One of the main points of this book is to tell the story of how philosophy in Western culture got its reputation for tolerating suicide. We have seen that ancient philosophers wrote against suicide, but that some celebrated suicides nonetheless were praised as having been virtuous and philosophically sound. We have seen that in the Middle Ages, religion regulated against suicide and Christian thinkers like Augustine and Dante condemned the celebrated “philosophical” suicides of antiquity. Because religion set itself so firmly against suicide, and because it did so expressly in opposition to these renowned ancient suicides, from early on Western culture considered philosophy itself as relatively tolerant of suicide. This association was increased in the early modern era, when art and literature created some fascinating portraits of ancient suicides. Again, because of religion’s harsh judgment against suicides, any sympathetic look at a famous suicide might be associated with the new rationalist thinking. Religion and philosophy thus squared off over suicide. At first it was a somewhat one-sided fight (in public at least) as few philosophical voices were openly and explicitly defending suicide. Tolerance of suicide was a legacy of the ancient world, and that legacy was reflected in some secular art and literature, but early modern religion was uncompromising in its condemnation. In this chapter I will show that initially religious sources accused contemporary philosophers and philosophical clubs of being in favor of suicide. Then, with the advent of the Enlightenment and its overt skepticism toward religious and traditional ideas, we find some philosophers directly proclaiming a secular philosophy tolerant of suicide.
A new age of critical examination of religion was key to the philosophical rehabilitation of suicide, but other factors influenced the changing attitudes as well. One of the most important was the rise of scientific medicine, which influenced people to think of suicide less as sinful than as a morally neutral result of a nervous disease. Political and economic pressures also reinforced the new philosophy and learning. A signal tenet of the nascent ideology of capitalism was respect for private property, which made it more difficult for governing bodies to confiscate the estates of suicides. With a decline in punishment came a decline in judgment, as individual suicides became less likely to be considered guilty of crime.
In different places, over different periods of time, the patterns of change had their own logic. As Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy argue in their Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England, English culture of the early modern period underwent two phases of change regarding suicide. During the first phase, the Reformation tightened moral strictures of all kinds, including those against suicide, while governments drew revenue from fines and forfeitures levied for crimes, including suicide. The second phase encompassed a much more complicated softening of response. MacDonald and Murphy detail the complexity of the rise of tolerance toward suicide with nods to the changing economic, judicial, and intellectual currents, including
local hostility to the forfeiture of self-murderers’ goods, the abolition of the prerogative courts during the English revolution, the governing elite’s intensified reverence for private property, the reactions against religious enthusiasm, the rise of the new science, Enlightenment philosophy, the increase in literacy among the middling classes, the vast expansion of the periodical press, and the gradual absorption of empirical epistemology into the mentality of the upper and middle classes.1
Rationalist, progressive thinking was one of many forces that conspired to make attitudes toward suicide more neutral. Perhaps partly as a result came a general impression among contemporaries that suicide was on the increase. Already in 1702 the English diarist John Evelyn wrote that it was “sad to consider how many of this nation have murdered themselves of late years.”2
Our story in this chapter begins just before the Enlightenment, generally thought of as extending from 1750 to 1850. Already reports can be found of contemporary people described as intellectually open to suicide. When the Oxford scholar Thomas Creech took his own life, in 1700, some contemporaries connected the act with Creech’s having translated Lucretius. Educated people knew that Lucretius had written in favor of a “philosophical,” dispassionate approach to the idea of death, and were familiar with the possibility that he had killed himself. Thus Creech was seen as having committed suicide in part because his love of this figure of the ancient world had convinced him that suicide was a positive choice. Other publicly discussed suicides of the period were also seen as being partly based on philosophical argument. In 1704 an aristocrat named George Edwards killed himself by inventing a contraption by which three pistols would go off at once. John Smith, an Anglican minister, published a pamphlet in which he presented Edwards’s suicide as a symptom of the terrible lengths to which philosophy and irreligion had progressed in the country, especially the “new Epicureanism.” He blamed all those who upheld the principles of Hobbes, Spinoza, and the neo-Epicurean Walter Charleton. He also compared Edwards to the deist Charles Blount, who believed in a creator but rejected most other aspects of religion. Blount had also killed himself, twenty years earlier, and Smith insisted that taking a stance against Christianity deprived men of reason.3
In fact, Edwards’s story was more complicated than that. He had been famously pious as a young man, but after reading a number of philosophical works, he grew increasingly rationalist in his interpretations of scripture. Finally he came to believe that much of the Bible could not be true. He asked, for example, how all the races of the world could have come from one white Adam. With such scandalous opinions he found himself shunned by former friends, and his wife left him. It was then that he put an end to his days. This death and its public discussion received a great deal of attention. Some saw irreligion and philosophy as the cause of Smith’s suicide; others blamed the intolerance Smith encountered among the religious. What was generally agreed upon was that suicide was on the rise, and though John Donne, a religious man, had written a treatise calling for tolerance of suicide, irreligion and philosophy were more closely associated with suicide.
