Betwixt and Between: Suicide, Sociology, and the Problem of Meaning

ABSTRACT

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, rising rates of suicide were widely held to be indicative of a pervasive crisis of meaning. This article examines the response to the problem of suicide in the thought of Emile Durkheim, Max Weber, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. It argues that their engagement with the problem captured what each of them felt to be core truths surrounding the human condition as well as the most pressing contemporary social ailments. Read together, their thought is illustrative of the fruitful relationship that sociology had with philosophy, literature and the other arts during its formation as a discipline. It was a relationship that was particularly conducive to the examination of the problem of meaning. The discussion of suicide during this period is illustrative of key themes within classical sociology that have become increasingly marginalised in contemporary sociology with the narrowing of its fields of inquiry.

KEYWORDS:

• suicide
• sociology
• problem of meaning
• Durkheim
• Weber
• Nietzsche
• Dostoevsky

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In contrast, Marx paid little attention to the problem of suicide. His entire writings on suicide consist of a four-paragraph introduction to his translation of proto-sociologist Jacques Peuchet’s commentary on suicide in Paris. Marx utilises Peuchet’s observations to highlight the stifling oppression that women are subject to within the narrow confines of the bourgeois family. As a critique of bourgeois gender roles, it is of interest as an addendum to the more developed critiques in The Holy Family and The Communist Manifesto; however, it has little relevance in relation to sociological accounts of a crisis of meaning. For the Peuchet essay, see Marx, “Peuchet on Suicide,” 43–75.

2. Bell, “The Return of the Sacred,” 33.

3. Carroll, “Death and the Modern Imagination,” 562.

4. Nietzsche, “Twilight of the Idols,” 549.

5. Löwy, Georg Lukács, 38–39.

6. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 10.

7. See, e.g., Meštrović, Emile Durkheim and the Reformation of Sociology; and Meštrović, “The Social World as Will and Idea,” 674–705.

8. See, e.g., Alexander, Structure and Meaning.

9. Eliot, Christian Society & Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, 5.

10. Durkheim, The Rules of the Sociological Method, 32.

11. See, e.g., Alexander, Positivism, Presuppositions and Current Controversies, 1–35; Lepenies, Between Literature and Society; Levine, Visions of the Sociological Tradition, 18–22; Pope, Durkheim’s Suicide, 1–17.

12. Smith and Alexander, “Durkheim’s Religious Revival,” 588.

13. Nisbet, Sociology as an Art Form.

14. Leppenies, Between Literature and Society.

15. See, e.g., Griswold, Cultures and Societies in a Changing World.

16. Mills, The Sociological Imagination.

17. Coser, Sociology through Literature, 3.

18. Giddens, “The Suicide Problem in French Sociology,” 4.

19. Minois, History of Suicide, 326.

20. Gates, Victorian Suicide, 155.

21. Alexander, Positivism, 9.

22. Durkheim, Suicide, 355. Hereafter page references are cited in the text.

23. Durkheim, “The Dualism of Human Nature,” 149.

24. Ibid., 162.

25. Durkheim, Sociology and Philosophy, 72.

26. Durkheim, The Division of Labor, 106.

27. Ibid., 171.

28. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 109.

29. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 181.

30. Hollingdale, Thomas Mann, 15.

31. Shakespeare, Hamlet, in Complete Works, 2.1.299, 2.2.300.

32. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, 39–40.

33. Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle, 17.

34. Carroll, Humanism, 38.

35. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 155.

36. Ibid., 143.

37. Tolstoy, A Confession, 35, 34.

38. Ibid. 30.

39. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 139–40.

40. Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 18.

41. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 247.

42. Weber, The Protestant Ethic, 124.

43. See, e.g., Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy.

44. Dostoevsky, The Idiot, 354.

45. Dostoevsky, The Karamazov Brothers, 330.

46. Dostoevsky, Diary of a Writer, 541. Hereafter page references are cited in the text.

47. Gide, Dostoievsky, 112.

48. Dostoevsky, Devils, 446. Hereafter page references are cited in the text.

49. Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for “The Possessed,” 236.

50. Ibid. 239.

51. Wasiolek, Dostoevsky, 130.

52. Dostoevsky, Notebooks for “The Possessed,” 252.

53. Gide, Dostoievsky, 130.

54. Weber, “The Social Psychology of the World Religions,” in From Max Weber, 281.

55. While extensive scholarly attention has been devoted to Weber’s pessimism, little attention has been paid to the pessimistic strands of Durkheim’s thought as well as the influence of fin-de-siècle pessimism on classical sociology more broadly. The only works to address this theme are Bailey, Sociology Faces Pessimism; Meštrović, Emile Durkheim and the Reformation of Sociology, and Meštrović “Rethinking the Will and Idea of Sociology.” More recently, Gunderson has provided a detailed survey of the pessimistic strands withing classical sociology, “Recovering a Disillusioned Modernism.” Modern sociology of course is not without its own pessimistic strands; however, leading theorists such as Foucault, Bauman, Beck, and Bourdieu focus more upon the deleterious consequences of the structural inequalities endemic to late-capitalist modernity. While there are overlapping concerns, this is a different form of pessimism to the metaphysical pessimism that was a fundamental concern for Weber and Durkheim.

56. See, e.g., Wrong, The Oversocialized Conception of Man.

57. Graña, Fact and Symbol, 65.

58. Bell, “The Return of the Sacred,” 33.

59. Nisbet, Sociology as an Art Form, 105.

60. Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 153.

61. Zolberg, Constructing a Sociology of the Arts.

62. The seminal texts are Becker, Art Worlds; and Bourdieu, Distinction.

63. Becker, Telling About Society, 8.

64. Eyerman, “Towards a Meaningful Sociology of the Arts,” 27; Serrão, “Toward Sociology from the Arts,” 6.

65. See, e.g, Felski, Uses of Literature; Rusu, “Literary Fiction and Social Science”; Serrão, “Towards Sociology from the Arts”; Misztak, “Sociological Imagination and Literary Intuition”; Vana, “More Than Just a Product.”

66. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation, x.

67. Misztak, “Sociological Imagination and Literary Intuition,” 1.

68. Davies and Neal, “Durkheim’s Altruistic and Fatalistic Suicide,” 36–52.

69. Abrutyn and Mueller, “When Too Much Integration and Regulation Hurts”; Abrutyn and Mueller, “Towards a Cultural-Structural Theory of Suicide,” 48–66.

70. Jenkins, “Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-enchantment, 11–32; Possamai: Sociology of Religion for Generations X and Y.

71. See, e.g., Doidge, The Anxiety of Ascent; and Carroll, “Death and the Modern Imagination.”

72. Bell, Cultural Contradictions, 330.

73. Mills, Sociological Imagination, 171.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Scott Doidge

Scott Doidge is a teaching associate at the Australian Catholic University. His research interests are in social theory, cultural sociology, the sociology of education and the history of ideas. His current research focuses on the intersection of the arts and social theory and examines the historical, political and social context of contemporary debates over the value and relevance of the humanities and social sciences.