“America is killing its youth,” Alan Vega of the band Suicide famously sang on “Ghost Rider.” When actual suicide has been the cause of death, that sentiment has never been too far from the truth, and nearly two years’ worth of forced social isolation in varying degrees has probably contributed to their “...experienc[ing] an increase in suicide rates” even as a decline in same was enjoyed by the overall U.S. population. Maybe more telling than any raw data on suicides per year, though, is the fact that the 1-800 phone number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline will, in July 2022, finally be transferred to the kind of three-digit number (988) most commonly associated with life-or-death emergencies. It is safe enough to say that this remains a persistent crisis, and therefore Albert Camus’ famous thoughts on suicide remain undiminished in their relevancy:
There is but one truly 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 the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories – comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer. And if it is true, as Nietzsche claims, that a philosopher, to deserve our respect, must preach by example, you can appreciate the importance of that reply, for it will precede the definitive act.[i]
Camus’ proposition has gone largely unheeded in modern philosophy curriculae, as there is a continued proliferation of the “nine or twelve categories” obscurantism that he derides. The unsurprising result is that suicide has remained a problem to be dealt with by medical rather than philosophical authorities, and given the inextricability of medical advances from State policy, this has generally meant that measures against suicide are – for better or worse - very much shaped to serve that policy. That is to say, suicide prevention is better equipped to deploy the palliative tools already used against mental illness than to make the unflattering suggestion that State sponsors can very often be complicit in crafting the conditions of an intolerable life. The tragic result here is that suicide more often becomes conceptualized as the end point of a pathological condition than as the catastrophic – but perfectly reasoned – outcome of a lifetime of societal oppression, private abuse, or both.
To be certain, no serious modern nation sees itself as having the skill to totally prevent the act of voluntary death, and in those countries where legal euthanasia exists, some recent news stories have surfaced which show intriguing differences in the “official” approach towards this problem. First, in Switzerland, we have the introduction of a sleek, 3D-printed, needlessly aerodynamic “suicide pod” designed by a firm called Exit International. The brightly-colored self-extermination chambers do their duty by means of inducing hypoxia and hypocapnia, and are available to those who “qualify to die before they decide to end their life,” i.e. passing a test which “ensure[s] the decision is their own and not influenced by any other factors.” Notably, the pods carry on a lengthy tradition of Swiss friendliness towards legally assisted suicide (the procedure has not been proscribed there for nearly eighty years now), though the eager and enthusiastic stylings of the pods, along with similar promotional material, still manage to be somewhat unsettling.
At somewhat the opposite end of the libertarian spectrum is the decision of the German Euthanasia Association to only provide services for those who have either been vaccinated for, or recovered from, Covid-19. At face value, this decision appears not like some last-ditch attempt at deterring the assisted suicide of a valued citizen so much as a cynical requirement that the would-be suicide assent to the correctness of State doctrine even up to the point of death. Of course, being able to access euthanasia services in the first place has typically required some degree of permission from the State, but additionally demanding that the prospective suicide have his or her health in order first is another level of bureaucratic absurdity. Yes, I understand that this restriction is in place to protect the individuals actually administering the euthanasia procedures, but the poignancy of all this is still difficult to ignore. It is an enhancement of the already existing irony of legal assisted suicide: in the effort to reclaim one’s sovereignty in one of the most extreme ways possible, a final meaningful transaction requires the consent of governing bodies who very well may have made significant contributions to the suicidal individual’s earthly torment.
I am always puzzled by such official, legal prohibitions on suicide existing in modern states. The suicide-prone often have convictions that run contrary to the agenda of the ruling order, along with advanced sensitivity to the injustice and triumphal stupidity that thrive in authoritarian societies (this can certainly be said of certain friends of mine that chose to voluntarily end their lives). So, logically, the self-willed removal of dissident elements or vociferous critics would be convenient for any regime concerned with the consolidation and expansion of its power. The same would, I imagine, hold true for those who no longer have any “productive” value: as Eugene Thacker notes, “one commits suicide not because one wants to die, but because one is already dead…” (Thacker concludes this thought with “in which case suicide is not worth the trouble,”[ii] though this hardly feels like a “go-to” pep talk for suicide prevention). Perhaps the small price to be paid in terms of “public relations” damage would be worth it in the end for a regime to shed its “undesirables” in this way. Yet here we are, wondering what it is about the suicidal impulse that causes governing bodies to ostensibly stand up for its suicidal citizens’ well-being. Suffice to say that, until these same bodies quit systematically engaging in certain other activities inimical to “public health” - torture, indiscriminate murder of non-combatants, incommunicado detention, etc. etc. – they forfeit the right to be seen as purely altruistic on this or any other issue. Therefore it is worthwhile to consider State authorities’ suicide prevention efforts from a different perspective; namely that of their own self-preservation.
