In The Facts of Life Laing quotes a distraught woman as asking the head of her philosophy department, “If I do not feel I exist, why should I not kill myself?” By “exist” she meant, of course, exist as something other and more than a machine. Her question was dismissed as trivial. But it is the farthest thing in the world from trivial. If we do not feel that we exist and that our existence is somehow important, why indeed should we not kill ourselves—and everyone else, and all unborn generations as well—which we seem to be getting ready to do. To return for