The more that philosophers and philosophical clubs became synonymous with antireligious attitudes and renewed interest in the ancients, the more these people and places were connected to tolerance or encouragement of suicide. Just as religious writing had used the ancient suicides as a counterpoint, the new secular writing used ancient heroes to valorize self-murder. Jonathan Swift published an essay in 1709 in which he praised Cato as the greatest among the ancients. Joseph Addison’s popular play Cato celebrated the Roman’s suicide as a glorious apotheosis. Cato’s death is the play’s grand climax, featuring solemn exposition by the dying man, including the cry, “Lose not a thought on me, I’m out of danger,” painting death as an escape from harm. This play had many memorable lines. Historian David McCullough has pointed out that Nathan Hale’s “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country” adapts Addison’s “What a pity it is / That we can die but once to serve our country.”4 In either phrasing it is a remarkable request for multiple self-initiated deaths. There is evidence that such attitudes mattered to people who saw the play or read of it. We know from a report in Gentleman’s Magazine that the poet Eustace Budgell threw himself to his death in the Thames, having left behind a note reading, “What Cato did and Addison approved, / Cannot be wrong.”5
The suicide rate in the English aristocracy in this period was thought of as so high that other nations wrote of the practice as “the English malady.” When George Cheyne published The English Malady in 1733, he did not have to argue that the English had a particular problem with nervous diseases and, lately, with suicide. He wrote that his friends had urged him to write the book because of the recent “frequency and daily increase of wanton and uncommon self-murders.”6Cheyne explained that the problem was the melancholy disposition caused by gloomy weather, but that the immediate cause was the progress of anti-Christianity and the rise of a secular philosophical spirit among the English people. The suicide question became, especially in England and France, one of the most visible battlegrounds between the secular and the religious. Among the educated classes, books and essays on the subject were widely read, and lectures brought the matter to a broad population as well. In George Minois’s words, “Cato, Epicurus, and Lucretius had become heroes once again, and it was chic to be broadminded about suicide and oppose the clergy.”7 In this era London and Paris were hotbeds of Libertinism, which represented a philosophy of freethinking and open-mindedness in religion, politics, and social mores. The Libertines were frequently devoted to Epicurus. Libertine circles were scandalous for their interest in sex, and they were also known for their disdain for the religious rejection of suicide. Often secular philosophy was linked to suicide because of its profound equanimity in the face of death, a stance that seemed to some the pinnacle of strong-minded maturity. With the Libertines we see a more playful version of this stance: they refused to take death seriously and entertained ideas of suicide alongside ideas of extramarital sex, seeing both as a rejection of the rigidity of religious morals.
If someone wanted to appear rationalist and secular, and yet take a stand against suicide, he had to make a point of it. This is evident in the very origins of the word “suicide,” which dates to this period. The word was invented in England by the scholar Sir Thomas Browne in his popular Religio Medici, in which he praises the Roman poet Lucan and what he calls his “Stoic genius,” but says he goes too far when he praises self-assassination as with the suicide of Cato. “This is indeed not to fear death, but yet to be afraid of life. It is a brave act of valour to condemn death, but where life is more terrible than death, it is then the truest valour to dare to live. And herein religion has taught us a noble example.”8 (“Suicide” didn’t pass into French and then the rest of the European languages until the middle to late eighteenth century.) It adds a measure of importance to these words to note that Browne was himself well known to suffer from bouts of melancholy.
