Epicurus why fear death

That is, are there any good reasons for your pending death to trigger the emotion of fear? It is reasonable to be fearful of things to the extent that those things can cause you harm. None of them would help us in our Epicurean goal of being happy, and so are reasonably feared. Even something that you dreamed or imagined — say, a stranger standing silently by your bed as you wake — has a kind of existence necessary for it to be the reasonable object of a fear, even if it turns out to have been the shadow of a tree.

And Lucretius would add: it is just as unreasonable to fear nonexistence after life as it is to fear nonexistence before birth. No, the Epicurean argument against the fear of death concerns only your own self and its dissolution. When I think through these steps, I find that their efficacy is largely dependent upon my mood. I like the idea of being able to intellectualise away the fear of death, as if merely thinking philosophical thoughts would be enough to give me courage.

Epicurus recognised this. It can have its fruits. It can lighten a little the fear of death, which in turn can subtly augment your enjoyment of life — and that is, on the whole, one of the great purposes of being here in the first place.

Their disagreement goes right to the heart of the Epicurean view. Nagel says that Epicurus is wrong: death obviously does deprive us of the possibility of the joys of life; only airy-headed philosophers indulging in their wanton complexities would deny so simple a truth.

An example: the brilliant philosopher and mathematician Frank Ramsey died at It is reasonable to hold that his death deprived him — and the world — of uncountable, perhaps now-inconceivable, philosophical insights.

But it also took away from him the quiet charms of growing older, the wisdom of age such as it is , the elation of having children, and so on. In that sense, death was very bad for Ramsey, as it is for all of us. For the great majority of lives, death deprives. That alone is a good enough reason to fear death, or so Nagel would say.

His stance was elaborated in by the philosopher Ben Bradley using the terminology of possible worlds, the basic gist of which is to compare possibilities, treat each possibility as real, and then decide which possible world is better. It seems intuitive that the possible worlds in which Ramsey lives longer are better than the possible and, unfortunately, actual world in which he died at 26, and it suitably follows that death is bad and should be feared.

But this perspective, however compelling, abandons the first-person — indeed, existential — vista of the Epicureans, whose philosophy, like that of most other ancients, is inextricable from their ethical outlook. Because the Epicurean argument can in theory make life itself more enjoyable, and pleasure is the purpose of life, then their argument is more likely to be true, according to them.

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Death is what motivates us towards achieving our goals, which helps us to appreciate our loved ones and which concludes our story. It is our marching towards death that forces us to consider how we ought to live and, contrastingly, how we ought to die. For Socrates and Plato the purpose of philosophy is obvious: it is preparation for death. For Plato, our preparation for death was also a preparation for a kind of afterlife, which is something that Epicurus did not agree with.

Epicurus was born approximately seven years after Plato died and began his philosophical journey at the age of fourteen as a revolt against his teachers. Epicurus proposed that the world was made up of atoms over two thousand years before they were shown to exist and that the universe was infinite. He also encouraged a form of pleasurable living that was rejected by the Stoics , who thought his way of life was degenerate. Epicurus proposed that pleasure defined as a lack of pain and mental disturbance was the goal of life.

But to achieve that goal we needed to rid ourselves of fear, especially the fear of death. Epicurus believed that our fear of death is the worst fear we face in life because it pervades our thoughts while we are alive.

Our lust for life and our fear of death are the same thought, merely framed differently. By fretting about not having enough time with our loved ones, by not completing what we want to complete in life — we are really fretting about death. People often feel a weight on their minds that bears down upon them and exhausts them.

But if they could only know what are its causes, they would not live their lives in the way we so often observe: no one knowing what they want, everyone wanting to change their position in life, as if they could thereby lay down their burdens….

As Seneca also comments in his discussion on the apparent shortness of life , we are ever preoccupied with the future, and rarely attentive to the present. We must remember death is nothing to us, and acknowledge that our unfocused craving for life in fact damages the only life we get: it removes us from appreciating what we already have.

So, rather than forego current pleasures by worrying about future inevitabilities, we should accept and celebrate our mortality and live simply and authentically in the face of it. Besides, by prolonging life we subtract nothing from the time when we shall be dead. As Lucretius frankly puts it:. No matter how many generations you live through, the same eternal death is still waiting, and someone who ends life as the sun goes down today will have just as long a period of non-existence as one who died many months and years before.

Mortality is part of our nature. A nd so, in seeking to advocate the Epicurean principle of removing excess desire, fear, and anxiety from our lives, Lucretius set his sights on our biggest sickness of all, the root of many of our faults: our fear of death. Do you think he succeeds in using further Epicurean principles, like living in an atomic world, to allay this fear? Are you ready to live authentically in the moment, and banish your worries about the non-existent future?

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