These correlations of Morris's five factors of ways of life with the four relatively adequate world hypotheses of my analysis plus mysticism are admittedly rough; but so also are Morris's ways of life.

The correspondence is about as close as possible; and I take it as a sort of confirmation of the view that the four relatively adequate world hypotheses with their philosophies of life have a wide and permeating application as intellectual guides for human thought and action. To these must be added mysticism as a deeply appealing philosophy, even though it is not intellectually adequate - indeed it is a philosophy that is openly anti-intellectual.

One may wonder why animism, another highly inadequate philosophy with an intense human appeal, does not figure in Morris's results. I suspect the reason is that interpretations of it are so exceedingly varied. Its concepts of spirits and their imaginary actions yield so many myths that are all equally justifiable in animistic terms that no settled animistic way of life comes to the surface.

What about religion and science as guides to life? It will be observed that among Morris's ways of life several of the major religions find a place - Buddhism, Taoism, Mohammedanism, Christianity, and Confucianism - but are stripped of all animistic appendages and sectarian rituals. What turns a conceptual way of life into a religion is perhaps largely a matter of intensity of belief, faith, and dogmatism.

As regards science, this is an historically recent name for a collection of special areas of research with institutionalized methods of observation, experiment, and analysis. It has become almost a way of life under the name of positivism. But positivism tends to take on a characteristic that automatically removes it from a way of life - namely, a denial of concern with human values. In my judgment this also automatically removes it from the group of relatively adequate philosophies, since values are a subject matter too massive and insistent to be ignored. When positivists relent and begin to concern themselves with values, they find that their interpretations of the human enterprise, including the activities of the special sciences, coalesce with those of one or another of the four relatively adequate philosophies - but not ever, however, with mysticism. Positivism and mysticism, from opposite poles, are thus alike in exhibiting an inadequacy of scope.

Having made this rapid survey of the ways in which sets of concepts seem to have a guiding influence on human action, we are now in a position to consider their application to a single person - particularly to a person who finds himself in practical difficulties and is seeking guidance about what to do. Immediately we must point out that our examination up to this moment has been concerned almost entirely with matters of intellectual guidance. Yet at the outset we stated our problem as not a purely intellectual one but one having equally to do with emotions. Our question was whether a set of concepts could keep a person emotionally balanced in view of the reality of a situation in which he found himself. The rationalists across the centuries have unanimously said yes. What else indeed could be expected to hold the emotions in harmony? Perhaps, on the long view, they are right. But the conclusion is far from obvious. There have been dissident voices across the ages. There have been champions of faith and for the reasons of the heart, champions of power, complaints of the hopeless in the toils of temptation, and subterfuges of addicts. Reasons of the intellect sometimes have a pale and feeble look.

I want to commit myself to a certain hypothesis at this point, one with which some psychologists will not agree but which has been gaining steadily in acceptance and which I think will eventually be proved correct. This is that the dynamics of human action is one thing and the intellectual channeling of it another - the hypothesis that there are no, or very few, dynamics or drives intrinsic to thought. All the dynamics (or nearly all) come from drives and (in the wide sense) the emotional side of the personality.5

This hypothesis, if correct, is important for our present subject. It sets certain limits to rational guidance. It means that we cannot assume that correct reasoning from a set of true concepts will always be effective in leading a man to act reasonably. It means that a philosophy will not necessarily make a man philosophical. It does not by any means imply, however, that philosophy cannot be efficacious. It implies only that there are limits to its efficaciousness which have nothing to do with its truth or adequacy. This conclusion may pertain directly to the general topic of our volume, which is self-destruction.

I do not propose to argue for the above hypothesis in this paper. That would be an essay in itself. I only want from now on to show its bearing on the problem of suicide for those who accept it.

To begin with, I think it leads to a distinction between what could be called rational and irrational grounds for suicide. Tis suggests that all suicides need not be regarded as irrational. Incidentally, the wide acceptance of the view that all suicides are owing to depression or other emotional conditions beyond the rational control of the victim is strong evidence for the hypothesis I am advocating. But in suggesting the possibility of rational suicides, I am opposing the opposite extreme of granting no efficacy to the conceptual channelling. A rational suicide would be one that is based on a dynamic demand for sound logical and evidential grounds for actions or for an equivalent in rationally accepted institutionalized authority.

Such dynamic rational grounding of action is to be distinguished from rationalization. Rationalization is the finding of plausible reasons for strong impulses (often unconscious) to justify one's action. Dynamically charged rational activity is in its less complex instances simply problemsolving by whatever instrumental acts seem best available to reduce the tensions. In more complex instances, as in scientific inquiry, the acts are mediated by logical, mathematical, and experimental procedures which have gained men's confidence as reliable tools for guiding instrumental action. These rational tools are charged with the dynamics of the problem motivating the scientists. The rational tools have no intrinsic dynamics in themselves. The same is the case with the philosophies we were considering earlier.

