“My death, praise I unto you, the voluntary death, which cometh unto me because I want it.” Friedrich Nietzsche
Western moral philosophy is not known for its careful attentiveness to the social consequences of individual choices. Edith Hall hopes to draw our attention to the consequences of suicide in Facing Down the Furies. Hall wants us to ask the question, “who is damaged by suicide?” She hopes to “contribute to the secular philosophical case against suicide” by exploring the impact of suicide for people left behind. Engaging with ancient Greek tragedies, she wrestles with the legacy of suicide in her maternal family, narrating how the ancient Greeks have helped her navigate her family’s history and her own suicidal ideation. The book is a stirring personal memoir that argues against suicide from its damage to others. She hopes the book “will help others who have suffered from the intergenerational impact of this saddest way of dying, as well as those in such despair that they are contemplating suicide themselves.”
I suppose that the best way to engage such a book is with an equally personal reflection on it. While I have not been at serious risk of suicide, the specter of depression has never been far from me, including two somewhat significant bouts with it, in high school and during my PhD work. There is precedent for suicide and suicidal ideation in my family line; my paternal grandfather discovered his uncle dead by suicide as a young man. I have also talked with other family members about their experiences with depression on several occasions.
Hall’s book intrigued me for two reasons. First, my early depression was linked heavily to existential meaninglessness, and largely resolved when I rejected the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche (and his existentialist heirs) and settled into my Christian faith. So, I am predisposed to be skeptical about secular arguments against suicide. Second, the focus of Hall’s argument is the impact of suicide on others, and especially on children and grandchildren. My research in psychology and theology predisposes me to see this as compelling and critical. Hall’s argument addresses not only the potential damage of suicide, but also the positive good a suicidal person can do by persisting in living. An appreciation for what our care and example offers to others, and especially our children, can bolster our sense of purposefulness.
Yet, as compelling and critical as Hall’s argument from damage to others is, I believe it falters over the extent to which society has a moral claim on a person to persist in living from a purely secular perspective. The argument needs to be situated in a coherent vision of the good, true, and beautiful where individual human life is sacred and people are united in a common love.
As Hall illustrates, the literature surrounding self-killing is ancient. My first encounter with this literature was reading and teaching Plato’s Phaedo. Like Hall, I was disturbed by Socrates’ callousness toward his family. After Socrates was condemned to death by swallowing hemlock, his friends urged him to live in exile instead. Instead, he voluntarily embraced death to demonstrate his respect for the laws of Athens—since it is better to suffer injustice than to commit it (and seemingly to demonstrate the irrationality of fearing death). In the process, he chided the foolishness of his disciples and of “the women,” especially his wife Xanthippe. Early in the narrative, he coldly sent her away with his children. And Socrates was hardly alone among Greeks in seeing self-killing as justifiable in certain cases.
Hall presents Aristotle as a counter-example to Socrates’ coldness. Not only does he explicitly argue against suicide on the grounds that a person does injury to the state, but he also set a different example, dying in exile from Athens caring for Herpyllis, the mother of his son, Nicomachus. Through his protracted illness, Aristotle continued working and preparing for the happiness of his bereaved.
By contrast, the Stoics argue that self-interest makes suicide acceptable. Hall records five legitimate reasons for suicide according to the Stoics: (1) in obedience to a religious command (an oracle), (2) to avoid being forced to do a shameful deed, (3) in the case of serious physical illness, (4) to escape the misery of poverty, (5) and to avoid losing rational freedom through dementia. Gaius Musonius Rufus analogizes suicide with “retiring cheerfully from a banquet.”
The Epicureans are more mixed on the subject. Philodemos and Epicurus held out hope that we can never be sure that the best might yet be to come. This amounts to “never call a man unhappy until he is dead”—to twist a phrase from Croesus of Lydia. Yet, to other Epicureans suicide is preferable to living in fear or finding life irksome. Lucretius reportedly killed himself at the age of forty-four. The Romans agreed that suicide could be noble, citing women who killed themselves to save their honor, cases of self-killing for patriotic reasons, and cases involving faithfulness to conscience.
Since Augustine, the Christian tradition has been almost uniformly against suicide with the possible exception of John Donne. Augustine argues that “thou shalt not kill” applies also to the self. The prohibition against murder, and so against suicide, has been grounded in the sacredness of human life, owing to the fact that every human bears the image of God. Aquinas details three reasons that suicide is illicit: (1) It is contrary to the self-love necessary for being, and so is contrary to charity; (2) It does injury to the community (following Aristotle); and (3) it usurps judgment over God, our Master, since judgment concerning life and death belongs only to him.
