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Two aphorisms from Assorted Opinions and Maxims further attest to the importance Epicurus holds for Nietzsche at this point. In the first, Nietzsche confesses
to having dwelled like Odysseus in the underworld and says that he will often be
found there again (AOM 408). As a “sacrificer” who sacrifices in order to talk to
the dead, Nietzsche states that there are four pairs of thinkers from whom he will
accept judgment, and Epicurus and Montaigne make up the first pair he mentions
(AOM 408). In the second aphorism, Epicurus, along with the Stoic Epictetus, is
revered as a thinker in whom wisdom assumes bodily form (AOM 224).
Epicurus has been celebrated for his teachings on mortality and the cultivation
of modest pleasures. For Nietzsche in The Wanderer and His Shadow, the particular value of Epicurus’ teaching is that it can show us how to quieten our being and
so help to temper human minds that are prone to neurosis. Nietzsche is also
attracted to the Epicurean emphasis on the possible modesty of human existence.
He admires Epicurus for cultivating a modest existence in two respects: first, in
having “spiritual-emotional joyfulness [Freudigkeit] in place of frequent individual pleasures,” as well as “equilibrium of all movements and pleasure in this harmony in place of excitement and intoxication” (HH II; KSA 8, 41 [48]); and,
second, in withdrawing from social ambition and living publicly in the marketplace by adopting instead the more private way of life found in the garden.5
Nietzsche points out that for Epicurus, a “tiny garden, figs, a bit of cheese, and
three or four friends besides — this was luxuriance” (WS 192).6 In so doing,
Nietzsche is indicating his appreciation for what one commentator has called the
“refined asceticism” found in Epicurus, in which the enjoyment of even small
pleasures and the disposal of a diverse and delicate range of sensations is given
particular importance.7 Even sensations and experiences that seem insignificant
can, Nietzsche recognizes, be importantly transformative over time, for individuals and for humanity more broadly.8
To further clarify Nietzsche’s Epicurean interests here, it is Epicurus the ethicist — that is, the philosopher who teaches humans a new way of life by remaining true to the earth, embracing the fact of human mortality, and denying any
cosmic exceptionalism on the part of the human — and not Epicurus the atomist, upon whom Nietzsche focuses his attention in The Wanderer and His
Shadow.9 There, Nietzsche describes Epicurus as “the soul-soother [SeelenBeschwichtiger] of later antiquity” who had the “wonderful insight” that to quieten our being it is not necessary to have resolved the ultimate and outermost
theoretical questions (WS 7). To those who are tormented by the fear of the gods,
one points out that, if the gods exist, they do not concern themselves with us and
that it is unnecessary to engage in “fruitless disputation” over the ultimate question as to whether they exist or not. Furthermore, in response to the consideration of a hypothesis, half belonging to physics and half to ethics, and that may
Nietzsche on Epicurus and Death
cast gloom over our spirits, it is wise to refrain from refuting the hypothesis and
instead offer a rival hypothesis, even a multiplicity of hypotheses. To someone
who wishes to offer consolation — for example, to the unfortunate, to ill-doers,
to hypochondriacs, and so on — one can call to mind two pacifying formulae of
Epicurus that are capable of being applied to many questions: “firstly, if that is
how things are they do not concern us; secondly, things may be thus but they
may also be otherwise” (WS 7).
Nietzsche champions Epicurus as a figure who has sought to show mankind
how it can conquer its fears of death. As James Warren has pointed out, in identifying the goal of a good life with the removal of mental and physical pain,
Epicureans place “the eradication of the fears of death at the very heart of their
ethical project.”10 As a “therapy of anguish” Epicureanism is a philosophy that
aims to procure peace of mind, and an essential task in so doing is to liberate the
mind from its irrational fear of death. It seeks to do this by showing that the soul
does not survive the body and that death is not and cannot be an event within
life. In The Wanderer and His Shadow, Nietzsche remarks that Epicurus is the
inventor of what he calls “heroic-idyllic philosophizing” (WS 295): it is heroic
because conquering the fear of death is involved and the human being has the
potential to walk on the earth as a god, living a blessed life, and idyllic obviously
because Epicurus philosophized, calmly and serenely, and away from the crowd,
in a garden. In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes of a “refined heroism,”
“which disdains to offer itself to the veneration of the great masses … and goes
silently through the world and out of the world” (HH 291). This is deeply
Epicurean in inspiration: as noted, Epicurus taught that one should die as if one
had never lived.
As one commentator puts it, Epicurus “distilled the major theses of his ethical
teaching into a simple fourfold remedy” known as the tetrapharmakos: (i) God
should not concern us; (ii) death is not to be feared; (iii) what is good is easy to
obtain; and (iv) what is bad is easily avoided.11 We can secure the goal or telos of a
human life by incorporating these four views and altering our view of the world
accordingly. And removing “the fear of death … is an essential step towards the
goal.”12 For Epicureans it is vitally important we think about death correctly, or
adequately, since this is an integral part of what it is to live a good life: “Our conceptions of the value of life and the nature of death are inseparable. In that case,
we learn not to stop focusing on death, but to stop thinking about it in the wrong
way.”13 Implicit in this conception is the idea that one can stop fearing death by
thinking clearly and adequately. For Epicurus, the fear of death emanates from
false opinions and false value judgments, and the therapeutic task of improvement is an intellectualist one. According to Pierre Hadot, overcoming our fear of
death is also a “spiritual exercise.”14
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For Epicurus the study of nature should make human beings modest and selfsufficient, taking pride in the good that lies in themselves, not in their estate, and
as opposed to the display of learning coveted by the rabble.15 Epicurus is an attractive figure for Nietzsche at this point in his thinking, because of the emphasis on
a modest lifestyle, the attention given to the care of self, and also because he conceives philosophy not as a theoretical discourse but one that, first and foremost, is
a kind of practical activity aimed at the attainment of a healthier, flourishing,
life.16 One flourishes when one has freed the mind from fear and superstition.
