Durkheim’s Suicide

Abstract

The spirit of scientific endeavour and the growth of scientific knowledge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries increasingly drew the observer towards the conclusion that, as Morris puts it, ‘the things and events he experienced were determined and controlled by forces within the world rather than outside it’.¹ The spectacular advances of the natural sciences led many to the belief that diligent application of the same principles and procedures to the study of human behaviour would, ultimately, produce an understanding of the social world equivalent to the scientist’s grasp of the natural world. Thus debating the meaning and morality of social phenomena increasingly gave way to a factual interest in them and traditional concern with the ‘evilness’ (or otherwise) of suicide — should people do it?² — was transcended by the question of why people do it. In this quest students were encouraged not to search themselves for essences and ultimate truths, but rather, to ‘distance’ themselves from their material; social phenomena were, after all, only ‘facts’, and as such could be analysed objectively.³ In this undertaking the observer must clear his mind of preconception, and base analysis on careful observation and description. Morselli, in his classic study, explained that suicide is ‘connected to the natural development of society’, and that this only became apparent through the adoption of a scientific approach:

This new aspect of suicide could not become clear when metaphysical systems prevailed; it was necessary to collect all the facts, to unite them together, to consider their analogy and differences, to do, in short, precisely the reverse of what philosophy had done up to that time. That is not to start from a preconceived system, but to base arguments on facts supplied by observation and, when possible, by experiment.⁴