Here is where a man's philosophy of life relates to the problem of suicide. How much influence does a man's philosophy of life have upon the releasing or the restraining of suicidal impulses? We are assuming that a set of concepts cannot of itself instigate dynamic impulses. However, if a person is caught in a serious predicament loaded with conflicting impulses of fear, love, hate, loyalty, and respect for obligations, law, and other such, the dynamics of these impulses could charge a philosophy of life in which this person has gained confidence and effectively guide him to a decision. The philosophy of life would function in this instance just as the rules of scientific procedures guide a scientist to his results. The decision would be rational even if it were for an act of suicidal self-sacrifice or at the risk of death. And the philosophy of life would clearly be responsible for that decision. There is just one important qualification: the decision could not be regarded as entirely rational if the philosophy of life that led to this decision was not itself as rational or reasonable as possible. This means, according to our earlier discussion, that the philosophy must be as adequate as any available to the person confronted with the problem.

Another way in which a philosophy of life may acquire dynamic effectiveness is if it becomes a cultural institution with which a person has become identified through the action of acculturation. A person who deliberately acts in conformity with the demands of his cultural pattern in the solution of a problem loaded with conflicting impulses can hardly be said to be acting other than rationally. But here again the same qualification may be made that was made above; his decision would not be regarded as entirely rational unless the culturally institutionalized philosophy was itself as rational as possible.

The rationality of a suicidal act is thus a matter of degree. I think we must grant that any act of self-destruction is rational if it is voluntary and deliberate and wholly determined by factual conflicts of a situation that was considered with the guidance of a philosophy of life. It would be rational whether the guiding philosophy was the man's own choice or creation or one that he had acquired through acculturation. However, the degree of rationality of the act would depend on the degree of rationality of the philosophy which was guiding the person's deliberations.

Insofar as Indian widows were conforming to their culture in throwing themselves on their dead husbands' funeral pyres, they were minimally rational in their acts. But the institutionalized philosophy of life that sustained that custom was of questionable adequacy. A person who is considering how to act in an intensely conflicting situation cannot be regarded as making the most rational decision, unless he has been as critical as possible of the philosophy that is guiding his decision. If the philosophy is institutionalized as a political ideology or a religious creed, he must think critically about the institution in order to acquire maximum rationality of judgment. This principle is clear enough even if in practice it is enormously difficult to fulfill.

The main conclusion we are reaching is that acts of self-sacrifice may be rationally performed even to the point of voluntary self-destruction. This is clear in cases of death or risk of death incurred in the line of duty - for firemen, policemen, soldiers, lifesavers, coastguardsmen, sea captains on sinking ships, and even for laymen who find themselves in comparable positions. This conclusion seems to me clear also in situations in which an argument can be made for the advisability of induced death, as in hopeless cancer cases in which the patient takes the final decision into his own hands. These are all instances of what I would call rational suicide.

What then would be irrational suicide? These would be cases for which efforts for prevention are obviously in order. These would seem to be cases based on serious emotional disturbance, in which rational guidance is cut off, or largely cut off, by the intensity of the emotional conflicts. In most such cases, I suspect that the emotional impulses are beyond the person's voluntary control, being in the region of the inhibitions of the unconscious. Here whatever reasoning there is takes the form of rationalization, and a person's perceptions of the reality of the situation are either blanked out or interpreted to fit his emotional projections instead of used to test his hypotheses and imaginations. To the person, it seems that the only way out is suicide; whereas to a psychologically trained outsider it is evident that the problems are of the person's own making because of his lack of insight into his own motivations and twists of interpretation. By careful professional help such persons may gain insight into the nature of their impulses and acquire a correct awareness of the reality of their situation and thereby gain a capacity for rational intellectual guidance for their actions. The therapist may often have to do much more. He may have to give them the support that they may have been lacking until they are able to stand on their own feet. He may even have to build up a stable inner core of integrated character (ego strength as it is often called) with which the person can then build on further and function effectively in his environment.

For such suicide-prone persons when their suicide impulses are strong, it would seem that a philosophy of life could have only a minor restraining effect. Even the institutionalized creed of a church to which the person belonged would have little effect. This seems to be borne out in the statistics of Catholic versus non-Catholic suicides. Though there are more non-catholic suicides, the proportion of Catholic suicides is large. To these should be added the suicides from strict Protestant churches of Calvinistic or high Episcopalian sects which proscribe suicide with religious sanctions as severe as those of the Catholic Church. To render the statistics comparable, comparison should be made between strict Christian churches and permissive, individualistic ones. Furthermore, like the unreasonable Catholic prohibitions against birth control, the Catholic prohibition of all suicide may restrain some devout Catholics from performing what in the foregoing discussion we found could be regarded as rationally well-justified suicide.

