Suicide's Origin in Literature

David Hume’s “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion” shields suicide while Emile Durkheim’s “Suicide and Modernity” unearths the causes. Durkheim and Hume label suicide differently because their perspectives varied from the moral structures in their positions. Their causative ideas of suicide are just as dissimilar as their definitions. One of the motives tied to suicide is morality; a topic that has powers vested in the justification and deconstruction of the act. Not only is morality a central subtopic, agency under Durkheim and Hume holds a strong position that affects the way suicide works. In addition, the societal aspects produce varying results in respect to the two suicide authors. Furthermore, suicide’s actual quandary comes from within it. Hume specializes religious morality traditionally, but Durkheim centralized economic morality in the idea of the industry’s choices. Thus the use of religious morality by Hume and the economic use by Durkheim lays the framework that morality is the problem and suicide is the ultimate solution.

Suicide’s definition employs interpretation by Durkheim and Hume at unlike angles. In Hume’s “Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion”, he defines suicide indirectly because his argument never focuses on the act itself. The justification interests Hume more. He does say that, “. . . that tho’ death alone can put an end to his misery, he dares not fly to this refuge, but still prolongs a miserable existence from a vain fear . . .” (Hume 98). Hume fabricated suicide into an action releasing the burdened from melancholy. In accordance, suicide acquired an unbiased representation from Hume. Durkheim takes a contrastive approach, due to his motives. Suicide purifies the individual from a life of amara...

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...cause that capacity was given to us. A break in morality can cascade down to everything in life; productivity, free will, and society. The biggest dilemma to arise from it is suicide; the taking of your life because it is not worth living. When this happens, Hume and Durkheim comprehended the struggle to live could only be due to society’s empire on top of ethics. The way we live is centered on what is good and bad. So suicide is a direct reaction to the discontinuity of ethics within a being.

Works Cited

Durkheim, Emile. “Suicide and Modernity.” Social Theory: The Multicultural, Global, and Classic Readings. 5th Edition. Ed. Charles Lemert. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2013. 63-68. Print.

Hume, David. “Of Suicide.” Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. 2nd Edition. Ed. Richard H. Popkin. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998. 97-105. Print.