A Body Dedicated to Positivism: Beşir Fuad

Imagine you are a soldier who has risen to such prominence through your achievements that you have captured the attention of the empire’s sultan. Your rank and career have granted you a respected position within society. Yet behind this story of success lies an immeasurable loneliness and pain. You leave all of this behind and devote yourself entirely to thought, literature, and science. Unfortunately, your personal life is no less turbulent: family conflicts, financial hardships, and above all, the death of your only child at a young age, leave you tossed from one crisis to another. Out of such a life emerges a man who cannot find an answer to the question, “What is the meaning of life?”—a man who has exhausted all his stores of meaning: Beşir Fuad.

First Encounter: Curiosity from Youth

I first heard the name Beşir Fuad during my high school years. I was told about his unusual death: an Ottoman intellectual who injected himself with morphine, slit his wrists, and meticulously recorded the pain he experienced as he died. At the time, this seemed merely “interesting,” and I did not dwell on it—until, during university, while reading a book titled The Introduction of Positivism to Türkiye, I encountered his name again...

Bits and pieces began to coalesce in my mind: a successful officer, a thinker devoted to positivism, Türkiye’s first naturalist writer, a troubled family life, and a few letters left behind. In one of these letters, he bequeathed his body to the Mekteb-i Tıbbiye-i Şahane as a cadaver for scientific study. At that moment, I asked myself: What else could this man be but a body dedicated to positivism? Even in death, he wished his corpse to serve positivism and science.

His suicide was grounded in experiment and observation. He documented the nature of pain and its physical effects. His final message was essentially this: “I have defended positivism throughout my life. Let my death serve it too.”

His suicide was a “scientific farewell.” There must be a category of suicide defined by such a motive.

Emile Durkheim’s Types of Suicide

The French sociologist Emile Durkheim, in his sociological study titled Suicide, identifies four types of suicide: egoistic, altruistic, anomic, and fatalistic.

• Egoistic Suicide: This occurs when an individual regards their own values as superior to those of the society to which they belong and fails to integrate into that society, ultimately ending their life as a result.
• Altruistic Suicide: The defining characteristic of this type is that the individual places the interests of their society above their own.
• Anomic Suicide: This is the type Durkheim discusses most extensively. Individuals derive meaning in life from the structures and values of their society, each of which carries specific duties. When these structures fail or lose their function, the individual’s integration into society collapses. The person concludes that life is meaningless, cannot answer the question, “What is the meaning of life?”, and chooses to end their life.
• Fatalistic Suicide: This refers to the act of ending one’s life by someone who cannot accept their fate and refuses to submit to it.

When we examine Beşir Fuad’s suicide, which of Durkheim’s types can we associate it with? Or is his suicide entirely unique? Beşir Fuad’s suicide is too original to be directly categorized under any of the above types, yet it occupies a position between egoistic and anomic suicide.

Conclusion: Is Beşir Fuad a Tragedy or a Manifesto?

Perhaps Beşir Fuad’s suicide is not best understood as one of Durkheim’s categories, but rather as a “protest” suicide. Bequeathing his body to the Mekteb-i Tıbbiye, documenting his pain, and orchestrating a conscious death ritual all place his suicide within the framework of an “epistemological suicide.”

Was Beşir Fuad’s death a scientific sacrifice, or a cry against meaninglessness? Perhaps it was both. But one thing is certain: he still compels us to ask, “What is the meaning of life?” And perhaps it is for this very reason that he remains a name worth discussing.

Suppose your fate included such a life. If you were in Beşir Fuad’s place, what would you do? Perhaps it is difficult to empathize with him. Yet I would ask us, as beings capable of empathy, to try. Empathy in this case is difficult, but necessary. We, perhaps, would cling to emotions, human relationships, art, and faith, rather than rejecting metaphysical values and rigidly adhering to positivism as he did. Perhaps we would not isolate ourselves from society to such an extent. Yet all these alternative paths may have been invisible to him, obscured by the mental pressure and inner turmoil he endured.

“People may choose death when they believe it will serve a greater good than their own existence.” - Simon Critchley^【1】