Chapter 159. The Last Testament of a Rationalist: Mitchell Heisman’s Suicide Note as a Work, Its Architecture and Its ‘Experiment in Nihilism’

Part XVI turns to a single book that tries to explain religion from outside. It reads monotheism, Christianity, Nazism and Anglo-American liberal democracy as stages of one sociobiological and technological process, and it presents its author’s death as the last step of its argument. The library holds it as suicide note, by Mitchell Heisman. This chapter describes the work as the library records it, sets out its architecture as its own Overview gives it, and presents its opening and closing frame. Heisman’s interpretation of his own act is reported as his argument. It is placed beside the library’s scientific literature on suicide and the nihilist and anti-nihilist writers the catalogue links to the book.

The Work as the Library Records It

The catalogue record for work #38252 gives the title in lower case, suicide note, names Mitchell Heisman as author, dates first publication to 2010 and lists the subjects Nihilism, Rationalism, Suicide and Metaphysics. It describes the book as “a ~1900-page philosophical treatise interrogating reason, meaning, free will, God, and self-destruction, weaving evolutionary biology, history, religion (Judaism and Christianity), technology, and political order” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, catalogue record]. The library’s copy is a single PDF whose extracted text runs to 3,386,556 characters. The title page states that “This work is free and licensed by Mitchell Heisman for copying and distribution under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, title page]. The catalogue gives no date, place or circumstances of death, and this study adds none. What the record does establish is that the author presented the book under that title, and that its text treats the author’s death as part of its design. The offline reference shelf has no article on Heisman: a search for his name returns only articles on winners of the Heisman Trophy, a college-football award [Wikipedia: Jay Berwanger; search “Mitchell Heisman”]. For this study the book is therefore its own main witness.

The epigraph comes from Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo: “Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, epigraph]. This places the whole book inside the oldest Western topos that joins philosophy and death.

Architecture: The Book’s Own Overview

The Overview divides the treatise into five blocks, each with a title and a subtitle that states its thesis [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “Overview”]:

The proportions matter. Part I (religion and Nazism) fills roughly 600 pages. Part II (the Norman Conquest and Anglo-Saxon liberal democracy) fills more than 1,000, and from about section 52 the library’s study guide is dominated by the Norman Yoke, Locke, Jefferson and Lincoln [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, study guide sections 52-147]. The book is therefore not mainly a work of theology. Its theses on religion sit inside a sociobiological theory of history, in which God is redefined as the end point of technological evolution [ibid., section 1].

The Exordium: Freedom of Speech on Trial

The first exordium makes a claim about how the book will be received. Heisman argues that “Findings of sociobiology have refuted the original theory of human nature underlying liberal democracy”, that the constitutional right of free speech “was built upon this pre-Darwinian view of man”, and that a sociobiological account of liberal democracy is therefore “inherently controversial and liable to be repressed within a liberal democracy” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “Freedom of Speech on Trial”, pp.15-16]. Hence “the freedom of speech hypothesis”: “the repression of this work may empirically verify this theory of liberal democracy through the very act of repressing it” [ibid., pp.16-17]. He asks that the work be “distributed for free; not for profit”, and names his key to the whole subject as “The Saxon/Norman origin of liberal democracy in the English-speaking world” [ibid., pp.18-19; study guide section 0].

‘An Experiment in Nihilism’

The second exordium opens with an epigraph from Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo (“How much truth does a spirit endure, how much truth does it dare?”) and then: “The following is an experiment in nihilism. Already I have contradicted myself! How can one believe in disbelief?” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “What the hell happened to reason?”, p.20]. If there are no gods, no good and evil and no “reasoning that is fundamentally rational”, Heisman writes, then “there is no sane way to choose between science, religion, racism, philosophy, nationalism … ismism”, and “life is equal to death and death is equal to life” [ibid., pp.20-21]. He supports this diagnosis with Nietzsche’s question in The Will to Power, “why has the advent of nihilism become necessary?”, and with Leo Strauss’s statement that “modern western man no longer knows what he wants” [ibid., p.21; cf. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, #69520, Part 1, “Nihilism”].

