Should we fear death?
Nothingness, immortality of the soul, facing the end
Should we fear death? Philosophers give 3 main answers: the soul survives, nothing to fear and an anxiety that enlightens. AskPhilosophy presents 18 arguments, from Pythagoras to Thomas Nagel, reconstructed step by step, logic-checked and verified word for word against their original texts.
The 3 possible answers
Each column is one way of answering the question: what it holds and the philosophers who defend it. Click a column to see only its arguments.
Death is not the end: something of us goes on.
Platon, Kant, Pythagore, Avicenne
Whether or not death is nothingness, wisdom means not fearing it.
Socrate, Spinoza, Marc Aurèle, Bruno…
Death causes anxiety, and facing it is how we truly live.
Pascal, Heidegger, Thomas Nagel, Léon Tolstoï
The arguments
Click an argument to see it step by step, with the objections and replies.
The soul survives
Death is not the end: something of us goes on.
5 argumentsThe soul survives: the argument from opposites
Everything comes from its opposite, as waking from sleep: the living come from the dead, so the soul must exist in between.
The soul survives: the argument from affinity
What is composite can break apart; the soul, invisible and thinking, resembles what is simple, while the body quickly dissolves.
Immortality as a postulate of practical reason
The moral law commands holiness, reachable only through endless progress, which requires an endless existence.
The soul passes from one body to another
Pythagoras said he remembered his past lives, and one memory was reportedly checked: so the soul passes from body to body.
The soul does not die with the body
The thinking soul is neither a body nor produced by one, and does not depend on it to exist: so it does not perish with it.
Nothing to fear
Whether or not death is nothingness, wisdom means not fearing it.
9 argumentsDeath: a sleep or a journey
Death is either a dreamless sleep or a journey to the dead: either way it is a gain, not an evil.
Meditating on life, not death
Thinking about death means seeing it as an evil and acting from fear, while reason pushes us to live.
We lose only the present
We can only lose the present moment, the same for everyone: dying young or old, we lose the same.
Nothing dies, everything changes its face
There is only one immortal substance: dying is just division and recombination; the thing does not die, it changes.
Life is not short, we waste it
Life is long enough if used well, but most people scatter it; a life well used is complete.
Death is nothing to us
Good and bad exist only in sensation, and death ends all sensation: when it is here, we are no longer.
The symmetry argument
The time before we were born did us no harm, and the time after death is just like it.
To philosophise is to learn how to die
Death frightens us because it is strange; thinking of it constantly makes it familiar and takes away its power.
The tedium of immortality (the Makropulos case)
Nothing guarantees that an endless life stays interesting for someone who keeps their character and tastes.
An anxiety that enlightens
Death causes anxiety, and facing it is how we truly live.
4 argumentsThe hidden precipice: facing death
Death is certain and terrible, yet almost everyone distracts themselves so as not to think of it, like running toward a cliff.
Being-toward-death
Death is my most personal possibility, which no one can live for me: facing it pulls me out of "the They" and makes me myself.
Death is an evil because it deprives us
A harm need not be felt: death deprives us of the goods of the life we would have had.
Caius is mortal, but me? The death of Ivan Ilyich
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.
Other philosophers' positions arrive as profiles are completed. No position is presented as the winner.