In July 67 C.E. the man who would become the great Jewish and Roman historian Titus Flavius Josephus was trapped in a cave with forty fellow soldiers. Josephus was a Jewish commander in the first Jewish-Roman war when the Romans burst into his garrison and slaughtered thousands. In hiding, Josephus and his companions discussed the situation and agreed that all was lost; they decided that instead of allowing the Romans to kill them, they would commit suicide. Their method was similar to the one used at Masada: they drew lots to establish the order in which each man would kill another. When they carried this out, Josephus was one of the final two, and these last two men together decided not to go through with it. They surrendered to the Romans and Josephus went on to write his books, become an adviser to the Roman emperor, marry several times, and father many children. This story has long served as a reminder that surviving a near-suicide can lead to a life full and rich beyond all expectation.
In his Essays, Montaigne writes that Josephus was caught in danger “so clear and so imminent … that logically there could be no way out.” He might have accepted death, but as Montaigne expresses it, “he did well to hang on stubbornly to his hopes; for fortune, beyond all human reason, so reversed this situation that he saw himself delivered from it without any mishap.”1 One never knows what life might bring. Montaigne had a pervading sense of the world as unknowable to human beings. For him there is so much reality beyond what our senses can report that we always must remain humble in our attempt to understand the universe and our place in it. This uncertainty carried through to Montaigne’s ideas about melancholia: our despair, he observes, generally hinges on troubles that are specific only to a particular moment in our lives. Montaigne was against suicide because people can never know enough about their situation and their future to make anything but a premature judgment on the question. Montaigne scholar Hugo Friedrich wrote that for Montaigne, “Actuality, which is always laden with what is different, and which cannot be hauled in or anticipated by any judgment, takes away life’s right to throw itself away.”2 Montaigne wrote of his own struggles with the anguish of life, from kidney stones and other painful ailments to keen loneliness and sadness, but he opposed suicide because of his belief in life and in its surprises. Indeed, he tells us that some of his best friendships came late in life, as did richer happiness.
Just as Montaigne reminds his reader that, sometimes, in short order, bad fortune can turn to good, some have emphasized that sorrowful moods also change—sometimes in short periods of time. Voltaire wrote, “The man who, in a fit of melancholy, kills himself to-day, would have wished to live had he waited a week.”3 To put the matter in another way, we are complex beings who feel very differently at different times, such that the “you” in any given moment should not have the authority to end life for the many yous of many other moments.
Utilitarianism, the doctrine of the greatest happiness for the greatest number, holds that government should not be set up to protect people from their own decisions. If a person wants to walk over an unsound bridge, a utilitarian would say, no authority should step in and stop him. In John Stuart Mill’s words, “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. … Over himself, over his body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”4 One might think that as a principal philosopher of utilitarianism, Mill would believe in a person’s right to end his own life, but it is not the case. Mill argued in On Liberty that since the essence of liberty is the power of the individual to choose, any choices that deprive a person of all further choices must be rejected.
Mill writes that in his and most other civilized countries, a contract made in which a person sells him- or herself as a slave would be null and void, “neither enforced by law nor by opinion.”
The ground for thus limiting his power of voluntarily disposing of his own lot in life, is apparent, and is very clearly seen in this extreme case. The reason for not interfering, unless for the sake of others, with a person’s voluntary acts, is consideration for his liberty. His voluntary choice is evidence that what he so chooses is desirable, or at the least endurable, to him, and his good is on the whole best provided for by allowing him to take his own means of pursuing it. But by selling himself for a slave, he abdicates his liberty; he forgoes any future use of it, beyond that single act. He therefore defeats, in his own case, the very purpose which is the justification of allowing him to dispose of himself. He is no longer free; but is thenceforth in a position which has no longer the presumption in its favor, that would be afforded by his voluntarily remaining in it. The principle of freedom cannot require that he should be free not to be free. It is not freedom, to be allowed to alienate his freedom.5
Thus despite all one might have assumed about utilitarianism, “It is not freedom to be allowed to alienate [one’s] freedom.” It is a powerful idea. It could also be argued from the perspective of utilitarianism that suicide does not serve the greatest happiness for the greatest number, because while ending the pain, and existence, of one person, it creates profound grief in those left behind. It has a negative influence, furthermore, not only on those who actually grieve, such as family and friends and closer acquaintances, but also on complete strangers who know about the suicide, especially if they have qualities in common with the victim.
