When news broke that Baek Se-hee, author of I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, had died at 35, much of the world reacted with the same stunned tenderness her book once inspired. Baek had given voice to depression in a way that felt both local and universal—rooted in South Korea’s fraught relationship with mental health, yet resonant far beyond. Her act of organ donation saved five lives, blurring the boundary between despair and final generosity. Reading the BBC’s report of her death (BBC News, 2025), I found myself revived by old questions: When does death become a moral statement? How do cultures differ in reading a person’s final gesture? And is it ever possible to die on one’s own terms without losing the dignity that the act itself claims?
These questions echo through Western philosophy and Eastern ethics alike. In what follows, I trace six intertwined lines of thinking—from the Greeks to Christianity, from samurai ritual to modern East Asia—each illustrating how we have made sense (or refused to make sense) of self-inflicted death as both rupture and affirmation.
Long before Christian morality took hold in Europe, Plato had already sketched a powerful argument against suicide. In his Phaedo, Socrates tells his interlocutors that while a true philosopher may “be willing to die,” he must not kill himself: “though he will not take his own life, for that is held not to be right” (Plato, trans. 1892/2020). The metaphysical logic is stark: human beings do not wholly own themselves, but are under the custody of the gods, and must not abandon that office prematurely (MIT Classics Archive, 2020). Later in Laws, Plato insists suicides be buried in unmarked graves—except under extreme, legally defined circumstances (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2012). The message is clear: self-killing disturbs the cosmic and civic order.
Aristotle shifts the register from the divine to the civic. In Nicomachean Ethics, he treats suicide not primarily as a metaphysical crime, but as a failure of one’s duty to the polis. He describes suicide motivated by distress or misfortune as unbecoming: though it might not wrong oneself in the strict sense, it injures the community that invested in you (Aristotle, as discussed in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2012). In this framing, the moral harm is relational.
The Stoics, for their part, introduced a tension: they afford a limited permission for suicide in extreme cases—but only if done rationally. Death is not villainous, but must arise from reason, not rage or despair. Their motto “Lex non poscenda mors” (death is not a debt) suggests that death is natural, not punitive; yet they reject suicide born of emotion (Suicide: Studies on its Philosophy, Causes, and Prevention, n.d.). Seneca’s own death—performed with composure under imperial command—became a paradigm of “philosophical suicide” (Long, 2015). Even in its permitted form, suicide is strictly moralized.
When Christianity entered the scene, it inherited and reinforced this moral architecture. Augustine, inheriting the Greek and Stoic critique, added a theological dimension: life as a divine gift that no mortal may prematurely reclaim. “Thou shalt not kill” was extended to include oneself. Over centuries, suicide became both sin and sacrilege. Though modern secular ethics largely reject religious frameworks, the residue of this prohibition lingers in norms that frame self-killing as irrational, selfish, or pathological.
Crossing to East Asia, we find a different moral grammar. In Japan, seppuku (or hara-kiri) was not merely tolerated but sacralized. The samurai who killed himself to atone for failure or avoid dishonor did so in a ritual of purification rather than self-destruction. Suicide was integrated into codes of loyalty and honor. Even today, Japan’s cultural relationship with suicide is ambiguous: while the government treats it as a social crisis, some public attitudes still see it as an act of responsibility or moral expression (Wikipedia, “Suicide in Japan,” n.d.; Scripting Suicide in Japan, 2024). The ritual logic transforms the act from taboo to moral reclamation.
Korea, steeped in Confucian relational ethics, holds a more ambivalent posture. The self is defined through duty, shame, and social role. In that configuration, suicide may sometimes be read not as pathology but as tragic moral signification. Reports of Baek Se-hee’s death have already drawn commentary that gestures toward meaning beyond illness: “she wanted to share her heart with others … to inspire hope” (The Guardian, 2025). Her death becomes part of a narrative, not just a medical case. The act of giving her organs further plays into the logic of self-sacrifice.
These divergent traditions—Greek, Christian, East Asian—are not irreconcilable. Modernity has blurred their edges. In East Asia, psychiatric and medical discourses increasingly compete with older moral frames; in the West, debates about assisted dying, autonomy, and dignity reopen questions once closed. The idea of death on one’s own terms haunts both traditions: it is the ghost of Socrates, the samurai, the quietly suffering author. It demands that we ask, again and again: who owns our life? Who may claim authority over its end?
In life and in death, Baek Se-hee’s story reminds us that the final act may speak louder than any preceding line. Cultures differ in how they hear it—but we cannot stop listening.
References
Aristotle. (n.d.). Nicomachean ethics (W. D. Ross, Trans.). In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/suicide/
BBC News. (2025, October). Baek Se-hee, author of “I Want To Die But I Want To Eat Tteokbokki,” dies at 35. Retrieved from https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpq1dy8w3jwo
Long, A. A. (2015). Seneca and the Stoic path to death. University of California. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/suicide/
MIT Classics Archive. (2020). Plato, Phaedo. Retrieved from https://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedo.html
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (2012). Suicide. Retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/suicide/
Scripting Suicide in Japan. (2024). University of California Press. Retrieved from https://webfiles.ucpress.edu/oa/9780520400276_WEB.pdf
Suicide: Studies on its Philosophy, Causes, and Prevention. (n.d.). (PDF) Retrieved from https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/Suicide%3B_studies_on_its_philosophy%2C_causes%2C_and_prevention_%28IA_cu31924030317998%29.pdf
The Guardian. (2025, October). Baek Se-hee, author of I Want to Die but I Want to Eat Tteokbokki, dies at 35. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/oct/17/baek-se-hee-author-of-i-want-to-die-but-i-want-to-eat-tteokbokki-dies-aged-35
Wikipedia. (n.d.). Suicide in Japan. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_Japan
Wikipedia. (n.d.). Baek Se-hee. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baek_Se-hee
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