It is paradoxical that Plato gave us Socrates’ famous death scene, history’s most praised image of a suicide, and yet within that very dialogue, the Phaedo, Socrates categorically states that suicide is not right.1 We have been proceeding chronologically so far, looking at the history of suicide from beginning of recorded history on—discovering the relatively tolerant attitude toward suicide in the ancient world and how that changed in the Middle Ages and in the eras that followed. In this chapter we double back to the start of our story in order to tease out a particular kind of thinking about suicide. It begins with the paradox of Socrates willingly drinking the hemlock but first telling his students that they themselves must eschew suicide. His reason, and the theme I will bring to light in this chapter, is that we owe it to the world and to our community to stay alive.
In the scene of Socrates’ death, one of his followers, Cebes, asks him about suicide. Socrates says, “There is a doctrine uttered in secret that man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door of his prison and run away; this is a great mystery which I do not quite understand. Yet I, too, believe that the gods are our guardians, and that we are a possession of theirs. Do you not agree?” Cebes agrees, and Socrates then asks whether he would be angry if one of the animals he owned killed itself, having received no indication from him that he wanted it to die. Cebes acknowledges that he would, and Socrates concludes, “Then there may be reason in saying that a man should wait, and not take his own life until he is summoned, as I am summoned now.” Socrates has been given a sentence of death. Shy of that, in his opinion, we have to stay alive. “A fool” may think that he should run away from his master and his duty, he says, but a wise person will see that the good choice is to stay with one’s duty until the end. Socrates says it is better to let the larger forces make these decisions, and he says that life is where the good is, unless one is being taken out of life, in which case, one should go along with that too.
The Socrates whom Plato describes in the Crito also calls for people to stay alive because of what they owe their country and their countrymen. If our duty leads us to be wounded or to die in battle, so be it, but just as this may be our duty, so it is generally incumbent upon us to stay alive. A man must not take it upon himself to “yield or retreat or leave his rank” whether in battle or in a court of law, or in any other place.2 To do so would be to do violence to the community. Socrates adds that it is clear that we must not do harm to our father or mother, and it follows that neither must we do harm to our country. Through history it will be remembered that in Plato’s work the advice from Socrates and from Plato himself is that we owe it to each other to stay alive. Life is difficult, but we need each other and we must not leave our posts.
In The Republic, Plato further affirms that it is better to bear your sorrows than to try to escape them by ending your life. When someone is sad, Plato says, feelings of misfortune weigh upon him and seem to force him to indulge his sorrow, but at the same time there is something inside him that offers a strong guide to resist these feelings. Plato writes of this forbearing strength as an inner principle of law and reason. We all experience trouble and pain. For some of us it is excruciating, at least at times. The right thing to do, Plato counsels, is to wait. “To be patient under suffering is best. … We should not give way to impatience, as there is no knowing whether such things are good or evil; and nothing is gained by impatience; also, because no human thing is of serious importance, and grief stands in the way of that which at the moment is most required.” What is most required is “taking counsel upon what has happened” and “raising up that which is sickly and fallen, banishing the cry of sorrow by the healing art.”3
As with Socrates and Plato, it is worth returning to Aristotle with the specific question of what we owe one another. As we have seen, the narrative of suicide that arose in the Middle Ages held that suicide is a sin and a crime, and that the ancient world had praised suicide. Yet when we go back and study the great thinkers of the ancient world specifically for their thoughts on suicide and community, we find them offering strong words against suicide. Aristotle was direct about the strange nature of suicide as a crime and how hard it is to conceive of prosecuting people for doing harm to themselves. In an amusing turn of phrase he writes that “no one commits adultery with his own wife, burgles his own house, or steals his own property.” So can suicide be thought of as wrong? Aristotle says yes:
A person who cuts his throat in a fit of anger is doing this voluntarily, contrary to correct reason, and the law does not allow this; so he is acting unjustly. But towards whom? Surely towards the city, not himself, since he suffers voluntarily, and a kind of dishonor attaches to the person who has done away with himself, on the ground that he has perpetrated an injustice against the city.4
Aristotle’s assessment reads as a cold depiction of the relationship between the individual and the community. Though Aristotle is clear in his rejection of suicide, he neither expresses sympathy for the victim nor clearly says what the city is missing when it loses a man or a woman in this way. Still, it is an eminent start to the development of the idea that we all need one another and that suicide is wrong because we each matter to all of us. Aristotle says suicide is contrary to the rule of life and is unjust to the community.
This idea—that the world needs us to stay alive—was beautifully reconfigured in the medieval Jewish world. The scholar Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) stands out as one of the greatest Jewish sages. Born in present-day Spain, he inherited a Judaism full of complex injunctions and contradictory rules; in reinterpreting these ideas over the course of his life, he shaped much of what is recognizable centuries later as Judaism, in practice and ideas. He was a profoundly rational figure, claiming that when science and scripture clashed it was best to follow science, because holy texts could be misleading or misinterpreted.
So many wise sayings have come down to us from Maimonides that we do not have solid source attributions for them all, but many of them bear his unmistakable tone and reflect his signature themes. His emphasis was often on the problem of how insignificant we can feel as individuals. Consider this one: “One should see the world, and see himself as a scale with an equal balance of good and evil. When he does one good deed the scale is tipped to the good—he and the world are saved. When he does one evil deed the scale is tipped to the bad—he and the world are destroyed.” What is so poignant about this is its insistence on our individual importance. It is easy to see that if we all behaved badly, committing crimes and violence, the world would be a horrible place, but Maimonides declares that our actions matter on this grand scale even when considered individually. Regarding suicide Maimonides’ key idea was this: “He who destroys himself destroys the world.” It is a profound proclamation, dependent on a profound vision of our interdependence. The human world is held together by our optimistic trust that life matters to others and that the things we do in concert with others, even just living, are invested with that meaning. With a suicide, what is taken away is not only the person’s presence but also her faith in life mattering, her hope in life, and her attachment to the future.
