Death

If everything in the cosmos arises from change and returns to it, death is but one transformation among others, the dissolution of the elements back into the whole they came from: nothing in keeping with nature can be an evil. But Marcus does not merely defuse its terror; he keeps it daily before his eyes to govern present action, so that an acute awareness of death, more than a consolation, becomes the spur to a life rightly lived. His own note is the image of the ripe fruit: to leave life as the olive falls, blessing the earth that bore it.

Meditations, II, 17 · Meditations, IV, 48 · Meditations, IX, 3

Spoiler

Part II, chapter 5

A materialist and enemy of fictions, Bentham acknowledges no hereafter: death is the simple cessation of sensibility, hence neither to be feared nor surrounded with superstition. He pushes the consequence so far as to bequeath his body to science and have it preserved as an auto-icon, a lucid gesture against the religious terror of death.

Auto-Icon; or, Farther Uses of the Dead to the Living

Diogenes flaunts a provocative indifference toward death: he asks, it is said, that his corpse be thrown over the wall to the beasts, and mocks the care of burial, since he will no longer be there to feel anything. The fear of dying belongs to the empty conventions he sets out precisely to undo; death is nothing that should trouble the self-sufficient sage. The serenity meets the Epicurean tone, with no promise of personal immortality.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI, 79

Hume refutes the immortality of the soul on every ground, metaphysical, moral and physical: nothing warrants the belief that consciousness survives the dissolution of the body. He faces his own end, moreover, with a cheerful serenity, without fear or hope of a beyond. Death is the natural terminus, and to dread it makes no more sense than to regret not having existed before being born.

Of the Immortality of the Soul

The Cynics flaunt a provocative indifference toward death: Diogenes, it is said, asks that his corpse be thrown over the wall to the beasts, mocking the care of burial, since he will no longer be there to feel anything. Death is nothing that should trouble the self-sufficient sage, and the fear of it belongs to the empty conventions he sets out precisely to undo.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives, VI

Utilitarianism, naturalistic and secular, rests on no firm doctrine of the hereafter: Bentham takes death to be the simple cessation of sensibility, Mill leaves immortality undecidable. Death is therefore above all the end of the capacity for pleasure and pain, which warrants seeking to postpone it and to reduce its sufferings, more than investing it with meaning.

Bentham, Auto-Icon; Mill, Three Essays on Religion

Sartre explicitly rejects Heidegger's being-toward-death: far from being my ownmost possibility, which would give my life meaning, death is an absurd, external fact, the sheer suppression of my possibilities. It is neither awaited nor assumed as mine, it hands me over to the gaze of others. Meaning comes from freedom in progress, never from death, which is less to be tamed than to be kept from governing life.

Being and Nothingness, IV (My Death)

Death "is nothing terrible", but is the opinion about it that makes it so: it is a natural event, the return of the elements to the whole, to be kept daily before one's eyes without fear. The tone meets the Epicurean serenity toward death, with a Stoic cosmic coloring rather than any genuine personal immortality.

Enchiridion, §5 and §21 · Discourses, III.24

Mill judges the immortality of the soul neither provable nor refutable by reason: experience rather pleads for the end of consciousness with the body, but the question stays open. He grants that the hope of a future life, though without secure foundation, may have value for conduct, without one's being able to rely on it as on knowledge.

Three Essays on Religion (Theism)

For the free man, the fear of dying is a passion born of inadequate ideas, to be dissolved through knowledge: a free man thinks of nothing less than of death. The eternity of the mind he speaks of is no personal survival in duration, hence a residual share of immortalism. And though every being strives to persevere in its being (conatus), this metaphysical refusal of its own destruction stays secondary to the sage's serenity.

Ethics, IV, prop. 67 · Ethics, V, props. 38-39

Death is a natural process, in keeping with the order of the cosmos, and therefore an indifferent not to be feared. The meditation on death (the premeditation of evils and the memento mori) serves to free present life from anxiety rather than to promise survival. Marcus Aurelius sees in it the mere dissolution of the elements back into the whole.

Seneca, Letters to Lucilius, 26 · Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, II, 17

The three poles of this axis fit the Taoist view poorly: death is neither a nothingness to be tamed nor the promise of an immortal soul, but simply a moment of universal transformation, like the turning of the seasons. At his wife's death, Zhuangzi stops weeping and sings while drumming on a basin, understanding that she now sleeps in the great chamber of the cosmos. The fear of death dissolves into consent to change.

