It means you want to make an intellectual spectacle of yourself. You have something urgent to say to the world, a final truth, and you want the world to notice you and what you have to say.
Mitchell Heisman has accomplished this, somewhat. Before shooting himself in the head in front of tourists and students in the Yard, he emailed to hundreds of academics a long manuscript titled Suicide Note.
Although Heisman’s suicide was his own, with his own specific miseries and obsessions, he’s given us something broadly valuable in Suicide Note. Suicide is traumatic and mysterious for the rest of us; when someone about to do himself in writes at length about why, we can profit from it.
I’ve only read the last few chapters of Heisman’s note; they contain the core of his convictions.
I rage at the entire cosmos for having no ultimate meaning.
Heisman’s nihilism was acute, extreme. His super-rationalism insisted that in the absence of any obvious, overarching point to human existence, one might as well end things. He describes, quite tellingly, his experience of “reductionist collapses” – moments in his life when all of the emotions, faiths, myths, and attachments we generate to give ourselves pleasure and purpose crash to bits. With “my analytic tendencies,” Heisman explains, “I could take myself apart in some ways, but I could not put myself back together.”
In a desperate reconstitution-experiment, Heisman begins listening to Bach:
Bach bounds me to the earth enough so that I can function as a living human being. Bach is ground from outside of myself that makes up for the nihilistic lack of ground within myself.
The choice of Bach is significant: Heisman seeks order, narrative, feeling, in a disordered, fluctuating, emotionless cosmos, and Bach is the most ordered of composers.
But Bach – a deeply religious man – doesn’t last long. Heisman’s “unadulterated material objectivity” sees the crutch, the lie, in his consort with Bach. “The progress of reason leads to nihilism,” he concludes; “there is no fundamentally rational basis for choosing life over death.”
Heisman’s hypertrophic rationalism allows him no non-rational or even semi- or weakly-rational basis for existence. He is an intellectual fanatic, demanding all or nothing — a fully meaningful world according to strictly rational laws, or forget about it.
Places like universities – locations packed with people invigorated rather than depleted by analytic tendencies – must be unmasked as the contemptibly false consolations that they are. So you travel to the local pinnacle of human thought – Harvard University – and point your gun at both sources of your misfortune: the life of the mind, and your particular mind.
September 23rd, 2010 at 8:43AM
The ‘note’ and act both strike me as deeply infused with hubris: “If I can’t figure out a reason to live,” he argues, “clearly nobody else could, either, so there’s no reason to ask anyone else for help.” I’m now mildly curious as to if (and if so, how) this manuscript deals with the question of why other people don’t follow his example: mere irrationalism? lack of necessary intelligence? failure of will?
September 23rd, 2010 at 9:18AM
Interesting that you say that, Ahistoricality, because the main thing that struck me, reading through Suicide Note, was the utter absence, in any real sense, of other human beings, either as people who might help the author, or as people the author might love… Many of us continue to live because we love the world and we love other people… When Christopher Hitchens says I’d really planned on seeing my children grow up he marks, I think, the primary reason most of us want to be in the world: To be with the people we love. When Richard Rorty, about to die, writes I would have lived more fully …if I had made more close friends, he gets at the same thing. The basic fact of deep implication in the lives of others is so basic, so deep a motive, that it’s always unsettling, as in this case, to witness its absence.
September 23rd, 2010 at 10:54AM
[…] on September 23, 2010 by profmondo Over at must-read blog University Diaries, Margaret Soltan takes a humane look at someone who sought what he misguidedly saw as the limits of […]
September 23rd, 2010 at 11:04AM
And what of the role of pleasure? Is there nothing in this world for him that was so enjoyable that it was worth hanging around to enjoy it some more?
Seems to me this was more an expression of a depression that sought justification for reaching death far sooner than planned.
Man is not a rational beast; he is a rationalizing beast.
September 23rd, 2010 at 12:03PM
Bill: It is hard to know whether all the argumentation in Suicide Note is an elaborate after-the-fact dressing up of simple chemical failure of the brain.
Yet this may be a case in which ideas actually did bring a person to suicide. I have no trouble with the idea that, well, ideas can do people in, can undermine them in various ways. I think of the suicidal consul, Geoffrey Firmin, in Under the Volcano, who as he’s dying says he’s dying from having stupidly invested his belief in “bad ideas.”
September 23rd, 2010 at 2:05PM
Hi UD,
RE: “Chemical failure of the brain?”
Hmmmmm . . .
My guess is you are far too sophisticated too fall for the nonsense regarding depression and suicidality being literally caused by a “chemical imbalance” in the brain. As Leo and Lacasse have repeatedly and persuasively documented, there is an enormous amount of evidence discrediting such a notion and very little supporting it (yet its persistence, especially in pharma marketing both disturbing and ethically significant).
Even if it weren’t extremely dubious on its own terms, of course, the biological reductionism involved in conceptualizing complicated social phenomena like depression and suicide as misfiring (?) neurotransmitters is also disturbing and ethically significant.
I’m not trying to put any words into your pen, here; but you cover suicide so artfully here, I was somewhat surprised to see those words . . .
Anyway, feel free to correct me if I’m misinterpreting here.
September 23rd, 2010 at 2:06PM
Ugh. Sorry for all the grammatical errors. Commenting on UD can be stressful for us perennial lurkers.
September 23rd, 2010 at 6:42PM
Hi Daniel: You’re right that I don’t think depression is reducible to synapses, etc. I think I was hoping to get some clarification from the commenter (to whom I was responding) as to what he thinks “depression” means. That is, I was hoping to find out whether he thinks it’s merely a matter of chemical business in the head…
September 24th, 2010 at 10:42PM
[…] rage at the entire cosmos for having no ultimate meaning. University Diaries __________________ Learn your theories well, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of a […]
September 25th, 2010 at 10:43AM
[…] Posted by Jaguar University Diaries The excerpts read like parts of a paper I wrote a few months ago. Since I hate to be redundant, […]
September 25th, 2010 at 6:09PM
[…] So…. maybe we make a little mixed cocktail? A little Bellow, a little Mitchell Heisman, author of Suicide Note [details here]. […]
September 26th, 2010 at 8:36AM
[…] … has a good take on Suicide Note. (Background here.) […]
October 17th, 2010 at 8:49AM
[…] epiphany more calmly? The terminus of our insistence on transformation is Mitchell Heisman’s Suicide Note, with its petulant rejection of a world that doesn’t soar with meaning. After nearly drinking […]
February 7th, 2012 at 1:58PM
[…] readers might remember Mitchell Heisman, who shot himself in the head in the middle of Harvard Yard a few years ago, on a busy morning. Or […]