Religious writers over the centuries had the option of opposing suicide by calling it a sin and saying that God had legislated against it, but it is important to note that some concentrated their attention on the nature of humanity and argued that suicide was wrong because we each matter, because what each of us says and does creates our world. Within Christianity we see an efflorescence of this approach in the first part of the seventeenth century, in the ideas of a movement that has been called “devout humanism.” Humanism was a manner of thinking that arose in the Renaissance and entailed turning away from religion and focusing attention on human culture and experience. As time went on some religious thinkers joined this conversation, though they made it clear that they saw faith in God as central to their thinking, and this was devout humanism. Here a writer might easily comment that God had ordained against suicide, but it was more characteristic for such thinkers to keep the matter in the human realm and to speak of our interdependence. John Donne has been understood as a devout humanist and despite his own writing in favor of tolerance for suicide, the poetry and prose that he published during his lifetime influenced the cultural conversation of the Western world toward understanding humanity as profoundly interconnected. Most famously, in his Meditation XVII of 1623, he wrote that when we hear that someone has died—announced in his time by the ringing of a church bell—this death must remind us of our own.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were: any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.5
These stirring words have moved generations of people to consider the meaning of their lives as innately enmeshed in their communities. Other devout humanists drew on the idea of interconnection to make a direct argument against suicide. In this context they addressed the ancient suicides, writing that taking oneself away from the rest of humanity was an act of weakness, not strength. One of the devout humanists, the Jesuit Louis Richeome, writes that Cato
killed himself, driven to an extreme by that very sin of pride. For having always fed his soul on the flies of vanity and popular favors, which gave him no substance nor solid reputation foreseeing that if he were to fall into the hands of Caesar, his enemy, his reputation would decline; beside himself with frustration and despair and unable to endure that rival, he ripped life from his body, taking the remedy of a cowardly soul despite his seeming valiance, when he disemboweled himself.6
Reverence for the heroes of the ancient world had been an important element of secular humanism, so this critique of Cato was a remarkable condemnation of suicide. There were others. Another believing humanist, François de Sales (1567–1622), the bishop of Geneva, also wrote about these issues and his example shows us how strongly such thinkers felt they had to attend to the specific stories of ancient suicide and to reject the act in each particular case. Sales wrote about sadness and melancholy with touching sympathy, but he warned against ending that sadness through suicide. His argument shows us that he expected his contemporaries to know of a great many of the suicides of the ancient world, and he clearly thought that on this question the ancients were a bad influence on people of his own time. How, Sales asked, could we think of the Stoics as virtuous when they recommend killing oneself when life became unbearable? Sales wrote that Seneca acted out of pride and vanity and that Lucretius was wrong to kill himself. Cato, he said, was no sage but a desperate man. Yes, Sales allowed, Cato had “a certain firm courage” that was praiseworthy, “but anyone wishing to follow his example must do so in a just and good cause, not by killing himself.”7 The courage was there in Cato, but for the rest of us the lesson should be to apply that kind of ferocious courage to something worth dying for. Sales thought the Christian martyrs were to be praised in this way, but not the ancient world’s suicides. Again his details show us that in his world these figures were well known. “Such was the case with our martyrs who with invincible hearts performed so many miracles of constancy and valor that the Catos, the Horatii, the Senecas, the Lucretias, and the Arrias deserve no consideration in comparison with them.” The former had died for the community of Christians whereas the latter had taken their lives for their own reasons. Sales also cited Ecclesiastes, writing, “Sadness hath killed many, and there is no profit in it.”8
As we can see, thinking about suicide in this era entailed a subtle and complex balancing of responses to several traditions. Amid this conversation we hear a variety of ways of arguing that we should stay alive for each other, for the community of which we are a part. The French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) writes of many men and women joining monasteries or similar associations whose members believe that mystical communion with God can come through sometimes extremely harsh treatment of the body, which often ended in early death. He cannot help but see these as suicides and as wrong. Writing of the deprivations of abandoning oneself to God, he writes: “This is not to say that it would be permissible for us to take our own life, nor even to ruin our health. For our body is not ours—it is God’s, it is the state’s, our family’s, our friends’. We ought to conserve it in its strength and vigor, according to the use we are obliged to make of it.”9Malebranche was living in an era marked by increasing respect for the rights of the individual, and while this was much celebrated, it could also produce anxiety and isolation. His claim that our individual bodies are not our own but are in some sense owned by our loved ones could be a powerful antidote to feelings of alienation. To his mind we must not kill ourselves or ruin our health even through devotion—because we are part of something larger than ourselves, and we are needed.
