Emile Durkheim and Albert Camus were the two towering figures in thinking about suicide in the twentieth century. Both are remembered as having deeply considered suicide in light of modern ideas about our place in the universe, but it is less well known that each took a decided stance against it. How they came to this conclusion is the subject of this chapter.
In the social sciences, Durkheim was easily the most significant interpreter of suicide of the twentieth century. His book Suicide was published in 1897, and because it relied on statistics, it is generally considered to be the original modern sociological monograph. The book has since been subjected to a good deal of criticism on a variety of counts—for instance, Durkheim did not believe that suicide has a significant imitation factor, an opinion which is now widely rejected—but it is remarkable how much the book’s statistical revelations and its descriptive language of suicide have held up. Durkheim established that suicide rates are generally higher in men than in women (though childless women begin to catch up as the years go by); that rates are higher for single people than for the married, higher for childless people than for parents, higher for soldiers than for civilians, higher among Protestants than among Catholics and Jews, higher in times of peace than in times of war, higher in Scandinavian countries than elsewhere, and higher among the educated than among the uneducated.
Durkheim identified four kinds of suicide, and his language is still in use today. He divided suicides into egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic. Egoistic suicide occurs in a person who lacks a sense of belonging to the community and who becomes overcome by feelings of meaninglessness, apathy, and depression. Altruistic suicide is the opposite: the victim is so profoundly enmeshed in the ideals of the group that upholding these ideals becomes more important than life itself. Anomic suicide is characterized by an individual’s moral confusion, uncertainty, and lack of direction, usually related to dramatic social and economic upheaval. Fatalist suicide is the opposite of anomic: it is a response to being chronically oppressed so that one’s own desires are endlessly thwarted. All these could be combined to produce various results.
These terms gave sociologists a classification framework that has lasted more than a century. They are of use to clinicians but also to people who are suffering and experiencing isolation and can recognize themselves in Durkheim’s descriptions. This is especially true today, when our understanding of depression tends to be divided between biological explanations and familial explanations; it is useful to be made aware of broader sociological explanations as well. Durkheim’s key message was that in most of the modern Western world, people feel cut off from their communities and uncertain about how they fit into the world. Suicide in the West was, for Durkheim, a crisis caused by insufficient social integration. He wrote that suicide was the most obvious symptom of a widespread need for more feelings of human connection. Too much individualism was not a character flaw, it was a social problem. Durkheim was doubtful that religion or science could provide a cure. Instead, he hoped that some new form of community connection would arise. He proposed that it might be some kind of “corporation,” using the word in a noneconomic sense. He hoped his imagined corporations or something like them would replace the collective force that functioned in society before modern life. For Durkheim, the lack of this collective force was precisely what was causing modern suicide. “First of all,” he wrote, “it can be said that, as collective force is one of the obstacles best calculated to restrain suicide, its weakening involves the development of suicide.”1 With a strongly integrated society, individuals feel deeply connected to something larger than themselves, something that “forbids them to dispose willfully of themselves.” People feel they have to stay alive and fill their roles.
Even depression, for Durkheim, was best described in terms of its sociology and the alienation of the individual from society: of “melancholy suicide,” he wrote, “This is connected with a general state of extreme depression and exaggerated sadness, causing the patient no longer to realize sanely the bonds which connect him with people and things about him.”2 Present-day investigations of suicide also focus both on the state of extreme depression and the disconnection of the victim from the rest of society, but they do not ascribe the former so strictly to the latter. (Today, depression is usually discussed less as a function of society than as biological and/or based in a difficult childhood or a traumatic experience.) It is important to remember that Durkheim, contrary to most of today’s researchers, doubted that what we call suicidal contagion is real. He believed that those who killed themselves after a publicized suicide would have done so anyway, though perhaps a little later. We may attribute Durkheim’s certainty on this matter to his commitment to the idea that European suicide was to be explained through his concept of the egoistic results of the disruption of tightly knit communities.