We now come to John Henley, author of the foremost work against suicide of his age. Henley was not a traditional Christian thinker, preferring his own logical arguments to the dogma of the churches, but like conventional Christianity he saw suicide as wrong, and he criticized the lauded suicides of antiquity. In 1730 Henley published the pamphlet Cato Condemned; or, The Case and History of Self-Murder, Argued and Displayed at Large, on the Principles of Reason, Justice, Law, Religion, Fortitude. Henley started his career as an English clergyman but transformed his preaching into a kind of one-man-show, inspirational, protoabsurdist theatrical experience and began charging admission. He became popular with freethinkers and said he hoped to “die a rational.” Alexander Pope sketched him as the “great restorer of the good old stage / Preacher at once and Zany of thy age.” Henley condemned Cato. Henley’s rejection of suicide was based on secular grounds, though he also mentioned that God disapproved. As Henley saw it, “Life … is made for some purpose, directed to some end. This end has been assigned to be the following of Reason, Virtue, Nature, or God. However it can not have been the aim of life, that it should be destroy’d; the true end of any being must be to act according to the utmost of its Faculties; this is properly, the following of Nature. The Faculties of Man are Knowledge and Free-will.” This went much farther than religious decrees that suicide was wrong simply because it went against God’s plan. Instead, Henley argued that life intrinsically had purpose and that human beings had to find a way to follow that purpose, whether following reason, virtue, nature, or religion. “Self-murder,” he says, is wrong, then, because “it takes away all reason and virtue and all the noble trial and satisfaction of them; so that on Principles of Nature itself, it must be deemed utterly unlawful.”9
Henley also saw self-murder as “repugnant to the end for which our nature was given us, and to that limited right which we have over our own lives, so it is opposite to the duty of man, considered as a member of civil society.” We are all members of society and these connections are to be honored. As for the tedium of life, here is what Henley offers us:
It is a beaten notion of the Epicureans and Stoics, that life is only a dull narrow circle of the same actions, and therefore is inconsiderable; Lucretius describes this conceit, and Seneca applauds it. But they seem to forget that the life of man is a progress in understanding and goodness; which is not a tasteless round of the same actions, but ever opens a new scene to the mind and to the conduct. The life of sense is indeed a dull circle; but that of reason and virtue improves upon our hands, and makes us every day wiser and happier.10
The abiding pleasures of life, Henley explains, renew themselves despite all the repetition of existence. We discover new truths. We find new ways to do good for others, which both make us proud of ourselves and bring the praise of others. He acknowledges that life can be tiresome and hard but believes that as we go through life we gain wisdom and the ability to be the person we want to be.
Despite his title, Henley knows well that the ancients did not uniformly side with Cato’s action. Many of them held that suicide is wrong, he writes, and “this the very pagan philosophers expressed in the strongest language,” that “no man ought to quit his station.”11 Beyond pointing out that ancient philosophers were antisuicide, Henley criticizes the traditionally celebrated ancient suicides. Cato’s death, he writes, was “a mixture of pride and impatience.” Brutus and Cassius came to an “immature end.” Of the ninety-year-old matron of the Isle of Cea, Henley explains that she pridefully refused to experience a change in her prosperity.12 He writes that he knows about the misery both of physical pain and mental anguish, which he acknowledges may be equally tormenting, but he still rejects suicide, exhorting sufferers to manage the disorderly troubles of the heart. “Courage,” he tells us, “consists in bearing pain” as well as in resplendent deeds and impressive actions.13 Furthermore, Henley proclaims that if the ghosts of Cato and Brutus were told of a country where men deliberately dispatch themselves in moments of misery born of small disappointments, weariness of life, or a fear of poverty, they would be furious about it and would fiercely abhor being held as a precedent for such behavior.14
Henley emphasizes that the celebration of Cato’s suicide in antiquity does not mean that all of antiquity was in favor of suicide as a response to the difficulties of life. “And yet this justice must be done the heathen world,” writes Henley, “that the laws of their states and the reasonings of their best philosophers, condemned this practice as a rash forsaking of the station in which the providence of the gods place mankind, and their expressions are numerous and strong against it.”15 Henley reminds us that in the work of “the best philosophers” of the ancient world, self-murder is rejected, and that such rejections are plentiful and robust. And he deprecates even the relatively few cases in which pagans were applauded for suicide. These celebrated suicides had been spoken of as examples of courage, honor, and liberty, but for Henley suicide represents not courage but cowardice or desperation, not honor but shame, and not liberty but slavery to one’s passions.16 Henley’s work was celebrated by contemporaries. Apparently there was a hunger for a treatise rejecting suicide from a rationalist perspective.
In the history of suicide, Henley is unusual in positing a relatively secular antisuicide philosophy. Christian, Jewish, and Muslim authorities forbade suicide on theological grounds and chided the ancient pagan world for encouraging suicide as a response to difficulties. Henley, in contrast, made energetic and imaginative arguments against suicide independent of church prohibition. He also supplied an unusually nuanced view of ancient ideas about suicide. He recognized that his culture’s main image of ancient suicide—that of Cato and the other celebrated deaths of the sort—was incomplete, ignoring the teachings of the great ancient philosophers against suicide. Across the centuries, secular philosophy had been consistently associated with being pro-suicide, so Henley’s contribution was to make powerful arguments against suicide that did not depend on church prohibition.
