Skepticism and the Discourse about Suicide in the Eighteenth Century: Traces of a Philosophical Concept

“Suicide,” Goethe wrote in his autobiography, “is a phenomenon of human nature that demands everyone’s attention and needs reassessment in every epoch, however much it may already have been discussed and treated.”1 Two things become clear from this assessment. First, that during the Enlightenment this “phenomenon” apparently was discussed once again. And secondly, Goethe’s realization that there is no absolute truth, no certain knowledge possible about this question, that, in his judgment, suicide is determined by temporal and geographically changing values. It is an eighteenth-century assessment which signals a connection between contemporary views of suicide and skeptical influences.