On Suicide, Part 1

I have wanted to write about this topic for a while, but it was Jane who finally gave me the impetus to do so.

But before I say anything on suicide, I feel obliged to look at one of the most famous speeches in English literature concerning the idea. It is a curious thing that this speech is so famous, considering how taboo and emotionally charged the topic is when brought up in other spheres of life. Perhaps it is so famous because it confronts the one 'unthinkable' idea and does so with beauty and eloquence, so that one's conscience is eased in knowing that 'Shakespeare himself' wrote on suicide, and did so unflinchingly....

Hamlet: To be, or not to be; that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And, by opposing, end them. (III.i 58-62)

Compare this to the first two sentences of Camus' "The Myth of Sisyphus":

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.

Under these auspices, we ask: is suicide then primarily an emotional or an intellectual problem? We have hints in the play that Hamlet is naturally contemplative and somewhat dark in personality, notwithstanding the horror of the principle action of the play: having his father murdered by his uncle for political and marital gain.

Many of Hamlet's statements about the world exude a general kind of malaise, and even in the 'To be or not to be' speech, his frustrations are various and do not focus exclusively on the wickedness of his uncle, or even murderers in general. In fact, Hamlet already has thought of suicide before he even knew that his uncle had killed his father in Act 1 Scene 2:

O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God, O God,

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fit on't, ah fie, fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely. (129-137)

When he wants to deride his uncle, his mother, or most anyone else (and truly, the only person in the play he speaks very well of is Horatio), he talks of disease, soil, rot, foulness, and other such metaphors for contagion. For Hamlet, the world dwells in sickness rather than in health, where things are destined to waste away before they bloom into something worth the effort of growth. To take the title of an essay by another 20th century existentialist writer (Miguel de Unamuno), Hamlet has a tragic sense of life.

Life has been many things to many different people, but it would not be difficult to argue that the natural world is unforgiving and that human society tends to be banal, stupid, and cruel. But since most people being banal and doing cruel things are not the ones reflecting sincerely on life, it is the contemplative ones that get struck (and stuck) with the overwhelming sense of life's purposelessness, of life's ultimate trajectory towards tragedy.

To answer my first question, schematically: it is the use of our intelligence, becoming attuned to facts about the world, that then begets in us an emotional state of.... despair? melancholy? malaise? Something like that. Hamlet has it. Camus had it. I probably have it as well. And so....

There grows in souls such as ours a dialectic between thought and feeling that inevitably brings up that fateful question: To be, or not to be?

It's intriguing to me that Hamlet brings up the idea of nobility in the second line of his speech. Most contemporary thought has little to do with the idea of nobility (although Nietzsche is an exception) and I have to admit that it is even somewhat foreign to me - have I ever made a choice because it was the most noble thing to do? I think contemporary discourse still talks about right and wrong, good and bad, ethical and unethical (I think Nietzsche made it impossible to speak of good vs evil in a serious context), but rarely do we think of things as 'noble' or 'ignoble'.

Another intriguing thing is that Hamlet talks of suicide as 'taking arms' and 'opposing' the troubles of existence, whereas we usually think of suicide as a quick escape that does not involve such a monumental struggle. Perhaps Hamlet is here referring to the fact that he intends to avenge his father, though he knows that doing so risks his own death. Or perhaps Hamlet is thinking of 'being' in two different ways: 1) being as merely existing, being 'present' as a fact in the world and 2) 'being' in the sense of living with fullness. In this case, the stoic stance of suffering the outrages of life would be closer to non-being, because one essentially makes oneself a stone, 'dull to all proceedings', a death-in-life. To take arms against life would then be closer to living with a purpose, but such purposiveness, for Hamlet, is what leads all the more quickly to death.

To be continued....