Durkheim attached incalcuble importance to the disappearance of the small town and of the closer relations people had before city industry, trains, and changing mores separated the average person from his community. People feel integrated through family, community, and the state, and modernity supplied less community than earlier periods. Individuals were now conscious of society and their dependence upon it only in relation to the state. The state, however, is relatively remote and can have only a distant, periodic influence over them. Individuals’ feelings of being subsumed in a society thus become weak and inconstant.3 For most of people’s lives, Durkheim continues, nothing draws them out of themselves and instills restraint on them. Inevitably, they lapse into egoism or anarchy. People cannot become attached to higher aims if they do not feel they belong to anything. Thus, for Durkheim, freeing people from all social pressure abandons them to themselves, and to sorrow. So it seems that for people sensitive to melancholia some kind of deeper sense of belonging is necessary, though difficult.
Though Durkheim’s work was primarily a sociological study—based in statistics and using an objective, scientific tone—toward the end he makes some philosophical statements about the meaning of life and comes to the resolute conclusion that suicide is immoral. Durkheim describes the aspect of humanity that he calls “the cult of man”—something not unlike culture and mutual feeling—and discusses how it brings us together. “This cult of man is something, accordingly, very different from the egoistic individualism, … which leads to suicide.” Instead of alienating people from society and driving them to think only of themselves, the cult of man “unites them in one thought, makes them servants of one work.”4 Human beings are not just what each of us is on our own, Durkheim says, we are also humanity in some ideal form as created by a given people at its moment in time. To be well, we need to be drawn out of our individual personalities, to feel the overarching culture within and beyond us. The state is bound by these ideas as well. “Our dignity as moral beings is therefore no longer the property of the city-state; but it has not for that reason become our property, and we have not acquired the right to do what we wish with it.”5 With this, Durkheim concludes that suicide is wrong:
Under these conditions suicide must be classed among immoral acts; for in its main principle it denies this religion of humanity. A man who kills himself, the saying goes, does wrong only to himself and there is no occasion for the intervention of society; for so goes the ancient maxim Volenti non fit injuria. This is an error. Society is injured because the sentiment is offended on which its most respected moral maxims today rest, a sentiment almost the only bond between its members, and which would be weakened if this offense could be committed with impunity. How could this sentiment maintain the least authority if the moral conscience did not protest its violation? … No matter that the guilty person and the victim are one and the same; the social evil springing from the act is not affected merely by the author being the one who suffers.
In this proclamation Durkheim reverses his usual focus on what society ought to be doing for the individual, and what it fails to do for the suicidal, and asserts the obligation of the individual to not kill him- or herself for the sake of the common society of the community of humanity. This is not too far from Kant’s claim that suicide does deep damage to humanity, or from Maimonides’ notion that he who destroys himself destroys the world.
Durkheim makes it clear that he does not intend to blame suicide victims or sympathize with abuses of earlier times. Having said that suicide is wrong he adds, “Of course, this does not mean that we must revert to the ferocious penalties imposed on suicide during the past centuries.” These, he says, were created when the entire system of public repression was enforced with undue ruthlessness. “But the principle that homicide of one’s self should be reproved must be maintained.”
Durkheim did not feel he had to tell his reader about the ferocious penalties that were inflicted on suicides in past centuries, but his may have been the last generation that could take such knowledge for granted. Twentieth-century discussions of suicide rarely mentioned the torturing of corpses, or if they did, it was with a good deal of explanation. Yet meditations on suicide continued to be animated by a rejection of interference with the individual’s control over his or her own life. In defiance of God and the state, some claimed that suicide was a fundamental choice that belonged to every human being. This was particularly true in conversations about the philosophical movement of existentialism.
Though existentialism has roots in nineteenth-century philosophy, it became an influential philosophical movement only after World War II. Different values have been associated with this rubric, but one theme common to them all is that human beings come to existence and then make up a purpose for themselves. In Jean-Paul Sartre’s words, “man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself afterwards.” Of all of the thinkers involved with this movement, French existentialist Albert Camus stands out for having written specifically on suicide in a way that reached average people rather than just philosophers.
