Condemned to exile on a flimsy
charge of corrupting the youth and spreading false religion, Socrates, that
most revered figure of Western philosophy, took his own life, not only sealing
his place in the pantheon of intellectuals zealously devoted to the truth, but
also denying his Athenian accusers the opportunity to inflict injustice upon
him.

Lisa Lieberman bemoans the decline
of Socratic suicide: suicide undertaken rationally and honorably, a gesture of
defiance against authority or an assertion of one’s integrity or identity in a
flawed world.  Gone are Samson, Lucretius, and Cato.  In their stead is a
conception of suicide as an essentially private act undertaken by a person
afflicted with depression or other mental illness, an act with little personal
responsibility and even less political significance.  The suicides of those
attempting to regain their dignity (such as those of Holocaust survivors Primo
Levi and Bruno Bettelheim) are now the rare exception to the trend of "medicalizing"
suicide so as to rob of its potential for rebellion, aggression, and
disruption.

Leaving You is the history
of this transition in Western thinking about suicide, in which suicide shakes
off its relationship to the polity and becomes symptomatic of blameless
victimization.  Though Lieberman traces the beginnings of this transition to
the early Christian condemnation of suicide as contrary to divine authority,
her focus falls on the anxieties suicide produced in the emerging European
Enlightenment democracies.  The success of these democracies was widely seen as
depending on the proper use of the liberties they afforded their citizens,
liberties which citizens were obliged to exercise not only self-interestedly
but also virtuously.  Suicide came to represent an "abuse" of
democratic liberty, a failure to exhibit the Tocquevillean civic virtue needed
for self-government.  These factors, combined with the emergence of a science
of mental health, are the chief causes of this transition in Western thinking
about suicide, according to Lieberman.

The eighteenth century French philosophes
recognized early on that suicide took on a distinctly political meaning within
democratic communities.  Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
French authorities were fixated on the manie du suicide that seemed to
coincide with the emergence of an urbanized and mobile society.  Suicide became
a subject of medical and bureaucratic concern.  It became understood as a
contagion linked to the level of "social dysfunction," (36) thus
requiring the skills of sociologists and alienists to trace its respective "outer"
and "inner" causes.  Lieberman sees in early modern France the
development of a conception of suicide as a blameless malady lacking in
volition and traceable to alienation and other social forces.  This
understanding reached its zenith in the work of Durkheim, Laplace, and Comte. 
Suicide, according to many French intellectuals of the time, was a sign of France’s
decline, just as it signaled the decline of classical Rome. 

Lieberman finds a mirror of this
transition in the literary narratives of the era.  Rousseau’s Nouvelle
Heloise offered an early example of a new model of suicide: the romantic,
tortured soul maltreated by circumstance.  In the end, Rousseau manages to
suggest that such suicide was simply petulant and temperamental.  Liberty was a
burden that demanded fortitude lest it be overwhelmed by passions.  Rousseau,
by emphasizing social duty over personal fulfillment, affirmed that life in a
democratic society demanded a disciplined use of personal freedom even though "human
nature often fell short of this moral standard."  Lieberman notes a
gendered version of this dynamic in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary:  The novel
was read as an example of uppity female behavior, a bid for power and a
rejection of bourgeois matrimony.  Suicide, for Emma Bovary and for Flaubert’s
audience, becomes a weapon wielded against patriarchal society.

According to Lieberman, romantic
suicide of the "goodbye cruel world" variety became a standard "script"
for suicide in the nineteenth century.  In suicide notes and memoirs, suicidal
individuals came to adopt the language of such works as Goethe’s The Sorrows
of Young Werther, practically savoring and wallowing in their romantic
sorrows.  These individuals adopt a largely passive tone, describing suicide as
the inevitable consequence of a fragile soul’s being battered about by a
capricious lover.  For Lieberman, the romantic suicide script served a double
role: The suicidal individual was able to "construct an identity" as
a soul ill-suited to live in a harsh world, even if her motives were
transparently less noble (dishonesty, self-pity, malice, etc.).  For the ‘audience,’
this script absolved them of responsibility, since the suicide could be viewed
as either the result of insanity or impersonal social forces.  This romantic
script is still with us, Lieberman notes.  William Styron indulges in it in Darkness
Visible, and the interest in the suicide of Sylvia Plath indicates its
continuing allure.