As popular as Henley was, his defense of secular philosophy and antiquity from the conventional charge of support for suicide remained a minority opinion. A much better known figure today, Anglo-Irish philosopher Bishop George Berkeley (1685–1753), rejected suicide from a more conventional perspective. He described a rise of suicide in his time and linked it directly to a rise of irreligious philosophy. Berkeley is most famous for his idea of immaterialism, the concept that all we know of anything is our perception of it and all anything really amounts to is our perception of it. Nothing, in this thinking, is real in its own right. Everything—the chair, the table, the universe—is in our minds and in the mind of God. Everything is an idea. Berkeley was also a strong defender of Christianity against freethinkers and against the acts of suicide which he believed flowed from freethinking. In 1732, Berkeley wrote Alciphron; or, The Minute Philosophy: An Apology for the Christian Religion Against Those Who Are Called Freethinkers. Berkeley resisted calling his subjects freethinkers, it being rather too nice an epithet for his liking.17 He claimed that they reduced the glory of life to something minute, a nub of animality followed by death. A character in the book objects that this was like faulting the mirror for the wrinkles one sees there, but Berkeley gives the stronger voice here to the case against the “Atheist, Libertine, Enthusiast, Scorner, Critic, Metaphysician, Fatalist, and Skeptic.” Suicide was not the bishop’s primary subject, but he is certain of its origins: “As the Minute Philosophy prevails, we daily see more examples of suicide.” A friend had been such a philosopher, he explains, who when wavering in his philosophic certainty “endeavored to fortify his Irreligion by the discourse and opinion of other Minute Philosophers, who were mutually strengthened in their own unbelief by his. After this manner, authority working in a circle, they endeavored to atheize one another.”18 Berkeley was the best-known voice among many who argued that suicide was on the rise because people no longer trusted religion enough to follow its rules.
In the Enlightenment, the attitudes Berkeley described came to be proclaimed openly by philosophers. Enlightenment philosophers attacked a variety of religious prohibitions and claimed that many rules of the churches—including the religious prohibition of suicide—were merely superstition and custom. The loudest champions of the right to suicide were two of the greatest upstarts against Christianity, the Enlightenment philosophers David Hume and Baron d’Holbach. When we examine their philosophical arguments, we find that they were concerned more with rejecting religious control than specifically with establishing a more liberal attitude toward suicide for individuals and society. It is an important distinction, because it seems that some people were convinced by these philosophers and acted on their convictions. According to contemporaries there was a marked increase in suicides in this era, and many blamed philosophical arguments in favor of the right to suicide. When we read those arguments and find them to be fiery and witty attacks on the religious prohibition against suicide, not sensitive, empathetic meditations on the meaning of life, it is fair to wonder whether this philosophical sally against the churches did indeed inspire more negative consequences than its arguments merited.
David Hume (1711–76), a Scottish philosopher, was one of the most interesting figures of the Enlightenment. It is unclear whether Hume believed in God. He did not call himself an atheist but often sounded like one. In a chapter of his Enquiry into Human Understanding of 1748, a character defends the beliefs of Epicurus in denying “a divine existence and consequently a providence and a future state.”19 Contemporaries and readers ever since have seen this as Hume’s own argument against the ideas of his era, couched in an ancient context so as to deflect criticism. Using a proxy to argue for Epicurus, Hume could express the idea that there is no God, no justice built into the world, no afterlife. Elsewhere he writes of the uselessness of the concept of God once we accept that we cannot know anything about him. Theologians, faced with skepticism about the reality of the biblical God, had already begun to read the Bible as allegory and to describe God as unknowable. Hume wrote that if we really could not know anything about this notion of a divinity, we were left with a notion of no divinity. Hume also wrote that we did not need God as a basis of human morality; rather, he observed, doing good brings peace of mind and the high opinion of one’s fellows. He even claimed that religious notions of morality grew from this human source.
“On Suicide” is one of several provocative, irreligious essays Hume wrote in the 1750s. It is a defense of our right to end it all that comically dismantles the church fathers’ proscriptions. He notes that “modern European superstition” holds suicide to be impious because it is not God’s idea for us to die now. But then, he teases, is it not impious “to build houses, cultivate the ground, or sail upon the ocean?” God did not arrange any of these things for us. If the disposal of human life was strictly the province of the Almighty, Hume argues, it would be equally criminal to act for the preservation of life as for its destruction. “If I turn aside a stone which is falling upon my head,” he explains, “I disturb the course of nature, and I invade the peculiar province of the Almighty, by lengthening out my life beyond the period which by the general laws of matter and motion he had assigned it.”20 Hume was a bold and original thinker. Throughout history people had argued that we had to stay alive simply because the gods or God had put us in our situations and only such divine authority should be able to remove us from them. Hume here cements the common association of religious skeptics and the defense of suicide.