It may be added that some suicide-prone persons with an extreme capacity for imaginative rationalizations could well invent a philosophy of life for themselves which sanctioned and encouraged suicide. Schopenhauer's philosophy of life notoriously does this and he has had many followers. Not infrequently we read in the newspapers of suicides reported to have taken an intense interest in Schopenhauer's philosophy. His philosophy, it should be noted, is a form of mysticism. Let me remind the reader that in my previous review of the relatively adequate philosophies, I referred to mysticism as a model of a philosophy which suffered from inadequacy of scope. For consistency we shall have to admit that a suicide based on mystic premises exhibits an act of extreme minimal rationality, since a person performs it on the basis of a highly systematized philosophy of life, whereas such an act is at the very outer rim of rationality, beyond which is nothing but rationalization. Often we suspect that a suicide's interest in such a philosophy is a rationalization.

Edwin S. Shneidman recently conducted an informative series of conferences with suicide-prone subjects and inquired about their philosophies of life. He asked each of them in a disarmingly informal manner the following questions: (1) What is your philosophy of life? (2) What is the purpose of life? (3) Is that a real tree (or chair, and so forth)? (4) What are the tests of reality or of truth? (5) What is your idea of causation, chance, decision?

In all he interviewed six subjects at the Suicide Prevention Center. 'I'he first question seemed to mystify or be misunderstood by most of these subjects. One man (the most disorganized of the group) replied, "Passive indifference. I don't seem to care about anything." But to the second question he answered, "Health in the normal way, happiness, good accomplishments." Pressed further he stated that he was a "strictly dogmatic Catholic," expected to see people after death in "heaven, hell, or what. If I find happiness, I don't know what form it will take."

About the tree, his belief that it was real was based on its "form shape." This belief in the hereafter was based, however, on "intellectual conviction and faith."

Luck, he said, played no part in his life; but as for being "preordained," he did not believe in it at all. Asked about cause and effect, he replied, Vague m my own mind what you mean." He was sure he had no right to commit suicide.

This sort of vagueness about a philosophy of life, perception, tests of truth, and cause and effect ran through the answers of all these subjects except one. She, along with two of the others, was an agnostic - though she went to a Unitarian church with which she felt loosely connected.

Her answers, which exemplify the opposite extreme from those of the man quoted above, went like this: As to her philosophy of life, she was Unitarian, although raised Methodist. "Never believed in God but always sort of wished I could." As for afterlife, "Nothing." As for purpose of life, it was "human relationships, to love and be loved." Taken more broadly, "Life is purposeless. It just happened." To Shneidman's inferring, You are an adventitious circumstance of biological roulette" her reply was, "Yeah, I think it was just a question of which sperm got to the ovum first. An awful lot of ova there who didn't get any sperm at all, but I think It was strictly chance." Referring to the birth of her child she said, "I was delighted with him." And to the question of whether she thought of him as arbitrary, "I don't feel any lack about the fact that this is biological." About immortality, her reply was, "Improbable." About the reality of the tree, "Accepted," but "No explanation of the origin of the world." She found no difficulty with the notion of infinity in connection with space and time for the world.

Her comments on suicide were vivid: "I think suicide is one of the greatest things to keep you going. If you knew you couldn't die, I think the world would be unbearable.... I think it's great.... I think it's a completely moral justifiable thing that nobody need do, but if you are miserable yourself and you're not doing anybody any good, I think it's great." On Shneidman's asking if her suicide would not put her "skeleton in the grandchildren's psychological closet," she recognized that "this kind of scar will be very bad."

Asked if she felt her life was entirely within her hands, she replied yes. Pressed further about whether this would be so if she were in a depressed state, she admitted that "you perceive only those things vou care to perceive. But I think it's my right." Shneidman then asked, "What about the decision itself? Granted that you have the right." Her answer: "The decision, will I be able to make an intellectual decision about an emotional thing? Probably not. I think it will be an emotional decision, not an intellectual one."

This woman in these last few words just about summarizes the conclusions of the present paper. She has a rather well developed naturalistic philosophy of life, which does, as Hume convincingly shows in his essay "Of Suicide," grant to a man on the basis of a naturalistic, individualistic ethics a right to end his life if he finds such an act is one that will maximize the satisfactions of all concerned. "A man who retires from life," he wrote, "does no harm to society: He only ceases to do good.... I am not obliged to do a small good to society at the expense of a great harm to myself." The woman whose comments we have just quoted is simply stating the same thesis, that under certain justifiable conditions an act of suicide is rationally justified if it conforms to an adequate philosophy and is performed after careful rational deliberation. However, she also sees that in a state of depression a person is most likely to act irrationally, and suicide under such motivation is not rationally justified. The decision then is "not an intellectual one."

