QuestionsShould we fear death?The hidden precipice: facing death
Should we fear death?An anxiety that enlightens

The hidden precipice: facing death

"We run carelessly to the precipice"; diversion in the face of death

Blaise Pascal 1623 · 1662The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.
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What it claims

One must face death rather than divert oneself to forget it, and this indifference is a strange lack of sense.

Why

Death is certain and terrible, yet almost everyone distracts themselves so as not to think of it, like running toward a cliff.

The same idea through history
Michel de Montaigne1580Montaigne already sees that the "remedy of the vulgar" is not to think of death. He draws the opposite conclusion from Pascal's: one must get used to it to make it familiar (see the objection below).
Blaise Pascal1670Pensées (written about 1658-1662, published in 1670). Pascal describes diversion as a screen placed before death, and says that this flight is the strangest thing in human conduct.
Blaise Pascal1670Pascal does not stop at fear: it is because death is "the end that awaits the noblest life in the world" that one must wager on eternal life (see the wager argument).Martin Heidegger1927Heidegger takes up the idea that fleeing death is our ordinary way of living (the "they"), and that one must stand before it to exist truly.
In short

"The hidden precipice: facing death" is an argument by Blaise Pascal (Pensées (Brunschvicg 183, 194, 210), 1670) on the question "Should we fear death?" (answer: an anxiety that enlightens). Its claim: One must face death rather than divert oneself to forget it, and this indifference is a strange lack of sense. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Pensées (Brunschvicg 183, 194, 210)
Valid with an implicit premise

Here, "anxiety" means this: death really is a terrible evil, and the right reaction is not to flee it. Pascal notes that all men know they will die, and that almost all manage not to think about it: games, hunting, business, conversation. He compares this to people running toward a precipice after putting a screen in front of them so as not to see it. He does not say fear is the goal. He says that hiding death from ourselves does not make it less real, and that not trying to find out what comes after is the greatest lack of sense. Pascal himself draws the sequel: the wager (see "Pascal's wager").

P1Death is certain and final: it is the last act, however fine the comedy of life.
P2What threatens us at every moment is terrible: death places us within a few years under the necessity of being forever either annihilated or unhappy, and nothing is more real or more terrible.
P3Men do not look at this end: they daze themselves so as not to see it, like people running toward a precipice after putting something before them.
P4 · implicit premiseHiding from oneself a certain and terrible end is unreasonable, because hiding it does not change it; the only reasonable conduct is to look it in the face.
Therefore one must face death rather than divert oneself to forget it, and this indifference is a strange lack of sense.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, the computer finds a case where the end is certain, terrible and hidden by diversion, but where hiding the danger is a sensible way of living well: there is then no reason to face it.
Valid with P4. P1 to P3 describe the situation: a certain, terrible end, hidden by our diversions. To conclude that one must look at it, Pascal assumes P4: when a danger is certain and serious, the only reasonable conduct is to look at it. Without P4, one could just as well conclude that distraction is a wise defence. This is the link that Montaigne, Epicurus and Spinoza each dispute in their own way.
Analogy. A patient receives a serious diagnosis, puts the letter in a drawer and throws a big party every night so as not to think about it. Pascal would say the party cures nothing and that he loses the time in which one can still act. An opponent would answer that this patient perhaps lives better this way, and that looking at the illness all the time does not make it less serious.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Montaigne, Essays III, 12 1588 · attacks premise 2

Montaigne agrees with Pascal that the flight of the "vulgar" is blind, and he himself says one must keep death in mind (Essays I, 20). But he refuses to judge it so terrible. He writes that we trouble life with the care of death and death with the care of life. Death itself is too brief a moment to call for precepts: it is the preparation that frightens us. So death should not be made the great subject of dread that fills our life.

Pascal replies
see the argument
Pascal, Pensées (on Montaigne) 1670 · Pascal's judgment on Montaigne (not a point-by-point answer)
Pascal judges Montaigne's views on death to be "thoroughly pagan", and that throughout his book he thinks only of dying cowardly and softly.
The debate goes on (our summary) Pascal here judges Montaigne's attitude, he does not answer his argument about preparation. They agree that death must be looked at; they differ on what one sees: for Montaigne, a brief moment one tames; for Pascal, the threshold of an eternity at stake. The deep answer therefore depends on P2: everything depends on what follows death, a point on which Pascal and Montaigne do not share the same faith.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Disagreement of substance: is death a brief passage one can tame, or the stake of the whole of life? It depends on what one believes about the afterwards.
E
Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus 300 BC · attacks premise 2

Epicurus holds that all good and evil consist in sensation, and that death is the privation of all sensation: so it is nothing to us. There is nothing terrible in what will never be felt, and fleeing it through diversion is not blindness, it is simply not tormenting oneself for nothing.

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in -300, after the author's death (1662).
The debate goes on (our summary) Epicurus writes about two thousand years before Pascal: the answer could only come from Pascal, and we found none in our corpus. A possible answer Pascal does not state here: the text B194 considers annihilation ("forever either annihilated or unhappy") as one of the two ends, and finds it terrible, without discussing the idea that it is not felt. An Epicurean can see a mere assertion in this. A reader of Pascal can see that he is not speaking of pain, but of the loss of all that one is.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Disagreement of substance: whether what is not felt can be an evil. This is the point on which Nagel defends the deprivation argument (see that entry).
Spinoza, Ethics IV, prop. 67 1677 · attacks the conclusion

Spinoza draws the opposite conclusion: the free man thinks of death least of all things, and his wisdom is a meditation not of death but of life. For him, facing death as Pascal wants is letting oneself be led by fear instead of reason.

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1677, after the author's death (1662).
The debate goes on (our summary) Spinoza writes fifteen years after Pascal's death. We have no answer from Pascal. Spinoza can be defended thus: thinking constantly of death is a form of fear, and reason leads us to live. Pascal can be defended thus: not thinking of death is not wisdom if it amounts to hiding it. Spinoza's sentence concerns the free man, already freed from fear; Pascal speaks of those who flee it.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Disagreement of substance: must one think of death to live well, or set it aside? Two opposed traditions, neither widely accepted.