Along very different lines the invaluable German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) also expressed the idea that the suicidal owe it to themselves to stay alive. In his masterful work The World as Will and Representation, he describes all the action in this life as will, hunger, and desire, over which human beings have little control. He sees suicide as a result of suffering after one’s will is thwarted.6 Schopenhauer was not a cheerful fellow, and though his writing is lively, his conclusions tend to be downbeat. For him, because of the hardships and horrors of human existence, “Optimism … seems to me to be not merely an absurd, but also a really wicked way of thinking.” Still he believed suicide to be above all else a mistake. For Schopenhauer, the overarching point of human existence, the only element that has real truth behind it, is the achievement of insight, and the suicide gives up all possibility for future insight. This loss is especially acute, Schopenhauer believed, because the pains that we suffer afford us additional possibilities for real understanding. As awful as they can be, the tribulations of life provide a mortification of the will which allows for unusual levels of knowing truth. As such, suicide is an evasion of a precious challenge.
The other reason Schopenhauer saw suicide as a mistake is that the attempt to eradicate oneself doesn’t actually work. You stay who you are. Even though you demolished your physical being, your nature is essentially indestructible. Schopenhauer illustrated the problem with a metaphor of trying to remove a rainbow from a waterfall by scooping the water with a bucket. You cannot remove yourself from the world. As Schopenhauer scholar Bryan Magee has put it, for Schopenhauer, the suicide “neither gains what he hopes to gain nor loses what he wants to lose.”7 He does not lose what he wants to lose because, Schopenhauer points out, the act of ending life freezes life in the situation that inspired the suicide. He does not gain the escape he sought to gain because escape means getting to someplace better. You have to feel this suffering to get to something better; death is no place and no escape. Schopenhauer, who was influenced in part by Eastern religions, advises the person in distress that this enormously challenging experience will eventually bring exceptional wisdom and peace of mind.
Real insight into ourselves and our world comes with time, and that insight is our salvation. In his Parerga and Paralipomena, Schopenhauer takes pains, though, to distance himself from religious antisuicide, offering a contrarian position from the perspective of atheistic rationalism: “The only valid moral reason against suicide … lies in the fact that suicide is opposed to the attainment of the highest moral goal, since it substitutes for the real salvation from this world of woe and misery one that is merely apparent. But it is still a very long way from this mistake to a crime, such as the Christian clergy would like to stamp it.” Along these same lines, some of his remarks make him seem almost prosuicide: “They tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice … that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.”8 His defense of suicide is all about how wrong the church is in its condemnation of it. Schopenhauer points out that the Bible does not call suicide a sin or a crime, so when the clergy fulminate against the act they are doing so for their own reasons. In his estimation the secret reason for religious rejection of suicide is that a suicide puts the lie to the religious claim that God and his world are good. They denounce suicide, he explains, to escape being denounced by it. As with other philosophical defenders of suicide, Schopenhauer is arguing mostly against religion. But as we have seen, elsewhere Schopenhauer makes clear that having title to one’s own life and person does not mean you should do whatever you want with yourself. There is your own future to think about. Schopenhauer writes to identify and work out the mistake of suicide, the way it seems to offer a release but does not, as all possibility for release and safe haven are only available by living. He discusses this idea in The World as Will and Representation: “Whoever is oppressed by the burdens of life, whoever loves life and affirms it, but abhors its torments, and in particular can no longer endure the hard lot that has fallen to just him, cannot hope for deliverance from death, and cannot save himself through suicide. Only by a false illusion does the cool shade of Orcus allure him as a haven of rest.”9 Then he segues into a Zen-like reminder that it matters little what individuals do:
The earth rolls on from day into night; the individual dies; but the sun itself burns without intermission, an eternal noon. Life is certain to the will-to-live; the form of life is the endless present; it matters not how individuals, the phenomena of the Idea, arise and pass away in time, like fleeting dreams. Therefore suicide already appears to us to be a vain and therefore foolish action; when we have gone farther in our discussion, it will appear to us in an even less favorable light.10
That less favorable light is that for Schopenhauer, suicide is an act of will that is trying to destroy a person’s acts of will, so it cannot be successful. The only success life can have, he believes, is the slow, difficult, even excruciating process of learning to conquer one’s will, to see an end to it and thus be wiser, for only when you quiet the distortions and noise of the will can you begin to see the world around you. By conquering one’s will one is not only wiser but also happier, because that is what happens once you accept that you are not going to get a lot of what you want. What the suicidal person who rejects suicide has chosen to say, Schopenhauer tells us, is this: “I do not want to avoid suffering, because it can help to put an end to the will-to-live, whose phenomenon is so full of misery, by so strengthening the knowledge of the real nature of the world now already dawning on me, that such knowledge may become the final quieter of the will, and release me forever.”11 What Schopenhauer calls the will-to-live is full of desire that makes us miserable, but suffering can give a person a much clearer vision of the world as it actually is, so that the noisy will is at last quieted and the person is free. All this can take place only while one is alive and among the living.
