Freeing ourselves from the fear

All good and evil reside in sensation, and death is precisely the privation of all sensation: physics guarantees it, since the soul, made of subtle atoms, scatters when the body comes apart. Hence the decisive argument: death is nothing to us, for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist; the subject that could suffer and the dreaded event never coexist. The fear of death therefore aims at a nothing and rests on the illusion of still witnessing one's own absence. This targets the terrors of the afterlife, punishment and survival, which Epicureanism holds to be fictions without object: there is no infinite span to dread, and a finite but unanxious life is worth an eternity.

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 124-125 · Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, book III

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)

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

The argument rests on two premises drawn from physics: all good and evil reside in sensation, and death, the dissolution of the soul's atoms, is precisely the total privation of sensation. It follows that death can be an evil for no one, since the subject who would suffer it never coexists with it: while we are, it is not present; when it is present, we are no more. The fear of dying therefore targets a nothingness, and to dread a state in which one will not be is as empty as grieving over the time before one's birth. This reasoning, the second plank of the tetrapharmakos, removes the object of the anxiety that, on Epicurus' view, poisons the whole of life.

Letter to Menoeceus, 124-125 · Principal Doctrines, II

Since the soul is corporeal and is born, grows and ages with the body, it dissolves with it: all feeling then ceases, and a subject who is no more can suffer no evil. Death is therefore nothing to us, a conclusion Epicurus already held; but Lucretius devotes the whole of book III to it and makes of it a long consolation, multiplying proofs of the soul's mortality and the symmetry argument: we do not grieve over the nothingness before our birth, so why dread the one after our death, which resembles it in all things? To wish to survive is to contradict oneself, for the dead will have neither lack nor regret. The consolation widens into a rejoinder spoken by nature herself, who reproaches the living for their ingratitude and their thirst to endure.

On the Nature of Things, III, 417-829 (the mortal soul; death is nothing to us) · On the Nature of Things, III, 830-1094 (the symmetry argument; the diatribe of Nature)

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

Since death is but the natural term of a loan repaid to nature, the evil lies not in it but in the fear of it, a fear that enslaves a whole life to its shadow. Seneca then turns that fear into an instrument of freedom: whoever rehearses dying each day, and holds the door of voluntary exit open, can no longer be coerced by anything or anyone. The meditation on death is thus not morbid but emancipatory, and it matters less for an afterlife, which he does not expect, than for restoring to the present its full worth.

Letters to Lucilius, XXVI and LXX (rehearsing death) · Letters to Lucilius, IV (to rehearse death is to rehearse freedom)

At his wife's death Zhuangzi sings, drumming on a basin: to weep would be to ignore the course of things. Death is neither a nothingness to fear nor a passage toward an immortal soul, but a moment of ceaseless transformation (hua): the vital breaths knot into life as the seasons follow one another, then unknot and reform elsewhere. Who knows whether the dead one is not rejoicing, like an exile come home at last? This serenity through insertion into the great passage of forms meets the Epicurean appeasement, yet it is laced with the idea that living matter endlessly recomposes itself, which is neither quite an extinction nor a personal immortality.

Zhuangzi, ch. 18 (Perfect Happiness) · Zhuangzi, ch. 6 (The Great Source as Teacher)

The young Montaigne, following Seneca and Cicero, holds that "to philosophize is to learn to die": to rehearse death ceaselessly so as to disarm it. The mature Montaigne overturns this voluntarist Stoicism: thinking too much about death poisons life. Better to trust nature, which "will teach you well enough" to die when the time comes, as peasants do without philosophy. Death ceases to be an ordeal to prepare for and becomes a natural term to welcome without fear, in a serenity colored more by Epicureanism than by any hope of an afterlife.

Essays, I, 20, "That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die" and III, 12, "Of Physiognomy"

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

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

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'

Spoiler

Part II, chapter 5