Epicurean thinking is a helpful resource for Nietzsche, because Nietzsche wants
free spirits to take pleasure in human existence, and doing so involves them taking
pleasure in themselves, in friendship, and in simple, modest living.17 As Hadot
has pointed out, for an Epicurean sage the world is the product of chance, rather
than of divine intervention; coming to this understanding brings with it pleasure
and peace of mind, freeing the sage from an unreasonable fear of the gods, and
making it possible to consider each moment as an unexpected miracle and to greet
each moment of existence with immense gratitude.18
Such is a key feature of the project that we also find under way in Dawn. In this
text, Nietzsche is keen to encourage human beings to cultivate a fresh attitude
toward existence, as part of his critique of customary morality. His motivation for
this is tied to his analysis of the current, and quite literally dread-filled existence,
of humanity. As he remarks, our current attitude toward existence has been heavily conditioned and reinforced through our being punished for certain behaviors,
to the point where we understand even natural causes and effects in terms of
punishment and where we “experience existence itself as a punishment” (D 13).
The new attitude that Nietzsche hopes to foster as an alternative to such a punitive
view of existence will be characterized by humans accepting their mortality,
attaining a new serenity about their dwelling on the earth, and conquering their
unjustified fears of supernatural punishment (D 33).19
To arrive at this alternative, humans must learn to separate out their understanding of natural causes and effects from imagined supernatural ones (D 33)
and to institute a positive understanding of the role that is played by chance, the
“benevolent inspirer,” in the world and in human existence (D 36).20 Even our
feelings must be treated with suspicion during this revisionary process, according
to Nietzsche; this is because, as he contends, moral feelings are transmitted
through family observation — through our early socialization, in other
words — from parent to child (D 34). People consider it “a matter of decency” to
provide a “justifying foundation” for their inclinations, and thus, he suggests, we
can see a distinction between the history of moral feelings and the history of
moral concepts: the former are powerful prior to an action, the latter are powerful
following an action “in view of the compulsion to pronounce on it” (D 34).
Moreover, Nietzsche claims that moral feelings are not our own original ones, but
already contain judgments and valuations buried within them (D 35). Hence, on
Nietzsche on Epicurus and Death
his account, the common notion of trusting one’s feelings is itself problematic: it
amounts to “obeying your grandfather and your grandmother and their grandparents” rather than expressing our own values — which Nietzsche terms “the gods
in us: our reason and our experience” (D 35).
The inherited dimension of moral feelings and the punitive view of human existence to which Nietzsche draws our attention in aphorisms 33, 34, 35, and 36 of
Dawn is particularly important to understanding why he discusses death at all in
this text. These aphorisms suggest that our understanding of death is developed
from what we might call an outsider’s perspective. We have (as far as we know) not
already died ourselves; while we may have observed the deaths of family members
and friends, or had experiences of serious illness or injury that have brought us
close to death, and while we may have gained substantial understanding of the
bodily and behavioral dimensions of dying from such experiences, we have still not
experienced death itself directly from within our own subject perspectives. Our
outsider’s perspective on death seems to present a particular challenge to our engagement in the project of overcoming our understanding of human existence as a
punishment (D 34). The lack of first-person experience, combined with the framework of punishment, means that for us death as the end of existence may well
seem to be the most fearsome and worst of all possible punishments; only salvation
from death in the form of an afterlife (ideally one in which we are not also punished) appears to present a way to solve this problem. This fear of punishment is
holding us back, and therefore, this particular fear must be tackled.
We contend that Nietzsche uses Epicurean thinking as a strategy to do this work
in Dawn, picking up the Epicurean doctrine on death and putting it to critical
effect. For Nietzsche, our religions and customary moralities do not wed us to the
earth as a site of dwelling and thinking; rather, they prompt us to consider ourselves “too good and too significant for the earth,” as if we were paying it only a
passing visit (D 425). The “proud sufferer” has thus become in the course of
human development the highest type of human being that is revered (D 425).
Nietzsche clearly wishes to see much if not all of this overturned, in order to begin
to counter our punishment-based fear of death.
Several aphorisms in Dawn identify humanity’s dream of an immortal existence
as misguided, and aim to wake us from the dream of immortality. Dawn 211 is an
especially witty aphorism in which Nietzsche considers the impertinence of the
immortality dream. Here, he notes that the actual existence of a single immortal
human being would be enough to drive everyone else on earth into a “universal
rampage of death and suicide out of being sick and tired of him!” (D 211). To this
deflation of the standing of an immortal human, he adds:
And you earth inhabitants with your mini-notions of a few thousand miniminutes of time want to be an eternal nuisance to eternal, universal existence!
Is there anything more impertinent! (D 211)
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The wiser strategy is for us to take more seriously the creature that lives typically
for seventy years, to give it back the actual time it has hitherto denied itself, and to
value this. In so doing, Nietzsche suggests, we would replace the misguided dream
of immortality with a new, yet healthy, sobriety toward the mortality that characterizes human existence.