Camus opens “An Absurd Reasoning,” the first essay in his collection The Myth of Sisyphus, with these words:
There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest—whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories—comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.6
He makes the seriousness of the question clear by essentially threatening to think through the problem, come to an answer, and then carry out that answer, even if it means to die. With a fierce wit he judges that his subject is urgent compared with other questions of philosophy, writing, “I have never seen anyone die for the ontological argument.”
Nodding toward Durkheim, Camus tells us that suicide has been dealt with only as a social phenomenon and that he is instead concerned with the connection between individual thought and suicide. The problem he lays out is the overall meaninglessness of existence and how absurd that makes our lives of sound and fury. But the absurd is tolerable. Camus writes that it is no more than wordplay to conclude that because life has no ultimate meaning it is not worth living.7 The lack of overall purpose or goal does not imply that there is no value to living. For Camus, killing oneself is an unwarranted “insult to existence,” even though life is painful.8 He acknowledges that he is keenly aware of the sorrow and struggles of human life; he knows that it can be exhausting, repetitive, anxious, and depressing, but he concludes that once we fully recognize the absurdity of it all, a kind of love and joy arise. His philosophy sympathizes with anguish but cajoles the fellow sufferer to embrace life, all the more so because it makes no sense. We should, Camus writes, accept that our desires do not match up with the world as we know it, and yet love the unanswerable strangeness of it all.
Toward the end of the essay, Camus makes some compelling remarks about staying alive. He says that the absurd teaches us not to make the mistake of valuing certain kinds of lives and their experiences over other kinds of lives. “For the mistake is thinking that the quantity of experiences depends on the circumstances of our life when it depends solely on us. Here we have to be over-simple. To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.” There is nothing more than being aware of one’s life, whatever form it might take. For Camus, “one’s revolt, one’s freedom,” is this awareness, and it is the essence of living “to the maximum.”9There is no life that is higher.
This is an unusual stance in philosophy. Philosophers are much more often found encouraging people not to worry about an early death, saying that we all die in the end and that it is of no importance how long our span of life is. Camus specifically argues with the ancient philosophers for teaching that a short, brilliant life is as good or better than a long, ordinary one. To his mind, the experience of being alive and feeling life is more important than anything in particular that life may offer. Such advice is aimed at those who have a painful fear of death and who cling so tightly to life that they forget to enjoy it as it passes. Camus, however, is aiming his advice at those who are, to some degree, disappointed by life and entranced by the idea of death. That is why Camus gives more weight to the quantity of life than to the quality. He believes that the great gift that life offers is the same for all of us and builds up over the years, so no matter how difficult one’s life seems, it would be a terrible mistake to cut it short. That leaves premature death as a real problem to be feared, and Camus acknowledges this. It is often a matter of luck whether we have a long or short life, and Camus says that this is the one real trouble we must face.
These ideas turn philosophy on its head. Instead of wisdom consoling the mass of common people who are frightened of death, Camus sees a somewhat more hidden distress of humanity, which is being fed up with life. Instead of saying that death does not matter, Camus addresses the part of us that already believes that death might be preferable to life, and he says that once we have understood the absurdity of life and accepted it, we will see that more life is always better: “One just has to be able to consent to this. There will never be any substitute for twenty years of life and experience.”10 People feeling depressed and disheartened by life might feel that they are just marking time, getting through one day after another without much reason. Camus insists that there is a reason for getting through the days even when one does not feel joyous. He is certain that when we see the absurdity of the human condition, just living adds up to a rich experience that is, in its own way, joyful. In this sense Camus adds his voice to those who have said that we must not kill ourselves because of what we owe to our future selves.
Camus’s ideas are sorrowful but cheerful. No matter how much he believes in the fact of depression, he embraces life. In his words, “the point is to live.”11 He understands despair—“polar night, vigil of the mind”—but says, “I draw from the absurd three consequences. Which are my revolt, my freedom, and my passion. By the mere activity of consciousness I transform into a rule of life what was an invitation to death—and I refuse suicide. I know, to be sure, the dull resonance that vibrates throughout these days. Yet I have but a word to say that it is necessary.”12
Camus counsels a kind of revolt, which means for him that we must have knowledge of the certainty of our ultimate fate—death—but refuse to be resigned to it. It is a paradoxical revolt in the face of acceptance—a very tricky idea but one which Camus feels sure we can manage. This is why suicide is anathema to his philosophy of the absurd experience. He says that people consider suicide the ultimate revolt, but the contrary is true. Life in the face of its pain, he writes, is the ultimate revolt. Suicide “is acceptance in the extreme.”13 Our challenge is to be aware of death and at the same time reject it. The tension between being keenly aware of death yet not being resigned to it is what creates the absurd, and keeping the absurd alive keeps the person alive.
