Death is none of our business? — You bet it is! Epicur wants us to do exactly what most people try to do anyway: not to think about death. It wouldn’t really be any of our business. Cynics follow the exact opposite path. We want to think about death every day and mentally dying every day.
In almost every text that deals (no, not really) with dying, we find the famous quotation of the hedonist Epicures. The goal is clear: the phrase is meant to take away our fear of death.
Thus, the most terrifying of evils, death is nothing for us, precisely because, when we exist, death is not present and, when death is present, then we do not exist.
EPICURUS: LETTER TO MENOECEUS
Now, cynically, this is Epicurus’ indictment against death and thus against life. Death, which should be none of our business, be “the most terrifying of evils”. Well. It’s not. Let’s be honest, this sentence may sound logically reasonable. And one may well agree with it in the abstract. But has it ever really helped anyone to actually lose the fear of death because an Epicurus claims that only fools are afraid of death? I have yet to meet one.
From a hedonist, for whom, after all, pleasure is above everything, is already the failure all along the line.
Because the instruction, I should not be afraid, because it is illogical, does not work.
Never, e.g. also not with fear of harmless house spiders, from which I suffered in my childhood. “But this spider is quite harmless, you don’t have to be afraid of it,” my father said, for example, and let it crawl over his hand and laughed. I then ran away in horror.
Learning to love death
Even in antiquity, Cynics praised suicide as a possibility that always remains when life gets on your nerves. Precisely because you don’t have to fear life, since you can end it at any time, death actually loses its terror over time. On the contrary. It is shown as a solution, not as a danger. Accordingly, death appears to us as a friend, as a helper in trouble. And we cynics want to visit this friend, meaning dying every day.
The fact that this solution is not only condemned by Christians, but also rejected by hedonists, shall not concern us here.
What is more interesting is that cynics and later also the romantics manage not only not to fear death, but even to expect it joyfully. The idea of dying is thus filled with pleasure. The hedonists did not even dare to go that far.
Now, however, the desire for death, for Nietzsche the desire for decline, is not a gloomy death drive hostile to life, as it is, for example, for the psychoanalyst Siegmund Freud. On the contrary:
We succeed in a feat: we affirm death as beautiful and desirable, and at the same time we love life more than before precisely because of this. Life becomes an easy ride for us We are not afraid of catastrophes. So we can finally choose death when it seems the most beautiful choice for us.
Now, however, I’m sorry to disappoint you if you expect me to give you instructions on how to achieve this bliss, that you simultaneously love life to the fullest, enjoy it and aspire to death as something beautiful. I have thought about it for a long time. And found no recipe. I only know that Novalis had exactly this mood, that Caspar David Friedrich tried to express this blissful mood in many of his paintings. And I know when I had this mood for the first time, like an aha experience, which has not left my attitude to life since then.
For me, it was once that I had such a strong feeling of happiness together with my girlfriend after using amphetamine and I loved her so much that I pronounced,
“Oh, I love you so much, I would be so happy if I could die for you now.”
That total surrender, in estasy, that was such an intense feeling of happiness that I never had before. I didn’t want to die. I was just ready for it. And I imagined it as a maximum climax to be allowed to die for my Goddess.
Once when I was really close to death, I had a small stroke and a high blood pressure emergency, I had the feeling I was about to die. The doctor who was called confirmed this and said that it could possibly happen. And how was I? I was happy. Beause I felt deep gratitude for my life and also for the situation I was in. Everything was very good.
I did not die. And had no gloomy mood, no suicidal thoughts. I was happy. I was very happy to live.
Today, Muslims celebrate the Feast of Sacrifice. Not only was Abraham ready to kill his son, at the command of God. His son was also ready to die. In the end, God did intervene. But I think we have great problems today to even begin to understand this story. Possibly exactly this event gave not only the father, but also the son a great more happiness in life, as “will to might“. So it was not only about obedience and salvation, but surely also about an increase of vitality and joy of life.
So how exactly you can achieve this mood with you, I can not tell you yet. Become Cynicer. Live Parrhesia and you will see, I think. It will go to you then sometime like also the other cynics and romantics.
To the 2. Part, in which I have yet to discover the secret of the Harmony (Heraklit) of joie de vivre and longing for death can be explained better.