The relief and impetus toward a positive new future that mortality can provide
is also made evident in Dawn 501. This aphorism, entitled “Mortal souls,” offers
an important clarification of Nietzsche’s deployment of Epicurean thinking
toward death in Dawn. In the aphorism, Nietzsche suggests that dealing with the
yearning for immortality is a question of relearning both knowledge and the
human, including recharacterizing human time as mortal time:
With regard to knowledge [Erkenntniss] the most useful accomplishment
is perhaps: that the belief in the immortality of the soul has been abandoned. Now humanity is allowed to wait; now it no longer needs to rush
headlong into things and choke down half-examined ideas as formerly it
was forced to do. For in those days the salvation of poor ”eternal souls”
depended on the extent of their knowledge acquired during a short lifetime; they had to make a decision overnight — “knowledge” took on a
dreadful importance” (D 501)
Nietzsche argues that, if we were to abandon the dream of immortality, we would
find ourselves in a new situation with regard to knowledge: as mortal souls, we
could renew our courage for the passion of knowledge by making mistakes, by
experimenting with ourselves, and by accepting things provisionally. Without the
sanction of the old moralities and religions, he claims, individuals and entire generations “can now fix their eyes on tasks of a grandeur that would to earlier ages
have seemed madness” (D 501). The shift away from dreams of immortality and
toward lucid acceptance of mortality here is important, because it prepares the
way for the new enlightenment, characterized by the passion of knowledge, that
Nietzsche envisages. Nietzsche writes of this “passion of knowledge” in Dawn 429,
nothing that, “Knowledge has been transformed into a passion in us that does not
shrink from any sacrifice and, at bottom, fears nothing but its own extinction.”
The remark on sacrifice is important because it connects Nietzsche’s thinking
on knowing to his critical engagement with the presumptions of morality in
Dawn: fear of supernatural retribution and fear of censure by the community for
actions that might be perceived to bring such retribution stifle our thinking.21
Even if humanity were ultimately to be destroyed by this “passion of knowledge
[Leidenschaft der Erkenntniss],”22 Nietzsche continues, this thought would “hold
no sway over us” (D 429). Nietzsche, then, is encouraging us to explore the notion
of giving up on the desire for an immortal existence and to embrace our mortality
Nietzsche on Epicurus and Death
for the sake of the skeptical “freedom of feeling” that is necessary for both his
epistemological and ethical projects in Dawn.
Appealing to remarks in The Wanderer and His Shadow can help to further clarify the two main points on death that Nietzsche develops in these aphorisms in
Dawn. The first point is for the certain prospect of death to introduce into every
life a precious and sweet-smelling drop of levity, as opposed to an ill-tasting drop
of poison that makes all life appear repulsive (WS 322). As Nietzsche suggests in
Dawn, some of our thinking on the possibility of immortality is “shameless,” not
merely impertinent (D 211). If we were to stop to think of ourselves not as potential immortals, but rather as “earth inhabitants” working in terms of “mininotions of a few thousand mini-minutes of time” who are proposing to be eternal
“nuisances,” then we can and should laugh at the rather ridiculous aspect of ourselves that chases after immortality; and having laughed, we could then embrace
our mortality with better humor (D 211). Involving humor in this way also has the
practical effect of lessening our fear of death and dying. The second helpful point
from The Wanderer and His Shadow concerns what Nietzsche calls the “wise regulation and disposal of death,” something that belongs to the morality of the
future, a morality that at present is ungraspable and immoral sounding, but that
can provide humanity with a new dawn — on which, he writes, “it must be an
indescribable joy to gaze” (WS 185). As Nietzsche indicates in Dawn, part of this
morality of the future is “good courage” both to make mistakes and experiment
and to pursue tasks of “grandeur” that would previously, in the context of human
existence understood in fundamentally punitive terms, have seemed “a toying
with heaven and hell” of a terrifying kind because of the threat that such attitude
and actions would pose to “one’s eternal salvation” (D 501).
Nietzsche does, however, appreciate that there will be times when we need to
think about death, including when we need to make preparation for our own
deaths. This aspect of Nietzsche’s thinking continues into his later writings. Our
task is to die proudly where one can no longer live proudly, as Nietzsche provocatively claims later on in Twilight of the Idols (TI IX 36). To understand how Nietzsche
addresses our need to consider death within Dawn, we need first to understand
that Nietzsche treats the goal of a life and the end of a life as being distinct from
one another, in contrast to conceptions of existence that connect the end of life
with the possibility of eternal salvation. In an important aphorism, Nietzsche
works to supply reasons why the goal of a life, and the end of life — namely,
death — are not the same (D 72). This distinction involves appeal to the toxic
effects of Christianity and Christian morality.23 Nietzsche suggests that, by promoting the doctrine of the eternally damned and reinforcing fear, Christianity has discouraged the kind of experimentation that is necessary to advance the project of
campaigning against customary morality (D 72). He contends that Christianity
brought the “belief in subterranean terrors” under its protection, winning over
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what he calls “the ranks of the timorous” (D 72). It did so by first contrasting the
prospect of “final, irrevocable death” with the prospect of immortality, and by then
contrasting immortality for those who are redeemed with immortality in hell for
sinners and the unredeemed (D 72). “The doctrine of the eternally damned” is
therefore what, according to Nietzsche, became more powerful than the thought of
final and irrevocable death among those humans for whom the “drive for life” was
weaker (D 72). Nietzsche therefore suggests that science has had to recapture the
thought of final and irrevocable death for us by “conjointly rejecting any other
representation of death and any life beyond” (D 72).24 If the “after-death” no longer
concerns us, Nietzsche remarks here, then this is “an unspeakable blessing,” which
is “yet still too recent to be experienced far and wide” (D 72).
