The Acceptance Of Epicurus's Fear Of Death

the ethics of Epicurus tells us that to find happiness we must avoid all kinds of fears which are reduced to four namely: time which devours pleasures; pain which can come at any time; the fear of the gods and finally the fear of death. of all of them we will focus on this last: fear. for Epicurus the fear of death arises for several reasons: anguish over the disappearance of the self-fear of punishment etc. anyway the fact is that we feel dread of death. epicurus wonders if such an attitude is rational. of course Epicurus is aware that what worries people may very well not only death itself but also what it generates and its own expectation. but states it is a fool who says he fears death not because he shall distress at present but because

it sounds paradoxical but that's the way it is. it was not Christianity that inaugurated belief in the afterlife and faith in the survival of the self after physical death. and it is a source of terror for many human beings of yesteryear and today that death does not close the conscience forever. and that life after death is usually conceived by very different cultures with a curious hope injustice as a moment and a place in which each one will receive what corresponds to him by virtue of his merits and faults. the book of the dead in Egypt a Baedeker guide to the afterlife already informed four thousand years ago of what was going to be judged the deceased by the gods at the beginning of his life beyond the grave; at the climax of Hamlet in full monologue about whether or not to be the prince of Denmark does not sink the dagger in his chest because he wonders if death will really be a dream without dreams a loss of consciousness instead of a change of

epicurus would be blind to human nature if he did not see that the beliefs in a trial after death and the very fear of the disease that leads to death were the only causes of the dread that the human being experiences in the face of the undoubted prospect of having to die. because these two factors join a third much more lacerating possibly than the previous two. death truncates our projects. the very fact that this exists already as a possibility and that with total security will be done sooner or later reality puts a deadline to our plans. we realize that we will never have time to take them to their fullness. who even after a long life in which he knows the children of his children as adults can look back and say that he has had time to do what he set out to do fear of destiny is undoubtedly one of the greatest fears of humanity. since the beginning of our race our very survival has always depended on how well or badly the shaman fortune-teller or witch-in-turn read the stars or nature. the food was not abundant and the times of cultivation as well as the collection were marked by a certain predisposition of the