There is one experience that every human being who has ever lived shares, and every human being alive today will one day share: death. We will all die. The people we love will die. And unlike most of the things that frighten us, this is not a problem we can solve, avoid, or outrun. So what do we do with that knowledge? How do we live with it? This is one of the oldest questions in philosophy, and it has produced some of the most powerful and surprising answers in the entire history of human thought. In this deck, we will look at three great traditions that each took death seriously and came to very different conclusions. Epicurus, the ancient Greek philosopher, argued that death is literally nothing to us and that fearing it is a kind of mistake. The Stoics agreed that we should think about death often, but for entirely different reasons: they believed that contemplating our own mortality was the key to living fully. And the existentialists, writing in the shadow of two world wars, argued that it is precisely because we will die that our lives can have meaning at all. By the end, you will have three powerful philosophical frameworks for thinking about the most unavoidable fact of human existence.

Let us begin with Epicurus, who was born on the Greek island of Samos in 341 BC and founded a philosophical community in Athens known simply as the Garden. The Garden was unusual for its time: it welcomed women, enslaved people, and those from the lower classes, which was almost unheard of in ancient Athens. Epicurus taught that the goal of life was a state he called ataraxia, a kind of tranquil, undisturbed happiness, free from anxiety and pain. And he noticed that one of the greatest sources of anxiety for most people was the fear of death. So he set out to dismantle that fear with a single, elegant argument. His argument goes like this. When death is present, you are not. When you are present, death is not. Therefore, death and you can never meet. You will never experience being dead. Death is not a bad experience. It is not an experience at all. As Epicurus put it: death is nothing to us.

To understand how radical this was, it helps to know what Epicurus was arguing against. Many Greeks of his time feared death because they feared what came after it. The underworld, in Greek mythology, was not a pleasant place. Even the heroic dead spent eternity as pale, joyless shades. And various philosophical and religious traditions suggested that the soul might face punishment after death. Epicurus rejected all of this. He was a materialist: he believed that the soul, like everything else, was made of atoms, and that when the body died, the soul dissolved along with it. There was no afterlife, no punishment, no experience of any kind. Death was simply the end of experience. And if there is no experience, there can be no suffering. He wrote: where death is, I am not; where I am, death is not. So why fear it?

Epicurus also offered what philosophers sometimes call the symmetry argument. Think about the vast stretch of time before you were born. Billions of years passed in which you did not exist. Were you suffering during that time? Were you missing out? Almost certainly, you feel nothing about it at all. Epicurus argued that death is simply a return to that same state of non-existence. The time after your death will be exactly like the time before your birth: a blank, an absence, a nothing. And since we do not grieve the time before our birth, he argued, we have no rational reason to grieve the time after our death. The fear of death, on this view, is not just irrational. It is a kind of category error. We are treating non-existence as if it were a bad experience, when in fact it is no experience at all.