I just now came across this phrase for the first time on p. 442 of Blake Bailey’s biography of Richard Yates, A Tragic Honesty. If literary biography/pathography is your thing, Bailey’s the man. The context is a discussion of suicide, which is the act the phrase names. I recommend this erudite disquisition on the term and its variants.
As for Yates’s attitude to suicide, it seems he held that one was a wimp to off oneself, but also a wimp to give up the hard drinking and heavy smoking — piecemeal suicide one might call it — which put paid to his life at the relatively young age of 66.
What surprises me is the cocksurety of Yates and others who believe that we are mere material systems, and thus that we are easily disposed of. I am not saying we are not merely material systems. I am not a dogmatic affirmer of this view. Maybe we are. But to be cocksure of such a thing in the face of counter-evidence is surprising and suggests an unseriousness of attitude bordering on insanity. The sane look before they leap in matters large and small. Beware the leap of despair. Such a leap is a ‘leap of faith’ in one’s ultimate nonentity.
I have often wondered to what extent one’s cock or the female counterpart thereof influences the over-confident conviction of the mortalist. Is it your cock, the dowsing rod of your concupiscence, that makes you so sure? Our concupiscence contributes mightily to the sense most people have that the sense world exhausts reality. There may or may not be eternal life, but it is clear that the long dong of concupiscence will not lead one to the waters of eternal life.
As for the word ‘cocksurety,’ I thought I had coined it. I was wrong. We are not only concupiscent but vain as well, and much else besides. And so the the Calvinists speak of total depravity — which brings us back around to the Dutch.
Finally, is it slanderous to speak of Dutch valor in the case of the pot-valiant?
It is my axiom to never kill myself (out of despair). I even refuse to argue about it. Is that okay?
VV,
I hope you didn’t think this post was directed at you. What ‘inspired’ it was merely the fact that I stumbled upon a phrase I was unfamiliar with. I may, however, from time to time direct a post at you *in obliquo.*
Were you aware of the phrase either in English or in Czech?
I take you to be asking whether it is okay for you not to discuss suicide. Of course.
It’s an important topic, however, and I have 23 posts on it. https://maverickphilosopher.blog/index.php/category/suicide/
My general point was, if it´s okay to be dogmatic about such serious personal matters such as that one should never kill oneself out of despair.
My point was that I neither dogmatically affirm, nor dogmatically deny, that we humans are just complex physical systems. Therefore, if one commits suicide to end one’s troubles, that involves a ‘leap of faith’ in the form of a ‘leap of despair.’ One is going beyond what one can legitimately claim to know. I therefore deem suicide imprudent. But I do not dogmatically affirm that it is imprudent. Nor do I dogmatically affirm that it is morally wrong in every case.
As for killing oneself out of despair, my tendency would be to say, dogmatically, that that would be imprudent.
I would warn people that suicide is a permanent ‘solution’ to what in most cases is a merely temporary problem. Your girlfriend dumped you? Give it six months, and you may wonder what you ever saw in her. But some life problems are not temporary, e.g., untreatble clinical depression as described by William Styron in *Darkness Visible.*
Yes.
I also need to pay for this, to read it. On reincarnation and suicide.
https://fakenous.substack.com/p/reincarnation-and-suicide?utm_source=publication-search
I might have provoked Mike Huemer to write it, by posting https://blackbeardphilosopher.substack.com/p/the-goid, on facebook.
—
Btw, this is a fascinating related text.
https://www.jsanilac.com/optimalism
It argues:
You are in a realm governed by chance and the laws of nature.
But God exists.
You will live (reincarnate) many times.
Eventually, you will become something like a god.
We don’t know this, but it’s a coherent view, it’s very helpful, and it’s the only meaningful position that follows from religious intuitions across known cultures and societies.
I’m reading it now. I like the author very much. Some passages are dense, so I consult them with AI, as the author himself/herself advises. Yes, I don’t know if the author is male or female.