The most significant Enlightenment voice against suicide is Immanuel Kant. For Kant, suicide fundamentally violates the principle of moral duty because it destroys the source of our moral duty. Suicide attacks moral authority by violating the rational will itself. Conversely, Hall sees David Hume as the most significant enlightenment argument for suicide. His treatise, “Of Suicide,” published a year after his death, suggests that: (1) because there is no afterlife, there should be no irrational fear of death, (2) because we have native liberty, we should stop insisting on the sanctity of human life, and (3) because suicide does no damage to society (e.g., when we are elderly and infirm we do not contribute to society), we have no obligation to society. Jean-Jacque Rousseau’s Julie, or The New Héloïse represents a half-hearted rebuttal to Hume. Rousseau stresses relational obligations to friend and country, but simultaneously paints the female protagonist as happy in her death because she never recovered from her romantic attachment. This trend of glamorizing romantic suicide continued in the Romantics, such as Coleridge’s “Monody on the Death of Chatterton,” and especially Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). The book produced panic because it stimulated so many copycat suicides. “The Werther effect” is still used to refer to this phenomenon.
Finally, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre see suicide as an assertion of the human will. Nietzsche’s praise of “voluntary death,” because it is willed, is taken up by Sartre as an authentic response of the self to the absurdity of a godless world. Albert Camus agreed that suicide was the “one truly serious philosophical question,” but rejected it, choosing instead to “imagine Sisyphus happy.” In other words, humanity has the option to embrace life heroically, however futile.
On balance, it seems to me that the secular case for the licitness of suicide is stronger than the case against it. Secular arguments against suicide seem to be broadly grouped into categories: deontological argument (Immanuel Kant), arguments for hope (Epicureans, Albert Camus, Viktor Frankl), and argument from impact to others (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Emile Durkheim). The arguments for suicide seem to rely on a widespread deep metaphysical conviction that our existence lacks meaning outside of the meaning that we give it (it is doubtful that Kant’s argument is widely persuasive for this reason). As a result, in cases where the individual has no hope (and cannot imagine this changing) and sees no apparent damage his or her death would do to others, there remains no higher argument for persevering in life.
This is why Hall is so eager to introduce her idea of “the family curse” or “transgenerational damage” from Greek tragedy. She sees it as having a contribution to make to the secular philosophical case against suicide, by providing a deeper appreciation of the damage any individual might pass on to their descendants.
Hall’s argument from damage to others is emotionally compelling because she so eloquently narrates the legacy of misery from suicide in her family line while at the same time drawing parallels to her experiences to Greek tragedy. I want to build and support this argument by suggesting that it is also psychologically compelling in ways that she only hints at.
Hall acknowledges that psychologists have been paying attention to the damage suicide leaves to others since the 1960s. She cites a possible physically inheritable dimension to the tendency of suicide from a study conducted by the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. She also reflects on various ways that environmental factors contributed to the suicides in her family. I believe she understates her case for the inherited damage from suicide.
Without overstating my expertise, I want to highlight some additional suggestive links, some of which are developed further in Mark Wolynn’s It Didn’t Start with You. First, heritability for many traits ranges from 40-50%. This means that in many cases a bit less than half of the variation in a particular trait among a population is due to genetic inheritance. Nurture, experiences, and choices also have a big impact on how our genes are expressed. Yet, epigenetic expression is also partly inherited. Gene expression comes through the process of transcription when building proteins. And transcription is modified by epigenetic markers that determine how the genetic code will be read in the building process. Some of these epigenetic markers are themselves heritable (methylation, not histone modification). The point is that, even if we never meet them, our families pass on not just genes, but the predispositions to certain traits arising from their experiences, their choices, and their environments. I am not absurdly suggesting that suicide itself gets epigenetically encoded, but it is possible that trait responses to stress could be.