Nietzsche’s mention of science in Dawn 72 also opens up the claim that acceptance of our mortality also brings with it a relief from a pressing problem concerning the pursuit of knowledge. Nietzsche expands further on this point when he
claims that, in the past, “the salvation of poor ‘eternal souls’ depended on the
extent of their knowledge during a short lifetime” (D 501). This meant, as
Nietzsche points out, that “knowledge” not only took on a “dreadful importance”
but often involved choking down knowledge that amounted to no more than halftruths at best (D 501). Hence the “unspeakable blessing” of no longer being so
concerned with death and what follows it has epistemic as well as ethical and
existential advantages.
A key part of Nietzsche’s approach to death and dying in Dawn is to acknowledge the significance of power and power-relationships within social contexts to
our understanding of death. While, as we have suggested, Nietzsche uses
Epicureanism as a strategy in his thinking about death and dying in Dawn, this
attention to power-relationships marks out his own innovation from the influence
of Epicurean philosophy. Nietzsche writes that we should distinguish clearly
between a person who wants to gain power, who “resorts to any means and
eschews nothing that will nourish it,” and a person who already has power, and
who has grown “very particular and refined in his taste: rarely does something
satisfy him” (D 348). Nietzsche had claimed earlier in Dawn that the human feeling of power has already become the strongest human inclination (D 23). He links
power to the concept of self-possession, which he describes as the privilege to
punish, pardon, or be compassionate toward oneself as an integral part of attaining mastery over oneself (D 437). Following directly on from his drawing of a
distinction between the behaviors that characterize crude power gain and those
that characterize refined power expression (D 348), Nietzsche makes an important claim about death and morality, by which latter term he means customary
morality (D 349).25 The effect that customary morality, influenced by Christian
thinking, continues to have on us with regard to our attitude toward death is significant, according to Nietzsche:
Nietzsche on Epicurus and Death
Not all that important. — When one witnesses a death, a thought regularly
arises, which one, out of a false sense of decency, immediately represses in
oneself: that the act of dying is not as significant as the universal awe of it
would have us believe, and that the dying person has probably lost more
important things in life that he is now about to lose. Here is the end,
certainly not the goal (D 349)
Attending to two particular features of this aphorism is worthwhile, in order to
understand Nietzsche’s thinking on death in Dawn.26 First, Nietzsche is pointing
out a false sense of decency, which, he claims, is informing his (and our) ways of
approaching death. Second, Nietzsche is hinting at an explanation for this “falseness” in the final remark, which distinguishes between the end of a life (the person’s
death) and the goal of a life (the “spirit and virtue” of the life).27 If we separate out
these two concepts, and stop viewing the end of life and the goal of life as being
equally tied to eternal salvation, then space is created for a new appreciation and
affirmation of human existence — as something to be celebrated, and as something
in which joy is to be found, rather than as the highest form of punishment.
As Rebecca Bamford has pointed out in previous work, there is a noteworthy
continuation of, and elaboration on, this point by Nietzsche in Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, which lends greater support to our reading of this aspect of Dawn.28
In his work on Nietzsche’s understanding of suicide and its ethical implications in
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which incorporates detailed attention to Thus Spoke
Zarathustra 1:21, entitled “On Free Death,” Paul S. Loeb has shown that Nietzsche
does not accept that we need to think it is necessarily problematic or tragic for a
person to die, or morally wrong for a person to seek to end their own life, if they
do so according to the terms and values of the life that they have lived.29 At the
end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1:21), Nietzsche makes a similar claim to the distinction that he had developed between the end of life and the goal of life in Dawn
349; he writes, “Verily, Zarathustra had a goal, he threw his ball: now you friends
and heirs of my goal, to you I throw the golden ball.” Nietzsche is very careful here
to establish that re-working our characterization of death, and rethinking what
virtue might mean as part of critical engagement with the presumptions of morality, needs to incorporate respect for humans as connected to the earth, as well as
their being embodied:
Free for death and free in death, a sacred Nay-sayer when it is no longer
time for Yea: thus is his understanding of death and life.
That your dying be no blasphemy against humans and earth, my friends:
that is what I ask from the honey of your souls.
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In your dying shall your spirit and your virtue still glow, like a sunset
around the earth: or else your dying will have turned out badly.
Thus I would myself die, that you friends might love the earth more for my
sake; and into earth will I turn again, that I might rest in her who bore me.
(TSZ 1:21)
As Loeb has shown in discussion of these remarks, understanding death as a consummation of life would, as Nietzsche suggests here, encourage us to liberate ourselves and to pursue our own virtues as an important constituent part of affirming
our lives, and to sustain us in so doing.30 Zarathustra’s analysis of our liberation
through adoption of this new account of death toward the end of this section of
Thus Spoke Zarathustra appeals to the history and long-term effect of Christian
values and to the possibility of our overcoming these, very similarly to Nietzsche’s
earlier claims in Dawn.31 Moreover, as Gary Shapiro has pointed out, Nietzsche
urges us to take seriously our connection to the earth as part of understanding
death when he expresses horror at the tattooing of the earth through Christianity’s
attitude to death. As Shapiro discusses, according to Nietzsche, Christianity has
made a wretched place “of the earth, merely by erecting the crucifix everywhere,
thereby branding the earth as the place ‘where the righteous are tortured to
death’!” (D 77).32 The Christian religion, Nietzsche claims, has put its torments to
use to an unprecedented and shocking degree. Christianity has succeeded in making of the earth a wretched place, merely by erecting the crucifix everywhere,
thereby branding the earth as the place “where the righteous are tortured to
death!” (D 78). It is Christianity that has turned the deathbed into a bed of torment. Against this, Nietzsche had already espoused the virtue of the rational or
free death as early as The Wanderer and His Shadow: “Natural death,” he writes,
“is the suicide of nature, that is to say the annihilation of the rational being by the
irrational to which it is tied” (WS 185).