It is not a great shock that Arthur Schopenhauer, as one of the foundation stones of philosophical pessimism, would have had something to say about the larger social implications of suicide (particularly as his father’s death by drowning, when the young Arthur was 17, was assumed to be self-inflicted). Though ultimately determining suicide to not be worth the effort, as it did not truly overcome the universal striving of the Will, Schopenhauer did cast a critical eye upon its prohibition. In particular, he claimed that “it is only the monotheistic, that is to say Jewish, religions whose members regard self-destruction as a crime”, and this in spite of the fact that “neither in the Old nor in New Testament is there to be found any prohibition or even definite disapproval of it.”[iii]
The veracity of this statement is questionable today, if we consider the example above from a German state whose residents are only nominally believers (at least if the percentage of the church-going population as indicative of anything). Likewise for another pertinent example from China, where the fascistic marriage of corporate and governmental power decreed that preventative “suicide nets” be placed on the grounds of the FoxConn manufacturing complex (employees here were also required to sign “no suicide” pledges). Nevertheless, other thoughts by Schopenhauer on suicide are perfectly applicable to the type of authoritarian, utilitarian societies we presently inhabit, if they are shorn of references to the Christian church and its leadership. Take, for example, the following:
The only cogent moral argument against suicide is that it is opposed to the achievement of the highest moral goal, as it substitutes for a true redemption from this world of misery a merely apparent one.[iv]
While still aiming squarely at “these religions,” what Schopenhauer then said can be very easily assigned to the authorities that have set themselves up as moral arbiters in the place of religion: they are organizations which “[denounce] self-destruction so as not to be denounced by it.”
That any ruling class or network of elites could fear suicide’s “denouncing” effect seems to affirm what semanticist S.I. Hayakawa had to say on the subject, namely that suicide is a “communicative act.” Simply stated, the commission of the act often betrays a belief that those voluntarily ending their lives are doing so in order to dramatically alter the society that they are permanently leaving. While Hayakawa admitted that suicide was often the pitiable end result of struggling with mental illness, he did come closer to the thinking of someone like Antonin Artaud and others who deemed the suicidal, particularly those inclined towards unfettered artistic expression, as being collectively murdered by society (another memorable instance of the “suicide = murder” protest came from the German SPK [Sozialistisches Patientenkollektiv] which essentially saw the medical establishment as the vanguard of capitalist oppression).
Focusing squarely on Japanese tradition, in which “the idea of honor attaches to some degree even to suicides of desperation,”[v] Hayakawa suggests that it has
… long regarded suicide as a purposeful act, which may be and often is, honorable […] The Japanese dead are, in a sense, very much alive and part of the community. They are kami – they are present in the very air you breathe – they are dead but they cannot be said to be gone […] death is seen not as a cessation of life but as part of the entire life process.[vi]
Seen in this way, the intentions behind the forms of suicide most commonly seen as “unique” to Japan, e.g. the notorious seppuku martial suicide, as well as additional categories that Hayakawa lists (“suicides of protest” and “suicides of apology”) become somewhat clearer. Modern Japan is notable for forms of suicide so spectacular, i.e. leaping in front of oncoming subway or commuter trains, that it is difficult not to perceive them as socio-cultural critiques, (if not occasionally macabre artworks – indeed Hayakawa suggests the same when remarking on the aesthetic decisions involved in this act, something “no more mysterious than the fact that great corporations select an able art director”. Japanese authorities surely recognize the communicative, potentially denunciatory force behind these acts, but to my eyes have never really concocted a persistently effective public awareness campaign, relying instead on physical deterrents that can pass for having some other function besides preventing suicide (safety barriers of plexiglass or other durable material, placed between certain train platforms and the tracks below, can be sold to the public as a measure for “general” safety, although this seems odd in a country where there are a negligible number of accidental deaths caused by collisions of trains against human bodies).