In “Open Your Mind to Death” (pp.22-26) Heisman calls the belief that life is preferable to death “one of the most widespread superstitions”, “a kind of xenophobia”, and “the ‘noble lie’; the common secular-religion of the West” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “Open Your Mind to Death”, p.22]. He argues that “fear of death is the unquestionable master that establishes all other hierarchies — both social hierarchies, and the hierarchies within one’s own mind”, and he proposes “opening your mind towards the liberation of death” [ibid., p.23]. Here he coins viviocentrism: “Just as overcoming ethnocentrism requires recognition of the provincialism of ethnic values, overcoming viviocentrism emerges from the recognition of the provincialism of life values” [ibid., p.24]. He presents the “liberation of death” as “only the next step” in the Western elimination of biologically based biases, and lists among the equalities it would complete “the equality of life and death” [ibid., pp.24-25; study guide section 3].

In “Evil, Base, and Insane” (pp.26-31) he cites Strauss’s charge that Weber’s value relativism “necessarily leads to nihilism”, then asks whether suicide could “represent the pinnacle of the rational life realized”. He defines the experiment as “nihilism as a foundational premise for life”, and calls it “an experiment in Western rational-empiricism for nihilism appears to be the cumulative consequence of the scientific approach to life. Nihilism is where science and philosophy meet” [ibid., pp.27-28]. He describes his method as “honesty to the point of absurdity; honesty without mercy”, and his aim as “To will death through truth and truth through death” [ibid., p.30]. The formula often quoted from the book, “radical moral integrity through rational moral self-consistency leads to rational self-destruction”, appears in Part I, in the subsection “Success is Disaster” (pp.165-166). There Heisman applies it to the logic of Jewish ethics: to consistently empower the weak “ultimately leads one to overthrow what is strong within one’s self” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, “Success is Disaster”, p.166]. The same pattern of argument therefore ties the personal experiment to the historical theses.

Terminus: ‘The Value of Facts’ and ‘The Punchline’

The Terminus begins with “The Value of ‘Facts'” (pp.1741ff.: “All Scientists are Liars”, “On the Origins of Hydrophobia”, “Separating Facts from Values”) [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, TOC]. Heisman disputes E. O. Wilson’s dismissal of suicide as philosophically irrelevant and asks “In what other domains does a scientist’s hypothalamic-limbic cortex override his or her capacity for logical reduction?” [ibid., study guide section 141]. He attacks the fact-value distinction as itself neither purely factual nor provably valuable, and argues that the Darwinian explanation of the preservation instinct describes behaviour without prescribing that life ought to be preferred [ibid., section 142]. “The Punchline” then states the central dialectic: “Could the attempt to remove all sources of prejudice, bias, and subjectivity amount to rational self-destruction? Is to most fully approach objectivity to approach death?” The study guide’s paraphrase is that the dead are most objective because least interested or prejudiced [ibid., section 148]. The book ends on a geometrical metaphor: “If Hobbes’ Euclidean logic was that of rational self-preservation, then the following is the non-Euclidean logic of rational self-destruction”, offered as a way “to experimentally test” what Heisman calls the “most distinctive, foundational premise” of liberal democracy. He grants that one cannot scientifically observe one’s own death, and closes on Nietzsche’s opposition of truth and life [ibid., section 149].

A Second Documented Perspective: The Science of Suicide

The library’s clinical and evolutionary literature studies suicide from outside, and it does not endorse Heisman’s reading of his own act. The volume edited by Rudd and Joiner, Suicide Science: Expanding the Boundaries, presents hopelessness theory (Abramson, Metalsky and Alloy, 1989) and the prospective work of Abramson, Alloy and colleagues (1998) linking “cognitive vulnerability to depression” to suicidality among college students. It discusses rumination as a moderator of that vulnerability, and reports a prediction that “perceived burdensomeness” may be related to more lethal means among those who die by suicide [Rudd and Joiner, Suicide Science, #32953, chapters on hopelessness and burdensomeness]. Jesse Bering’s A Very Human Ending sets out Joiner’s interpersonal model, in which suicidal desire must be joined by an “acquired capability for suicide” involving “a lowered fear of death and increased physical pain tolerance”. Bering reports Joiner’s conclusion that suicide is “an exemplar of psychopathology” [Bering, A Very Human Ending, #38664, ch. 8 “Gray Matter”]. Bering also describes Denys deCatanzaro’s evolutionary hypothesis, which casts suicide in terms of inclusive fitness and Hamilton’s rule, and he argues against Joiner that some cases cannot be reduced to “misperceptions of Hamilton’s rule” [ibid.]. Set side by side, the two bodies of work disagree about method. Heisman makes the will to die a test of the objectivity of reason. The scientific literature treats fear of death, hopelessness and perceived burden as variables to be measured. Heisman’s own first move is to declare that literature “viviocentric”.

