Falling on Your Sword: Is Suicide Cowardly or Courageous?
(Brutus falls on his sword after his defeat at the second battle of Philippi.)
Ancient Roman military commanders would sometimes commit suicide after a devastating or embarrassing defeat by literally falling on the point of their own sword. This kind of noble suicide is with us even today in the notion that sea captains are supposed to go down with their ship if they are unable to see to the safety of all hands once the inevitability of his or her ship sinking has become clear.
Despite this ancient tradition of a noble suicide, our attitude about suicide today is rather different. We tend to pity people who commit suicide, perhaps seeing its root causes in mental health disorders and wishing beyond hope that there was something we could have done to help and to prevent such a tragic outcome, whether for those we care about or those who are strangers to us. For us, suicide is no longer noble, as it was even for Socrates as he proudly drank the hemlock; it is a tragic consequence to be prevented at all costs.
(The Death of Socrates by Jacques Louis David)
What accounts for this shift in thinking about the meaning and connotations of suicide? One way to look at suicide is that is a too-easy way out of one’s troubles instead of pushing through them stoically, and causing no small amount of grief for one’s family, friends, and loved ones in the process—the ultimate expression of selfishness and cowardice. Those who commit suicide are, at the end of the day, thus only to be pitied for their lack of strength or blamed for their selfishness, regardless of one’s views on the role of suicide in determining one’s place in the afterlife.
Another, very different, way to look at suicide, however, is itself as a form of courageousness. If, however, life is ultimately meaningless, and endless road of obstacles ahead—as the existentialist philosopher Albert Camus suggested in The Myth of Sisyphus—suicide may be the ultimate form of courage. On this view, those who commit suicide are not tragic figures; they are the ones who can muscle up enough courage to embrace the finitude and ultimate meaninglessness of life once and for all—instead of clinging helplessly to life like a baby clutches its blanket.
One sometimes hears firsthand account of people who were this close to committing suicide—miming measuring some small fraction of an inch with their fingers—looking down the barrel of a loaded gun or standing on the edge of some cliff or appropriately high manmade structure. These individuals sometimes credit God for their survival, or perhaps their innate will to live. I’ve even heard tales of well-timed episodes of Star Trek being credited for saving the lives of once-suicidal fans.
It’s common wisdom to feel empathy or pity for these once-suicidal individuals, and even to praise them for their inner strength in resisting the urge to hasten their own demise. Yet, on this more ancient notion of suicide, the noble falling-on-one’s-sword conception of suicide, these individuals who somehow can’t seem to muster up the strength to pull the trigger or take the longest leap, are ultimately cowards who were unable to fall on their swords like those fallen military commanders of old.
Should we be so rigid and naively optimistic as to insist that life is always preferable to death? I have known several people who have committed suicide, and I would have been the first to help them if I had known the mental and emotional states they must have been in. Yet I myself can never quite decide whether they should be pitied for their cowardice and blamed for their selfishness, or whether they should be praised for having the courage to fall on their own metaphorical swords when faced with the collapse of their individual worlds, with obstacles that could not be overcome, with lifetimes of deep disappointments and failures, and with the ultimate arbitrariness and meaninglessness of our finite human lives.
One can’t help but think of the 9/11 jumpers—those unknown individuals who willingly jumped from the burning World Trade Center towers on September 11th, 2001 when faced with death by fire and suffocation or death by falling to the ground, accepting their deaths proactively for the sake of a few precious seconds of breathable air and existential calmness before being blinked out of existence—with absolute, Cartesian certainty—in what is perhaps the ultimate sign of strength: refusing to be a victim even in death and exerting a final act of autonomy and control over a circumstance and life itself spun out of control.
If suicide is sometimes to be praised, why then are we culturally so incredibly gung-ho about suicide prevention, plastering our social media feeds with suicide prevention hotline numbers—like this: 800-273-8255 (National Suicide Prevention Lifeline)—and well-intentioned but ultimately ineffective platitudes about open arms, open doors, open hearts, and expressions of “call me if you need me”? Why not grant each person the autonomy to decide his or her own answer to Albert Camus’s fundamental question of philosophy—whether life is or is not worth living?
Don’t we actually rob people of their autonomy by taking away their freedom, and the subsequent nobility, of choosing to end their own lives? And what should we make of those who have already committed suicide? Should we mourn them as tragic figures or praise them with the highest accolades proudly emblazened on their gravestones: “Here lies a person who was brave enough to unmask life and see it for what it is—a person of strength and action to be remembered throughout the ages for having the courage to look death squarely in the face instead of being a victim of life itself.”
I myself have contemplated suicide, as ultimately any thinking and feeling person must sometimes do. I’ve never, however, seriously entertained it. I can’t decide about myself whether this inability to seriously entertain the notion of ending my own life should brand me as a person with immense courage to live my life life to its fullest, especially in light of everything I’ve gone through—things unknown to most people, even those who are closest to me—or a coward unable to rip the mask off this earthly reality and clinging futilely to this earthly life with all its many disappointments, unable to muster up my inner strength simply to buy a gun and pull the trigger or to drive myself downtown and take one final leap into the river.
I tend to view myself in a positive light, as most of us are capable of doing most of the time. There is a part of me, however, that is envious of those I’ve known who have committed suicide, as I’m envious of those ancient commanders who fell on their own swords rather than bear the weight of the disappointments they brought upon themselves—or fate having brought upon them. I envy their conviction and lack of ambiguity, their confidence in their own actions when faced with a life they were no longer able to bear, each of them for their own deeply personal reasons known only to them and taken with them to the grave. For it seems to me that even a suicide note cannot fully explain the paradoxical sense of existential despair and existential autonomy that a suicidal person must have in that final moment and one final act.
Although we like to think of ourselves—we, the living—as the courageous ones, perhaps we are the real cowards, and our fallen friends and loves ones who took their lives by their own hands are, counterintuitively, the stronger ones among us, maybe the strongest we will ever have the privilege to know. Shouldn’t they be praised and remembered accordingly? And shouldn’t we all be just a bit more wary of our own “cult of the living” in light of their superior existential and suicidal strength—those warriors throughout history, together with those warriors of today, who had the courage and the strength to fall on their own (literal or metaphorical) swords instead of facing the despair of yet another tragic and fateful day?
