On December 17, 2010, the Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire after police confiscated his fruit and beat him. Unlike other suicide methods, self-immolation has an extremely high fatality rate, at over 70 percent according to one study. Yet when Bouazizi died from his injuries three weeks later, it was rarely described as a suicide in the English and Arabic language press. To associate Bouazizi’s act with this particular word would render it less powerful and less courageous.
But that’s before you get to hard cases. Must we stop others who wish to kill themselves, or must we honor the wishes of those who wish to die? Is it ever rational? The subject of Cholbi’s relatively obscure book, published in 2011, is receiving new attention in light of a growing interest in both suicide and assisted suicide — whether that assistance comes from medical professionals or even the state itself, as with Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying program (MAiD).
Due perhaps to being a philosopher, Cholbi manages to write about the bloody and tragic issue of suicide with the dry, clinical precision of a mathematical proof. With a barrage of hypothetical scenarios and thought puzzles, he explores what makes an intentional act of self-killing truly intentional. It is not as straightforward as it may seem.
At first, this analytical method is off-putting, but as a way of thinking carefully about a rather dark topic, it begins accumulating force. Somewhat like “liberalism,” “nationalism,” or “democracy,” suicide is a difficult word, because it can both describe an empirical fact — what is observationally accurate — and a value judgment about whether the observationally true thing is good or bad. Just as with Bouazizi, the case of the spy who swallows a cyanide pill to avoid divulging information to his captors has committed suicide. But we tend not to perceive it that way, because doing so might taint an otherwise honorable death. He sacrificed himself for something greater, and he did so without harming others in the process.
While it may be rational to want to hold on to life as tightly as possible, it can also — with a different set of starting premises — be “rational” to wish for death. This wish is more common than we might like to admit. To cite only the most striking example, nearly one-third of teenage girls have seriously contemplated suicide, according to 2021 data from the CDC’s Youth Risk and Behavior Survey. Fortunately, successful suicide attempts — although this is an odd way of thinking about success — are much less common. As Cholbi reminds us in his characteristically understated prose, “Killing oneself is hard, requiring courage and fearlessness that few of us possess.”
In the broader sweep of history, attitudes towards life and death can change relatively quickly. At least in their orthodox forms, the three Abrahamic faiths offer a resolution to the question of suicide. To take one’s life is to intrude upon God’s domain and to therefore challenge his sovereignty. The Talmud states: “For him who takes his own life with full knowledge of his action, no rites are to be observed. . .There is to be no rending of clothes and no eulogy.” But again there is that caveat. What does it mean for someone to possess “full knowledge of his action”?
As Cholbi notes, early Church leaders worried that a preoccupation with earthly strangeness and suffering might “inadvertently encourag[e] suicide among Christians.” The Bible repeatedly describes believers as “sojourners.” The true destination, after all, was elsewhere. If this life was merely a prelude to better things, what was the point of delaying? Under Roman rule, the early Christian longing to detach from the things of the world presented a particular problem for a community that was still small and vulnerable.
Suicide is generally considered a grave sin in Islam. Only God can take away what He has given. But it is more complicated than that. At least at the level of the individual believer, Islam is not an outcomes-based religion. As one well-known saying of the Prophet Mohamed put it, “actions are judged by their intentions.” Accordingly, the state of mind of the sinner must be taken into account, which allows for various exceptions. It appears that those who might have otherwise balked at the notion of a “good” suicide made an exception as well.
In densely populated societies where there is a cultural stigma to being alone for extended periods of time (or at all), self-killing presents a brute logistical challenge. In hearing descriptions of my father’s childhood with five siblings in Egypt, I have had trouble parsing out when, if ever, my father had time to himself. Religion seems to have something to do with it, too—perhaps in part because religiously conservative societies tend to be the ones that feature the stigma against alone-ness. One systematic review of 89 articles on religion and suicide found that while religious affiliation and religious service attendance “[do] not necessarily protect against suicidal ideation,” they do “protect against suicide attempts.” This isn’t exactly a revelation. Emile Durkheim, in his pioneering 1897 study On Suicide, came to a similar conclusion with considerably less empirical data: “If religion…protect[s] man from the desire to kill himself, it is…because it is a community.”
Even without recourse to scripture or religious law, suicide appears and reappears as sort of limit case, a test of how far ethics and philosophy can go. In a sense, there is nothing beyond it. The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein pronounced suicide as “the elementary sin.” He reasoned that “if suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed.” For Wittgenstein, it was personal. Remarkably, three of his four brothers committed suicide, which naturally made him suspect he might be next. He was suicidal for much of his life, and, like many authors, seemed prone to writing the books he needed to read. He saw resisting his own suicide as one of his life’s greatest tasks. At the age of 62, he fell deeply ill. His final words to his wife Joan were “tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”
Shadi Hamid is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a research professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Seminary. He is the author, most recently, of The Problem of Democracy: America, the Middle East, and the Rise and Fall of an Idea. Read more of his work at shadihamid.substack.com.
