Durkheim: Suicide
Durkheim Suicide - September 22, 2009
Durkheim views society as an entity greater than the sum of its parts, its parts being individuals. “Durkeim is seeking to establish that what looks like a highly individual and personal phenomenon is explicable through the social structure and its ramifying functions.” (pg. 10) In other words, Durkheim knows that suicide appears to be an individual’s means to an individual’s end. However, he is trying to prove otherwise, that suicide is explained by the patterns of society as a whole.
This is one of the many subjects that Durkheim notoriously flip-flopped on. He “seemed prepared to accept the existence of individuals as beings who could be thought of as separate from society and exist entirely in their own right,… but his own attitude to the individual was clearly in opposition to this concession.” (Gane, 1989, pg. 97)
I would offer that some other phenomena that appear personal but may be societal are over-eating and hygiene. Durkheim’s book is important because it planted the seed that suggested it was admissible to study subjects that seem strictly personal, with no apparent social aspects to them, as if they could be explained through an examination of societal patterns, functions, and currents. This allows thought to progress away from disciplines like psychology, which would examine an obese person’s individual mentalities toward eating rather than societal influences.
Durkheim was a social realist. He states that “sometimes men who kill themselves have had family sorrow or disappointments to their pride, sometimes they have had to suffer poverty or sickness.” (pg. 297) These statements point to the possibility that suicide is driven by a depressive state, or what Durkheim refers to as neurasthenia. Research has shed light that this type of “depression of fatigue, through harassing cares and loss of sleep, has in thousands of instances led to suicide, by a development of a momentary insane impulse to self-destruction.” (Kellogg, 1915, pg. 323) Does Durkheim agree that suicide can be labeled as a temporary act of suicide?
Durkheim pulls his classic cyclical discourse when he ponders if suicide is a form of insanity. “Suicides generally seem influenced by some abnormal passion…, are completely indistinguishable [but for] act of self destruction; and there is therefore no reason to impute a general delirium to them. This is the reasoning by which suicide, under the appellation of monamania, has been considered a manifestation of insanity. But, do monomanias exist?” (pg. 60) His reasoning is that “there are no monomanias, there cannot be a suicidal monomania and, consequently, suicide is not a distinct form of insanity.” (pg. 62) Is he trying to say that there are unique and momentary expressions common to suicide that are, collectively, delirious ideas fundamental to disease? In his opinion, there is no common bond between all suicides that would label suicide a particular mental disease.
Durkheim continues to explain the differences in individual suicides to further his point that there is no common bond. He develops thoughts on maniacal, melancholy, obsessive, and impulsive/automatic brands of suicide. Durkheim has contradicted himself here in that the man who commits “obsessive” suicide is driven “solely by the fixed idea of death which, without clear reason, has taken complete possession of the patient’s mind. He is obsessed by the desire to kill himself, though he perfectly knows he has no reasonable motive for doing so.” (pg. 64) I would offer that this man’s monomania, his “inordinate or obsessive zeal for or interest in a single thing” is the obsession with death. I do not understand how this man could simultaneously hold an awareness that he has no other motive to kill himself. The possession of that additional cognition seems contradictory to Durkheim’s “sole fixed idea of death.”
While searching for evidence, Durkheim comes across the idea that suicidal trends are connected to weather. “Certain observations do seem to show that too great heat excites man to kill himself… If temperature were the basic cause of he variations noted, suicide would vary regularly with it. This is not true. Far more suicides occur in Spring than in Autumn, although it is a little colder in Spring.” (pp. 110 – 111) If it isn’t precisely and exclusively the temperature, then what can we interpret from any trend connected to temperature? Durkheim progresses to “perceive the nature of these causes” by inserting a look at length of day statistics. “When the days grow longer quickly, suicides increase greatly (January to April); when the increase of the former slows down, so does that of the latter (April to June). The same correspondence reappears during the time of decrease. Even the different months when days are of approximately the same length have approximately the same number of suicides (July and May, August and April).” (pg. 116)
Although it has been discussed that suicide rates may be contingent on certain factors like neurasthenia, insanity, monomania, and/or the weather, Durkheim expresses late in the text that there is no “definite relation between the variations of suicide and the conditions of physical environment supposed to have most effect on the nervous system, such as race, climate, temperature. Obviously, though the neuropath may show some inclination to suicide under certain conditions, he is not necessarily destined to kill himself; and the influence of cosmic factors is not enough to determine in just this sense the very general tendencies of his nature.” (pg. 298 – 299)
One connection can be drawn here to the Rules of Sociological Method in that Durkheim refuses any other discipline’s stance on suicide. Durkheim says, “the conclusion from all these facts is that the social suicide-rate can be explained only sociologically.” (pg. 299) Coming from a philosophical background, I would argue that suicide can be explained quite well by the greats. “Aristotle denounced suicide rigorously and sweepingly; yet he, as far as we may build upon scattered incidental remarks of his, certainly denied to the soul an immortal essence; Plato reasoned most deeply and argued most eloquently to prove that the soul is immortal, yet he distinctly pronounced suicide to be under various circumstances defendable;… an J.J. Rousseau proclaimed… of the soul’s immortality and his firm persuasion of the lawfulness of suicide.” (Migault, 1856, pg. 7)
Durkheim does mention that “certain currents of opinion, whose intensity varies according to the time and country in which they occur, impel us, for example, towards marriage or suicide. Such currents are social facts.” (Rules, pg. 55) He also prepares us for the study of various types of suicide (egoistic, altruistic, and anomic) by mentioning in the Rules that “if suicide depends on more than one cause it is because in reality there are several kinds of suicide.” (pg. 150) Durkheim follows that we need to study punishment by perceiving the common element found in all its antecedents and all derivations produce their common effects.
Durkheim’s book on suicide was in my view an adequate application of the tools he laid out in the Rules of Sociological Method. The difficulty I find in reading Durkheim is that he never seems to take a definitive stance on a subject. He shows how suicide rates vary depending on the time and place. That isn’t surprising to me. To correlate that variety to a conclusion that suicide must be studied strictly sociologically is too limited a stance. “When a man has become detached from society, he encounters less resistance to suicide in himself, and he does so likewise when social integration is too strong.” (pg. 217) So, Durkheim has stated here that integration or lack thereof influences suicidal tendencies.
Religious, economic, marital, familial, and legal pressure are all types of restraints that regulates man’s actions. Suicide might be a way to become released from any of these restraints. After reading Durkheim’s book on suicide, I am not certain that I am able to draw any conclusions as to the reasons for or in opposition to suicide however I have gained a better knowledge about how to apply new concepts introduced in the Rules (social facts, social current, social types) to social phenomena.
Texts cited in addition to Durkheim’s Rules and Suicide:
Gane, M (1989). On Durkheim’s Rules of Sociological Method. Routledge.
Kellogg, J.H. (1915). Neurasthenia: or, Nervous exhaustion. Battle Creek, MI: Good Health Publishing Co.
Migault, H.G. (1856). Eight historical dissertations in suicide, chiefly in reference to philosophy, theology, and legislation. Heidelberg, Germany: G. Mohr.