Furthermore, Hume says, God did not put him into his life as a general puts a soldier at his post; rather, his life occurred because of a series of random events and almost as random human choices. He argues, “When I shall be dead, the principles of which I am composed will still perform their part in the universe, and will be equally useful in the grand fabric, as when they composed this individual creature.” Hume also says that the suicide no more steals rights from God than does the magistrate who sentences someone to death; the suicide may even be doing the public as much good, by getting rid of a “pernicious” person. He even says that when our existence becomes a burden we ought to kill ourselves because, “’Tis the only way that we can then be useful to society, by setting an example, which if imitated, would preserve to every one his chance for happiness in life, and would effectually free him from all danger of misery.”21 It is a remarkably uncharitable assessment of what people mean to each other. This is one of the most potent origins of our culture’s perception of secular philosophy as pro-suicide, so it is important to note that it does not address much outside the fight with religion. Hume delivers a tirade on the religious arguments against suicide, but his glance at the question on its own terms is an incredibly cold one.
As original as Hume’s ideas were, they were matched by those of Baron d’Holbach, a French philosopher born in Germany and one of the key figures of the French Enlightenment. The baron wrote on suicide with his classic cheek; he too laughs at church logic and fumes at religious cruelty, and does not reconceive the question in humanist terms. D’Holbach’s support of suicide was so gleeful it was almost a giddy paean to the grave.
D’Holbach published his best-known work, The System of Nature, in 1770. In this materialist treatise he proclaims the world to be a system, utterly materialist, with no God and with the actions of human beings so profoundly determined by other forces—society, culture, biology, physics—that it is nonsense to speak of free will. The baron writes sentences so long you find yourself rather spat out by the end of them, not sure where you have just been, and he hides his occasional brilliance in long pages of rambling thoughts. When he gets to matters that concern us most though, he is quite interesting and relatively concise. On suicide he ruminates on why he thinks people are afraid to die and why these particular fears are laughably wrong. For more than a page he lists great people who have died, pausing now and then to say something like “the universe will not be stopped by thy loss.”22 Death is real, he keeps insisting, and you should think lightly of your own.
D’Holbach encourages his reader to forgive the person who is terminally ill and in dire agony, but he goes much farther. His language seems to support the idea that we might commit suicide for the respect it might garner from others, or for the escape from minor ills. Consider how he describes suicide in other cultures:
The Greeks, the Romans, and other nations, which every thing conspired to make intrepid, to render courageous, to lead to magnanimity, regarded as heroes, contemplated as Gods, those who voluntarily cut the thread of life. In Hindoostan, the Brahmin yet knows how to inspire even women with sufficient fortitude to burn themselves upon the dead bodies of their husbands. The Japanese, upon the most trifling occasion, takes no kind of difficulty in plunging a dagger into his bosom.23
What kind of problems could be legitimate causes for suicide, according to d’Holbach?
Man can only love his existence on condition of being happy; as soon as the entire of nature refuses him this happiness; as soon as all that surrounds him becomes incommodious to him, as soon as his melancholy ideas offer nothing but afflicting pictures to his imagination; he already exists no longer; he is suspended in the void; he quits a rank which no longer suits him.
He knows that there are arguments against suicide that do not entirely rest on the wishes of God, and he mentions them.
Some moralists, abstracting the height of religious ideas, have held that it is never permitted to man to break the conditions of the covenant that he has made with society. Others have looked upon suicide as cowardice; they have thought that it was weakness, that it displayed pusillanimity, to suffer, himself to be overwhelmed with the shafts of his destiny; and have held that there would be much more courage, more elevation of soul, in supporting his afflictions, in resisting the blows of fate.24
Yet in one little stroke he bats away the idea that one owes it to other people to stay alive, and the idea that it is against nature to kill oneself: “That society who has not the ability, or who is not willing to procure man any one benefit, loses all its rights over him; nature, when it has rendered his existence completely miserable, has in fact ordered him to quit it: in dying he does no more than fulfill one of her decrees, as he did when he first drew his breath.”25 He says no more about these life-affirming arguments—that individuals owe it to our communities to stay alive and that nature is opposed to it. He dismisses the first by saying that a man owes nothing to a community that has so let him down, and he denies the second by saying if you feel like killing yourself that must be what nature wants you to do. They are quite unfeeling comments and it is a strange kind of solace he offers next: “To him who is fearless of death, there is no evil without a remedy.”