The obvious conclusion is that under the latter circumstances the suicide should be prevented if possible and that the most skillful therapeutic techniques should be employed to place the person emotionally driven in this way without benefit of rational channelling and control of his actions in a position to have insight into his emotional conflicts and lethal drives - in short, to convert him so far as possible into an integrated personality in adjustment (though not necessarily in literal conformity) with his social and physical environment. As part of this remedial work, it would be beneficial to provide him with an adequate philosophy of life for long-term guidance of his emotional impulses.

The woman we are speaking of boasted such a philosophy. But she evidently did not have full insight into her emotional conflicts and the depression resulting from them. And she recognized that in the emotional stress and dominance of a depression, her philosophy of life would probably be powerless to guide her to "an intellectual decision." Hence she needed psychological help to save her from the irrevocable consequences of an irrationally motivated act.

Her situation seemed to be similar to those of the other four patients except for their much greater lack of philosophical guidance. From their replies none of them showed evidence of an explicit conception of a way of life. Their answers were fragmentary, although paradoxically often quite firm and dogmatic. My suspicion is that their responses were guided by better articulated philosophies of life than they knew they had. They were responding from dogmas that were deeply imbedded in their personality structures by acculturation. This came out clearly in the case of the man who accepted on faith and authority the whole Catholic creed: he was unable to tell in detail what this philosophy of life involved, even with respect to the objects of perception or cause-and-effect. The same can less clearly be surmised of the others, even of those who were "free thinkers" and agnostics (perhaps the more so because they were so definitely agnostic). Embedded in their personalities by the acculturation of their American environments is some kind of philosophy of life which would come out in action whenever these unexpressed dispositions happened to get touched. But again, such institutionalized philosophies were as powerless as was the explicit philosophy of the woman quoted above to channel action rationally in the stress of a state of emotional disturbance.

The rational guidance of a philosophy of life is available only to a relatively well-integrated personality whose unconscious conflicts (such as he has) do not overpower his voluntary actions. To such a man an adequate philosophy would be his safest guide through life. And to my mind, for all who are in a position to acquire it, an explicit philosophy is a guide greatly superior to a purely institutionalized ideology or creed. For even when not inadequate, the latter is rigid and dogmatic, whereas the former may be flexible and open to revision. Particularly in these days of rapid social and technological change, it is highly important for men to acquire a philosophy that is adequate for comprehending such changes and for recommending reasonable adjustments to them or effective ways of guiding them to beneficial ends.

Stephen Pepper
(reprinted from Essays in Self-Destruction ©1967 )

REFERENCES

1. Trans. Cyril Bailey, Bk. I.
2. These world hypotheses and their sources of evidence and cognitive justification are taken up in the author's World Hypotheses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1942).
3. The Structure of a Moral Code (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957).
4. For the form of much of this summary I am indebted to a report by Dr. Elsa A. Whalley presented at a staff meeting of the Suicide Prevention Center, Los Angeles, on Oct. 26, 1962.
5. In support of this hypothesis, I refer to K. B. Madsen's book Theories of Motivation ( Cleveland: Howard Allen, 1964; Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1964). The most influential recent writer to develop a dynamic theory of cognition is D. O. Hebb in his The Organization of Behavior (1949). But since 1955 he has felt obliged to change his view, mainly on the evidence of certain physiological data. In an article in the Psychological Review (62: 243-54, 1955) he writes: "Psychologically, we can now distinguish two quite different effects of a sensory event. One is the cue function guiding behavior; the other, less obvious but no less important is the arousal or vigilance function. Without a foundation or arousal, the cue function cannot exist . . . arousal in this sense is synonymous with a general drive state, and the conception of drive therefore assumes anatomical and physiological identity . . . the drive is an energizer but not a guide . . . Thus I find myself obliged to reserve my earlier views and accept drive conception." To this quotation from Hebb, Madsen adds, "It should finally be added that this conception of 'drive' is in agreement with the conception now gradually dominating psychology" (p. 187). In his summary chapter Madsen states: "As a consequence of the previous discussion, I would suggest that 'motivation variables' should be defined as synonymous with 'dynamagenic function variables' and as a consequence of this I would define 'cognitive variables' as synonymous with 'directive function variables'" (p. 306).
6. This is quoted from S. E. Sprott, The English Debate on Suicide from Donne to Hume (La Salle, III.: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1961), p. 133. This detailed scholarly account of the century-long debate on the transition from the medieval to the modern Western cultural pattern and its more naturalistic philosophy of life is most illuminating and pertinent to the topic we have been discussing.