Nietzsche does not leave this point on the celebration of mortality behind in his
later writings; he later elaborates on it in Twilight of the Idols, where he remarks that
it is for “love of life” that one should want death to be “different, free, conscious, no
accident, no ambush” (TI IX 36). Here one elects to die “brightly and joyfully,” and,
moreover, “among children and witnesses: so that a true leave-taking is still possible, when the one who is taking his leave is still there” (TI IX 36). Here there can take
place a true assessment of life’s achievements and aspirations, offering “a summation of life.” All this can take place, Nietzsche holds, “in contrast to the pitiful and
ghastly comedy which Christianity has made of the hour of death” (TI IX 36).
Nietzsche notes that while today we have a new sensibility with respect to torments
of the body — for instance, we cry with indignation and rage whenever something
inflicts torment on another’s body, be the other a person or an animal — we have
not yet extended such a sensibility to torments of the soul.
Nietzsche on Epicurus and Death
Nietzsche’s fundamental aim in writing about death, within the wider context
of his project in Dawn, is to counter our socially conditioned yearning for immortality. He writes that we are in the process of renouncing our concern with the
“after-death” (D 72), and that therefore the most useful accomplishment not only
with regard to the advancement of knowledge but also with regard to human
development resides in the giving up of the belief in the immortality of the soul
(D 501). He does not present his case against immortality solely in terms of philosophical argument. As with almost all the topics he addresses, he confronts us
with “opinions” on things (where opinion might best be understood in the sense
of “mixed opinions and maxims”), and he uses wit, along with a range of affectgenerating language, to support those viewpoints and opinions and also to encourage us to consider some ways in which they may be beneficial to us, or at least to
make more apparent some of the ways in which they might affect us.
Here we might raise one concern with Nietzsche’s thinking on death as part of
his campaign against customary morality in Dawn: understanding and affirming
the logical reasoning behind Epicurus’ well-known claim from his letter to
Menoeceus that “death is nothing to us” might overcome the problem of our
excessively negative and fearful attitude toward death, far more simply and
straightforwardly than Nietzsche seems to consider. Epicurus famously asserts
that death is nothing to us:
most awful of evils, is nothing to us, seeing that, when we are, death is not
come, and, when death is come, we are not. It is nothing, then, either to the
living or to the dead, for with the living it is not and the dead exist no
longer.33
We might consider, then, why Nietzsche does not simply present logical reasoning
about death — especially given that, as we have discussed, he sees Epicurus as a
strategic resource for his work in Dawn.
Nietzsche understood that logical understanding alone is ultimately insufficient
to address the problem of our negative and fearful attitude toward death. First,
logic alone cannot entirely overturn the effect of inherited feelings that incorporate
hidden value judgments (D 35). More broadly, it cannot easily overcome the fearinducing effects of customary and Christian morality. We might see logically that
death is nothing to us, but this does not mean we can immediately and easily feel
that death is nothing to us. This is especially the case given that, as Epicurus’ own
discussion indicates, we cannot experience death from the position of our current
lived subject perspective — we can’t easily counteract the feeling of fear with
another experience of the concern at hand, because the relevant counteractive
experience is not available to us. Hence, Nietzsche cannot try to reason us out of
our fear using logic alone, and expect to succeed. Rather, he must address the
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problem by illustrating a possible way in which, by challenging our fear as inherited from our family and society, and by challenging any associated value judgments, we might ourselves come to shift our own feelings about, and understanding
of, death — from the paradigm of punishment to a new, non-punitive, paradigm.
In doing so, we would then be in a position to adopt a new, more affirmative, attitude toward human existence, which would, Nietzsche thinks, be healthier for us.
Notice that a careful reading of Epicurus also supports Nietzsche’s approach
and further attests to the significance of Epicureanism as a strategy informing
Nietzsche’s thinking on death in Dawn. A little earlier in the same section of his
letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus remarks:
Accustom yourself to believe that death is nothing to us, for good and evil
imply awareness, and death is the privation of all awareness; therefore a
right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life
enjoyable, not by adding to life an unlimited time, but by taking away the
yearning after immortality. For life has no terror; for those who thoroughly
apprehend that there are no terrors for them in ceasing to live. Foolish,
therefore, is the person who says that he fears death, not because it will
pain when it comes, but because it pains in the prospect.34
Epicurus here is concerned with a change in feelings — specifically with the
quashing of fear — because such fear is unnecessary and unfounded, and because
such fear “pains in the prospect” or causes us unnecessary psychophysical disquiet. In aiming to mitigate against such worry on our part, Epicurus is not proposing that we simply forget about death, but rather describing how we might
pursue peace of mind as a part of pursuing a healthier and more flourishing life.35
To elaborate on this latter point: in the letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus seeks to
identify what the study of philosophy can do for the health of the soul, working
from the premise that, “pleasure is the starting-point and goal of living blessedly.”36 Epicurus stresses that he does not mean the pleasures of the profligate or
of consumption; rather, the task is to become accustomed to simple, non-extravagant
ways of living. The key goal for Epicurus is to liberate the body from pain and
remove disturbances from the soul. Central to his counsel is the thought that we
need to accustom ourselves to removing our longing for immortality because
“there is nothing fearful in life for one who has grasped that there is nothing fearful in the absence of life.”37 What appears to be the most frightening of bad things
should be nothing to us, “since when we exist, death is not yet present, and when
death is present, then we do not exist.”38 The wise human being “neither rejects
life nor fears death. For living does not offend him, nor does he believe not living
to be something bad.”39 If, as Epicurus supposes, everything good and bad consists
in sense-experience, then death is simply the absence of sense-experience. The goal
Nietzsche on Epicurus and Death
of philosophical training from an Epicurean standpoint, then, is that freedom
from disturbance and anxiety in which we reach a state of ataraxia.
