Should A Wise Person Fear Death? Warren Zhu, Year 13, Churchill House
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down, And death shall have no dominion. —Dylan Thomas Introductory Remarks
us…”, and the wise person would not fear death.
Should a wise person fear death? This question first came to me as I was reading Epicurus, the great Greek champion of happiness. It is a question of extreme relevance, but one so broad that any attempt at answering the question would, by its nature, be incomprehensive. Nonetheless, I will, in this essay, take on the quixotic task, with the caution that it is by no means conclusive.
Plato, in the Phaedo, provides another argument: If the duality between the transient and material body, and the immaterial and immortal soul is true as Plato believes it to be,wise ones would not fear death, since the soul shall not perish along with the dead of the body. The wise, instead, would even look forward to it, as it untethers them from their body—with its tedious biological processes—into the realm of pure thought, the only realm that matters to the wise.
I will first examine Epicurus’ argument along with Plato’s, who held a very similar view, and point out why I believe the two arguments are inadequate. I will then examine the larger question of: “should a wise person fear death?”, taking Dostoevsky, Seneca, Heidegger, and Nietzsche’s arguments, each of which argue for a realm of life in which that ‘death’ has ‘no dominion’ over, and therefore, should not be feared by the wise. It would, however, be prudent to first clarify what the word ‘wise’ is before setting out to answer the question: Wisdom is not intelligence—the ability to solve mathematical problems or understand abstract notions; nor is it knowledge—the storage of facts and theories. Wisdom, as discussed in this essay, is a clarity in one’s understanding of life and death. The wise person, it follows, is the one with the most reasonable attitude towards life and death. The Arguments Epicurus’ argument goes as follows: we fear death only because we believe it is bad in some way. However, death cannot be bad for anyone since "when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist…”. Death, to the living human being, is nothing, because they will never cross paths. Therefore, “Death…is nothing to
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There is, however, a successful objection to both Socrates and Epicurus, presented in Hamlet’s famous Soliloquy. Hamlet says: To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life; The flaw in both Epicurus’ and Socrates’ arguments is that they are both assuming what the experience of death is like—in Epicurus’ case, nothingness; in Socrates’ case, bliss in pure thought—and this move is unjustified, because the “dreams” that “may come”, could be ones that “give us pause”. This, although does not fully discredit Epicurus and Socrates’ arguments, shows that they are much less robust than they claim to be. Not all is lost, however, for one can find a different kind of argument that dispels the fear of death but does not presuppose any post-death experience. For these, we can look to Dostoevsky, Seneca, Heidegger, and Nietzsche. In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky gives an