The concern with the individual increased with time. John Milton, the great seventeenth-century poet and scholar, left us with meditations on staying alive that are among the most subtle yet robustly useful we will find. Milton had a life full of difficult reversals. He was terribly unlucky in marriage and in politics; his first wife left him and went back to her family from 1643 to 1645, helping to inspire his pamphlet advocating that divorce be permitted. She died in 1646. His second wife died, too, leaving him with three daughters. He later married again. As for politics, he backed Oliver Cromwell under the Commonwealth (the republic) of England, and after Cromwell died, Milton wrote tracts calling for the retention of government without a king. He was on the wrong side of history here, and with the Restoration he went into hiding to avoid execution. He was eventually pardoned but spent some time under arrest. He also went blind at age forty-four. His sonnet “On His Blindness” is crucial to our study, and I offer it in its entirety:
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide,10
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His State
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.11
When he thinks about how his eyesight is gone (and how his days are spent) with half his life still to go, and when he thinks of his talent for writing buried in him because of his blindness, he wants to ask how he is supposed to do his work like this—it is day labor in the dark. But patience tells him that God doesn’t need people’s work. It is worth noting that when Milton wrote this, he had yet to write Paradise Lost, a poem based on the Hebrew and Christian Bibles yet marvelous in part because in it, Satan is drawn as a much more interesting and compelling character than God. Milton was nominally a Christian, if a rebellious one. By the end of his life, he called himself a monist, rejecting the content of any religion but believing that the world “is one” and that this “oneness” of the world is divine. In the sonnet, he writes of what God wants from people, but it is applicable to what people want from other people and from themselves. Often people demand a great deal from themselves and their lives and are despondent when reality does not measure up. Milton has long been understood as having offered consolation for this affliction, reminding us that we do not always have a say in the role that we play in the world and that sometimes we must learn to see the service we are giving when we are doing nothing but waiting.
In the final three lines, Milton’s assertions feel surprising. While there are many ways to interpret these lines, they clearly speak to the virtue of patience. The work of waiting through suicidal dark periods is heroic. In the context of this book, Milton’s insight is multilayered and particularly profound. It offers us the possibility that our quiet endurance will be rewarded as generously as any achievement. From this perspective, the failures or troubles that haunt a possible suicide may come to be more bearable.
It is also worth mentioning that among the few poems that we have of this stellar poet, one is Samson Agonistes— Samson the warrior. Samson had been a great warrior in his time, but after his capture by the Philistines, he becomes one of the Bible’s few suicides, pulling down the ceiling and killing droves of his enemies, after declaring that he would die with them by doing it. Milton introduces the poem carefully because it is an antisuicide poem but a strange one. His preface reminds us that going through misery with a character in a book or on stage can make someone miserable feel better. He tells us that tragedy has always been considered the most consequential and useful of literary forms because, as Aristotle wrote, when we are made to feel pity, fear, or terror, it purges the mind of those and similar feelings. We give ourselves painful experiences in art so that we can handle them in real life. Samson Agonistes is a disturbing story of depression and suicide, and Milton informs us that he is telling us this story of melancholy to fight his own melancholy, and to help us fight our own.
It is a long poem, the length of a short book, yet it begins quite late, in medias res—Samson has already been captured and blinded, and is toiling away his days for the Philistines’ amusement. His desolation is affecting, especially knowing that Milton himself lost his sight. Samson laments his situation, saying that he has become his own dungeon, and that this is the worst form of imprisonment. He is now permanently “shut up from outward light / to incorporate with gloomy night.” Milton’s Samson story is about the terrible depression Samson expresses as he is visited by Delilah, who wants forgiveness and love, and from his father, who wants to cheer him up. The culmination of the tale is a great bloody, loud, catharsis of an ending. Samson’s father says he heard a noise and the chorus, in shocked phrases, responds:
Noise call you it, or universal groan,
As if the whole inhabitation perished?
Blood, death, and dreadful deeds are in that noise,
Ruin, destruction at the utmost point.
Samson’s father exclaims that he hears a great noise and concludes that they have killed his son. The response that comes is, “Thy son is rather slaying them.” Though of course, he too dies. It works as a harrowing end for the poem, but the catharsis is not for Samson, who is dead, but for his father, now “all calm of mind, all passion spent.” It seems in this poem that Milton is not praising suicide, but that he is feeling so much darkness that he needs the contemplation of this murdering suicide in order to expiate his own agony and therefore live on, “all calm of mind, all passion spent.” The father, the author, and the reader move on and put the suicide behind them.
Before we leave Milton, consider again his idea that “they also serve who only stand and wait.” It is reflected in all the arguments against suicide that encourage people to stay alive, for to do so is a way of serving: serving the community, family, and friends—and themselves.
A hundred years later, in the eighteenth century, the French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot framed a more specific argument against suicide. Diderot (1713–84) and his friend the mathematician Jean d’Alembert (1717–83) created one of the Enlightenment’s quintessential projects, the Encyclopedia, a compendium of knowledge and know-how containing the old secrets of the guilds, the latest science and technology, and the most scandalous new ideas. It was considered very antireligious. Diderot himself is generally remembered as an atheist, though there were times when he seems to have believed the world had some kind of intelligent spirit to it.
Diderot was adamantly opposed to suicide. In his “The Marquise de Claye and the Count of Saint-Alban,” the Count is weary of life and wants to end it, but the Marquise endeavors to convince him to stay alive. She tells him that his feelings are misleading him and that his desire to die will go away if he waits. She also tells him to remember the feelings of his family and his beloved and to try to live for them. Diderot also writes against suicide in his “Essay on the Reigns of Claudius and Nero,” writing, “It is rare that one harms only oneself.” For Diderot, Cato and Seneca gave no help to the cause of philosophy.12
In an article attributed to him in the Encyclopedia, Diderot rehearses the traditional arguments, including that God gives life and only he should take it, but he also declares that no one is useless to the community, even if he thinks he is. For Diderot, suicide was a rejection of one’s role and responsibilities in society. He held that it was an egocentric act without regard to the harm inflicted on others. “As for the morality of this act,” he writes, “it must be said that it is absolutely contrary to the law of nature.”13 The two most important reasons he offers are about our relationship with others and our duty to ourselves. First, writes Diderot. “We are not in the world only for ourselves. We are in close connection with other men, with our country, with our relatives, with our family. Everyone requires of us certain duties from which we may not exempt ourselves on our own.” He explains that as he sees it, to willingly abandon our life and with it our fellows is a violation of the duties of society. Proclaiming that we owe it to society to stay alive, Diderot writes, “It cannot be said that a man could find himself in a situation in which he was assured that he is of no use to society. This situation is not at all possible.” Even a person who thinks he has nothing left to offer, Diderot asserts, can, in fact, offer the example of courage and patience.