It is at this point that he arrives at the most heated part of his argument: “As to the superstitious, there is no end to his sufferings, for he is not allowed to abridge them. His religion bids him to continue to groan”; he is forbidden to escape into death, for if he did “he would be eternally punished for daring to anticipate the tardy orders of a cruel God, who takes pleasure in seeing him reduced to despair, and who wills that man should not have the audacity to quit, without his consent, the post assigned to him.” This is d’Holbach’s fury against the church and God, and he is certain that if people could see that the church is regularly wrong and that God is a bad invention of humanity, they would be more virtuous, more happy, less superstitious, and, in this particular case, they could die.
He sees how problematic this is, ending his tirade with a comment that many of his readers may fear that his maxims might encourage unhappy people “to cut the thread of life,” but he believes that maxims can never actually lead to suicide. The real cause of suicide, he writes, is “a temperament soured by chagrin, a bilious constitution, a melancholy habit, a defect in the organization, a derangement in the whole machine,” so no matter how much a philosopher might write about the reasonableness of suicide, such discussions will not lead readers to do it. Surely what he says has a little truth in it—pithy words encouraging suicide would not be enough to cause suicides on their own. However, just as surely, ideas do influence people. Thus d’Holbach feels safe in arguing with the church over suicide, having convinced himself that his writing can do no harm. In a distressingly uncharitable assessment he writes:
Besides, what assistance or what advantage can society promise to itself from a miserable wretch reduced to despair, from a misanthrope overwhelmed with grief, from a wretch tormented with remorse, who has no longer any motive to render himself useful to others, who has abandoned himself, and who finds no more interest in preserving his life? Those who destroy themselves are such, that had they lived, the offended laws must have ultimately been obliged to remove them from a society which they disgraced.26
This claim recognizes that society will balk at throwing away one of its members, but the baron is certain that anyone who would actually kill himself must have been useless at best to society.
D’Holbach saves his most outrageous attack on religion for his footnotes. Here he reviews the history of suicide, noting that even religion has never been clear on the question. He invites his readers to consider “the fabulous Samson,” who avenged himself upon the Philistines though it cost him his own life. Religious penitents who deny themselves to the point of death, he says, should also be considered suicides. Even Jesus, “the son of the Christians’ God, if it be true that he died of his own accord, was evidently a suicide.”27
In the footnotes he also cites the ancients, including “Seneca, the moralist,” who is said to have allowed suicide. D’Holbach points out that those who died by storming into impossible battles have been held as models of heroic virtue. But what he gets wonderfully wrong is Cato’s reputation. Because John Henley’s work was so well known, d’Holbach writes not that Cato was celebrated for his virtuous last stand but that “Cato has always been condemned” for doing what seemed to d’Holbach the very height of honor, for “refusing to outlive the cause of liberty.”
The philosophers of the Enlightenment advanced many of the ideas that are now the cornerstones of modern life. Their work broke down long-standing rules about who was fit to govern, and they loosened the rules about what professions various people were allowed to enter. They questioned social and sexual mores and advocated more freedom of choice. These agitations influenced contemporaries and the generations that followed. Much of this is commonly understood as change for the better. But along with many positive freedoms, some Enlightenment philosophers argued for the freedom to kill oneself. Given the perceived rise in suicide in this period, it is not surprising that some people made the connection between these deaths and the arguments of Enlightenment philosophers in defense of suicide. This question has not received much attention from historians, but it seems reasonable that if we can talk about the philosophers’ influence in so many other domains of human behavior, we can also suppose that their writing in favor of the right to suicide also had an impact.
It is a rare observation, but not entirely unheard of: historian of suicide Jeffrey R. Watt relates the epidemic of suicides described by people of the time and asks, “Could it be that through their writings, the philosophs were, wittingly or unwittingly, helping unleash suicidal tendencies that Christian moralists had effectively restrained for over a millennium? Some contemporaries certainly thought so.”28 It is an important point. French critics noted a dramatic increase in suicides beginning in the 1760s and blamed it on “Anglomania” and on the irreligious arguments in favor of suicide.