Zhuangzi, ch. 18 (Perfect Happiness) · Zhuangzi, ch. 6 (The Great and Venerable Teacher)

Asked about death and the spirits, Confucius redirects attention to life: you do not yet know how to serve the living, how could you know how to serve the dead?. He sets aside speculation about the hereafter without denying it, and shifts care onto present conduct. But the cult of ancestors maintains a continuity: the dead remain present through memory and the rites, a form of survival in the lineage.

Analects (Lunyu), XI.12

A threefold consolation against the fear of death: the symmetry argument, the state after our death is none other than the state before our birth, hence a matter of indifference; death as the 'muse of philosophy,' without which one would hardly philosophize; and the indestructibility of our being-in-itself, the will, which knows neither time nor end, though no person survives.

The World as Will and Representation, vol. II, ch. 41, 'On Death'

To fear death, says Socrates, is to think oneself wise when one is not, for no one knows whether it is an evil. It is one of two things: either a dreamless sleep, and so a gain, or a journey of the soul to the dead, and so a blessing; in both cases the good man has nothing to fear. The proof of immortality will come from Plato; in Socrates the position stays suspended between these two hopes.

Plato, Apology, 40c-41c (the two hypotheses about death)

Confucianism turns away from speculation about the hereafter to shift care onto present life and duties, but surrounds death with rites and perpetuates the cult of ancestors. The dead thus remain present in the memory and piety of the lineage: not an annihilation to be feared, nor truly a survival of the soul, but a continuity through filial piety and transmission.

Analects (Lunyu); Classic of Filial Piety

Aristotle holds death to be the most fearful of things, for it is the end and deprives of all goods: it is a real evil, not a nothing, before which courage finds its meaning in facing it without flight. The soul, the form of the body, perishes with it for the most part, only the intellect (nous) being able to count as eternal, but impersonally. Hence a finitude assumed, tinged with the gravity of a loss.

Nicomachean Ethics, III, 6 and 9 · On the Soul, III, 5

Aristotelianism holds death to be the natural end of the compound of soul and body: a real evil, which deprives of all goods, but to be faced with courage rather than fled or denied. Except for the intellect, whose eternity remains impersonal, nothing of the person survives: a lucid finitude, which grants death its gravity without making of it either a nothing or a passage.

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, III

With Heidegger, phenomenology makes death a structure of existence: Dasein is being-toward-death, and it is by resolutely anticipating its ownmost, insuperable and non-shareable end that it tears itself from the idle talk of the "they" and authentically takes hold of itself. Death is not a distant event but what, here and now, individualizes existence and gives it its weight.

Heidegger, Being and Time, §§ 46-53

In the existential tradition, finitude is no external accident but what individualizes existence: for Heidegger, Dasein (being-there) is being-toward-death, and resolute anticipation of one's own death wrests one from inauthenticity, the opposite of authenticity. Sartre qualifies this thesis, but the movement unanimously rejects consoling immortality.

Heidegger, Being and Time

Nietzsche dismisses the Christian beyond as a slander on life, and likewise refuses to make death an absolute evil: he preaches a free death, chosen at the right hour, that crowns existence instead of merely undergoing it. To die one's own death, at the summit, is to make one's end an act and a fulfillment, in the amor fati that says yes even to the eternal return.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra, On Free Death · Twilight of the Idols

Death separates the soul from the body, but the intellective soul, because it subsists in itself, does not perish: it survives awaiting the resurrection of bodies, where the human being will once again be complete. Death is therefore neither sheer nothingness nor the ultimate horizon, but a passage toward eternal life and, for the just, toward the vision of God. This is a properly Christian immortalism, joining the immortality of the soul to the resurrection of the flesh.

Summa Theologiae, Ia, q. 75, a. 6; Suppl., q. 75

Platonism affirms the immortality of the soul, argued in the Phaedo from its kinship with the Forms and its simple, indissoluble nature. Death is but the separation of soul and body, and the philosopher rehearses it throughout his life.