Diderot explains his second crucial reason for rejecting suicide with equal verve. He holds that human beings are obligated to attempt to make themselves happy and to always be improving themselves and their lot in life. “In depriving himself of life,” the suicide “therefore ignores what he owes to himself.” For Diderot this obligation to ourselves trumps all misfortune. We must not interrupt the possibility of our future happiness, and we must not make it impossible for us to go on improving ourselves in the future. He concedes that people who kill themselves think death might be a happier state than life but insists that “in this they reason badly.” He cautions that even people who feel certain that there is an afterlife do not really know for sure.
Diderot still wants to fight with the church, so he turns his attention to the only argument for suicide written by a priest, the poet John Donne, and he attacks.
Although it is not at all uncertain that the Christian church condemns suicide there have been Christians who wished to justify it. Among this number is doctor Donne, a learned English theologian, who, undoubtedly to comfort his compatriots, whom melancholy often leads to cause their own deaths, undertakes to prove that suicide is not prohibited in Holy Scripture and was not regarded as a crime during the first centuries of the Church.
Diderot writes that Donne, in Biathanatos, declared that self-homicide is not always a sin and may in fact never be one. Diderot notes that this position did not get Donne rejected by the church. Diderot the rationalist is against suicide so he finds a way to show religion as pro-suicide. Still referring to Donne, he writes further of the theologian’s tolerance for suicide:
In his book he claims to prove that suicide is not against the law of nature, reason, or the revealed law of God. He shows that in the Old Testament, men acceptable to God caused their own deaths themselves, which he proves by the example of Samson, who died crushed under the ruins of a temple that he made fall on the Philistines and himself. … Everyone knows, among the pagans, the examples of Codrus, Curtius, Decius, Lucretius, Cato, etc. In the New Testament, he wants to strengthen his system by the example of Jesus Christ, whose death was voluntary. He regards a great number of martyrs as genuine suicides, as well as a host of hermits and penitents who caused their deaths little by little.14
Diderot also cites Donne as writing that during a persecution against the Christians by the Romans, the “fervor for martyrdom” was so great that the proconsul, tired of executions himself, had the public crier ask whether there were still Christians who wished to die for their faith. When a collective voice replied in the affirmative, the proconsul told them to go hang and drown themselves on their own in order to spare the judges the trouble of it. Donne made the point that these were suicides yet were approved of by the church authorities of their time. Diderot makes much of this:
This proves that, in the early Church, Christians were hungry for martyrdom and offered themselves voluntarily for death. This zeal was subsequently checked by the council of Laodicea, and by the council of Carthage, in which the Church distinguished true from false martyrs and it was prohibited to risk death voluntarily.
Diderot managed, by skipping most of history, to highlight the aspects of the Christian narrative that seem to condone suicide, thus positioning himself as opposed both to suicide and to the church.
The common idea that Enlightenment philosophers were pro-suicide was clearly not based on all Enlightenment philosophers. The fact that this association was so strong, despite so many exceptions, is probably mostly the result of how much the pro-suicide arguments of Hume and d’Holbach shocked people and staked a claim on their memory. The philosophers who offered exceptions to the idea did so for a variety of reasons, but chief among them was sympathy for the individual and his or her family and friends. Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709–51), a French Enlightenment philosopher, wrote with particular feeling about the harm done to others by suicide. He was a thoroughgoing materialist, his most influential book being Man the Machine, in which he denied the idea of a soul separate from the body. His works were burned and banned for their blasphemy. Despite his rejection of religion, like Diderot, he did not approach the suicide question according to that opposition, but instead judged suicide on its own terms and rejected it. In his “Epicurean System” he writes,
No, I will not be the corrupter of the innate pleasure one takes in life. … I will make humble people see the great good that religion promises to anyone who has the patience to bear what one great man has called le mal de vivre. … The others, those for whom religion is only what it is—a fable—and whom one cannot retain by broken ties, I will try to seduce with generous sentiments. I will show them a wife, a mistress in tears, desolate children. … What sort of monster is someone who, afflicted with a momentary pain, tears himself away from his family, his friends, and his homeland, and has no other aim but to deliver himself from his most sacred duties.15
He sees a positive view of suicide as something that can corrupt life’s pleasures. He hopes that anyone who can get help from religion on this question will do so, but for him religion is a fable. Instead, for people like him, the harm done to other people is a tremendously compelling reason to spare oneself. He reminds his reader that the worst of our pain is not constant, calling the pain that we suffer momentary. Finally, he reminds us of the range of people who need us, from family to friends to homeland, and he calls our continued presence among them a “sacred” duty. Except for calling the person who does fall into such behavior a monster, La Mettrie offers a beautiful example of a sensitive secular philosophy against suicide.