Placement: Nietzsche, Cioran, Rose and Vălcan

The catalogue links #38252 to Nietzsche, Cioran and Seraphim Rose [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, related works]. Nietzsche, whom Heisman quotes from his first pages, defines nihilism as the state in which “the highest values devalue themselves”, and distinguishes “active nihilism” from a “weary”, “passive nihilism” whose “most famous form” is Buddhism [Nietzsche, The Will to Power, #69520, Part 1, “Nihilism”]. Simona Modreanu’s study of Cioran describes the opposite outcome to Heisman’s. Cioran “lives precisely because it is in his power to end it whenever he wishes; he lives with the idea of suicide”. Modreanu notes that, to her knowledge, nobody has killed themselves with a book of Cioran’s in hand, his work being “a postponed suicide” (“o sinucidere amânată”) [Modreanu, Cioran, #21878]. The Orthodox hieromonk Seraphim Rose diagnoses nihilism as the root of modern revolution and as a revolt in which “God, if there is any god, is the enemy” of humanity. He contrasts it with the Christian sense in which “the world is nothing and God is everything” [Rose, Cauza Revoluției din Epoca Modernă: Nihilismul, #49221, ch. III]. Ciprian Vălcan’s essay on fin-de-siècle Vienna presents the suicide as “a personification of disorder, of the intrusion of meaninglessness”, against a background of “diffuse nihilism”, and draws on Otto Rank’s link between suicide and narcissism [Vălcan, Sinucigaşul sau vremea nihilismului, #11526]. The reference shelf traces the word from Jacobi through Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons to Nietzsche’s account of the loss of traditional values under secularisation [Wikipedia: Nihilism]. Placed in this lineage, Heisman stands apart from all of them in one respect. Nietzsche and Cioran each turned nihilism into a stance for living, and Rose turned it into a call to faith. Heisman frames his nihilism as an experiment and claims to carry it through to its end.

Key points

• The library holds suicide note (#38252), by Mitchell Heisman: a 2010 treatise of about 1,900 pages (3.39 million characters), released under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US licence, with an epigraph from the Phaedo on philosophy as preparation for death.
• The book’s Overview defines five blocks: Exordia, Part I (three treatises on monotheism, Christianity and Auschwitz), Part II (three treatises on 1066, liberal democracy and “genetic suicide”), Terminus (“The Punchline”), and a bibliography.
• Part II is almost twice the length of Part I. Heisman’s theses on religion are embedded in a sociobiological theory of Anglo-Saxon and Norman history.
• The “freedom of speech hypothesis” holds that repressing the work would itself verify its thesis about the limits of liberal democracy.
• The “experiment in nihilism” treats nihilism as “the cumulative consequence of the scientific approach to life”. It introduces “viviocentrism” and the “liberation of death”, and names fear of death as the master of all hierarchies.
• The Terminus attacks the fact-value distinction and E. O. Wilson. It sets a “non-Euclidean logic of rational self-destruction” against Hobbes’s logic of self-preservation.
• The library’s suicide science (hopelessness theory; Joiner’s interpersonal model; Bering’s evolutionary discussion) documents a second, empirical perspective that does not share Heisman’s interpretation.
• Nietzsche, Cioran (the “postponed suicide”), Seraphim Rose (nihilism as revolt against God) and Vălcan (suicide in an age of diffuse nihilism) give the comparative lineage.