QuestionsShould we fear death?Caius is mortal, but me? The death of Ivan Ilyich
Should we fear death?An anxiety that enlightens

Caius is mortal, but me? The death of Ivan Ilyich

The syllogism of Caius; the death of Ivan Ilyich

Léon Tolstoï 1828 · 1910At fifty he saw no meaning in anything; he found it again in the faith of simple people.
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What it claims

Looking at one's own death, instead of treating it as Caius's business, is what shows how one has lived and what frees us from fear: anguish enlightens.

Why

We know all men die without believing it for ourselves; facing our own death, we finally see how we lived, and the fear gives way.

In short

"Caius is mortal, but me? The death of Ivan Ilyich" is an argument by Léon Tolstoï (The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), ch. VI, XI and XII) on the question "Should we fear death?" (answer: an anxiety that enlightens). Its claim: Looking at one's own death, instead of treating it as Caius's business, is what shows how one has lived and what frees us from fear: anguish enlightens. 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, 0 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), ch. VI, XI and XII
Valid with an implicit premise

Ivan Ilyich is a respected judge who has done everything "as one should". When an illness condemns him, he remembers the syllogism learnt at school: "Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal". For Caius that was right. For him, Vanya, it was not. This distance between knowing that we die and believing that I die is the starting point. Tolstoy follows it to the end: it is by looking at his death as his own that Ivan Ilyich finally asks whether he has lived well, and at the end the fear disappears. This is a story, not a proof: the argument below is the one the story stages, and it is worth what a well-described case is worth.

P1We accept that "all men are mortal" as a general truth, which holds for Caius, but we do not apply it to ourselves: as long as death stays abstract, it does not touch us.
P2When death becomes one's own, the past life is called into question: "What if my whole life has been wrong?"
P3When Ivan Ilyich accepts this truth about his life, the fear disappears: "There was no fear because there was no death. In place of death there was light."
P4 · implicit premiseWhat happens to Ivan Ilyich is not a special case: we all live with the syllogism of Caius, and what the story shows holds for every man.
Therefore looking at one's own death, instead of treating it as Caius's business, is what shows how one has lived and what frees us from fear: anguish enlightens.

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 one character, Ivan Ilyich, for whom everything happens this way, while other men never know this light and looking at death teaches them nothing.
With the hidden premise P4, the conclusion follows: if we see in Ivan Ilyich that leaving the abstract (P1), then looking at one's death (P2), then accepting the truth (P3) leads to the end of fear, and his case holds for everyone (P4), then it holds for us. P4 is the weak point: a story proves little. Another dying person might be gripped by terror to the end, seeing nothing luminous.
Analogy. We all know a bridge has a weight limit, and we cross it without thinking. The day the bridge cracks under our feet, we suddenly understand everything we already knew. For Tolstoy, death is that bridge: knowing it is not enough, one must feel that it is for me.

Objections

3

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

E
Epicurus 300 BC · attacks the conclusion

There is no need to look for light in anguish: the fear of death is a misunderstanding. All good and evil consist in sensation, and death is the privation of all sensation. When we are here, death is not; when death is here, we are no more. Fear is not cured by going through it, but by seeing that it has no object. See the argument "Death is nothing to us" (epicure-mort-rien).

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in -300, after the author's death (1910).
The debate goes on (our summary) Epicurus died long before Tolstoy, who does not cite him in this story. A possible answer in the spirit of the novel: Epicurus's argument is general, like the one about Caius, and this kind of reasoning is exactly what fails to reach Ivan Ilyich (ch. VI); what frees him is a truth about his life, not a reasoning about death. An Epicurean reply: if the fear vanishes at the end, then it had no object. We found no answer from Tolstoy to Epicurus.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Both aim at serenity before death and part on the path: arguing in advance (Epicurus) or going through the trial (Tolstoy). Open point: was a fear that gives way to truth well-founded or not?
Spinoza 1677 · attacks premise 2

The free man lives by the guidance of reason, not by fear of death: he directly desires the good, to act and to live. "A free man thinks of death least of all things": his wisdom is a meditation on life. Ivan Ilyich owes his discovery to illness; the wise man does not need that detour. See the argument "Meditating on life, not death" (spinoza-mort).

no reply
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1677, after the author's death (1910).
The debate goes on (our summary) Spinoza writes two centuries before Tolstoy. Tolstoy can be defended thus: it is not death that Ivan Ilyich meditates on, it is his life, and death imposes that question on him; it is the opposite of the wise man who avoids thinking of it. Spinoza can be defended thus: Ivan Ilyich was precisely not guided by reason, and the suffering of his three days of screaming shows it. We found no answer from Tolstoy to Spinoza.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Both agree that life must be the centre. Underlying disagreement: can one see one's life truthfully without going through the trial of death?
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness 1943 · attacks premise 2

Death is not a possibility of my own that would give my life its meaning: it is an absurd fact that comes from outside, that strips all meaning from what I was still waiting for and hands my finished life over to the judgement of others. Death therefore does not reveal the true meaning of a life. (A summary of Sartre's thesis, which we do not quote.)

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1943, after the author's death (1910).
The debate goes on (our summary) Sartre writes after Tolstoy's death (1910). Tolstoy can be defended thus: the story does not say that death gives life its meaning; it only forces Ivan Ilyich to stop justifying a life he feels to be indefensible (ch. XI: "There was nothing to defend"), and this judgement is about his life, not about death. Sartre can be defended thus: a judgement made in agony and fear is precisely the most suspect.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point: is a dying person's view of his life more true or less true than others? There is no widely accepted answer.