The Dedalus Book of Literary Suicides

by Gary Lachman

  One philosopher who put the theory and practice of suicide together in a dramatic way was the little known German thinker, Philipp Mainländer, a disciple, like Boltzmann, of Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer’s grim view of life, spelled out in detail in his single masterwork, The World as Will and Representation, can be summed up in this quotation. “We can regard our life,” Schopenhauer tells us, “as a uselessly disturbing episode in the blissful repose of nothingness. Human existence must be a kind of error: it is bad today and everyday it will get worse, until the worst of all happens.” That Boltzmann’s calculations led to the conclusion that eventually, the organised energy in the universe – collected in planets, stars, galaxies and so on – would level out into a kind of lukewarm cosmic soup, suggest a kind of scientific proof of Schopenhauer’s ‘blissful repose of nothingness’. But although it’s unclear how much, if at all, his philosophical beliefs motivated Boltzmann’s suicide, Mainländer’s was clearly prompted by a metaphysical pessimism that outdid even his master’s.

  Mainländer’s central insight, which eventually led to his death, was that the universe itself is a result of God’s suicide. As Jorge Luis Borges, in his essay Bianthanatos, which is a reading of Thomas De Quincey’s abridgement of John Donne’s treatise arguing that Christ’s death was a suicide, remarks of Mainländer, “he imagined that we are fragments of a God who, at the beginning of time, destroyed himself, avid for non-being.” “Universal history,” Borges continues, “is the shadowy death throes of those fragments.”1 Borges rightly suggests that Mainländer’s view is very reminiscent of that of the Gnostics, who believed this world was the creation of an evil demiurge, and that it was best to escape from it as soon as possible. This was a sentiment favoured by Aristotle as well; in his Poetics he suggests that it is best not to have been born, and second best to die young. Some later Gnostic sects, like the Cathars, sometimes helped the ill and aged among them to escape the demiurge by suffocating them. It is unclear what, if anything, Mainländer knew about the Gnostics, but he might have pointed out to them that, as he writes in his work The Philosophy of Redemption, “Our world is the means and the only means of achieving non-existence.”2

  Mainländer, whose real surname was Batz, was born in the small German town of Offenbach am Main in 1841. Although early on he showed an interest in literature and poetry, in order to please his father he studied commerce at Dresden. After a period in Italy, he returned to Germany, where he helped in his father’s business. Then, in 1860, the single most important encounter of his life took place: he came across Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation; ironically, it was the year Schopenhauer died. The effect of Schopenhauer’s work on Mainländer was similar to that on another one-time disciple, Nietzsche. Mainländer, as Nietzsche (and Boltzmann) would be later on, was stunned by Schopenhauer’s pessimistic vision. Schopenhauer, whose thought is in many ways very similar to Buddhism, argued that the world was the result of a blind, compelling will, that forced human beings to live. All wills are in conflict and no sooner is a will satisfied than it is bored with its satisfaction and is once again driven by an unappeasable hunger. Like the Buddha, Schopenhauer argued that the higher life is achieved through cessation of the will and abstention from its desires, hence lessening suffering. Ironically, Schopenhauer, who preached a profound world-rejection, lived a rather comfortable life, and augmented his ‘nay-saying’ with many civilized pleasures; Nietzsche, his one-time disciple, who later created a ‘pro-life’ philosophy of ‘yea-saying’ (Mainländer in fact was one of his targets) had a miserable life, full of illness, loneliness and poverty.

  Schopenhauer argued that by withdrawing from the will’s compulsion one could attain a degree of freedom and a measure of ‘blissful repose’. He also argued that life itself was a very big mistake, and that suicide was neither a crime nor a sin. But he didn’t actively advocate killing oneself: suicide, he believed, was merely one more manifestation of the will, rather than a valid retreat from it. Mainländer, however, went further. Not only is suicide neither a crime nor a sin, it’s the clearest act of devotion to God.