Leaving You offers a richly
textured historical narrative, and Lieberman displays a great facility at
synthesizing disparate sources of evidence into a compelling explanation of how
Western culture has revised its understanding of suicide.  But it is a greatly
limited narrative.  First, Lieberman promises that her narrative will
illuminate "our reigning perception of suicide."  Yet Leaving You
is almost completely concerned with the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
and with developments in France at that.  There is not a single reference to
research on suicide after 1900.  Hence, I have doubts that Lieberman has much
to tell us about what ‘we’ think about suicide and how we came to think it.  A
number of competing views of suicide co-exist in our culture: One is the
victimization paradigm so vividly traced by Lieberman.  But there are others:
suicide as usurpation of God’s power, as a rational response to trying
circumstances, as the utterly predictable result of persistent mental illness. 
None of these views dominates and they are inconsistent with one another. 

This indicates a second limitation
of Lieberman’s book: It is not a book about suicide, but about the evolution of
the cultural meanings of suicide.  And it is not mere arrogance to say that we
now understand the origins of suicide better than we ever have, even if the typical
popular understandings of suicide lag behind this knowledge.  We now understand
the intimate relationship between suicide and affective mental disorders, the
ways in which such disorders impact the psyche of suicidal persons, and the
neurological and social factors that encourage such disorders.  This is not to
assert that suicidology has been so successful that its demise is now
imminent.  Lieberman seems to implicitly endorse a methodological precept
widely accepted within the discipline of cultural studies: that cultural understandings
of a phenomenon is all the "truth" there is about a phenomenon.  While
we should be mindful of the impact that cultural understandings of suicide have
toward our scientific theories about it, this is not reason to doubt that our
scientific understanding of suicide is stronger now than ever and likely to
deepen.

Thus, I am less sanguine about
Lieberman’s affection for the now lost picture of suicide as a defiant
political gesture.   Lieberman herself struggles to find examples that truly
follow this model, and I would suggest that Socrates is the exception rather
than the rule concerning the motivations for suicide.  If suicide never really
was a defiant political gesture, why should we lament the demise of this
understanding of suicide? 

Finally, a worry about the
practical significance of Leaving You: Lieberman appears to subscribe to
the thesis that the more we medicalize suicide, the more we rob the suicidal of
their volition and autonomy.  This is problematic on two fronts:  One, it
assumes that suicidal individuals are acting autonomously and of their
volition.  This is at least debatable.  Second, the medicalization of suicide,
and of mental illness generally, has occasionally led to abuses and violations
of autonomy, including forced institutionalization and medication, etc.  But these
are not the fault of our attempts to identify the causal factors, whether they be
biological or social, that contribute to suicidal behavior.  They are failures
of practice, not of theory per se, and to investigate the causes of
suicide can only lead to more humane and more ethical societal responses to
suicide and need not undermine the autonomy of the suicidal.

These concerns notwithstanding, Leaving
You performs one of the great services of history.  By reminding us of the
contingency of our beliefs and practices, it stimulates us to reflect upon the
legitimacy of those beliefs and practices.  Suicide can’t help but generate
uneasiness in us, Lieberman rightly claims.  For it runs counter to many of our
most cherished beliefs and hopes about humanity.  Lieberman’s book will help to
illuminate the sources of this uneasiness.

 

© 2003 Michael Cholbi

 

Michael Cholbi, Ph.D., Assistant
Professor of Philosophy, California State Polytechnic University at Pomona

Categories: Philosophical, Ethics, Depression