Another way Enlightenment figures attacked the church’s stance on suicide was to reject the punishments that were still being inflicted on the corpse and on the familial survivors of a suicide victim. The best example of this comes from Voltaire, one of the supreme Enlightenment figures. Voltaire is today remembered for his comic and philosophical short novel Candide of 1759, but in his own time he was most famous as a political agitator. He was one of the first to have used the press and public opinion to force action from governing bodies. In particular, he was a great crusader against the oppression and abuses of ordinary citizens at the hands of the Catholic Church. Voltaire’s most extensive writing on suicide was in the entry “On Cato: Of Suicide” in the Dictionnaire philosophique. There, he tells of one suicide he was very close to: in October of 1769 a man whom he knew to be serious, professional, mature, and without vices had left a “written apology for his voluntary death,” which Voltaire tells us was not made public out of fear of setting off a wave of other suicides. It is an astute early observation regarding suicidal influence. In this case the issue of suicidal influence was acute, as the victim’s father and brother had killed themselves, and at the same age. Following this sad tale, Voltaire tells story after story and mentions the common belief that the English had lately been killing themselves more than the French but suggests that this perception merely reflects the publication of suicide statistics in England, a practice censored in France.
Voltaire writes approvingly of the lauded suicides of the ancient world, praising Cato and calling Arria sublime, but he concludes with a critique of what the church of his time was still doing to the bodies of suicides:
We still drag on a sledge and drive a stake through the body of a man who has died a voluntary death; we do all we can to make his memory infamous; we dishonor his family as far as we are able; we punish the son for having lost his father, and the widow for being deprived of her husband. We even confiscate the property of the deceased which is robbing the living of the patrimony which of right belongs to them. This custom derives from our canon law, which deprives of Christian burial such as die a voluntary death. Hence it is concluded that we cannot inherit from a man who is judged to have no inheritance in heaven. The canon law, under the head “De Poenitentia,” assures us that Judas committed a greater crime in strangling himself than in selling our lord Jesus Christ.29
Voltaire’s anger at the church is at the heart of the secular defense of suicide. Here the anger is directed at the cruelty inflicted on the families of suicide victims. As with Hume and d’Holbach, the defense of suicide issued by secular philosophy is pervaded by the conflict with religion. If the Catholic Church and other religious groups had never taken a fierce position against suicide, it seems unlikely that the philosophers of the Enlightenment would have taken up the subject, and if they had, it seems possible they would have followed the logic of their other opinions and given serious thought to the happiness and preservation of the individual.
Voltaire’s fellow French Enlightenment philosopher the Baron Montesquieu (1689–1755) also wrote about suicide. Montesquieu is today remembered as the author of the idea of separation of powers, but in his own time was known as having described the character of various nations on the basis of environment, including such factors as whether the country was an island or mainland, the characters of its neighboring states, and its climate. For him, the ancient kind of suicide was very different from the contemporary; the ancient was a moral and political behavior, he explained, while suicides of his own time, especially the English, killed themselves without good reason. For Montesquieu the environment determined such tendencies.30 He saw the English climate as having tremendous ill effect on its people, bringing on a “disrelish of everything.” His analysis of the behaviors of various countries excited contemporary imagination, as it provided a whole new way of categorizing the acts of individuals. His claims sound today like grand generalizations, but in his own time what struck people was the scientific air that he gave such deliberations. Montesquieu contributed to the image of the Enlightenment philosopher as accepting of suicide, writing that if someone is miserable he ought to be able to take his own life, and without threat of posthumous punishment.31
We have seen that contemporaries believed that suicide was on the rise in this period and that this rise was the result of the new philosophical arguments in favor of it. The philosophers we have looked at so far either ignored this possibility or, in the case of d’Holbach, denied that such influence could really occur. Some philosophers, however, acknowledged a connection. Two important examples in particular felt responsible for increasing suicides in their own countries and in Europe at large because of things they had written. The first is Madame de Staël, a French-Swiss author who lived and worked in the period following the Enlightenment and was noted for her brilliance and modernity. She was famed for the influence of her salon and her writings on culture and history. De Staël’s first work to touch on the subject of suicide, written in 1796, was on the influence of various passions on people and nations. Here she opined, “There is something sensitive or philosophical in the act of killing oneself that is completely foreign to a depraved being.” Over the next several years de Staël was often chided that such statements had encouraged suicides. Partly because of the notoriety of that work, she took up the subject again. Her Reflections on Suicide of 1813 was an attempt to look at the question in objective, scientific terms. She is kind in her consideration of victims of suicide, but now, instead of praising them, she writes that they must not be celebrated: “Inordinate misery makes people think about suicide. … We must not hate people who are unhappy enough to detest life, but neither should we praise the ones who give way under an overload: If they could keep going, their moral strength would be all the greater.”32 This switch in her approach to the subject shows us how heavily the onus of having been blamed for suicides weighed on some of the writers who defended it.
