Should A Wise Person Fear Death?

ShouldShould A A WiseWise PersonPerson FearFear Death?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

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.

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 us… ” , and the wise person would not fear death.

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.

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

irrationalist argument for the groundlessness of the fear of death—that in genuine love immortality would be self-evidently felt. To try to explain this account in the form of an argument, would be that by subordinating our self-interests to another entity through love, something much more enduring than that fleeting moment of the consciousness of the self between two ‘eternities of darkness’ that we call life. Therefore, the wise person, whose wisdom consists in his love and understanding, should not fear death, for death has no ‘dominion’ over love.

Dostoevsky’s argument is much more difficult to refute, mainly because it relies on an experience of intense love. It may be said, however, that it is much too reliant on emotion, rather than reason, which, the wise person, in its relentless questioning, would not accept.

Seneca, the Roman Stoic, however, provides an argument that relies not on emotion, but rationality. To Seneca, as with the Stoics before him, fear, just like all other emotions, rises out of confusion. Firstly, only things that are invariably bad should be feared; since death is not always negative to the person who suffers it—to a slave who has lost all of his freedom, for example—the fear of death is completely irrational. Secondly, the emotion of fear, even as a response to what is unequivocally bad, is still counterproductive and irrational, for, to the stoics, all emotions rise out of irrationality. Third—and Seneca argues passionately on this point—only the person who is not afraid of death can be considered truly free, for the choice to die when the circumstance warrants it is no less a freedom than any other action. Seneca says: “just as I shall select my ship when I am about to go on a voyage… so I shall choose my death when I am about to depart from life. ” , and this is no different for the wise person, being the paragon of virtuous understanding and the freest person. Thus, for the rational, wise person, death shall have no ‘dominion’ .

Seneca’s argument, in some sense, refutes Dostoevsky’s, insofar as it is predicated on a refutation of the validity of emotion. But it refutes Dostoevsky’s argument in such a way that the refutation supports his conclusion. In this, the case for a positive answer to the question that we are currently investigating is strengthened. The combination of Seneca and Dostoevsky’s arguments is similar to Bertrand Russel’s famous argument against Naïve realism (Russel’s argument being that since Physics presupposes Naïve realism, and Physics shows that Naïve realism is wrong, Naïve realism, whether Physics is right or wrong, is wrong).

Building upon the previous conclusion, there are two different kinds of arguments from Heidegger and Nietzsche that I wish to discuss, which would strengthen the case that a wise person should not fear death.

Heidegger agrees with Seneca that fear rises out of confusion. To him, fear and anxiety are two sides of the same coin. Fear arises out of inauthenticity, of Dasein (i.e., the mode of being that humans—or, as he likes to call it, mortals—hold) not realizing its own potentialities-of-Being. In contrast, anxiety is characteristic of the authentic mode of Being (authentic mode of Being being something analogous, though not completely the same as, being-wise). In authenticity there is nothing to fear— there is even no Dasein to be anxious, for only “anxiety is anxious” . In fact, in his analysis of Dasein’s temporality, Heidegger asserts that it is death that provides Dasein’s everyday activities with meaning, just as for Aristotle it is the telos that give every object its purpose. In this sense, death is something to be affirmed.

To Heidegger, the question is not so much answered, but dissolved. His is less of an argument but a description of a phenomenon that, once he directs one to see it with him, removes the sense of the question. For the wise person, who here could perhaps be defined as the anticipatorily resolute (his jargon for the conditions of authenticity) Dasein that lives in authenticity, would never experience fear. Therefore Death has no ‘dominion’ over the authentic, wise person.

Nietzsche argues in a similar fashion as Heidegger, although, instead of pointing one to a phenomenon, the wise person is defined by him, amongst many other attributes, as the one who would not fear death. His concept of amor fati (love of fate)—the ideal for the truly great and wise man (the Übermensch/Superman/Overman)—requires one to love every moment, no matter good or bad, of one’s life, including death. The wise person affirms death as he affirms everything else that comes at him as an inescapable part of fate. Whatever ‘dominion’ death shall have; it will not dominate the noble, Aristocratic (in the typically Nietzschean fashion) love of fate that the wise person possesses in virtue of his wisdom.

Conclusion

I agree with Epicurus in his statement, that a wise person does not fear death, although I do not agree with his argument—for it overlooks an aspect of death: its murky uncertainty. For the same reason, Socrates’ argument does not convince me. However, the pair of arguments of Dostoevsky and Seneca, which contradict each other and at the same time prove the same thing, have great validity. So do Heidegger and Nietzsche’s position, since both of their arguments cannot be refuted logically, but only believed or not believed: Heidegger pointing one to the mode of Being of the wise person in which the fear of death is dissolved, and Nietzsche defining the wise person in such a way that it cannot fear death. These are my grounds for agreeing with Epicurus’s conclusion (that the wise person should not fear death), in that there are spheres of life (love, in rationality, in authenticity, or in amor fati) that death has no dominion over.

Of how much relevance, however, does this brief survey and tentative conclusion bear? I’m afraid, perhaps not much; I fear that the wise person is perhaps only an ideal, something that exists up there in the world of forms and ideas, something that lies in the colorful world outside of the cave that we, the fugitives of darkness, can never divine. The truly wise person may be able to dispel the existential fear, but we ordinary mortals would still succumb to the dread despite the strength of all arguments. However, at the same time, I also want to contest that the setting up of such an ideal—the wise person—to strive for, is, still, of some value. For we are, in some sense, story-telling animals, animals who struggle to understand where we are, who we are, and just as importantly, where we should be. The destination may not be reachable (as in the case of the wise person), but we would, nevertheless, benefit in this quixotic (Sisyphean?) quest.