History of suicide : voluntary death in Western culture
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
History of suicide : voluntary death in Western culture
（Medicine & culture / series editor Sander L. Gilman）
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999
- Other Title
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Histoire du suicide : la société occidentale face à la mort volontaire
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [329]-372) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
According to the author, the complexity of the philosophical problem of suicide is reflected in Western culture's contradictory and ambivalent attitudes on the subject: Cato, Cleopatra and Samson were heroic in taking their own lives; Judas, Brutus and Achitophel were cowards. In this history, he examines how a culture's attitudes about suicide reflect its larger beliefs and values - attitudes toward life and death, duty and honor, pain and pleasure. Minois begins his survey with classical Greece and Rome, where suicide was acceptable, even heroic, under some circumstances. With the rise of Christianity however, suicide was unequivocally condemned as "self-murder" and an insult to God, who alone had the right to give and take life. With the Renaissance and its renewed interest in classical culture, suicide re-emerged as a philosophical issue. Minois finds examples of changing attitudes in Renaissance texts by Bacon, Montaigne, Donne and Shakespeare, whose question "To be, or not to be?" signalled the return of a more ambivalent view of suicide and a more open discussion of its meaning.
Minois follows the ongoing re-evaluation of suicide through the Enlightenment and the Romantic periods, and examines attitudes which emerge in 19th- and 20th-century science, law, philosophy and literature - developments that would enable a writer such as Camus to place the issue of suicide at the heart of modern philosophy. Minois comments on the most recent turn in this long and complex history - the emotive debate over euthanasia and the right to die.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I. Tradition: A Repressed Question
Chapter 1. Suicide in the Middle Ages: Nuances
Chapter 2. The Legacy of the Middle Ages: Between Madness and Despair
Chapter 3. The Classical Heritage: Perfecting the Timely Exit
Part II. The Renaissance: A Question Raised, Then Stifled
Chapter 4. The Early Renaissance: Rediscovery of the Enigma of Suicide
Chapter 5. To Be or Not To Be: The First Crisis of Conscience in Europe
Chapter 6. The Seventeenth Century: Reaction and Repression
Chapter 7. Substitutes for Suicide in the Seventeenth Century
Part III. The Enlightenment: Suicide Updated and Guilt-Free
Chapter 8. The Birth of the English Malady, 1680-1720
Chapter 9. The Debate on Suicide in the Enlightenment: From Morality to Medicine
Chapter 10. The Elite: From Philosophical Suicide to Romantic Suicide
Chapter 11. The Common People: The Persistence of Ordinary Suicide
Epilogue. From the French Revolution to the Twentieth Century, or, From Free Debate to Silence
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