While Diderot and La Mettrie were certainly Enlightenment thinkers, the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–88) has been seen as both an important Enlightenment figure and a central figure in what is often seen as the reaction against the scientism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism. He has also been remembered both as a proponent of tolerance for suicide and a strenuous opponent of suicide. The reason for this is a famous pair of letters in Rousseau’s novel Julie. The first is from Saint-Preux, a young man in despair because he is in love with a virtuous married young woman. It begins, “Yes, Milord, it is true; my soul is oppressed with the weight of life.” For a long time, he confesses, life has been a burden to him; he has lost everything that made life sweet, and only sorrows remain. “But they say I have no right to dispose of it without an order from the one who gave it me.” Saint-Preux objects to this, addressing his position to Socrates. “Good Socrates, what are you telling us? Does one no longer belong to God after death?”16
The young man mentions Arria and Lucretia, Brutus, Cassius, and the “great and divine Cato.” He claims that in the whole Bible one finds not one prohibition against suicide, and notes that when someone in the Bible takes his or her own life, “Not a word of blame is found against any of these examples.” Samson, he notes, is even celebrated. He says the world is bad, and the good in it is mixed with evil. Somewhat shockingly, not only does he want to die, he advises the friend to whom he is writing, the Baron, whom he says he knows to be as miserable as he is, to put an end to his sorrows by taking his life too.
The Baron’s response is magnificently furious. “Young man,” he begins, “you are being carried away by a blind transport; restrain yourself; do not give counsel while you are seeking it.” He wisely says, “So you are entitled to cease to live? What I would like to know is whether you have even begun.” He is sympathetic to the difficulty and pain of life, but insists that there is good in the world that is not mixed with evil. The Baron says it is one thing to help the end come sooner if you are in excruciating physical pain with no hope of survival. But “pains of the soul” are a different matter because, however acute, they eventually run their course and are over. When the sufferer endures the pain, the suffering ameliorates.
The Baron is particularly persuasive on the subject of usefulness to friends and the community. “But when you add, that your death does no one harm, are you forgetting that it is to your friend you dare to say this? Your death does no one harm? I see! To die at our expense hardly matters to you, you count our mourning for nothing.” He reminds the young man that there are other people who would also suffer terribly from his suicide, people he claims to love desperately, especially the girl he is so broken up over. Indeed, he says, there may be someone who “loved you enough not to wish to survive you,” and he asks whether the young man really thinks he owes such a person nothing. The Baron encourages his friend to think not only of what the world would miss from his own absence if he should carry out his “lethal designs,” but also what the world would miss if, because of his own suicide, someone else died.
Rousseau has the Baron rebuke his friend for believing that just because he is not directly responsible for others, because he is neither a magistrate nor a father of a family, “you think yourself absolutely free.” He asks whether his friend is not under some obligation to society, “to whom you are indebted for your preservation, your talents, your understanding?” He asks whether his friend owes nothing to his native country, “and to those unhappy people who may need your existence!” The Baron chides him that among the obligations he has enumerated, he has omitted only those of a man and of a citizen. His friend would never fight under a foreign prince, just for the money, “because his blood ought not to be spilt but in the service of his country” but he now, “in a fit of despair, is ready to shed it against the express prohibition of the laws?” This is where the Baron makes his stand. “The laws, the laws, young man! Does the wise man scorn them? Guiltless Socrates, out of respect for them was unwilling to leave prison. You do not hesitate to violate them in order to leave life unjustly; and you ask, what harm am I doing?”
“You try to justify yourself with examples. You dare to cite me Romans!” The Baron rightly points out that the lauded Roman suicides were not about despair or love. “Did Cato rip out his entrails for his mistress?” Furthermore, “What low esteem you hold Romans in, if you think they believed they were entitled to take their lives as soon as they seemed onerous.” That is in fact what the Stoics said, but some of the examples of Stoics who are said to have committed suicide, like Seneca, were forced to do it. Rousseau’s character is right to say that the Romans did not really approve of ending their lives just because their lives had become burdensome.
Know that a death such as you contemplate is dishonorable and devious. It is a larceny committed against mankind. Before you take your leave of it, give it back what it has done for you. But I have no attachments? I am of no use to the world? Philosopher for a day! Have you not learned that you could not take a step on earth without finding some duty to fulfill, and that every man is useful to humanity, by the very fact that he exists?
He also says that every time the young man is tempted to exit life, he should ask himself to do one more good deed before he dies. That act can be to help someone needy, to console someone unfortunate, or to defend someone oppressed. With this strategy, the time to kill oneself never arrives. Because the first letter was more provocative, many people took Rousseau’s book as a defense of suicide. Read from this distance, however, the second letter seems to be the one that locks up all the arguments and establishes itself as the more compelling truth. It is worth noting that Rousseau himself was tormented by suicidal thoughts, especially in the 1760s, but he did not do himself in.
