~Franz Rosenzweig
The womb of the inexhaustible earth ceaselessly gives birth
to what is new, and each one is subject to death; each newly born
waits with fear and trembling for the day of its passage into
the dark.
But philosophy refutes these earthly fears. It breaks
free above the grave that opens up under our feet before
each step. It abandons the body to the power of the abyss,
but above it the free soul floats off in the wind. That the fear
of death knows nothing of such a separation in body and soul,
that it yells I, I, I and wants to hear nothing about a deflection
of the fear onto a mere “body”—matters little to philosophy.
That man may crawl like a worm into the folds of the naked earth before the whizzing projectiles of blind, pitiless death, or that there he may feel as violently inevitable that which he never feels otherwise: his I would be only an It if it were to die; and he may cry out his I with every cry still in his throat against the Pitiless One by whom he is threatened with such an unimaginable annihilation—upon all this misery, philosophy smiles its empty smile and, with its outstretched index finger, shows the creature, whose limbs are trembling in fear for its life in this world, a world beyond, of which it wants to know nothing at all.
For man does not at all want to escape from some chain; he wants to stay, he wants—to live. Philosophy, which commends death to him as its special little shelter and as the splendid opportunity to escape from the narrowness of life, seems to be only jeering at him. Man feels only too well that he is certainly condemned to death, but not to suicide. And it is only suicide that that philosophical recommendation would truly be able to recommend, not the death decreed for all. Suicide is not natural death, but a downright unnatural one. The dreadful capacity for suicide distinguishes man from all beings that we know and that we do not know. This capacity indicates precisely this step out of all that is natural.