According to Martha Nussbaum, Epicurus’ teaching amounts to an inversion of
Plato, on the basis that for Epicurus truth is in the body; this view is in stark contrast to that of Plato, for whom the body is the main source of delusion and
bewitchment and for whom our task is to purify ourselves of our bodily attachments through proper mathematical and dialectical training.40 This contrast was
well understood and appreciated by Nietzsche, which is why, in Dawn, Nietzsche
is careful to highlight the dangers of teaching pure spirituality. This is evident, for
example, where Nietzsche criticizes the doctrine of pure spirituality for producing
“melancholy, anxious, oppressed souls” who blame all of their misery on the body
(D 39). It is also demonstrated in his criticism of the Christian interpretation of
the body, through which the “whole contingent nature of the machine” is turned,
unnecessarily, into a moral and religious phenomenon (D 86).
At this point a critical concern must be raised: Is Epicureanism indeed a philosophy of life-affirmation, or does it simply depict a universe of atoms and the void
that is indifferent to life and in which freedom consists in little more than attaining
a contemplative tranquility with respect to this fact? If the latter, then, Nietzsche’s
appeal to and use of Epicurus would seem misguided and his efforts with regard to
re-conceptualizing death in Dawn would thus seem less effective. D. H. Lawrence
observes in an Epicurean moment that the universe has no why or wherefore but
at all times simply is: indeed, we cannot even say what it is as it is “unto itself.”41
And James Porter raises the question that, if life has no intrinsic value for Epicurus,
then does this mean that life is a matter of indifference for him?42
Porter suggests that, when viewed from a third-person point of view, that is, the
cosmological one (of atoms and the void), life has no claim on us; rather, it discloses to us that “we are nothing more than physical entities, mere fortuitous
combinations of matter which reduce to their elements upon disbanding.”43 From
the viewpoint of nature, then, life is indifferent. The matter changes, Porter
argues, when we view things from a first-person perspective on life, that is, the
world of sensations, desires, and needs, or of nature in its human aspect. Here we
find that life by definition is not indifferent but a meaningful source of value. As
Porter puts it, the issue facing the Epicurean philosopher “is to decide just what
this value is and where it lies.”44 The argument is that life is a source of human
pleasure and thus of moral happiness, involving a strong attachment. Porter
argues that once we connect pleasure to life it is possible to show that Epicurus
has a philosophy of life, in addition to a philosophy of death, and that, in fact, it is
this emphasis on life — and not death — that dominates his writings.
Porter goes on to note that the “apparent pessimism” of the doctrine “clashes with
the joy and even fascination with life” that are found in the Epicurean perception of
the world.45 The task is to account for this disparity and the urgent question to focus
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Nietzsche’s Dawn
on is that of what makes creatures cling to life and remain attached to it. We can rule
out, he thinks, the fear of death since such a fear produces phantasms of life (such
as ideas of the afterlife) and does not prolong or propagate life itself. He thinks that
love of life, in the form of an attachment to life, precedes the fear of death, operating
at a primitive level of psychic attachment, “and may even precede” what he takes to
be the most primitive root fear present in the fear of death, that of the fear of the
blank void or horror vacui. Furthermore, it cannot be supposed that what makes us
cling to life is constant novelty since this seems to be a consequence of the love of
life and not its cause. The Epicurean affirmation of life, the practice of its love, consists in attending to and enjoying the present feelings or sensations of life, that is,
living in the here and now without desire and expectation and in a condition of
gratitude. As Porter puts it, “To love life is to be in an unqualified state of affirmation
about what lies most immediately to hand: it is the pleasure, the unalloyed passion,
and even thrill, of living itself.”46 For Epicurus, then, a correct understanding of our
mortality is one that should lead to the enjoyment of this mortal life. The Epicurean
love of life “is a love of mortal life and not a love of life abstracted from death, much
less of immortal life.”47 Moreover, this Epicurean love of life is not a longing for life,
but “rather an immediate expression of what is dear about life, what is most life
worthy in life,” and which makes it something fragile and easily ruptured.48
There are gaps, potentially significant ones, in Nietzsche’s appreciation of the
Epicurean teaching with regard to death. For example, Nietzsche never subjects
the effectiveness of Epicurus’ arguments to direct critical analysis, but simply
assumes that the rediscovery of the certainty of death within modern science,
along with the demise of the significance of the Christian conception of the afterlife, will prove sufficient to eliminate our knowledge of our inevitable deaths as a
source of anguish to us. Moreover, the triumph of the Epicurean view that we are
mortal and need not live in fear of an afterlife is not necessarily a triumph for the
Epicurean view that we should not fear death: one can eliminate fear of the afterlife by exposing it as a myth, but this does not liberate us immediately or absolutely from the fear of extinction, or indeed from specific fears concerning modes
of extinction. It is clear from much recent debate on physician assisted dying, for
example, that many people have non-trivial fears about death and the process of
dying that cannot easily be set aside. Our point here, however, is that an Epicurean
approach to death and dying provides a helpful resource that Nietzsche was able
to deploy in order to advance his critical project in Dawn.