Camus writes that it is essential that we do not die of our own free will because our embracing the absurd leads us to take all of life and give what we have. “Suicide,” he writes, “is a repudiation. The absurd man can only drain everything to the bitter end, and deplete himself. The absurd is his extreme tension, which he maintains constantly by solitary effort, for he knows that in that consciousness and in that day-to-day revolt he gives proof of his only truth, which is defiance.”14
In the title essay of The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus famously describes our human lives as similar to the torture of Sisyphus, who was condemned to roll the same stone up the same hill, just to have it roll down again, over and over until the end of time. Sisyphus was being punished in part because he had escaped the underworld once and lived some years enjoying life on earth. Now he is back in the underworld at his quintessentially meaningless task. Camus finds this absurd and he finds coping with the absurd heroic. Sisyphus perseveres and resists the lure of suicide. Camus holds that suicide tempts us with the illusory promise of freedom, but the only real freedom is to embrace the absurdity:
You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this earth.15
Camus asks us to fully imagine the huge effort Sisyphus must make, straining his body to push the huge stone, a hundred times over. We must see his face screwed up with the effort of it, his cheek pressed hard against the stone, his shoulder fully braced against its dirty surface, his foot wedging it to keep it from falling backward. At the end of his tremendous effort, “measured by skyless space and time without depth,” he is successful. Then he watches the boulder fall back down the hill in a matter of moments. Down he goes again to restart his toil. It is during that return, that pause in concerted effort, that Sisyphus most interests Camus. That time is when Sisyphus is most conscious. He is not distracted by the work but is fully facing the absurdity of his situation. At those moments, Camus writes, Sisyphus “is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.16
We are stronger than our rock. Sisyphus and the rock can be a man and his tedious, repetitive work, but the rock is also life itself, even if there is no task to perform that is as onerous as the labor of Sisyphus. Every day must be borne, and the reward for bearing it is another day. Still, Camus sees reason to rejoice as well as weep. He says that it is in the descent of our rolled-up rock that we are most aware of our predicament. “If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much.” The chief sorrow, he tells us, was in the beginning. Now when images of better times, like Sisyphus’s recollection of earth, become dominant in one’s mind, and when the desire for happiness becomes too much to resist, “melancholy rises in a person’s heart and grief is too heavy to bear.” Even this grief has an antidote: “Crushing truths perish from being acknowledged.”17
Even Oedipus, Camus tells us, was in the end resigned to what fate had unfolded for him and concluded that all was well. Sisyphus is exhausted but continues. He even continues well. “His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing.” The person who understands the absurdity of the human condition is strengthened by it. He or she still has to work unceasingly to bear up under the weight of being, but it is worth it. There is no higher destiny, Camus declares. The absurd man is the master of his days. When he gazes backward over his life, he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes his fate, created by him, and like Sisyphus and his rock, the whole seemingly unreasonable effort turns out to have meaning, just because it constituted his life. Thus, even while we are convinced that all human meaning comes from human beings, and not from outside them, we are still able to be impressed by its meaning if we allow ourselves to be. Camus says that each of us, like Sisyphus, is like a blind man who wants to see and yet knows the night has no end, but who is still “on the go.” Meaning and joy are inherent in our simple, yet heroically effortful, persistence. “The rock is still rolling.”18 We endure.
He ends the essay with a famous passage that combines all his strange pessimism and optimism.
I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. … The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.19
It is not a simple kind of happiness, but Camus asks us to perceive that it is happiness all the same. For those who find life hard to bear—or perhaps for all of us when we find life hard to bear—Camus is an odd but wonderful companion, entirely empathizing with our despair, yet cheering us on to live and even see a happiness in our struggle.