  Mainländer argued that immortality – which Christians believe they will participate in after their death – is unbearable and agonizing, even for God. But being eternal by nature, God cannot avoid it. The only way for God to achieve the release – or ‘redemption’, as Mainländer puts it – of non-being, is by transforming himself into our world of time, space and matter, “which is constantly progressing from a transient existence into a permanent oblivion and death.”3 This, I may add, is precisely the condition that Boltzmann foresaw as the outcome of his ‘increased entropy’, a lecture about which, we remember, the pseudo-suicide Arthur Cravan treated his Parisian audience to, in lieu of killing himself.

  As one commentator suggests, according to Mainländer’s view, the Big Bang is basically the result of God blowing his brains out. “Everything in the universe,” Mainländer tells us, “is directed toward non-existence.” Mainländer argued that eventually, human beings will realize that non-existence is preferable to existence, and act accordingly. i.e. commit suicide, which, for him, is an “act of redemption.”

  Mainländer’s own act of redemption took place in his thirty-fifth year. There may have been a suicidal strain in the family; three of his siblings would also kill themselves, although it is doubtful they were led to it via metaphysics. Mainländer had for some time deferred to his father’s wishes and worked at a bank. He hoped to save enough of a nest egg so that he could devote himself to philosophy and poetry. The stock market crash of 1873, however, ruined him, and Mainländer was left adrift. He seemed to have a craving for ‘submission and obedience’ which led to him taking on menial work; it also led to him entering the military. But although he had signed up for a three year term, he was released early; it is unclear why. Prior to his service, Mainländer threw himself into writing The Philosophy of Redemption. When he finished, he gave the manuscript to his sister, charging her with the task of finding a publisher. His only request was that his surname, Batz, did not appear, and that he instead be known as Philipp Mainländer. His motivation for this seems to be a combination of love for his hometown, and a reluctance to “being exposed to the eyes of the world.” Mainländer’s mind then became unbalanced and he grew obsessed with his work, producing, in a short time, his memoirs, a novella, and a second volume of his magnum opus. He developed a kind of megalomania, declaring himself “the messiah of social democracy,” and advocating celibacy as a means of avoiding the prolongation of life. The exact trigger of his suicide is unclear, but on 1 April 1876, the day after The Philosophy of Redemption was published, Mainländer redeemed himself by hanging himself, apparently by stepping off a stack of review copies of his work.

  Although philosophers like Schopenhauer, and more extremely, Mainländer, gave reasons and arguments in favour of suicide, a later group of thinkers were focused on the question why, given the world was meaningless, more people didn’t kill themselves. Inheriting a world that had already become inured to the idea of ‘the death of God’, the gradual rundown of the cosmos, and our own descent from the hairy ape, and to which the ideology of ‘progress’ no longer seemed to apply – a world in which human existence seemed pointless and accidental – beginning in the late nineteenth century, writers and thinkers began to chart the effect of this loss of belief on human consciousness. Nihilism, the belief, literally, in nothing, took hold of western consciousness and led those who were sensitive to it to an abyss. Unlike anarchists, with whom they are often confused, nihilists were not necessarily prompted to action by their belief. According to the historian Jacques Barzun, “The genuine kind believe in nothing and do nothing about it.”4 Although the pointlessness of life seemed apparent to them, most nihilists also recognized the pointlessness of killing themselves and avoided making the effort. Nietzsche, who considered himself an anti-nihilist, agreed with them that the universe is meaningless, but disagreed with them in believing that one�
��s own life needn’t be. Yet suicide was not far from his mind too. “The thought of suicide,” he wrote in Beyond Good and Evil, “is a powerful solace: by means of it one gets through many a bad night.”5 And in Thus Spake Zarathustra he counsels us to, “Die at the right time.”6 Sadly, this is one counsel Nietzsche himself did not follow. Having gone insane in 1889, most probably from syphilis, he remained in a state of mental and physical paralysis until his death in 1900; during that time he was under the care of his antisemitic, pro-nationalist sister Elizabeth, who forged his work, and often dressed him in a toga to impress important visitors.7