The same was true of Wolfgang von Goethe. His most famous novel, The Sufferings of Young Werther, published in 1774, tells of a young man who falls in love with a married woman, and whose lovesick sensitivity leads him to end his life. The novel brought the subject before the public eye in a brash, romantic way. The Sufferings of Young Werther was a rejection of traditional religion, not in favor of rationalism but in favor of the religion of the heart and the passions. In the wake of its publication there followed a rash of suicides of people who indicated that they had been influenced by the book by having it with them, often opened to the page of Werther’s suicide. Some of the victims also dressed like Werther for the event, with a blue frock coat and yellow waistcoat. There were no statistics to confirm an increase in suicides, but that was certainly the widespread conclusion. But the book also gives voice to antisuicide sentiments, like the following uttered by Werther’s rival, Albert: “You are certainly wrong when you compare suicide … to great actions, since no one can consider it as anything but a weakness. For it is certainly easier to die than bravely to bear a life of misery.”33 Albert’s argument did not go unnoticed in discussions of the book, but Werther’s reply was more passionate and commanded more attention. He claimed that it was absurd to call a person a coward for killing himself, as people could only take so much suffering. His most elaborate example was of a young woman abandoned by her lover and he describes her self-murder as beyond her control, such that in “the terrible agony of her heart, she throws herself into the depths to drown all her anguish in the embrace of death.”34 This was compelling in part because it described death as a consoling experience rather than the utter absence of experience. People were influenced by Werther’s views on suicide in general, by his romantic language in writing about it, and by his own suicide at the book’s conclusion.
Across Europe people spoke of Goethe’s book as having inspired many to kill themselves, especially young men thwarted in love. Echoing this, Madame de Staël wrote, “Goethe has caused more suicides than the most beautiful woman in the world.” Goethe came to sharply regret the work because of this. In later editions he included a note at the start of the book that said: “Do not follow my example.” Because of the suicides it seemed to be causing, The Sufferings of Young Werther was banned by authorities across Europe, including in Denmark, Saxony, and Milan. Clearly, d’Holbach was wrong to think that ideas had nothing to do with people’s decision to kill themselves. Surely internal pain was the driving reason most people carried out the act, but words and ideas could also be a deciding influence. Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther is notable for giving new impetus to the tradition of suicide based on romantic love. Spurred on by Goethe’s book and by rising cultural expectations of romantic love, this kind of suicide now became a common part of the culture.
Increasingly, even for this new phenomenon of love-sick suicide, doctors saw the problem as part of their purview and sought to implement a variety of cures, including bedrest as well as intense confinement and harsh water treatments. Medical science used rationalist language as it slowly led the culture away from speaking of demons and toward effective therapies. The medical world expressed its rationality in part by adopting a stance of moral impartiality. Throughout history, many diseases have been associated with character flaws, from the volatile heart patient to the reckless victim of venereal disease. As medicine emerged as a discipline, its practitioners and theorists tried to remain objective and scientific, sticking to the facts and offering no moral judgment. Suicide, once largely a moral question or the result of the devil’s temptation, was now increasingly treated by medical science as the result of a mental or nervous disease.
Meanwhile, as these debates raged, authorities grew less interested in enforcing criminal law against suicide. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in Scotland and England, nearly all suicides were found guilty of murdering themselves, condemning themselves to profane burial and their heirs to property forfeiture. But by around 1750 nearly all suicides were found to be of unsound mind and suffered no official penalties. Much of what changed was the medicalization of madness. This happened in different patterns in different countries, and everywhere and at all times the conversation about suicide could be expected to retain elements of religious mixed with modern medical thought. But the trend was clear. As Michel Foucault has written: “the sacrilege of suicide was annexed to the neutral domain of insanity.”35
Thus in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, suicide became medicalized, secularized, and decriminalized in mutually influential ways. In England medical opinion was at the forefront of that change, with doctors taking over the management of a variety of human behaviors that once had been handled by law.36 In the rest of Europe, philosophical and romantic defenses of suicide sometimes led the way, undercutting the old criminal response to suicide and opening a space for medical theorists to step in. The result was essentially the same. Doctors were slowly taking over the territory of explaining suicide, legal powers were increasingly willing to exempt self-killing from criminal law, and ordinary people were more likely to think of suicide in morally neutral terms rather than as the very worst of sins.
All of this assuaged the previous age’s brutality, but in its acceptance or tolerance of suicide, may also have led to an increase in the act. Certainly Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther, in which suicide is portrayed as an element of Romanticism, seems to have spawned suicides across Europe. It seems paradoxical that in the same era that brought the rise of medical science in dealing with suicide, more people began to take their own lives, but as we have seen, the old world had a host of ways of curbing suicide that the new world no longer had at hand.