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3. Methods of Mastering the Fear of Death. The
pessimistic evaluation of life can be considered as the
oldest “remedy” against the fear of death. That “the
best thing is not to be born, and the second best is
to escape life as soon as possible” has been, since
Theognis of Megara (sixth century B.C.), a recurrent
theme of Greek poetry and drama. Pessimism is an
important element also in Emperor Marcus Aurelius'
approach to mastering the fear of death. But for most
people the pessimistic stance carries no real conviction.
Thus, another Roman Stoic, the slave Epictetus, relies
more on self-discipline and the sense of decorum when
it comes to death. His answer is that we have to take
modestly the place assigned to us by God or Nature
at the banquet of life and when the end approaches
to leave it quietly and gracefully. This is also the view
of Seneca. But he realized, however, that such an
attitude is rather the result of the conquest of the fear
of death than its condition. He was, therefore, more
specific in suggesting as a remedy the constant thinking
of death.

However, this second method of conquering the fear
of death, even if it is done in the framework of hope
of a future life, is scarcely realistic. And without that
hope it is a “remedy” which may be worse than the
affliction. The shortcomings of this method gradually
became clear to Montaigne. In the chapter of his
Essays significantly entitled “That to philosophize is
to learn to die,” he reports that being bothered by
attacks of dread of dying, he at first tried to follow
Seneca's advice. As time passed, he came to the con-
clusion that the only proper remedy against the fear
of death is not “philosophy, which orders us to have
death constantly before our eyes,” but the attitude of
the unsophisticated peasant whom “nature teaches not
to think of death except when he actually dies....
If this be stupidity, let's all learn from it” (Essays [1595
ed.], Book III, Ch. 12). But how can not thinking of
death be effective in the “presence” of death? What
about the problem of “easy” dying? Here Montaigne
is somewhat vague. He praises Nature which arranged
things so that dying is in reality not too hard. And
he says that “if we have known how to live properly

and calmly, we will know how to die in the same
manner.”

However, Nature's cooperation is not necessarily
realized in every case, although it was in Montaigne's:
he did not have a chance to put the above statement
to a test, having died suddenly of a stroke. His expecta-
tion of a peaceful death as an outgrowth of a “proper
life” does not really convey Montaigne's radically new
attitude toward life which determines his eventual
attitude toward death. It is quite different from the
Stoic position and even more so from that of Christi-
anity; it is the expression of the Renaissance spirit with
its appreciation of the exciting and wonderful world
surrounding man of which he feels himself to be a part.
Life is not seen any longer as something to be endured
but something to be enjoyed and which can be shaped
and changed for the better by man's own effort. In
short, the memento vivere replaces the Christian me-
mento mori. (It is plausible to assume that this radical
reversal was, at least in part, an anticlimax to the
pathologically heightened consciousness of mortality
characteristic of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,
which grew out of the disaster of the “Black Death.”)
What a “proper and calm” life was for Montaigne,
a useful and productive life was for Leonardo da Vinci.
“As a day well spent bestows pleasant sleep, so a life
well used bestows pleasant death.”

This has become the most often suggested secular
answer to the problem of coming to terms with the
fact of death. A variant of it, which puts even a greater
emphasis on achievement, has been given expression
by the German poet Hölderlin: “Should my verse grow
perfect/ Most welcome then, O stillness of shades
below... (“To the Fates”). It is obvious, however,
that such a condition for overcoming the reluctance
to die is well beyond the reach of the majority of
mortals. Moreover, even the consciousness of having
led a “full” life, and achieved great things may not
be enough to make death welcome. What usually
makes death acceptable is its coming as a well deserved
surcease from a life of continuous hardship and partic-
ularly from the indignity and suffering of old age.
However, it is hardly necessary to point out that the
problem posed by premature death still remains in all
its poignancy.

The weakness of the method of allaying fear of death
by not thinking of it is that under certain circumstances
it is easier said than done. Robert Burton realized it
when he wrote in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621)
that “if our present weakness is such that death
frightens us, we cannot moderate our passion in this
behalf. We must divert them by all means, by doing
something else, thinking of another subject. Study is
above all the best means to divert one's thoughts” (Part
a, sec. 3, mem. 5 [1907 ed.]). Spinoza too was well
aware of this. But, according to him, not any kind of
study but only philosophical reflection which leads to
what he calls “a higher kind of knowledge” can be
truly effective. Therefore, his famous proposition
LXVII (in the fourth part of Ethics), “A free man thinks
of nothing less than death, and his wisdom is a medita-
tion not of death but of life,” is not advice to avoid
thinking of death as a means of overcoming fear of
it. To interpret this proposition as meaning that only
fools waste their time on meditating about death is
to misunderstand it completely. Spinoza's “free” man
is the wise man, and the latter is defined as “one who
lives under the guidance of reason and is not led by
fear.” But as Spinoza points out at the end of his
magnum opus, the attainment of wisdom is one of the
most difficult things in the world. Thus the above
proposition is not an admonition not to think of death
because no reasonable man does such a foolish thing,
but a promise of a reward for the effort of becoming
wise. It asserts that when one finally attains wisdom
(that is, becomes “free”) he will be able not to think
of death, but of life. And it is obvious that only after
having thought of death a great deal did Spinoza him-
self become able not to think of it any longer because
he had learned not to fear it.

Although the method of allaying the fear of death
by not thinking about it is a defective one, particularly
since one usually thinks of it for some good reason (be
it real danger of death to a loved one, or to oneself),
the proffering of such advice is understandable if we
consider man's uncanny ability to ignore his mortality.
There is also the previously mentioned phenomenon
that, in Freud's words, “in the unconscious no one
really believes in one's own death.” Were it not for
these psychological defense mechanisms, who knows
what havoc the knowledge of death would create in
man's psyche.

Finally, a fourth method of mastering the fear of
death is that of “minimizing” death. We have noted
already that Epicurus' argument against the fear of
death was, to a large extent, based on such an ap-
proach. But it was Socrates who must be considered
as its initiator when, in Plato's Apology, he presses the
analogy between death and sleep. “For fear of death
is indeed the pretense of wisdom... being the pre-
tense of knowing the unknown.... We may well hope
that death is good, since it is either dreamless sleep
or migration of the soul from this world to another
...” (Apology 39D).

A telling criticism of the sleep analogy is Keats'
complaint that “Mortality weighs on me like unwilling
sleep” (“Endymion,” 1818), and John Dryden's insist-
ence that death is a very special kind of “sleep”: “to
sleep, and never wake again.” These are valid reasons
why the other alternative suggested by Socrates has

been so popular. From the point of view of the
conquest of the fear of death, the belief in immortality
is nothing but another way of “minimizing” death.

While the method of not thinking of death could
be effective only in instances of the fear of death “at
the thought of it,” that of thinking of it constantly (and
thus becoming “familiar” with it) could probably be
of help also in the “presence” of death. The two other
methods, that of minimizing death, and that of mini-
mizing the value of life may be helpful in both in-
stances and unlike the first two are not mutually exclu-
sive, but can and have been combined for greater
efficacy. None of the four, however, is effective in the
case of pathological fear of death. As the fifteenth-
century Scottish poet, William Dunbar, stated in his
“Lament for the Makaris” (stanza 10),

Before we consider what, if anything, contemporary
psychology and psychotherapy have to contribute to
this issue, we have to say a few words about death
as the motive as well as the theme of philosophy.