  Nietzsche and another 19th century thinker, S#toren Kierkegaard, are credited with starting the school of philosophy known as existentialism, the most famous exponent of which was Jean Paul Sartre, whose Being and Nothingness is a massive elaboration on Hamlet’s suicidal query “To be or not to be.” Existentialism is concerned with questions about the meaning of life and the significance of one’s actions, considerations that it believed had been lost in the abstract academic approach to philosophy, still dominant today. Kierkegaard thought that in the ‘present age’, life had become so abstract that even suicide was affected. “Not even a suicide does away with himself out of desperation,” he wrote, “he considers the act so long and so deliberately, that he kills himself with thinking – one could barely call it suicide since it is thinking which takes his life. He does not kill himself with deliberation but rather kills himself because of deliberation.”8 But the existentialist writer and thinker with whom the philosophical question of suicide is most often associated is Albert Camus.

  Camus is best known for his novels The Stranger and The Plague, but he first made a name for himself with his long philosophical essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, which asks the simple question, “Is life worth living?” “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,” Camus writes, “and that is suicide. Judging whether or not life is worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”9 Camus himself didn’t commit suicide, although his death in a road accident in 1960 at the age of forty-six seemed, as one writer thought, to make sense.10 Another writer agreed. In his account of his own depression and near suicide, Darkness Visible, William Styron remarks apropos of Camus’ death that “there was an element of recklessness in the accident that bore overtones of the near-suicidal, at least of death flirtation […]”11 Styron also remarks that his and Camus’s friend, the novelist Romain Gary, who later committed suicide following the suicide of his ex-wife, the actress Jean Seberg, had told him that Camus had often spoken of suicide, if in a darkly comical way.12 Styron, understandably focused on his own harrowing experience of depression, wonders if Camus’ philosophical preoccupation with suicide “might have sprung at least as strongly from some persistent disturbance of mood as from his concerns with ethics and epistemology,”13 an expression of the ‘pathologizing’ of metaphysics I talk about in the introduction.

  The Myth of Sisyphus is concerned with why we should not kill ourselves, given we live pointless lives in a meaningless universe, a universe that Camus calls ‘absurd’. In such a universe, there is no reason why we should do anything, including live. Earlier God had given a direction and meaning to existence, but since God’s ‘death’ – not by his own hand a la Mainländer, but chiefly through the increase in scientific knowledge – that direction and meaning has vanished, and we are left facing a vast, empty space that is oblivious to our presence. As the existentialists pointed out in various ways, there is nothing necessary about us being here; there is, in fact, no reason why anything should exist at all. This, more or less, has been the dominant view ever since.14

  Camus ranges through a gallery of existential thought, encountering and rejecting the work of figures like Karl Jaspers, Edmund Husserl, Lev Shestov and others, and the essay rambles on much more than I recall from my first reading as a teenager many years ago. Suicide is the hook on which Camus hangs his thought, but his central preoccupation is with delineating what he calls ‘the absurd’, a theme he shares with Sartre, who spoke of the experience of ‘the absurd’ as ‘nausea’. In a oft-quoted passage, Camus writes of that “odd state of the soul in which the void becomes eloquent, in which the chain of daily gestures is broken, in which the heart vainly seeks the link that will connect it again,” and in which he detects “the first sign of absurdity.” “Rising, tram, four hours in the office or factory, meal, tram, four hours of work, meal, sleep and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, according to the same rhythm […] But one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.”15 Faced with the inability to answer that ‘why’, we are, Camus tells us, confronted with the ‘absurd’, and with the inescapable meaninglessness of our lives. To be sure, we are fenced in by a variety of immediate ‘meanings’: we work in order to feed ourselves, to support our families, to go on living. “You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit.”16 But, he continues, sometimes the habit falls away and we are left asking why we go on living, and then we are adrift.

