Altruistic Suicide

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Altruistic Suicide

But if excessive individuation thus leads to suicide, so does insufficient individuation: thus, among primitive peoples, we find several categories of suicide -- men on the threshold of old age, women upon the deaths of their husbands, followers and servants upon the deaths of their chiefs -- in which the person kills himself because it is his duty. Such a sacrifice, Durkheim argued, is imposed by society for social purposes; and for society to be able to do this, the individual personality must have little value, a state Durkheim called altruism, and whose corresponding mode of self-inflicted death was called obligatory altruistic suicide.26

Like all suicides, the altruist kills himself because he is unhappy;27 but this unhappiness is distinctive both in its causes and in its effects. While the egoist is unhappy because he sees nothing "real" in the world besides the individual, for example, the altruist is sad because the individual seems so "unreal"; the egoist sees no goal to which he might commit himself, and thus feels useless and without purpose while the altruist commits himself to a goal beyond this world, and henceforth this world is an obstacle and burden to him. The melancholy of the egoist is one of incurable weariness and sad depression, and is expressed in a complete relaxation of all activity the unhappiness of the altruist, by contrast, springs from hope, faith even enthusiasm, and affirms itself in acts of extraordinary energy.

Altruistic suicide thus reflects that crude morality which disregards the individual, while its egoistic counterpart elevates the human personality beyond collective constraints; and their differences thus correspond to those between primitive and advanced societies. But altruistic suicides do occur among more civilized peoples -- among the early Christian martyrs and the French revolutionaries -- and in contemporary French society, Durkheim insisted, there even exists a "special environment" in which altruistic suicide is chronic: the army Military suicide thus represents an evolutionary survival of the morality of primitive peoples: "Influenced by this predisposition," Durkheim observed, "the soldier kills himself at the least disappointment, for the most futile reasons, for a refusal of leave, a reprimand an unjust punishment, a delay in promotion, a question of honor, a flush of momentary jealousy, or even simply because other suicides have occurred before his eyes or to his knowledge."28 The "contagious" suicides ascribed by Tarde to psychological causes Durkheim thus insisted, are rather explained by the moral constitution which predisposes men to imitate one another's actions.

Finally, Durkheim's discussion of altruistic suicide aptly illustrates some of the most characteristic arguments of the work as a whole -- his rejection of any definition of suicide which appeals to subjective mental states (motives purposes, etc.), his suggestion that self-inflicted deaths reflect the most general moral sentiments of the societies within which they occur, and the view that such suicides are thus merely exaggerated expressions of behavior which, in more moderated form, would be labeled "virtuous." However pure the motives which led to the "heroic" suicide of Cato, for example, it was not different in kind from that of one of Frazer's primitive Polynesian chiefs; and where altruistic suicides reflect a courageous indifference to the loss of one's life (albeit to the loss of others' lives as well), its egoistic counterpart exhibits a praiseworthy respect and sympathy for the suffering of others (albeit a concern to avoid one's own suffering and sacrifices as well).

Notes:

26. "Obligatory" altruistic suicide is the essential type, from which two others derive -- i.e., "optional" altruistic suicide, in which a concurrence of circumstances makes self-inflicted death praiseworthy, thus encouraging it without requiring it; and "acute" altruistic suicide (of which "mystical" suicide is the "perfect pattern"), in which the individual kills himself for the pure joy of sacrifice and self-renunciation (cf. 1897b:222-225). 27. This is not to say that a melancholy view of life automatically increases the inclination to suicide. Christians, for example, have a gloomy conception of this life combined with an aversion to suicide, a conjunction Durkheim attributed to their "moderate individualism" (cf. 1897b: 226). 28. 1897b: 238-9.

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