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Death of Socrates. Image from the Wonders of the WorldCollection, New York Public Library

T

Ars Philosopha — June 25, 2013, 2:00 pm

On SuicideAnd why we should talk more about it

By Clancy Martin

he recent brouhaha

over a spread in Vice

magazine featuring

artistic representations of

women writers who took

their own lives has me

thinking about suicide. For

years, growing up, I was

obsessed with the thought;

among my earliest memories

is the desire, at age three or

four, to run in front of an

oncoming bus. Not because

I wanted to see what would

happen, but because I was sure I knew what would happen: I wouldn’t have to

live any longer. I suspect there may be a suicide gene. My elder brother reports

of wanting to kill himself from a very early age, and of having had to battle with

the desire many times in his life. We know that suicide often “runs in the

family”; three of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s four brothers killed themselves, and

Wittgenstein at various points contemplated doing so — this despite his family’s

enormous wealth and intelligence and its privileged position in Viennese

society.

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We tend to talk about suicide most when a famous person kills himself. There

was, we all remember, the flurry of argument about suicide — much of it

indignant, even outraged — when David Foster Wallace took his own life. His

friends were deeply hurt, and many of them were writers, so they wrote about it.

“[E]very suicide’s an asshole,” wrote Mary Karr, in a poem about Wallace’s

death. “There is a good reason I am not/ God, for I would cruelly smite the self-

smitten.” Suicide, seen as among the most selfish of acts, pushes a button in us

that even murder doesn’t.

That self-destruction should be morally blameworthy because of its selfishness

is, if not paradoxical, at least a bit odd. After all, if there is one thing I am

entitled to as a human being, only one right I am permitted, it ought to be the

right to life: this right, it has often been argued, is a kind of necessary

precondition for any other right one might claim. But does it make sense to say

that I have the right to life if I don’t have the right to end it when and as I

choose?

Albert Camus suggested that the only serious philosophical question is whether

or not one ought to kill oneself. Suicide, he wrote,

is merely confessing that [life] “is not worth the trouble.” Living,

naturally, is never easy. You continue making the gestures

commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is

habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even

instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of

any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily

agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.

Camus’s conclusion — that the very meaninglessness of life ought to provoke

us into a kind of mulish defiance toward the rationality of death — is not

entirely satisfying. At one level I agree: to go on living is to say “Fuck you” to a

universe that doesn’t give a damn about us. When Camus writes that we “must

imagine Sisyphus happy,” we know that the greatest part of Sisyphus’ happiness

must derive from the knowledge that the very gods who condemned him are

now watching him, with frustration and grudging respect, push that damn

boulder up the mountainside again and again. They can’t break him. But if the

universe doesn’t know I’m telling it to screw itself, and if I’m still stuck here

suffering, Camus’s solution turns me into the irritable French waiter who

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refuses to quit his job merely because he dislikes his customers so much. The

customers don’t know why he’s grumpy (if they notice him at all), so whom is

he really punishing?

Arthur Schopenhauer observed that it is only in the Judeo-Christian tradition

that we find the wholesale condemnation of suicide, despite the fact that

neither the Old nor the New Testament contains much mention of it. But

Schopenhauer’s radius is a little too small: Buddhism and Hinduism also warn

against the dangers and irrationality of suicide, depending on its motivations (in

many Buddhist and Hindu accounts, taking one’s life to escape suffering only

increases suffering in the next life). For Schopenhauer, suicide can be a

perfectly reasonable choice (if you are indeed miserable, why prolong the

misery?) or even a morally praiseworthy act. What courage it must require, he

writes, to end one’s own life when one can see nothing better to do with it. Or

when, as was sometimes true in ancient China and at the height of the Roman

Empire, the shame of defeat could be so great that to go on living was an affront

to oneself and one’s peers. Schopenhauer quotes Stobaeus:

The good man should flee life when his misfortunes become too

great. . . . So he will marry and beget children and take part in the

affairs of the State, and, generally, practice virtue and continue to

live; and then, again, if need be, and at any time necessity compels

him, he will depart to his place of refuge in the tomb.

Shakespeare’s suicides die for honor or love. And as the self-immolations of

Buddhist monks during the Vietnam War and in Tibet today remind us, suicide

may be a profoundly morally praiseworthy thing. To take one’s life in protest of

human injustice seems far more rational than to go on living in protest of the

injustice of the universe.