Schopenhauer also makes the compelling argument that the ancient Stoics had it wrong on the suicide question because their whole agenda was to live with a kind of indifference to life. The struggle to survive pain is the only real escape from pain. The very meaning of the term “escape” includes the notion that you leave for another place, not just that you disappear from a set of circumstances. (It might be worth noting here that the etymology of the English word escape is French, from a word meaning to “get out of one’s cape, leave a pursuer with just one’s cape”—so escaping is really getting out with your life intact, quite the opposite of suicide.)
From yet another perspective, Schopenhauer writes, “It was just the suffering it thus shunned which, as mortification of the will, could have led it to the denial of itself and to salvation, so in this respect the suicide is like a sick man who, after the beginning of a painful operation that could completely cure him, will not allow it to be completed, but prefers to retain his illness.12 The pain, Schopenhauer insists, is what you need to gain the wisdom that will lead you out of pain.
Another poignant work about the problem of suicide was penned by the poet and novelist D. H. Lawrence (1885–1930). In his poem “The Ship of Death” Lawrence, using Hamlet’s best-known soliloquy as a starting point, suggests that a calm interior existence is to be found only in life, difficult though that journey may be:
And can a man his own quietus make
With a bare bodkin?
With daggers, bodkins, bullets, man can make
a bruise or break of exit for his life
but is that a quietus, O tell me, is it quietus?
Surely not so! For how could murder, even self-murder
Ever a quietus make?
O let us talk of quiet that we know
That we can know, the deep and lovely quiet
Of a strong heart at peace!
How can we this, our own quietus, make?13
Lawrence’s use of “bodkin” suggests not only Hamlet but also the story of the daughters of Orion, who killed themselves with their bodkins and looms in order to protect their city from plague. Lawrence asks whether the kind of break with life that people make themselves can ever deliver calm and peacefulness. “Surely not so!” he exclaims. As many before him had done, he likens suicide to murder and dismisses it as a false path to “quietus.” Uncertain though we may be how to make our own peace other than by preparing for the death we cannot avoid, Lawrence declares that there is a goal: the true “deep and lovely quiet / of a strong heart at peace.”
In another poem, Lawrence gives us a better idea of what he means by seeking a strong heart at peace. Here is “Healing” in its entirety.
I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various
sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working
wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep
emotional self
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time,
only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long, difficult repentance, realization of life’s
mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.14
What could be a more astute reading of the effort of healing oneself? Again, as difficult as it is, it is possible, and it is possible only here among the living.
In 1910 Rudyard Kipling wrote his famous poem “If,” which contains a rallying cry for staying long after everything in you has given up.
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”15
The conclusion of the poem advises that if you can do this, if you can just hold on, “Yours is the earth and everything in it, / And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son.” Pain and exhaustion are to be suffered because if you can press through them, you have the chance of obtaining the highest goals. To be at peace with yourself makes you master of the earth and everything in it, and the paragon of a full human being.
These poems, like Schopenhauer’s observation, remind us of the future selves we can be if we can only endure the present. To return from poetry to philosophy, the twentieth-century Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) famously struggled with depression and with thoughts of suicide. Horribly, three of his four brothers killed themselves. Despite that, he wrote about suicide only twice, both times quite briefly. But his ruminations are deeply meaningful. When Wittgenstein speaks to the puzzle of human morality in his Notebooks, he contends with the immorality of suicide:
If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin. And when one investigates it, it is like investigating mercury vapor in order to comprehend the nature of vapors.16
This is so important that it deserves much more attention than Wittgenstein gave it. In fact, he turned his back on it a bit: the little philosophical observation ends with a doleful, “Or is even suicide in itself neither good nor evil?” He stops there but we need to give his comment its due and learn from its perception. Wittgenstein says here that suicide is the elemental wrong and that what is wrong about it can tell you about all other wrongs.
What could he have meant by this? Maybe that what is wrong about lying and stealing is not just that it hurts the other person but that it breaks faith with the human project. To invest ourselves in our own lives and to engage positively in the lives of others is thus “right” in a way that turning our back on our sense of life mattering is “wrong.” This is perhaps what Wittgenstein meant when he said that if suicide is allowed, everything is allowed. Our loyalty to feelings of life mattering is the basis for our morality. We feel our lives as full of wants, needs, fears, anxieties, love, and grief, all of which feel real, all of which matter and mean. We feel a kind of communion with other human beings, and what we do to enhance that feeling is right, and what we do to erode or break with that feeling of significance is wrong. In that sense nothing, as Wittgenstein says, could be more wrong than suicide.
