The anxiety objection
An argument, however sound, is not enough to dispel the fear of dying.
Objects to
Heidegger
- The Epicurean argument treats the fear of death as an error of reasoning: whoever grasps that "death is nothing to us" should see it vanish of its own accord.
- But this fear is not a mere opinion: it is the living being's attachment to its own existence, older than any reasoning and more obstinate than it. One can grant the conclusion and tremble still.
- Experience confirms it: no one contemplates their own vanishing as a truth of geometry. What we dread is not a painful state, it is no longer being at all, and no demonstration has any hold on that vertigo.
Therefore So the promised serenity may be only a victory of words: reasoned sometimes leaves intact the very anguish it claims to cure.
Deepenings
Fear and anguish
- One distinguishes fear, which always has an object one can face or flee, from anguish, which has none: before death, it is nothing definite that we fear, but the sheer "no longer being."
- This is why an argument, which always addresses an object, misses anguish: it refutes a reason for fearing, where what would need calming is one's whole relation to oneself.
Possible resolutions of the objection
Challenges
Problem