We may feel that the suicide is failing in some debt he or she has to society. But

as Hume puts it in his essay on the subject,

[S]uppose that it is no longer in my power to promote the interest of

the public; suppose that I am a burden to it; suppose that my life

hinders some person from being much more useful to the public: in

such cases, my resignation of life must not only be innocent, but

laudable. And most people who lie under any temptation to

abandon existence are in some such situation; those who have

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I

health, or power, or authority, have commonly better reason to be in

humour with the world.

It’s unlikely, as Hume points out, that a person who feels satisfied with his lot

will wish to take his own life; much more common is the suicide who —

mistakenly or no — sees himself as useless, even harmful, to the people and

world around him. In perhaps the most famous defense of suicide ever offered,

Hume writes: “I believe that no man ever threw away life while it was worth

keeping.”

The Suicide Oak, New Orleans. Photograph fromthe Library of Congress

am not endorsing suicide. Hume is wrong: many people have thrown away

or tried to throw away lives well worth keeping (the Wittgensteins are a

good example). My elder stepbrother Paul leaped from one of the tallest

buildings in Calgary when I was seven years old, and I wish he were still around.

I have tried it, and, happily, I have failed. A few months ago I was in the

mountains of southern Brazil with a Tibetan Buddhist monk, a retired

firefighter, who told me (we were swapping stories of how we became

Buddhists) that he had tried three times to kill himself. I admitted my own

attempts. “We’re in the most shameful club of all,” he said. “We are the ones

who couldn’t even do that.” It’s true: people are furious with you if you succeed

and contemptuous of you if you fail.

“But your wife, your parents, your children!” we want to remind the would-be

suicide. Here’s the darkest paradox of that dark night of the soul: it is precisely

the suicide’s willingness to sacrifice his family’s happiness that serves, in his

mind, as further evidence that he’s the kind of person who, in the long run, will

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only harm the people he loves by sticking around. This sounds like the most

contemptible form of self-pity. But we can’t reproach the suicidally depressed

for feeling too sorry for themselves: that is symptomatic of a mind no longer

able to bear its own existence. “Yes, I feel too sorry for myself,” the suicide will

happily admit, “so sorry for myself that I can’t take it anymore.” You can drown

in self-pity, but knowing that self-pity is morally blameworthy doesn’t make

things better, it makes them worse.

What is to be done? I began this little inquiry by mentioning the silly, self-

righteous complaints people have been making about Vice’s photo essay

depicting artist-suicides. “Exploitation!” “Sensationalism!” It’s an unfortunate,

hypocritical fuss in a culture that both glamorizes the act and expresses moral

outrage over it. (If you want to see some sensible comments about the shoot,

look at what Joyce Carol Oates has to say, here.) Being unable to talk about

suicide openly, even when a fashion spread in a popular magazine is what

provokes the conversation, is genuinely damaging. I was dismayed when Vice’s

editors decided to take the photos off their website, because they had initiated a

lively and mostly interesting (if not always well informed) discussion.

I remember when, at about age fifteen, I finally mustered the courage to tell my

father about my desire to kill myself. I could talk to him about anything: he was

one of those New Agey crying dads who erred on the side of embarrassing his

kids by speaking his mind. But when I brought up suicide, he replied, “Son,

don’t even say those words.” I have three daughters, and I now understand how

he must have felt. But I still believe open discussion is critical. Suicide is on the

rise in America: more Americans die by suicide than in car accidents, and

suicide by gun is almost twice as common as homicide by gun. (It’s hard to

know how to feel about that last statistic.) Middle-aged men in America are

committing suicide at an accelerating rate. When I was in treatment for

depression, I found that meeting and talking to other people about suicide was

profoundly helpful; I saw what a loss it would have been had those people

succeeded.

A friend once said to me, “Suicide leaves behind nothing but miserable people

blaming themselves.” My psychiatrist, a wise eighty-seven-year-old woman

who has been practicing six days a week for more than forty years, told me,

“Think of the example it sets. For your children.” That remains the most

compelling argument I’ve heard against suicide: it sets an example — for one’s

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children, of course, but for others too. It isn’t that we want people to “tough it

out.” It isn’t that we think the suicide has acted out of moral weakness. It’s that,

when we look at the people we knew who committed suicide, they were often

the very people we most appreciated having around. We need more of those

people, not fewer. The bad weather of depression can and does change. The

argument for awaiting such a change presupposes that life is worth living for its

own sake, which I think is the deeper point Camus was trying to make. As far as

we know, life is the only game in town.

© 2012 Harper’s Magazine.