QuestionsShould we fear death?Death: a sleep or a journey
Should we fear death?Nothing to fear

Death: a sleep or a journey

Socrates' dilemma on death

Socrates c. 470 BC · c. 399 BCI know that I know nothing.
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What it claims

In both cases, death is not an evil for the good man, and one may be of good hope in front of it.

Why

Death is either a dreamless sleep or a journey to the dead: either way it is a gain, not an evil.

The same idea through history
Socrates399 BCCondemned to death, Socrates addresses the judges who voted to acquit him. We know him through Plato, who wrote it down: it is not a word-for-word record of the trial. The argument is presented as Plato has him say it.
In short

"Death: a sleep or a journey" is an argument by Socrates (Plato, Apology, 40c-41c (Socrates according to Plato), 399 BC) on the question "Should we fear death?" (answer: nothing to fear). Its claim: In both cases, death is not an evil for the good man, and one may be of good hope in front of it. 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 2 objections, 0 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Plato, Apology, 40c-41c (Socrates according to Plato)
Valid with an implicit premise

At his trial, Socrates tells his judges he is of good hope in the face of death, and he justifies it with a dilemma. He does not claim to know what death is: he examines the two possibilities he sees. In both cases, he says, death is a good, or at least not an evil. These are the words Plato gives to Socrates.

P1One of two things: either death is a state of nothingness without any sensation, or it is a passage of the soul to another place, where the dead are.
P2If death is nothingness, it is like a dreamless sleep. Yet hardly anyone would find in his life many nights and days better than such a night: so death is a gain.
P3If death is a journey to the place where all the dead are, what greater good could one imagine? There one finds the true judges and the poets, and one can go on questioning people.
P4 · implicit premiseWhat is a gain or a good is not an evil.
Therefore, in both cases, death is not an evil for the good man, and one may be of good hope in front of it.

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 situation where death is a gain (a sleep) and yet remains an evil, for instance because it deprives us of what we loved.
The reasoning is a dilemma: two cases, the same result in each. It is valid if P4 is granted. But it is sound only if P1 is complete: the two cases must cover every possibility. That is where the discussion bites.
Analogy. Facing a closed door, you do not know what is behind it. You tell yourself: either the room is empty and quiet, or there is a party with people I admire. Either way, nothing to fear. That works as long as there is no third possibility, for instance a room where one suffers.

Objections

2

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

C
Classic objection: is the dilemma complete? attacks premise 1

There is a third possibility: an unhappy afterlife, for instance a punishment for one's faults in the beyond. If that possibility is not ruled out, the dilemma is false and death can be an evil. Socrates partly answers in advance: he speaks of the good man, for whom no evil is possible, either in life or after death.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Socrate in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Socrates does not explicitly consider a third possibility: he relies on the good man's goodness and on the gods, who do not abandon him. That protects only the man who has been just. For the others, the door stays open. This objection is our own analysis, not the quotation of a specific author.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point: the strength of the dilemma depends on what one believes about the afterlife. If it may be unhappy, the conclusion holds only for those who have nothing to fear there.
E
Epicurus attacks premise 2

Epicurus would go further than Socrates on the first case. For him, death is not even a gain: it is nothing to us, for as long as we are here it is not, and when it is here we are no longer. Our reading: the "gain" of sleep still supposes comparing states, whereas there is no one left to compare them. Epicurus's argument has its own page.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus see the argument
We have not yet found a direct reply by Socrate in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Socrates does not answer Epicurus, who comes about a century later. Both agree that death as nothingness is not to be feared, and differ only on the word "gain". This mention is our summary, without a quotation.