Montaigne goes to great length in this essay to treat suicide as dispassionately as possible. That gives his essay a strange distance right from the start, and that sense of strangeness builds through too many anecdotes to count concerning ancients who took their lives.
This, for example, is an icy cold thought:
The fairest death is one that is most willed. Our lives depend on the will of others: our death depends on our own. In nothing whatever should we bow to our humour more than in this. Reputation has nothing to do with such an undertaking: to take it into account is madness. Living is slavery if the freedom to die is wanting.
It bothers me when people stigmatize those who died by suicide, especially when the victims are called selfish. I think such a judgement overlooks how much anguish most people who take their own lives are dealing with. However, the type of suicide outlined above by Montaigne strikes me as selfish. Yes, we all can end our lives. So what? Why is this power meaningful?
But the essay gets odder, because Montaigne wants to be clear that he finds nothing acceptable in melancholy and self-loathing:
Creatures who enjoy a being richer and nobler than we do may well criticize ours, but it is unnatural that we should despise ourselves or care little for ourselves; it is a sickness peculiar to Man to hate and despise himself; it is found in no other animate creature. It is a similar vain desire which makes us want to be something other than what we are. The fruits of such desires can never be of concern to us since that desire is self-contradictory; it works against itself. Anyone who wishes to be changed from man to angel does nothing at all for himself: he would gain nothing by it. Who is supposed to be feeling that amendment for him and rejoicing at it? He is no more.
Ok, so suicide is a morally defensible act, but the conditions that most typically drive people to suicide aren’t acceptable reasons. What is permissible? His conclusion points toward one:
Pliny gives an account of a certain Hyperborean people whose climate is so temperate that the inhabitants do not usually die before they actually want to; when they become weary, having had their fill of life and reached an advanced age, they hold a joyful celebration and then leap into the sea from a high cliff set aside for this purpose.
So he supports a kind of joyous suicide at an advanced age when people have just determined “enough already.” Assisted suicide is something acceptable in our culture, although we assume there must be some kind of suffering involved for it to be fully socially acceptable.
Montaigne makes his case in the essay, but I’m still put off by it. I don’t understand rational suicide at all and I fully believe that the vast majority of those who choose to take their lives are suffering from some kind of mental disorder that needs treatment to restore hope and build resilience. Glorifying those who chose rational suicide for philosophical reasons further stigmatizes those who suffered and then died.
And to support this argument, the wonderful writer Stefan Zweig took his own life shortly after writing is own short book about Montaigne. I hate to think that he might have been swayed by Montaigne’s arguments.
One final thought on this essay—it’s a really strange title. There’s one story Montaigne tells of an elderly woman on Cea who took her life at 90 and wanted a witness, but there’s no sign that there was any ritual tied to her act. The quote I gave about the Hyperboreans doesn’t concern that isle either, but it covers customs. So perhaps someone misread the essay and applied a sloppy title.
It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue either.
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