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Fearing Death

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Amélie Oksenberg Rorty
Amélie Oksenberg Rorty
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
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Extract

Many have said, and I think some have shown, that it is irrational to fear death. The extinction of what is essential to the self—whether it be biological death or the permanent cessation of consciousness—cannot by definition be experienced by oneself as a loss or as a harm.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 58 , Issue 224 , April 1983 , pp. 175 - 188
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1983

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References

1 E.g. Epicurus and Spinoza.

2 Thomas Nagel, ‘Death’, reprinted in James Rachels, Moral Problems (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).

3 Cf. Robert Gordon, ‘Fear’, Philosophical Review (October 1980), and my ‘Explaining Emotions’, Journal of Philosophy 75 (1978), 150, reprinted in Explaining Emotions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).

4 4 Cf. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Sec. 4, Part II, 45, and Sec. IX, 8.5.

5 Kant notoriously did not apply the arguments of the first antinomy to the substantiality of the soul (conceived as a unified object), as he had applied them to the world (conceived as a totality). The reasons for his failure to extend those arguments lie in his ethics: although moral action is performed solely as a duty to what is right, the moral agent should in principle receive benefits from morality. As it seems evident that such benefits do not always accrue in life, Kant postulated an immortal soul to receive them. Despite this lapse, however, it seems clear that the arguments of the necessity and the impropriety of certain metaphysical inference patterns should consistently apply to the soul as well as to the world considered as a totality.

6 I am grateful to the participants in an NEH Summer Seminar for their helpful discussions of this paper.