Hanging On: Modernity and the Crisis of Suicide
/Stay
By Jennifer Michael HechtYale University Press, 2013The supremacy of the individual is the hallmark of modern thought, but it does not clarify the morality of suicide. Some torchbearers for modernity, like David Hume, marked self-murder as the ultimate expression of human freedom. Others, like Albert Camus, rejected suicide as an abdication of the self, an irrevocable surrendering of one’s liberty. Rather than decisively settle the issue of suicide, the valorization of humanism, and the corresponding elevation of the individual, transforms it into a universal crisis, demanding, as Camus once wrote, that every morally serious person confront it unblinkingly.Jennifer Michael Hecht’s Stay grapples with the grim fact that, for all the blessings it has otherwise bestowed, the Enlightenment also weakened the traditional prohibition against suicide by undermining the religious interdictions against it, thereby loosening the self from the primary moral restrictions that formerly manacled its free choice. The modern celebration of individuality “enhanced the value of the self above that of community and tradition and made each man and woman an independent being,” Hecht writes, but such manumission also had the power to “produce anxiety and isolation.” Radical freedom can feel like moral displacement, or the abandonment of any transcendent source of purpose or guidance.Hecht details the evidence that suicide is, in fact, a growing crisis: in the past half-century, worldwide suicide rates have leapt by 60 percent. In the United States, no exception to this frightful trend, suicide, for some age groups, now routinely kills more than murder, war, AIDS, or cancer. For all the many risks that that threaten human life, its voluntary forfeiture ranks among the most deadly.Hecht’s ambition in Stay is both philosophical and practical: first, she aims to “tell the story of how philosophy in Western culture got its reputation for tolerating suicide.” For this, she draws from a bottomless well of sources, earmarking “history and philosophy” as the “realms I always turn to seeking understanding.” Hecht scours the stacks to find counsel in Plato, Shakespeare, Lucretius, Sartre, Montaigne, Bertrand Russell, and seemingly every notable luminary who ever so much as mentioned suicide, however parenthetically. Former talk show host Phil Donahue’s pithy wisdom ranks a mention alongside Plutarch’s.That intellectual accounting, though, is preparatory to Hecht’s own argument, one she implausibly insists is unrepresented among the historical catalogue of opinions she compiles. What is most needful, she argues, is a new “contrarian position, a nonreligious argument against suicide,” necessary because “our culture’s only systematic argument against suicide is about God.” Hecht sets up her own version of Nietzsche’s “Death of God” scenario: now that “our arguments with the old beliefs of our culture have led us into some ideological dead ends,” we need to exalt a new philosophical authority to convince the emotionally downtrodden that suicide is morally impermissible.By “old beliefs” Hecht clearly means religion, apparently discredited by the modern rationalism she obviously prefers and repeatedly pits against faith. Also, while she touches upon Jewish and Muslim views on suicide, her abiding preoccupation is with Christianity. An earthly case opposed to suicide needs to be mounted to help the “millions of people who have no religion,” the “millions more whose religious beliefs don’t completely rule out suicide,” those who are religious and “believe that God will forgive the act and provide a blessed afterlife,” and the despondent soul who “in her darkest hour might not be able to feel the God she otherwise believes in.” Hecht never considers the possibility that some might benefit from a renewed commitment to their spirituality, or that the worldly readers she addresses might find solace from what grieves them in faithful devotion. And despite marshaling impressive statistical support for some of her other positions, she does not convincingly make the case that a significant number of suicides result from the absence of secular, philosophical encouragement. It’s never clear either that the rising numbers of suicides can be directly explained by the decline of religious authority.
The sociological fact that suicide influences suicide leads to a philosophical idea: that it is morally wrong to kill oneself. A key predictor of suicide is knowing a suicide, and that means that in killing yourself you are likely to be killing someone else too, by influence.
However, Hecht undermines her own argument with needless hyperbole, stretching her conclusions far beyond the perimeter of her evidence. Of course, suicide scatters seeds of anguish among a deceased’s survivors. But is it really clear that one suicide directly influences another? It’s rarely possible to locate a single factor that “causes” a person to kill himself; there is almost always a diffuse constellation of grievance and remorse, even if one particular event is the catalyst that sets the self- destructive wheels spinning. Hecht seems to acknowledge this herself a one point: “We cannot know how many people feel an acute loss when someone commits suicide.” Later, she deserts this circumspection, citing research that shows there are about “425 people connected to each suicide.” It’s hard to tell what she means by “connected.” Hecht’s intentions are good, but her guilt-trip to would-be suicides rests on far shakier assumptions than evidence allows.Hecht too often extends the same philosophical recklessness to her treatment of religion in general and Christianity in particular. She concedes that organized religion has historically been staunch in its opposition to suicide, but insists that its position reduces to nothing more than divine proscription, emptied of all rational substance. What makes Hecht’s neglect of Christianity’s natural law tradition, and the rich philosophical mediations it birthed, so inexplicable is that she discusses the cardinal arguments espoused by its theological father, Thomas Aquinas. In fact, the first offensive Aquinas led against suicide was strikingly similar to Hecht’s own: that “it injures the community of which the individual is a part.” Indeed, though she makes little of Aquinas’ anticipation of her own views, she does grant, discussing the antagonism of suicide to the community, that “Within Christianity we see an efflorescence of this approach in the first part of the seventeenth century.”