  Another writer, one we wouldn’t usually associate with Camus, asked a similar question some years earlier. In his Experiment in Autobiography, H.G. Wells hit the existential note a decade before Camus when he wrote that, “What was once the whole of life, has become to an increasing extent, merely the background of life. People can ask now what would have been an extraordinary question five hundred years ago. They can say, ‘Yes, you earn a living, you support a family, you love and hate, but – what do you do?’ ”17 Surprisingly, Wells, who had hitherto looked to science as the great emancipator and agent of human progress, took a darkly existential view in his last book, Mind at the End of Its Tether, in which he announced that “the end of everything we call life is close at hand” and that “everything was driving anyhow to anywhere at a steadily increasing velocity …”18

  Camus calls on the figure of Sisyphus from Greek mythology to symbolize his answer to the question of suicide. Although Sisyphus is doomed to a pointless, repetitive act – rolling a boulder up a mountain, only to have it roll down again, “futile and hopeless labour,” his own version of the workaday week – we must, Camus tells us, “imagine Sisyphus happy.”19 If anyone should have cause to embrace suicide as a means of escaping an ‘absurd’ existence, Sisyphus does. Yet he is “happy.” We, then, Camus suggests, should be too. Yet how can Sisyphus be happy?

  Although Camus rejects any religious or metaphysical ban on suicide and wants to live life “without appeal” to anything beyond it, and although he faces the ‘absurd’ squarely without flinching, he rejects suicide. For Camus, “killing yourself amounts to confessing.” “It is confessing that life is too much for you or that you do not understand it … It is merely confessing that that ‘is not worth the trouble’.”20 Yet it is not only this. “Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit [life], the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation and the uselessness of suffering.”21 So in an absurd universe, suicide is an expression of man’s freedom, perhaps his only one. We can, as Ivan Karamazov would like to in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, return to God the entrance ticket to this absurd universe, and not subject ourselves to its cruelties and pointlessness. Yet, for Camus, this would somehow be beneath the dignity of the ‘absurd hero’. “There is no fate,” he tells us, “that cannot be surmounted by scorn,”22 a sentiment reminiscent of Ernest Hemingway’s dictum that “a man can be destroyed but not defeated.” Hemingway, too, was a writer with an interest in the question of suicide, a question which he eventually answered by blowing his brains out, although there is good reason to believe that the electro-shock therapy Hemingway received as treatment for his depression, and which left his memory and his ability to write in ruins, was what finally sent him over the edge.

  Although the world is absurd
, our lives contingent, and the future without reprieve, and although Sisyphus, “the proletarian of the gods […] knows the whole extent of his wretched condition,”23 yet he can rise above it, be greater than it by not giving in to the impulse to give back the entrance ticket and sink into non-existence. Existence, for all its absurdity, is preferable to its opposite. In the face of it, Camus tells us, “the absurd man says yes.”

  Dostoyevsky, who Camus refers to frequently, and whose novel, The Possessed, he adapted into a play, was another writer obsessed with questions of life or death. Camus and Sartre had both put their lives in danger while being members of the resistance during the Nazi occupation of France. But Dostoyevsky had a more intimate encounter with his possible immediate death. Arrested for subversive activities, Dostoyevsky was facing a firing squad in the St. Petersburg’s Semyonovsky Square when a last minute reprieve was issued; the experience was so shattering that one of his fellow prisoners went insane. This near miss produced in Dostoyevsky a mystical appreciation of the absolute value of life, a vision of its “infinite possibilities” (Graham Greene) that returned in the visionary states preceding his epileptic attacks. Possibly the most concise expression of this insight occurs in Crime and Punishment, when Raskolnikov contemplates that:

  … someone condemned to death says, or thinks an hour before his death, that if he had to live on a high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he’d only have room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than die at once.24

  Dostoyevsky is full of these strange visions of meaning. In The Brothers Karamazov he tells the story of an atheist who disbelieved in life after death; when he dies, God, as a penance for his disbelief, sentences him to walk a million miles before he can enter heaven. The atheist refuses, and for a million years he doesn’t take a step. More time passes and he still doesn’t move. Finally, he gives in, and grudgingly does his penance. When he is allowed to enter heaven after walking his million miles, he immediately declares that a penance ten times as great would be nothing compared to five minutes in heaven. Yet there is also the counter image. Again in Crime and Punishment there is the criminal Svidrigalov, who sees eternity as the corner of a small dusty room, full of cobwebs and spiders. Like several of Dostoyevsky’s characters, Svidrigalov kills himself.