In addition, nurture begins to shape our predispositions right from the womb. Prenatal stress can impact the emotional regulation systems of in utero babies, yielding higher heart rates and less variability in heart rates, signaling worse regulation by the parasympathetic nervous system. Out of the womb, early childhood attachment through the mother’s loving gaze is fundamental for development for the child. Moreover, neglect and abandonment can have a profound effect on the emotional development of a child. Gabor Maté points out that children can be wounded by “good things not happening, such as their emotional needs for attunement not being met, or the experience of not being seen and accepted, even by loving parents.” Similarly, Bessel van der Kolk writes, “Over the years our research team has repeatedly found that chronic emotional abuse and neglect can be just as devastating as physical abuse and sexual molestation.” The effect of this can be seen by the fact that students reporting four or more “Adverse Childhood Experiences” are twelve times more likely to attempt suicide. It takes little imagination to apply these insights to a child bereft through suicide.
Psychologically speaking, Hall hints at difficult problems with healing from suicide. Suicide is an interruption without closure. And when the suicide is someone in the inner circle of a person’s life, it creates a sort of “narrative ghost.” Hall explicitly uses language like this when she confesses, “I have been terrifyingly haunted by my mother and these ancestors in my dreams.” Because suicide is a dyadic event, having a history and a sequel, the bereaved person is haunted by the dead through their narrative memory involving places, people, and things. This is why the death of a long-loved spouse can be so painful. There is no escaping this remembrance, foods, smells, scenes, or music. The interruption without closure only makes this more painful. But this also works forward. A missing father at a wedding or child at a birthday only further perpetuates the grief. The death requires an entire reconsideration of the story a person thought that they were living. Yes, it is possible to heal from this, but the process is long and difficult.
Hall beautifully illustrates some of this in the Greek tragedy she cites. When Phaedra, the wife of Theseus, hangs herself, he says, “In dying she has killed me too.” When Iphis loses his son in battle and his daughter to suicide on the funeral pyre of her husband, he says,
So what should I do in my wretchedness?
Should I go home? That way I would see the desolation of my house, with its many rooms, and my life’s futility.
Or should I go home to the home of Capaneus here, which used to give me the greatest delight when this daughter of mine was there?
But she is no longer alive, the woman who would pull my cheek down to her lips and take my head in her hands.
There is in these lines the aching of empty rooms, the lost joys of fellowship or caresses of love. They are now only to be imagined, having been interrupted without closure. But more than this, we understand how children fill what is lacking in the joy and life of aging adults. And aging adults complete the self-assurance and maturation of children. These are the obligations of love we all share.
I enjoyed Edith Hall’s book immensely. It is a moving personal and scholarly reflection on suicide, her family history, and the obligations we have to each other. She sounds an important and compassionate note. Working with teenagers, I have seen firsthand the disintegrating effect of suicide on children. So I commend her work widely. However, I have reservations about her ambition to contribute to the secular philosophical case against suicide. There are significant tensions in the secular case against suicide itself and between it and her use of Greek tragedy.
One tension is that the Greek tradition is hardly secular in the modern sense. From a Greek perspective, ideas of justice in a society were often tied to a metaphysically rich account of morality, human nature, and politics. Their sense of mutual obligations were rooted in what was rational, as a participation in the divine nature. They related their ethics and political constitutions to the sort of justice that would be acceptable to the gods. It is for this reason that they had a deeper sense of mutual obligations. Aristotle’s argument that suicide is a sin against the state is a good case in point, as is the death of Socrates. And yet, they also were not obvious exemplars of nurturing parents. A story like Euripides’s Alcestis might give a tender vision of a daughter’s abandonment by her mother through suicide, but this example should not obscure the fact the exposure and abandonment of babies was practiced among the Greeks from the ancient period into the Roman empire.
But more seriously, a Greek social imaginary does not fit neatly with secular moral convictions, especially in the areas of equality and freedom. The social bonds that tied together a polis, often came at the expense of individual freedoms, especially for foreigners and the weak. Equality was not extended to everyone (e.g., slaves and women), and certainly not on any egalitarian principle of common humanity, independent of ethnic group, social status, or ability.
It seems to me that there is tension in secular ethics over the extent to which we have obligations to others against the competing demand for equality and autonomy. This tension arises because of ambiguity over the source of meaning and moral values. Take motherhood for example. Which is more important, the role within the family and society or individual aspirations? Evolutionary biology suggests the former and cultural values the latter.
