Should We Fear Death? Epicurean and Modern Arguments
266
To the extent that the Epicurean conception of a happy life
asks us to give them up, or to deprecate their importance,
that conception is impoverished and should be rejected.
Although there is some wisdom in the Epicurean worldview,
it is incomplete at best. It cannot be used to save what I called
The Basic Epicurean Argument against fearing death, because
there is more to a good life than freedom from pain and anxi-
ety – aponia and ataraxia. A good life includes rich kinds of
experience and connection that are, by their natures, forward-
looking.
None of this is to say that there is no force at all in the
Epicurean arguments. In his Key Doctrines, Epicurus argues
that “the flesh” (p151) wants infinite duration of life, while
the intellect knows better. [2] In fact, I left open the question,
earlier in this essay, of how much we should fear death, even
if we have reasons to avoid and resist it. Perhaps “the flesh”
has its own reasons to fear death, reasons that make us fear it
more than is good for our happiness.
Though it is beyond the scope of this essay to pursue the
issue in detail, the equivalent of “the flesh” in contemporary
thought may be our unconscious genetic predispositions,
some of which may have increased our evolutionary ances-
tors’ inclusive fitness, but do not increase our happiness as
individuals. It is rational to have projects, relationships, com-
mitments, and interests that attach us to life. However, the
degree to which we actually fear death – the sense of nagging
anxiety or even panic that the thought of death sometimes
causes – might not be something we would choose if we
could reach into ourselves and rewrite our own genetic code,
in order to harmonize our personalities with our considered
ideas of what constitutes a happy life.
If my argument so far is correct, it would be rational to fear
death less than we do, but it is also rational to want to remain
alive, at least for as long as we have projects, relationships,