Jean-Paul Sartre, like Camus associated with existentialism, wrote an illuminating analysis of Camus’s 1942 novel The Stranger. Sartre describes the novel’s protagonist, Meursault, as beyond suicide: “The absurd man,” Sartre writes, “will not commit suicide; he wants to live, without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusions … and without resignation either. He stares at death with passionate attention and this fascination liberates him. He experiences the ‘divine irresponsibility’ of the condemned man.”20 Sartre also wrote about the possibility of suicide as an assertion of authentic human will in the face of absurdity. Sartre was fascinated with suicide as both a practical and a symbolic way of reacting to a godless world. Still, the real act of suicide was for Sartre the abandonment of all liberty.
It is worth noting here that even though Camus and Sartre reject suicide, they do consider it each person’s right, precisely because for them there is no God and no outside meaning, no framing significance that comes from outside the self. Neither has much faith in other people, and neither suggests that the community provides sufficient “outside meaning” to militate against suicide. Instead, for them the embrace of absurdity is a way of conceptualizing one’s commitment to living. In this sense, Camus champions the importance of the future self, without focusing on what that future self deserves.
Despite Camus’s stance against suicide, he is sometimes most remembered for the importance he gave the question. Because of his insistence that the thinking person must make a decision about whether life is worth living, he is often considered a supporter of the option to take one’s own life, and he is grouped with the secular thinkers who have actively accepted suicide.
As false as that association may be, secular philosophy has been an undeniable force in the trend toward neutral or even positive attitudes toward suicide. The nonreligious view of the world is often thought of as a brave look into the abyss. Here is how one of the happier secular philosophers, Diderot, described existence: “To be born in imbecility, in the midst of pain and crisis: to be the plaything of ignorance, error, need, sickness, wickedness, and passions … never to know where you come from, why you come and where you are going! That is what is called the most important gift of our parents and nature. Life.”21 But just as with the suicide question itself, the question of the abyss is keenly shaped by religion. Because religion addresses particular kinds of ideas, like an afterlife or the efficacy of prayer, the absence of those ideas is felt as a deficit. The world without them seems a world of despair. But as many can attest, especially people raised without religion, at some distance from these religious ideas, God and the afterlife are not always missed.
Without the worldviews of various religions, the universe has often been imagined as a dark, boundless place. Belief that life is meaningless has become widespread. In much secular literature, people worry that their actions don’t matter in a world without significance. Characters express sadness over losing the specific comforts of modern Western religion. Atheist philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche elaborately embroidered this mood, as did such novelists as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Virginia Woolf and other authors of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Here is Schopenhauer on life:
Many millions, united into nations, strive for the common good, each individual on account of his own; but many thousands fall as a sacrifice for it. Now senseless delusion, now intriguing politics, excite them to wars with each other; then the sweat and the blood of the great multitude must flow, to carry out the ideas of individuals, or to expiate their faults. In peace, industry and trade are active, inventions work miracles, delicacies are called from all ends of the world, the waves engulf thousands. All strive, some planning, some acting; the tumult is indescribable. But the ultimate aim of it all—what is it? To sustain ephemeral and tormented individuals through a short span of life, in the most fortunate case with endurable want and comparative freedom from pain, which, however, is at once attended with ennui; then the reproduction of this race and its striving.22
It seems reasonable to reply that such dark visions under-report love, trust, hope, and community. The good is worth saving. The bearable can become sweet, and sometimes there is joy in love, and art, and the absurd.
For an individual, when life seems too hard even to endure, the idea of saving the world may not be on the table. Nevertheless, as Camus might say, the choice to get through the day, made over and over, is the heroic action that the world requires from you. The argument against suicide put forward by Durkheim also points to how to live: be engaged. To be connected to the rest of us, at least conceptually; to cultivate within ourselves an ability to feel the sustaining force of the human culture in which we live. If we take Durkheim and Camus together, it seems the job is to try to feel your connection to the world, and to try to stay curious about what is happening and about what might happen—to experience life despite its capacity to seem as brutal and pointless as the hard labor of Sisyphus, for some people, some of the time.