There are places in Dawn where Nietzsche clearly does appear to be offering
new, post-religious consolations, such as the consolation we can gain from the
recognition that as experimental free spirits, the sacrifices we make of our lives to
knowledge may lead to a more enlightened humanity in the future: others may
prosper where we have not been able to. The possibility of a new source of hope
Nietzsche on Epicurus and Death
for the future of humanity is non-trivial. Nietzsche acknowledges this when he
suggests a field maxim to soldiers of knowledge, who are grappling with the difficulty of pursuing the passion of knowledge through sacrifice: “‘We must take
things more joyfully than they deserve; especially because for a long time we have
taken them more seriously than they deserve (D 567). And, in light of Porter’s
analysis, Nietzsche can plausibly be said to find in Epicurus, and to appeal successfully to, a victory over pessimism in which death becomes the last celebration
of a life that is constantly embellished. This last of the Greek philosophers teaches
the joy of living in the midst of a world in decay and where all moral doctrines
preach suffering. As Richard Roos has claimed, Epicurus provides Nietzsche with
the example that “a life filled with pain and renunciation prepares one to savour
the little joys of the everyday better” and that upon relinquishing “Dionysian
intoxication,” Nietzsche became “a student of this master of moderate pleasures
and careful dosages.”49 In Epicurus, Nietzsche discovers what Roos calls an “irresistible power” and a rare strength of spirit, regarding which he quotes one of
Nietzsche’s remarks from 1880: “I found strength in the very places one does not
look for it, in simple, gentle and helpful men … powerful natures dominate, that is
a necessity, even if those men do not move one finger. And they bury themselves,
in their lifetime, in a pavilion in their garden” (KSA 9, 6 [206]).50 The garden is not
a removal from the world, but rather a space in which human strength can be
expressed in proper relation to the earth.51
Defending a dialectical reading in which he differentiates between Nietzsche
qua author and Nietzsche qua free spirit, Matthew Meyer has recently pointed out
that since Nietzsche “rejects post-Socratic philosophy as superficial for its eudaimonistic tendencies” in The Birth of Tragedy 15, and that he opposes his own
“Dionysian pessimism” to Epicurus in The Gay Science 370, there is a case for
skepticism toward Nietzsche’s commitment to Epicurus.52 To be clear: in our earlier discussion, we have not claimed that Nietzsche is fully an Epicurean in Dawn.
Neither have we claimed that the way in which Nietzsche strategically deploys
Epicurean philosophy in his analysis of death in Dawn always holds true to the
same degree throughout his published and unpublished works, including the
free-spirit writings taken together as a group. What we have claimed is that, for
Nietzsche, Epicurus’ philosophy constitutes a resource that is of particular utility
to furthering Nietzsche’s campaign against customary morality in Dawn. If
humans could move past their socially conditioned fear of death as a form of punishment, understood as a fundamental expression of customary morality and its
harmful effects on us, then, for Nietzsche, there is a greater likelihood of humans
being able to loosen the grip that such fear has upon their minds, and to begin to
free themselves from the customary moral thinking that inhibits them in
unhealthy ways, and to become stronger and healthier.
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Nietzsche’s Dawn
Notes
1 Keith Ansell-Pearson. 2014. “Heroic-Idyllic Philosophizing: Nietzsche and the
Epicurean Tradition.” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 74: 237–263.
2 Ansell-Pearson, “Heroic-Idyllic Philosophizing,” 238.
3 Norman Wentworth DeWitt, Epicurus and His Philosophy (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1954), 3.
4 Neven Leddy and Avi S. Lifschitz (eds.), Epicurus in the Enlightenment (Oxford:
Voltaire Foundation, 2009), 4.
5 The reference to HH II here is to a note from July 1879. See Friedrich Nietzsche,
Human, All Too Human II and Unpublished Fragments, trans. Gary Handwerk
(Stanford; Stanford University Press, 2012), 400. On Nietzsche’s admiration for
Epicurus here, see Julian Young, Friedrich Nietzsche. A Philosophical Biography
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 279. See also Keith AnsellPearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy: On the Middle Writings (London:
Bloomsbury, 2018), 41.
6 Young describes the asceticism advocated by Epicurus as a “eudaemonic
asceticism,” which is clearly different to ascetic practices of world denial and
self-denial in Young, Friedrich Nietzsche, 279. See also Ansell-Pearson, “HeroicIdyllic Philosophizing,” 239.
7 Richard Roos, “Nietzsche et Épicure: l’idylle héroique,” in Lectures de Nietzsche,
ed. Jean-François Balaudé and Patrick Wotling (Paris: Librairie Générale
Française, 2000), 283–350.
8 On transformative experience in Nietzsche, see Rebecca Bamford. 2016. “The
Ethos of Inquiry: Nietzsche on Experience, Naturalism, and Experimentalism.”
Journal of Nietzsche Studies 47(1): 9–29.
9 Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy, 41–42.
