QuestionsShould we fear death?Meditating on life, not death
Should we fear death?Nothing to fear

Meditating on life, not death

Benedictus de Spinoza 1632 · 1677God, that is, Nature: everything follows by necessity.
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What it claims

The free man thinks of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life.

Why

Thinking about death means seeing it as an evil and acting from fear, while reason pushes us to live.

In short

"Meditating on life, not death" is an argument by Benedictus de Spinoza (Ethics IV, props. 63-67) on the question "Should we fear death?" (answer: nothing to fear). Its claim: The free man thinks of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life. 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.

Ethics IV, props. 63-67
Valid with an implicit premise

Since Plato, many philosophers have said that to philosophise is to learn how to die. Spinoza takes the opposite view: the free man thinks of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life.

P1The free man is one who lives under the guidance of reason alone.
P2Whoever is led by fear, and does good to avoid evil, is not led by reason.
P3Desire born of reason aims at the good directly: to act, to live, to preserve one's being.
P4 · implicit premiseThinking about death means thinking of it as an evil. Yet for Spinoza, knowing an evil always means having a confused idea, made of sadness and fear. So thinking about death means being led by fear.
Therefore the free man thinks of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life.

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 free man, guided by reason, without fear, turned towards life, who nevertheless thinks about death.
With P4 the conclusion follows. Without it, nothing prevents a person guided by reason from often thinking about death without fearing it, for instance in order to stop fearing it. Spinoza moves straight from "he is not led by fear of death" to "he does not think of it": P4 is the hidden bridge, and it is what Plato disputes in advance. To be fair to Spinoza, P4 rests on a thesis he proves elsewhere (Ethics IV, prop. 64): all knowledge of evil is inadequate. The question becomes: can one think about one's death without seeing it as an evil?
Analogy. A good swimmer does not spend his time thinking about drowning: he swims, and it is by swimming well that he is safe. Whoever thinks only of drowning swims badly, tense with fear.

Objections

2

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

Plato attacks premise 4

True philosophers practise dying, and that is precisely why death frightens them less than anyone. One can think about death without being led by fear, and it is even the way to be freed from it.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Spinoza in the texts.
Heidegger 1927 · attacks the conclusion

Fleeing the thought of one's own death means losing oneself in everyone's life. It is by facing the fact that I will die that my life becomes truly my own.

no reply
summary: their text is not yet in our corpus
No reply possible: objection raised in 1927, after the author's death (1677).