If the Catholic Church and other religious groups had never taken a fierce position against suicide, it seems unlikely that the philosophers of the Enlightenment would have taken up the subject, and if they had, it seems possible they would have followed the logic of their other opinions and given serious thought to the happiness and preservation of the individual.
Besides the precariousness of her hypothesis-driven scholarship—recklessly postulating what might have happened in an alternate universe —Hecht’s presumption that the modern sufferance (and sometimes celebration) of suicide contravenes its own core principles is never demonstrated. In fact, she concedes elsewhere that the unraveling of the inner logic of the Enlightenment—the apotheosis of the autonomous individual—buttresses the freedom to kill oneself. Rather than straining to indict religion for philosophical crimes and misdemeanors, Hecht could have investigated the possibility that modernity’s infatuation with freedom eroded its sense of moral restraint.Much of Hecht’s lack of theoretical moderation seems to result from a confused split in her aims: disinterested understanding and successful persuasion. She claims to mine both philosophy and history for guidance but also openly announces her intention to “proselytize to the living in favor of rejecting suicide.” It’s nearly impossible to skeptically examine the root causes and moral status of suicide while also trying to “erect an adamant prohibition” against it, which is supposed to “mitigate the struggle over it,” not Socratically extend its philosophical examination. Hecht longs for a “secular, logical antisuicide consensus”; for all her objections to religion’s tendency to prefer calcified doctrine to reason, she wants a doctrine of her own, the kind that concludes, not inaugurates, a debate.The collapse of philosophy into rhetoric produces a good deal of maudlin overstatement. Hecht begins the book by frustratedly asking, “Why are we not responding to this tragedy?” and then subsequently notes a variety of organizations that are, in fact, responding with vigor. She also inexplicably observes that while our society tries to prevent suicide as an abrogation of self-interest, “no one actually insists that suicide is wrong” —but, of course, the opposite assertion is more likely closer to the truth. Hecht’s encyclopedic tour of the philosophical engagement with suicide can be fascinating but also distracting, as many passages seem to appear only to justify a claim to comprehensiveness. These philosophical vignettes sometimes feel like exhibits in a mounting legal
A person in crisis may find it too hard to do anything for himself, let alone for someone else. Yet it may be possible to think through these ideas ahead of time, so that useful responses are at the ready when one needs them.
Though she pays lip service to the limitations ideas might have as instruments of practical persuasion, Hecht insists on making them the centerpiece of her campaign against suicide. “No argument will convince everyone, but no one should die for want of knowing the philosophical thinking on staying alive.” Ideas not only inform and edify, but save as well. Put succinctly, “Ideas matter.”At the heart of Hecht’s sanguine rationalism is the conviction that one can argue oneself out of debilitating sorrow. Despite her argument that the Enlightenment deepened the problem of suicide by dismantling the traditional restrictions on it, she still turns to its animating principles for an antidote to hopelessness, especially the conviction that the spread of reason is our last and best hope at redemption.The primary defect of Hecht’s often impressive study, then, is not the peremptory dismissal of religion, but her failure to appreciate the limitations of the intellect to relieve the pressures placed on a soul hobbled with despair. Stay’s turn away from the rarefied air of philosophical disputation to emotional appeal, even to sophistry, is evidence of Hecht’s own backhanded admission that modernity’s spiritual torpor cannot be repaired by philosophy alone, that the modern mind might lack the resources to heal itself without recourse to pre-modern forms of human guidance and comfort. We can’t merely think ourselves out of the abyss once one foot is planted in it. Part of that revival might even be spiritual.Nevertheless, Hecht is to be commended for courageously wrestling with the gloomiest aspect of human consciousness: our capacity to deny the goodness of existence itself and choose blind nothingness over suffering. Hecht’s commitment to pulling the most demoralized back from the ledge is evidenced on every page, crescendoing in a heartrending plea to those about to surrender hope to reconsider and “stay” among us. While she passionately argues that staying is a moral obligation of the highest order, Hecht always presents that duty with touching compassion.The dark shadow cast over modernity’s blessings is the unsettling fact that the many new comforts of life have not made us any more committed to living. Hecht’s contribution is an important step in comprehending the question Camus said afflicts us all, of the value of human life. This question has never pressed itself upon us with such urgency, a historical development that cries out for greater scrutiny. Stay is a forceful reminder of the power of the human intellect to defend carrying on when the weight of hardship pulls us under, as well as an inadvertent demonstration of its limitations to retrieve hope lost.____Ivan Kenneally is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York.
