“The most convincing argument in favour of our superiority over the animals is that, of all of them, only we know how to die voluntarily.”Charles Baudelaire · Inima mea dezgolită · 1887 · XII
Man is the only being that can refuse life, so he is not its prisoner.
Baudelaire does not praise suicide but uses it as logical proof: if you can refuse life, you stand in relation to it as a free being, not a prisoner of instinct. The animal cannot choose death; biology holds it to life. Man owns, in theory, his own limit. This is typical of an author who saw will and refusal as the measure of human dignity, even when the refusal is the darkest one.
Why it matters A hard fragment to read, but useful for understanding how the nineteenth century thought about freedom and its limits, and for discussing existential sovereignty without romanticizing it.