As with so many other philosophers who discuss suicide, Wittgenstein puts the weight on the negative—suicide is the primary wrong—but it is worth considering that the primary good gesture is to stay alive. Our chief moral duty is not to keep from infringing on the property and rights of the next person; rather, our chief moral duty is to maintain the significance of life whether or not we believe in a higher power. When people are sorely taxed by life and they break some of the rules that reinforce communal and individual meaning, they weaken it for themselves and for others, whether the breach is lying, stealing, cheating, or being cruel. For Wittgenstein, if there are any moral rules at all, if we can say that we owe one another anything, than the first thing we are responsible for is rejecting suicide.
The other comment that Wittgenstein left us regarding suicide seems to have been influenced by Schopenhauer’s theory. In a letter written in 1920, Wittgenstein confesses that he is “in a state of mind that is terrible to me.” He will not resort to suicide though, and he explains, “I know that to kill oneself is always a dirty thing to do. Surely one cannot will one’s own destruction and anybody who has visualized what is in practice involved knows that suicide is always a rushing of one’s own defenses. But nothing is worse than to be forced to take oneself by surprise.”17 Here Wittgenstein follows Schopenhauer’s idea that we cannot will the destruction of the will. What then, he asks, occurs with a suicide, if the act is not one which the person in question fully wants. The answer is that the aspect of the person who wants to end his or her life is only one part, and it has to plot against the rest of the person and circumvent objections of the rest by a sneak attack, by taking the person by surprise. What may look like an integrated person making an impulsive move might also be seen as a person in a particular mood acting quickly so as not to allow input from him- or herself in different moods.
Sometimes the feeling that life matters and has meaning resides “in our other selves,” and we do not always have access to it. Sometimes it is necessary to wait and to refuse to be taken by surprise by one’s own inner saboteur.
Sigmund Freud’s understanding of suicide also involved doing something rather different from what you want to do and sparing your future self. As Freud put it, “Probably no one finds the mental energy required to kill himself unless, in the first place, in doing so he is at the same time killing an object with whom he has identified himself, and, in the second place, is turning against himself a death-wish which had been directed against someone else.”18 Symbolically harming the parent or other victimizer is too painful, so the victim turns his or her anger inward. Another way of seeing it is that the parent has been so profoundly internalized that the victim is in fact attacking the other when he or she commits suicide. In both these interpretations, suicide is a mistake, an error in judgment. The answer to what is, for some of us, at times, the seemingly unbearable anguish of life, is to talk about the inner life until it becomes clear that the self is not the true target of our feelings of rage and despair. Freud and most of his followers acknowledged that this can be a very long process, but it is also something constructive that one can do with one’s pain. One can use it to find the trail out of a longing for death and instead learn to feel as an independent individual; the result will be a much more pleasurable existence, where suicide is no longer a consideration. The person in the future deserves to exist, deserves to live through the dark time associated with this error in judgment about the real source of his or her pain and anger.
Freud also spoke of a “death instinct” and saw this in our attempts to lose ourselves in entertainment, or in drugs, or even just in sleep. Sometimes it goes all the way to thoughts of suicide and suicidal wishes. Freud theorized that at times some people direct the impulse outward in the form of aggression, cruelty, murder, and destructiveness. This too, of course, is far from the response of a healthy ego and personality.
Thus one of the most astute interpreters of the mind was convinced that the suicidal person is not harming the person she thinks she is harming. Through talking about feelings in a psychotherapeutic setting, the would-be suicide might be able to become aware that her anger is not strictly localized on the self and may be released and managed without actual violence to herself or to others. If a cure is possible through talk therapy, then the future self ought to have a chance to live to that point where the person no longer wants to die.