It seems that the task of grounding meaning and moral values must be left to the autonomous individual. Yet, it is also obvious that individual autonomy is made possible by social support. The wicked problem of poverty perpetuates through the massive inequities of social support along the lines of class, race, and ethnicity. Secular ethics can turn strangely quasi-religious in enforcing social obligations, especially toward minoritized groups, while remaining silent about those within the family. Hall’s book is an exception to this. But, one wonders, might she be equally insistent on not neglecting or abandoning children for other reasons? What might she say about the impact of divorce on children?
My point is that, outside of an evolutionary story that sees human survival as the highest goal of human life, secular ethics struggles to provide a clear basis for social obligations. But this evolutionary story is also not obviously consistent with the principle of individual moral autonomy, nor is it clear about the limits of autonomy. For the group to succeed each individual must set aside their own needs for the good of the group, at least in some cases. In Jonathan Haidt’s words, the “hive switch” must be activated. But what are these cases? Additionally, I am skeptical that this “groupish” impulse among humans can provide much if any positive incentive for any particular individual to persist in living. From a purely evolutionary perspective, why should it? The fittest survive and reproduce. From the perspective of the species, suicide makes perfect sense if someone is no longer happy or no longer contributing to the good of the group.
For secular morality, there is a basic problem of social cohesion. Why should any member of society care about another member outside of artificial group identities that are always being called into question? And the problem grows as relational bonds grow weaker. When individual members of our society are hurt by a lack of obligation from others through neglect, abandonment, or contempt (in all sorts of ways, not just with suicide), on what grounds can we say that this behavior fails to meet some obligation? Must we affirm and support everyone? And given the presumption of individual autonomy, why must we?
Edith Hall’s moral intuitions are right, but they point to a vision of human life where mutuality, care, and belonging are grounded in a cohesive vision of what is good, true, and beautiful. In my view, secular ethics does not possess the ideological cohesion necessary for Hall’s proposal to work. To underwrite our moral claims on one another, we need a stronger consensus of what is good, true, and beautiful than secularism can offer.
Existentialists have asked questions about meaninglessness that cannot be answered from a secular perspective. We can imagine Sisyphus happy, but what if he’s not happy? What if he simply gets swept away by the absurdity of life? As the existentialists illustrate, it is possible to see through goodness and beauty in all shapes—a chestnut tree for example, until we begin to get nauseated by our insanity. And if this is true, we are more than capable of not caring whom our decisions hurt. We are capable of seeing through love as merely an evolutionary inducement toward the perpetuation of our species.
So, if the individual cannot find meaning and hope, then what external inducements against suicide are there? If a person doesn’t care about the damage, and if society is happy to let them go, what then? What we need is a philosophy that helps us to affirm something beyond individual meaningfulness and autonomy, a philosophy that can affirm human life as sacred and pull us together in affirming that even difficult, painstaking perseverance in life for the sake of others is good. Our Christian philosophy affirms that we have obligations of love among people united in a common love.
Especially during my high school years, I found a certain glamor in existential meaninglessness. I can remember experiencing moments like the chestnut tree of Roquentin in Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea. I would come to “see” that I was being carried along in a stream of vapid social games and false appearances, pushing me to act a part in a play that I thought might be entirely meaningless. I would be physically present in a place but mentally struck by the unreality of it all and impressed by my power to make it so. But in the end, I couldn’t “look through things” forever. I needed to see them.
There is a scene in C.S. Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress where John is shocked back into sanity by hearing his jailer say, “Our relations with the cow are not delicate—as you can easily see if you imagine eating any of her other secretions.” John cannot see milk as the same as sweat or dung. This makes him nauseated. As Lewis writes in The Abolition of Man, “You cannot go on ‘seeing through’ things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too?… To ‘see through’ all things is the same as not to see.’”
Ultimately, the question is, what can give hope to those contemplating suicide? The answer is that there is something higher, greater, and untouched by the particular pain I am experiencing at this moment. The weight of meaning does not rest on me. Yes, we ought to contemplate the beauty of persevering for the sake of love to our children and our children’s children. But, from a Christian perspective, we also can find meaning in persevering because suffering “produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame,” because God’s love has been poured out to us, and will bring to us a joy and glory that eclipses our momentary affliction (Romans 5:2-5; 8:18). We can persevere in love, because we are loved. And so we are part of a people united by a common love, for God and for others. If our lives are kept by God for this joy and glory, then persevering in that love is a courageous act of faithfulness to him and to others.
Originally published in the spring 2025 Mere Orthodoxy print journal. To become a member and receive future issues, join today.