Though he praised some ancient suicides, the great Enlightenment philosopher Voltaire also seems to have weighed in on the side of living. According to Frederick II, Voltaire once tried to kill himself, which the monarch guessed might have been caused by cowardice, or philosophy, but there is nothing to suggest he ever tried again.17 What Voltaire wrote was generally encouraging. He wanted “to make men return to themselves, and make them feel that they are in effect only victims of death, who should at least console one another.”18 Even when writing in the voice of a fictional character Voltaire reminds his reader that it is possible to be suicidal at times and yet still find life worth living. In Candide a character known as the Old Woman says, “I have been a hundred times upon the point of killing myself, but still I was fond of life.” In a letter to a friend, a Madame du Deffand, Voltaire writes, “Amiable people ought not to kill themselves; that is only for unsociable spirits like Cato and Brutus. … Companionable people ought to live.”19
In writing about the letter from Saint-Preux in Rousseau’s Julie, in which the young man contemplates suicide, Voltaire comments, “His instructions are admirable. First he proposes to us that we kill ourselves, and he claims that St. Augustine was the first person who ever imagined it was not nice to kill oneself. The minute we are bored, according to him we should die. But Master Jean-Jacques, it’s even worse when we bore others! What should we do then? Answer me. To believe you all the common people of Paris should run to bid adieu to this world.”20
We come now to an interesting piece in the history of arguments against suicide. As we saw in the previous chapter, Hume’s “On Suicide” was one of the best-known and influential texts in favor of the right to self-murder. When it was published, however, it was accompanied by an anonymous essay entitled “Anti Suicide.”21 The author of this lovely meditation on the subject first proposes that religion offers a sufficient answer to each of Hume’s points, then turns to secular arguments. He repeats an anecdote from Montaigne about Cleomenes, king of Sparta, who rejected his friend’s suggestion that they kill themselves: “Thinkest thou, wicked man, (said he) to show thy fortitude by rushing upon death, an expedient always at hand, the dastardly resource of the basest minds?” Better men than we, he continued, have given their lives in battle, “but he who, to avoid pain, or calamity, or censures of men, gives up the contest,” should at least try to do something. “It is base to live or die only for ourselves. … In hopes, then, we may yet be of some use to others, both methinks are bound to preserve life as long as we can.”
Having borrowed from the ancients, the anonymous author now turns to his own logical devices. He first insists that Hume’s conclusion is contrary to sense: “No deduction, however plausible, can produce conviction in any rational mind, which originates in a supposition grossly absurd.” He says the animals do not kill themselves so “in spite of all the sophistry [Hume] is master of, the question here will eternally recur, whether the wisdom of nature, or the philosophy of our author, deserves the preference.” Nature must be right. He practically shouts that we just have to feel this one.
Moreover, he writes, “That a man who retires from life ad libitum, does no harm to society, is a proposition peculiarly absurd and erroneous.” A society cannot live if it includes a principle the universal following of which would bring it to extinction. “It seems to be a maxim in human existence, that no creature has a right to decide peremptorily on the importance, utility, or necessity of his own being.” The authority of this is cast in its simplicity. In the author’s words, “There are an infinite variety of secret connections and associations in the vast system of things,” and no one can know what he or she might be able to do sometime in the unforeseeable future.
Other Enlightenment writers also argued against what they perceived as the ancients’ support of suicide. An author known only as Denesle wrote that those who defend suicide “are indistinguishable from assassins,” and that the deaths of Cato, Brutus, and Porcia were crimes.22 These ancient figures were important in the conversation because beyond being lauded suicides, they were also understood as people of great refinement. People of the Enlightenment saw themselves as highly refined as well, wiser and freer than the generations that had come before them. But was this entirely good for them? The Enlightenment author Henri de Feucher d’Artaize called suicide “the cowardly side of courage,” and he connected it to the rise of reason: “It is a dreadful benefit of our high development; a refinement of liberty.” He understood the suicides of Arria and Cato to have also been the result of the downside of sophistication and freedom, a refinement that had a kind of weakness as its corollary.23 People who are depressed despite lives of comfort often feel guilty that they fail to appreciate their advantages, so it is important to note that throughout history “high development” and “refinement of liberty” have been cited as making a person’s inner life tumultuous. Even many who value Enlightenment ideals of liberty and independence have worried that these principles, taken to extremes, might lead to anxiety and isolation. The sophistication of such famous ancient suicides as Arria and Cato made their cases particularly meaningful for antisuicide writers. Criticizing the suicides of Arria and Cato meant, by extension, also critiquing aspects of their refined, independent-minded culture and the Enlightenment version of these which had lately reappeared in Europe.
The German late-Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote movingly about suicide and the important relationship between the individual and society. His work stands out as strikingly original in these matters. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is generally regarded as one of the great works of philosophy of all time. In it he argues that there are two aspects of reality: the one that we know with our senses and with our human conceptions of time and space, the phenomenal world; and the real but unknowable universe, which he calls the noumenal world. He believes that morality in human beings is a hint of the noumenal world. For Kant morality is a special quality of human life, and examining morality gives us insight into larger questions of meaning and our place among others. One of his key approaches to this question is the categorical imperative—the maxim to act only in such ways as you would want to be endorsed by a universal law; that is, to act in ways that would be fine if everyone behaved the same.
Kant claimed that suicide is wrong because it debases humanity and takes from the universe the goodness that is you. In his 1785 Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant begins his discussion of suicide by saying, in the first place, that most of us owe it to someone to stick around. Killing oneself is the crime of murder, he says. “It can also be regarded as a violation of one’s duty to other people (the duty of spouses to each other, of parents to their children, of a subject to his superior or to his fellow citizen).”24 But for Kant the crucial question is what one owes oneself and whether, “if I set aside all those relations, a human being is still bound to preserve his life simply by virtue of his quality as a person and whether he must acknowledge in this a duty (and indeed a strict duty) to himself.” His answer, clear in the way he shapes the question, is emphatically yes.
Kant acknowledges the Stoics’ belief that a sage should quit life “at his discretion (as from a smoke-filled room)” only to dispute it. Kant says that the very courage that makes it possible for someone to confront death proves the value of such a person and makes it imperative that that same strength of character should be devoted to staying alive. For Kant “a being with such a powerful authority of the strongest sensible incentives” should not take himself from life. Suicide is a violation of nature that, for Kant, is inherently immoral to other people and especially to oneself. Anyone strong enough to kill himself is more than strong enough to live, ought to let himself live, and is very much needed among us.