Plato, Phaedo, 64a, 78b-80b, death as practice · Plato, Republic, 608d-611a, the immortality of the soul

Cartesian dualism really separates the soul, a thinking substance, from the body, an extended substance: nothing in the nature of the mind depends on the body, whose death therefore cannot reach it. Descartes presents it as an explicit aim of the Meditations to demonstrate, against the libertines, the immortality of the soul. Death is but the breakdown of a machine, the soul surviving it.

Meditations on First Philosophy, Dedicatory Letter and VI

For Leibniz, no substance truly perishes: the monad is indestructible, and what we call death is only an enfolding and a diminution, not an annihilation. The rational soul moreover keeps its individuality, its memory and its moral identity, the pledge of a personal immortality required by divine justice.

Monadology, §§ 73-77 · Discourse on Metaphysics, § 34

The self (ātman) is never born and never dies: death touches only the body-mind compound, not the consciousness that witnesses it. In this respect Śaṅkara belongs to immortalism, the present life being a passage toward liberation. But the encoding calls for a nuance: what is immortal is not the individual soul, which unravels with its rebirths, but the impersonal self identical in all. For the one who has realized this identity, death is no longer even an event to fear, which adds a coloring close to "death is nothing": it can subtract nothing from what, in essence, was never in time.

Commentary on the Bhagavad Gītā, II.11-30 · Commentary on the Kaṭha Upaniṣad

Theoretical reason cannot prove that the soul survives the body, but practical reason postulates it: the moral law commands a perfection that no finite life completes, which requires an indefinite progress, hence the immortality of the soul. An immortality not demonstrated but postulated, a rational belief resting on morality.

Critique of Practical Reason, Dialectic, II

A Christian, Locke looks for a future life, but grounds it on the promised resurrection rather than on a natural immortality of the soul, which he doubts (he even entertains a matter capable of thinking). It is God who raises and rewards, the hereafter being a gift, not an intrinsic property of the mind.

The Reasonableness of Christianity · Essay concerning Human Understanding, IV, 3

For Vedanta, the Self (atman) is eternal and does not die: death reaches only the body and the empirical person, while the atman transmigrates from life to life according to karma. It is therefore first an immortalism (the Self survives, indestructible), coupled with a passage (death is but a stage) and a preparation (dying well orients what follows), until the liberation (moksha) that dissolves transmigration itself.

Bhagavad Gita, II · Katha Upanishad

For the Buddha, death is neither the annihilation of a self (there is no permanent self, anattā) nor the survival of a soul, but a passage within the cycle of rebirths governed by karma: a mere stage, yet one to be carefully prepared, since the dying person's state of mind orients the rebirth, and something continues without any soul remaining. A balanced position, until the liberation that alone halts the cycle.

Suttas on karma and rebirth · Bardo Thödol (Tibetan tradition)

Nagarjuna takes up the Buddhist view of death as a passage within the cycle of rebirths, but reads it in the light of emptiness: birth and death are themselves empty of inherent nature. Death is therefore neither an absolute terminus nor the survival of a soul, but a conditioned transition, one stage among others, until wisdom undoes the cycle. A balanced position, without the pole of refusal.

Fundamental Verses on the Middle Way (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā), XXV

For Buddhism, death is neither the annihilation of a self nor the survival of a soul, but a passage within the cycle of rebirths governed by karma: a mere stage, yet one to be carefully prepared, since the dying person's state of mind orients the rebirth, and something continues without any permanent soul remaining. A balanced position, until the liberation that alone halts the cycle.

Bardo Thödol (Tibetan Book of the Dead) · Suttas on rebirth

For Beauvoir, death is never natural: it is a violence, an unjustifiable scandal that shatters projects and outrages life, however long and consented to. Rather than greet it with serenity, she prefers revolt and indignation, refusing to dress up as meaningful what is only a defeat. The death of loved ones, witnessed up close, appears to her as an unacceptable rupture, not a fulfillment.

A Very Easy Death · The Coming of Age

Death is the scandal par excellence: the horizon that reveals the absurd and ruins all hope, but which Camus refuses to greet with serenity. To resignation as much as to the hope of a beyond, he opposes revolt: to die unreconciled, lucid and in revolt, with no appeal and no consolation. It is in this obstinate refusal, not in acceptance, that the absurd man asserts his greatness.

The Myth of Sisyphus · The Rebel