Suicide as unfreedom and vice versa (ePub)

Essay from the year 2008 in the subject Philosophy - Miscellaneous, grade: A, mes (India - Calicut University: MES College of Engineering, Kuttippuram), course: sociology, language: English, abstract: In this paper I problematize that the suicides out of despair (hereafter sod) as statements of unfreedom. The paper is divided into six sections. The first section introduces the problem and locates it within the existing scholarship. The second section puts forward first of the two problems the paper engages: suicide as unfreedom. In this section, the situational and essent'ial ontology of suicide is briefly discussed and proceed to categorize two major forms of unfreedoms emergent from the historical ontology of human social life: slavery and bare life. The third section of the paper problematizes unfreedom as freedom corrupted both from the perspectives of Heideggerian essent'ial ontology and Badiouian situational ontology through set theoretical models of freedom/unfreedom. Subsequently three sets of unfreedom: heteronomy, atomy and bare life; and one set of freedom vis-àvis autonomy is logically derived and discussed. Freedom is presented as a directive idea helpful in doing away with unfreedoms. Then the second of the two problems - unfreedom as suicidal- is briefly discussed. The concluding section delineates that despite the emergent historical reality having constituted human social life as unfree, we could still be hopeful in recovering freedom as the essent'ial ontology of the human species and the evental potential of the situational ontology of life is not fundamentally unfree. In the following two paragraphs I discuss the classifications of sod and suicides out of choice (hereafter soc) and then I discuss how suicides are accounted in various disciplinary and theoretical positions. After the brief discussion on various approaches to suicide, I elaborate what I hold as unfreedom, contrasting it from freedom, from the positions of situational and substantial ontology. Through the discussion I arrive at a thesis that not just sods are impelled by conditions of unfreedom but problematize the unfreedoms as suicidal.