Choosing one's death
On the axis: Death · ending one's life
Faced with a life become unbearable, is ending one's days the ultimate freedom, the Stoics' "open door", or a wrong against oneself and others?
Justification
Since death is but the natural term of a loan repaid to nature, the evil lies not in it but in the fear of it, a fear that enslaves a whole life to its shadow. Seneca then turns that fear into an instrument of freedom: whoever rehearses dying each day, and holds the door of voluntary exit open, can no longer be coerced by anything or anyone. The meditation on death is thus not morbid but emancipatory, and it matters less for an afterlife, which he does not expect, than for restoring to the present its full worth.
He who has learned to die has unlearned slavery.Letters to Lucilius, XXVI
Letters to Lucilius, XXVI and LXX (rehearsing death) · Letters to Lucilius, IV (to rehearse death is to rehearse freedom)
Justification
Death is the scandal par excellence: the horizon that reveals and ruins all hope, but which Camus refuses to greet with serenity. To resignation as much as to the hope of a beyond, he opposes revolt: to die unreconciled, lucid and in revolt, with no appeal and no consolation. It is in this obstinate refusal, not in acceptance, that the absurd man asserts his greatness.
What matters is to die unreconciled and not of one's own free will.The Myth of Sisyphus, 'Absurd Freedom'
The Myth of Sisyphus · The Rebel
Justification
Theoretical reason cannot prove that the soul survives the body, but practical reason postulates it: the moral law commands a perfection that no finite life completes, which requires an indefinite progress, hence the immortality of the soul. An immortality not demonstrated but postulated, a rational belief resting on morality.
Critique of Practical Reason, Dialectic, II