We are humanity, Kant says. Humanity needs us because we are it. Kant believes in duty and considers remaining alive a primary human duty. For him one is not permitted to “renounce his personality,” and while he states living as a duty, it also conveys a kind of freedom: we are not burdened with the obligation of judging whether our personality is worth maintaining, whether our life is worth living. Because living it is a duty, we are performing a good moral act just by persevering. In one of the most crucial statements in the history of suicide, Kant writes: “To annihilate the subject of morality in one’s person is to root out the existence of morality itself from the world as far as one can, even though morality is an end in itself. Consequently, disposing of oneself as a mere means to some discretionary end is debasing humanity in one’s person.”25 Human beings must understand themselves as a force of good, a force of morality. As human beings, it is our job to preserve these ideals. This goes a step beyond Aristotle’s community or Rousseau’s reminder of survivor’s pain, and speaks instead of something larger. To be human is a powerful, profound thing that deserves a lot of patience.
Kant also famously offers his categorical imperative about our subject. His very first example of his maxim on morality is about suicide. Kant asks us to imagine someone who is sick of life and whose troubles have driven him to despair, but who is sufficiently in possession of his reason that he can think clearly about whether it would be right for him to kill himself. In order to come to such a decision the person asks himself whether “the maxim of his action could indeed become a universal law of nature.” Kant understands the urge to kill oneself as coming out of one’s “self-love.” The man would be saying with his act that he subscribes to this maxim: “I make it my principle to shorten my life when its longer duration threatens more troubles than it promises agreeableness.” The man’s thinking would thus revolve around his own self-interest. For Kant, to know whether something is right we have to look beyond ourselves and ask “whether this principle of self-love could become a universal law of nature.” He concludes that it “is seen at once” that a natural law that impelled beings toward death would be a contradiction and could not be sustained. For Kant, the categorical imperative shows suicide to violate human beings’ duty toward one another.26 In some ways this is the perfect example of the categorical imperative, because the crux of the categorical imperative is that true morality is to be judged on the basis of whether an action writ large would enhance or undermine society, and nothing can provide a more unambiguous answer than the actual survival or death of society’s members.
Similarly, other philosophers and writers have argued that individuals should not take their own lives because of their innate value to the people around them and humanity at large. This idea is common in the fiction of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which characters are often tempted to suicide. Herman Melville (1819–91), in Moby-Dick, famously considers the mystery of the ocean and the emotions it brings forth, so it is fitting that when he wanted an ancient suicide to illustrate his theme, it was to Narcissus that he turned. Melville writes that Narcissus “could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain”—an image Melville says we all see reflected in all bodies of water—and for that reason he plunged into it and was drowned.27 Scholars of Moby-Dick have seen the mention of Narcissus’s suicide in the beginning of the book as a foreshadowing of the vain suicidal mission into which Ahab would lead the society of the Pequod.28 Melville had intimate experience of the disruption of suicide: his son Malcolm died at eighteen of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Melville’s interest was in the torments of the individual, but some fiction writers, like some philosophers, wrote about the influence the suicide has on other people. The great French novelist Victor Hugo, in Les Misérables, writes a few striking sentences about profound inner pain and our duty to bear it and live through it: “You want to die, I want that too, I who am speaking to you, but I don’t want to feel the ghosts of women wringing their hands around me. Die, so be it, but don’t make others die. … Suicide is restricted. … As soon as it touches those next to you the name of suicide is murder.”29 It is striking to hear a character answer a desire for suicide by confessing that he too harbors that wish and then go on to say that suicide is prohibited precisely because of what it does to other people, even to the point of influencing them toward death.
The early-twentieth-century author G. K. Chesterton made the same kind of emotional plea based on what we owe the world, but in terms that resonate with some of the philosophical arguments we have already seen. Chesterton’s most enduring works are novels, such as The Man Who Was Thursday, a wonderfully cryptic tale which inspired Jorge Luis Borges and other unconventional writers. He also wrote rather straightforward nonfiction, such as Orthodoxy (1908), in which he offers his philosophy of life and his opinion on many aspects of his culture. Here he explains that he is sharply against suicide and that he resents the rationalist’s defense of it. Chesterton writes: “Grave moderns told us that we must not even say ‘poor fellow’ of a man who had blown his brains out, since he was an enviable person, and had only blown them out because of their exceptional excellence. Mr. William Archer even suggested that in the golden age there would be penny-in-the-slot machines, by which a man could kill himself for a penny.” Chesterton rejects this idea that social progress entails ever more acceptance of suicide: “In all this I found myself utterly hostile to many who called themselves liberal and humane. Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil, the refusal to take an interest in existence; the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life.” His notion of an oath of loyalty to life is an important variation on the theme of what we owe humanity. He also explores this in a way that reminds us of Maimonides and Kant, writing, “The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he is concerned he wipes out the world.” For Chesterton it is the rejection of what life has to offer that does the calamitous harm. “The thief is satisfied with diamonds,” he writes, “but the suicide is not: that is his crime. He cannot be bribed, even by the blazing stones of the Celestial City. The thief compliments the things he steals, if not the owner of them. But the suicide insults everything on earth by not stealing it. He defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake.” Chesterton well understands the agony that life can bring in its terrible confusions and endless losses. Still, he hotly rejects answering life’s pain by rushing toward death. The suicide, for Chesterton, is most awful for the rejection it delivers to everyone living.
