choice, one has to allow that the responsibility to first try a drug isn’t the same as irresponsible behavior driven by an addiction to that drug.
******Thanks go to some people in India centuries ago.
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