The Experience of Death, and The Moral Problem of Suicide

by Paul-Ludwig Landsberg

155pages. poche. Poche.

Genres: Philosophy

128 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1936

About the author

Paul Ludwig (also Paul-Louis) Landsberg was an Existentialist philosopher best known for his arguments of euthanasia as an acceptable method of suicide. A pupil of phenomenological philosophers Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger (University of Freiburg), and Max Scheler (University of Cologne), Landsberg was born to German Jewish parents who baptized him as a Protestant, but he himself later allied himself with Catholicism. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Bonn, but due to his anti-Nazi sentiments, he left Germany for Spain four days before Hitler's ascent to power in 1933. There he taught at the Complutense University of Madrid and the University of Barcelona, and studied the sixteenth century Spanish mystics. Due to the Spanish Civil War, Landsberg left for Paris where he taught at the Sorbonne, contributed to the philosophical journal Esprit, followed the Personalist movement of Emmanuel Mounier, and joined the French Resistance. Upon his wife's detainment by the Gestapo in 1940, Landsberg embarked on a bicycle odyssey cycling from town to town in France both in search of his wife and to evade the Nazis. During this time, Landsberg carried a poison that he intended to use on himself if captured by the Gestapo, but he ultimately rejected suicide and destroyed it. In 1943 he was captured by the Gestapo and deported to Sachsenhausen, where he died in April 1944. His best known works are The Experience of Death" (Essai su l'experience de la mort, 1936), and The Moral Problem of Suicide (Le probleme moral du suicide, 1937).

Reviews

[Carl Pelletier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lu en français

[Maman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Né en Allemagne, d'origine juive, il est baptisé protestant par ses parents, mais se tourne vers le catholicisme très jeune. Ces différentes facettes religieuses le servent dans ses réflexions philosophiques mais le desservent d'un point de vu politique. Ils s'oppose fermement au nazisme et le fuit mais sera déporté tout de même.

On retrouve dans ces deux ouvrages le professeur de philosophie qu'il a été. C'est une longue dissertation pleine de références à des courants de pensées, des auteurs, etc... On y voit une longue réflexion sur l'expérience de la mort, en partant des questions :
<> p20

Puis suivis d'une réflexion sur le problème moral du suicide qui montre les limites posées par la religion vis-à-vis du suicide.

Landsberg est un philosophe existentialiste (Cf Sartre <>) malheureusement peu connu comparé à d'autres. Il pose extrêmement bien ses réflexions et les limites de celles-ci. Je pense qu'il faut tout de même un petit bagage philosophique afin de comprendre plus facilement le texte.