However, I would argue with Hayakawa that the Japanese people have an exclusive perspective on suicide as being a “communal” rather than purely selfish act. There are simply too many other striking modern examples in which voluntary termination has been carried out in the hopes of affecting or bettering societal conditions that, of course, the successfully suicidal would not be around to actually witness. The self-immolation of Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức, followed in spirit by anti-authoritarian protestors like Ryszard Siwiec and Jan Palach, are difficult to interpret as anything other than strategic offensives against repressive systems that would not respond meaningfully to conventional forms of protest, and which were believed to be too marinated in their own violence to understand communications based on nuanced, reasoned argument. The denunciatory aspect of this act is also embedded in incidents that have not earned a similar heroic cachet: see the suicide-cum-mass murder in all its varieties, and what was perhaps the most famous mass suicide in modern history, the “revolutionary suicide” of Jim Jones’ Peoples’ Temple in Guyana, 1978 (and here the term “mass suicide” is something of a misnomer, implying complete voluntary action when, in reality, numerous children were coerced into the act). Without getting into the business of assigning different grades of moral correctness to any of the above acts, though, it is clear that all are united by the common bond of being first communicative, and then denunciatory.
For the record, I agree with Camus’ identification of suicide as a fundamental philosophical problem, and I feel he is saying something similar to Hayakawa when he admits that “absolute negation is not […] consummated by suicide.”[vii] Nevertheless, the above examples, and numerous others, invite some skepticism about his apparent conviction that choosing to rebel against authority and “choosing death” are mutually exclusive. As Herbert Read summarizes in his preface to Camus’ The Rebel, “if we decide to live, it must be because we have decided that our existence has some positive value; if we decide to rebel, it must be because we have decided that a human society has some positive value.”[viii] Particularly for suicidal martyrs, from the kamikaze pilot to the jihadi suicide bomber, there are those who refute this point by paradoxically affirming their existence through self-destruction, and who may hope in that same moment to die in a “communicative” way that affirms the worth of an idealized society.
While the suicide-as-martyr remains a frightening prospect to the dominant forces whose illegitimacy is meant to be revealed by voluntary death, it is not a suicide’s final moments of immolation which I feel causes the greatest concern (especially as these acts often involve random taking of non-combatant lives, or severe destruction of public property, that makes them easy enough to cast as the villain). Rather it is the more general denunciatory atmosphere, combined with an affirmation of self-determination, that these acts project. Even an archaic Japanese term for suicide, jiketsu, can be translated as “self-determination,” evincing a belief that this act was demonstrative of a certain striving for independence above all - whatever the suicide’s real intentions may have been. It is very possibly this aspect of suicide that is most unappealing to any totalizing authority: the way in which even suicides committed out of profound personal despair and hopelessness may be re-envisioned as acts of extreme self-determination, or as instances when even those being “collectively murdered” can at least deny their murderers, who may have successfully determined every other aspect of the suicide’s former life, the pleasure of choosing the exact time and place of exit.
Communicative, “denunciatory” suicide has one additional feature worth closing with here. Another luminary from the pessimist pantheon, Emil Cioran, memorably claimed of the “man of violence” that “his occasional efforts to destroy others are merely a roundabout route to his own destruction […] beneath his self-confidence, his braggadocio, lurks a fanatic of disaster.”[ix] Though this sentiment could, and has been, associated with the death-before-dishonor ethos of the martial suicide, it can just as easily be a wink in the direction of coercive, violent authorities the world over. For those who derive their authority principally from coercive violence, or threatening the non-compliant with the same, suicides are not simply communicative but also predictive: for systems gaining their legitimacy solely through violence and threat of force, these extreme actions provide a foretaste of their eventually collapsing under their own weight.
[i] Camus, A, (1991). The Myth of Sisyphus. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
[ii] Thacker, E. (2018). Infinite Resignation. London: Repeater Books.
[iii] Schopenhauer, A. (2004). Essays and Aphorisms. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. London / New York: Penguin Books.
[iv] Ibid.
[v] Hayakawa, S.I. (1957). “Suicide as a Communicative Act.” A Review of General Semantics, 15(1): pp. 46-51.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Camus, A. (1991). The Rebel. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
[viii] Quoted in Ibid.
[ix] Cioran, E. (1998). The Temptation to Exist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.