How can we ask ourselves to stay for someone else, and for our own futures, or even for a person in the abstract—that is, some unknown person whom we might influence? Here it is helpful to consider the work of the twentieth-century French Talmudic scholar and philosopher Emanuel Levinas. Levinas considered philosophy to be the “wisdom of love” instead of the “love of wisdom,” such that our acts of friendship are the most real and knowable aspect of the entire universe. His philosophy insists that ethics comes first, that “ethics precedes ontology”: the first thing we know is our own being, and the way that we know everything else is through the other person. For Levinas even one’s own self is possible only with its recognition of “the Other,” and this recognition carries responsibility to what is irreducibly different. The emphasis is on a relationship of respect and responsibility for the other person. The Other is a real person whom you really know, as well as a concept pointing toward all the others whose existence matters even in the abstract. Put another way, subjectivity is primordially ethical, not theoretical. Our responsibility for the other is not secondary to our subjectivity but rather founds our subjective being by giving it a meaningful direction and orientation, without which we are lost. Levinas’s thesis of “ethics as first philosophy” claims that the traditional philosophical pursuit of knowledge is secondary to a basic ethical duty to the Other. To meet the Other is to have an idea of infinity. Levinas further encourages us to stay by invoking the hope of greater understanding. He does not deny that life can be terrible but emphasizes that the pain is inextricably connected to love of being, and joy:
In its opposition to being (that is, suffering pain), the I seeks refuge in being itself (that is, in the gift of life and the “goodness” that accompanies it). Suicide is tragic, for death does not bring a resolution to all problems to which birth gave rise, and it is powerless to humiliate the values of the earth—whence Macbeth’s final cry in confronting death, defeat because the universe is not destroyed at the same time as his life. Suffering at the same time despairs for being riveted to being—and loves the being to which it is riveted. It knows the impossibility of quitting life: what tragedy! What comedy. … The taedium vitae is steeped in the love of the life it rejects; despair does not break with the ideal of joy.19
Macbeth complains, “I ’gin to be aweary of the sun / And wish th’ estate o’ th’ world were now undone.”20 But the world cannot be undone. Escape and even suffering can happen only here, alive on earth. In one poignant passage Levinas writes, “Prior to death there is always a last chance; this is what heroes seize, not death.”21
Levinas declares himself unambiguously against suicide.22 According to him there is no ethical case for taking one’s own life. Death cannot be chosen. This is in part because suicide is a logically and metaphysically contradictory concept, but also because in the choice of death, ethical responsibility turns into irresponsibility. Meanwhile, many people are desperately in need of escape, not from life but rather from themselves. In this, too, the only course from Levinas’s perspective is through new and different attention to the Other: the persons around one, their practical needs in daily life, and their more abstract needs as representatives of humanity. We have to keep looking forward to further human connection:
In the innocence of our daily lives, the face of the other (or the neck or the back) signifies above all a demand. The face requires you, calls you outside. And already there resounds the word from Sinai, “though shalt not kill” which signifies “you shall defend the life of the other.” … It is the very articulation of love of the other. You are indebted to someone from whom you have not borrowed a thing. … And you are responsible, the only one who could answer, the noninterchangable, and the unique one. … In this relation of the unique to the unique there appears, before the purely formal community of the genus, the original sociality.23
It may be true that no one wants to die; the suicidal, rather, simply do not want to keep living the way they are feeling. If Levinas is right that our very being is constituted through confrontation with the Other, then the crisis of suicidal misery is an opportunity. The misery requires us to ask for help or at least to express our distress to another person. In doing this we begin the long and difficult trip out from our loneliness into a real engagement with humanity and thus with ourselves. “The possibility of deliverance (and the temptation of suicide) arises in the anxiety of death.” Death is nothingness, but bearing anxiety can be everything and essential. “Such is a responsibility stronger than death, affirmed by Plato in his own fashion in the Phaedo when condemning suicide.”24 In Levinas’s work suicide seems like a real temptation against which he has to struggle, and he copes with it by recounting the ways in which we have a responsibility to stay around and learn more about the real nature of things and the persons we can come to be.
Of the nearly thirty-eight thousand people in the United States who took their lives in 2010, how many of them, two years or even two months earlier, might have been sorry to know that this was the end that they were to come to? A case can be made that they were obliged to give their future selves the same chance to look back and be glad still to be with us. The person who wants to take his own life is not necessarily “out of his mind”—people often seem almost cheerful, “back to normal,” in the days before they have planned to take their own lives. But being sane does not necessarily mean knowing, at that critical moment, what is best for one’s life. Everyone changes, but at a given moment, we tend to feel that this is the way we always have been. With depression, that despair of the possibility of change is even more intense; the depressed person is convinced that she will never come out of it. But even that person has had periods of happiness. It is the nature of existence that this happiness will return—if we stay around to enjoy it.
One of the best-known sayings about suicide alludes to the impermanence of the pain. As the talk-show host Phil Donahue put it, “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.” It is a pithy reminder that if you live you will have to continue to face this difficult life, but that the particular element that you despise in your life today may be utterly gone tomorrow, or soon after. Of course, depression is more durable than any given setback, but even depression is not permanent. One characteristic of major depression is that it feels as if it will never end, but in fact, even untreated it waxes and wanes, and with treatment most people will experience considerable improvement. There is always hope for a better life in the future, a life that may be sufficiently rich and strange, creative and beautiful, peaceful and vibrant to have made the wait worthwhile.