There is not a tiny creature in the cosmos at whom his death is not a sneer. … Of course there may be pathetic emotional excuses for the act. … But if it comes to clear ideas and the intelligent meaning of things, then there is much more rational and philosophic truth in the burial at the cross-roads and the stake driven through the body, than in Mr. Archer’s suicidal automatic machines. There is a meaning in burying the suicide apart. The man’s crime is different from other crimes—for it makes even crimes impossible.30
Chesterton here even supports the old religious idea of burying the suicide apart because he wants it clear that this is a profoundly damaging injury to humanity. We might advise that the suicidal person consider that whatever burden she thinks she presents by staying alive, it is a worse burden to kill oneself. As Chesterton eloquently puts it, “When a man hangs himself on a tree, the leaves might fall off in anger and the birds fly away in fury: for each has received a personal affront.”
We may balk at the accusatory tone of Hugo and Chesterton, but their positive message is more important. The writings of Hugo and Chesterton can both be thought of as tools for those who are tortured by thoughts of suicide but searching for a way to embrace living. If suicidal thoughts always inexorably led to suicide, there would be little point in arguing against the act. But in fact, many people have testified that parts of their lives were lost to an excruciatingly painful vacillation between the choices of life and death. Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf, first published in 1927, contains a poignant commentary on the situation of the suicidal person. The book is a novel but it has been understood as substantially autobiographical, and Hesse reported that in the period prior to writing the book he experienced despair and suicidal thoughts. Hesse’s narrator tells us that the suicidal person must struggle toward life, and that the struggle can be pervasive and exacting:
All suicides have the responsibility of fighting against the temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well in some corner of his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one, and that it is nobler and finer to be conquered by life than to fall by one’s own hand. Knowing this, with a morbid conscience whose source is much the same as that of the militant conscience of so-called self-contented persons, the majority of suicides are left to a protracted struggle against their temptation. They struggle as the kleptomaniac against his own vice.31
The narrator of Steppenwolf also contends that many more people than kill themselves are still essentially suicides, in that they think about killing themselves and have to work against doing so. Hesse’s testimony to the struggle is touching. One of the main ends of my argument is to erect an adamant prohibition against suicide and thereby mitigate the struggle over it. No one should be left alone to fight for her life without the benefit of all the great minds who have offered resolute advice to keep living.
Surely there are people who commit suicide with the intention of hurting others. Such a person would be unmoved by damage his own death would inflict on the world. In Arthur Miller’s After the Fall, the tormented Quentin says, “A suicide kills two people, Maggie. That’s what it’s for.” Attestations abound that suicide can devastate those close to the victim. In Dream Songs, the luminous twentieth-century poet John Berryman pitied Ernest Hemingway at the end of his life and asked his own long-dead father not to kill himself so that he, the poet son, would not have to suffer over it his whole life.32 Hemingway’s father took his life, and in 1961 Ernest followed suit. Then on July 1, 1996, one day before the anniversary of her grandfather’s suicide, Margaux Hemingway killed herself. In a poem called “On Suicide,” Berryman wrote that he was possessed by reflections on his own father and on suicide.33 His aunt had also taken her life. Eventually the poet committed suicide as well. The dramatic monologist Spalding Gray, author of Swimming to Cambodia, was likewise haunted by suicide. In an interview in Io magazine Gray said, “I was darkly convinced that at age fifty-two I would kill myself because my mother committed suicide at that age.”34 Gray lived a decade longer than his mother, but jumped to his death from the Staten Island Ferry in 2004.
These reprises of a suicidal theme suggest, conversely, that by simply staying alive one gives heart to others, even to the point of keeping them alive. Surely within families biological tendencies may also be a factor, but for Berryman and others like him, the fact of the suicide was hauntingly influential. They report being ravaged by a choice someone had made. The good we do by staying can be equally compelling. We tend to think of our contribution to another person’s life as a balance sheet: on one side things done well, on the other, things done poorly; we tend to forget the immense good accomplished by agreeing, in the face of pain, to life.
Suicide can seem like a quintessentially solitary act, but as the authors I have cited make clear, its meanings for the community are monumental. Today when we discuss the harm suicide does to others, we think in terms of the psychological. We talk about how survivors feel responsible and are ashamed that they were not able to help the victim. We speak about how survivors feel rejected. It is important to see that this question of the harm the suicide inflicts on others has been discussed as a central issue in philosophy and literature.
Philosophers in this chapter have invoked courage. Kant allowed that there was courage in the suicidal person, but claimed that this courage should be “a still stronger motive for him not to destroy himself.” Some of the writers discussed in this chapter argued that the death contemplated by the would-be suicide is morally wrong. As Rousseau put it, suicide “is a larceny committed against mankind.” Every person is useful to humanity, by the very fact that he or she exists. Just stay alive and you serve us mightily because you are an integral part of our hearts and minds and because of the influence your death would have on ourselves, our children, our friends, and our society. As Rousseau and Hugo both stated, it may even influence others to likewise die.
As Rousseau and others suggested, if you have any energy at all for participating in this world, perhaps live now only for those small kindnesses and consolations you can render. Perhaps seek to help those equally burdened by sadness. Confess your own sadness to those in sorrow. Your ability to console may be profound. The texts urge human beings to try to know that they are needed and loved. We all deserve each other’s gratitude for whatever optimism and joy we can hustle into this strange life by sheer force of personality, even by that most basic contribution, staying alive.