10 James Warren, Facing Death: Epicurus and His Critics (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 6.
11 Warren, Facing Death, 7.
12 Warren, Facing Death, 7.
13 Warren, Facing Death, 7.
14 Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, trans. Michael Chase (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1995), 93–101.
15 Epicurus, “Vatican Sayings,” no. 45 in The Essential Epicurus, trans. Eugene
O’Connor (New York: Prometheus Books, 1993), 81.
16 For further insight see Julian Young, Nietzsche. A Philosophical Biography
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 279–81. For insight into
Nietzsche on happiness and in relation to both Aristotelian and Epicurean
conceptions see Richard Bett. 2005. “Nietzsche, the Greeks, and Happiness (with
special reference to Aristotle and Epicurus).” Philosophical Topics. 33(2): 45–70.
Nietzsche on Epicurus and Death
17 See Martine Prange, Nietzsche, Wagner, Europe (Berlin and Boston: Walter de
Gruyter, 2013), 231. For Prange, one has to adopt an “Epicurean” lifestyle to
become truly free.
18 Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 252.
19 On Epicurus on fear and chance see Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 87, 223, 252.
20 Jessica N. Berry points out that knowledge of the natural world as a means to
assuage the fear of death was a central theme in the work of Epicurus and other
Greek atomists. See Jessica Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical Tradition
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 40.
21 Rebecca Bamford. 2014. “Mood and Aphorism in Nietzsche’s Campaign Against
Morality.” Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy 25: 55–76.
22 Translation modified: Smith renders this phrase as “passion for knowledge.”
23 See Ruth Abbey. 2015. “Swanton and Nietzsche on Self-Love.” Journal of Value
Inquiry 49(3): 387–403.
24 As Morgan Rempel points out, Christianity delayed the victory of Epicureanism
over beliefs concerning eternal punishment until the reinvigoration of science in
modernity. See Morgan Rempel. 2012. “Daybreak 72: Nietzsche, Epicurus, and
the after Death.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 43(2): 342–354.
25 This argument is developed from earlier work on Nietzsche’s broader thinking
on free death and assisted dying in Rebecca Bamford. 2015. “‘Moralic-Acid-Free’
Virtue: The Case of Free Death.” Journal of Value Inquiry 49(3): 437–51. See also
Bamford, “Mood and Aphorism,” 55–76.
26 See Bamford, “‘Moralic-Acid-Free’ Virtue.”
27 Bamford, “‘Moralic-Acid-Free’ Virtue,” 446.
28 Bamford, “‘Moralic-Acid-Free’ Virtue,” 440–43.
29 Paul S. Loeb, “Suicide, Meaning, and Redemption,” in Nietzsche on Time and
History, ed. Manuel Dries (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2008), 163–90; and
Paul S. Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010). See also Bamford, “‘Moralic-Acid-Free’ Virtue,” 437–51.
30 Loeb, “Suicide, Meaning, and Redemption,” 163–90. See also Loeb, The Death of
Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.
31 Loeb, “Suicide, Meaning, and Redemption”; Loeb, The Death of Nietzsche’s
Zarathustra; Bamford, “‘Moralic-Acid-Free’ Virtue.”
32 Gary Shapiro, Nietzsche’s Earth: Great Events, Great Politics (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2016), 140.
33 Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, trans. Robert Drew Hicks, in The Epicurus Reader,
ed. Brad Inwood and L. P. Gerson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 28–31. Internet
Classics Archive. Retrieved from <http://classics.mit.edu/Epicurus/menoec.html>
34 Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus.
35 On Epicurus and ataraxia, see also Robert C. Solomon, The Joy of Philosophy:
Thinking Thin versus the Passionate Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
203
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Nietzsche’s Dawn
161–63. On descriptive accounts of tranquility in Greek theories of happiness vs.
recipes for happiness, and the relevance of the former rather than the latter to
Nietzsche’s philosophy, see also Berry, Nietzsche and the Ancient Skeptical
Tradition, 155.
36 Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 128.
37 Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 125.
38 Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 125.
39 Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 126.
40 Ansell-Pearson. “Heroic-Idyllic Philosophizing,” 251.
41 D. H. Lawrence, “The Reality of Peace,” in Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine
and Other Essays, ed. Michael Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), 27. See also Keith Ansell-Pearson. 2013. “Attachment to Life,
Understanding Death: Nietzsche and D. H. Lawrence.” Parrhesia 18: 22–35.
42 James L. Porter. 2003. “Epicurean Attachments: Life, Pleasure, Beauty,
Friendship and Piety.” Cronache Ercolanesi 33: 205–27; Ansell-Pearson,
“Attachment to Life, Understanding Death.”
43 Porter, “Epicurean Attachments,” 207; Ansell-Pearson, “Attachment to Life,
Understanding Death.”
44 Porter, “Epicurean Attachments,” 207.
45 Porter, “Epicurean Attachments,” 211; Ansell-Pearson, “Attachment to Life,
Understanding Death.”
46 Porter, “Epicurean Attachments,” 212.
47 Porter, “Epicurean Attachments,” 212.
48 Porter, “Epicurean Attachments,” 212.
49 Roos “Nietzsche et Épicure,” 283–350. See also Ansell-Pearson, “Attachment to
Life, Understanding Death”; and Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for
Philosophy.
50 Roos, “Nietzsche et Épicure, 283–350; Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for
Philosophy, 43.
51 Shapiro, Nietzsche’s Earth; Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche’s Search for Philosophy.
Prange, Nietzsche, Wagner, Europe.
52 Meyer, Nietzsche’s Free Spirit Works: A Dialectical Reading (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2019), 46–7.