Suicide

Emile Durkheim

“In l738, a journalist (possibly Samuel Richardson) claimed that suicide was England’s 'new religion,'” Freya Johnston remarks a TLS review of three tomes on suicide, Kelly McGuire’s Dying to be English, Paul Seaver et al, editors, The History of Suicide in England, 1650-1850 and Richard Bell’s We Shall Be No More (“Suicide Watch,” TLS, 1/18/13). “Melancholy seemed to infect everyone and everything: even a sedan chair, narrating the history of its life and adventures in London in l757, admits that it has flirted with self destruction: ‘Since my reparation, I have had a very particular dejection of spirits. Whether I am almost tired of a foolish and ridiculous world, I can’t tell…’” Shakespeare reflects the suicidal British temperament. Hamlet was suicidal, Ophelia drowns (and there has always been a debate about whether it was suicide or accident), Othello did it along with both Romeo and Juliet. Of course another English great, Virginia Woolf, would drown herself. Hume, Johnston points out, condoned suicide while “Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755) condemns the act in its definition of “SUICIDE:” “Self-murder, the horrid crime of destroying one's self.” Not that the English have any monopoly on suicide, which has been particularly prevalent amongst American poets including Anne Sexton, John Berryman and Sylvia Path. Amongst the Italians Primo Levi survived Auschwitz only to take his life after the war (although there are those who have cast doubts on whether his fall from his Turin residence was suicide or not).  Cesare Pavese, a noted editor and writer, also killed himself. And speaking of melancholy Danes, the Swedes were always known for their high incidence of suicide despite all the entitlements of the welfare state. Albert Camus famously began The Myth of Sisyphus by saying, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.”And the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, wrote a book on the subject tersely titled Suicide, in which he attempted to isolate factors such as religious belief, marital status, sex and education, which contributed to suicide. Protestants he concluded were more likely to commit suicide than Catholics or Jews.

Alas Poor Yorick Stuff

If one could describe the preconscious thought process of average human beings, satiation of appetite and the desire for attention might be in a Hegelian dialectic with the fear of death, except for those who enjoy a surfeit of what is known as suicidal ideation. For Suicidal Ideationalists, who are sometimes also followers of German Idealism (with its search for overarching metaphysical assertions, which lead to a level of frustration resulting in suicidal thoughts), and who probably comprise a good part of the Hemlock Society’s mailing list, suicide constitutes a form of hope. Plainly there are people who regard suicide as a good thing, to the extent that it is an escape from the burden of existence. The poets Sylvia Plath, John Berryman and Anne Sexton all committed suicide. Clinical depression may have driven their decisions, but who is to say that extreme mental pain must be endured, any more than the physical pain that Dr. Kevorkian attempted to eliminate through assisted suicide. In The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus asserts that, considering the nature of the purposeless world in which we live, suicide is the only philosophical question that is important. One thing is certain: those who commit suicide have a level of control that those of us who open medical reports with trembling hands don’t get a chance to experience. For the average person who is not a member of the Hemlock Society, Death and Life are enemies (in the famous sequence from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Max Von Sydow plays chess with Death). The Faustian bargain wherein the soul is swapped for knowledge ultimately involves a search for the kind of immortality that Ray Kurzweil champions in The Age of Spiritual Machines, in which dying organs are replaced by microprocessors. But from another point of view, death may not be regarded as an enemy. Death is as much a part of the evolution of man as life, and without the death of cells (apoptosis), new cells would not be born. Death is the final life passage and the ultimate change. We are afraid of death because we are set in our ways and don’t want to let go. However, is it possible to accept death and even embrace it? Is that what it means to die with dignity?