I've been going through a total existential crisis for awhile. I'm terrified of death. Both for myself and my loved ones. And because of this pandemic, every time I feel weird I get a panic attack. I've run through every single religion desperate to find some way to find peace with my mortality, but nothing felt right. Is there any philosophy out there that can help me find peace?
In the Apology by Plato, Socrates says that if there is an afterlife, then death is not the end. If there isn't, then your conciousness will be extinguished and you won't ever experience death. In a sense, you will never be dead because you will cease to be. This helps if you're fear isn't around dying and getting old and watching your loved ones pass, but it helped me come to terms with the possibility of just randomly dying.
Broke: Quoting the idealist virgin Plato
Woke: Quoting the materialist chad Epicurus
I don't like the idea of not being tbh
Yeah but ‘not being’ you doesn’t give a shit. Or exist.
deleted by creator
Also can we start having struggle sessions about Platonism vs. Epicureanism vs. Aristotelianism (sp?) vs. Stoicism?
Epicureanism is clearly the best and I feel like nobody says this enough
I was about to make an Ancient Greeks struggle session joke in response to your other comment but you beat me to it lol
I may be stretching a bit here, but Epicurus laid out the methodology for empirical study over a thousand years before the European renaissance and enlightenment revived his thinking.
He was right that life came from a type of natural evolution. He was mostly right that diseases were spread by something tiny spread by filth and touching. He was onto something with atomism, in that it was more accurate than any of his peers to actual physics. He was right that the soul and consciousness emerged from material atoms in movement. He even predicted a bit of quantum science when he said that atoms were not deterministic, but had some kind of random swerve and eschewed the crude materialism of his predecessors.
He also taught slaves and women as equal in his garden, didn’t own slaves, taught for free, was volcel but orgies were probably going on at his 24/7 garden parties.
Marx wrote his thesis on him. The dude was certainly onto something. Way ahead of his time, millennia ahead of his time
Edit: Also he also called laws of thermodynamics. He believed all atoms that exist have always existed and will always exist, and therefore believed matter could not be created or destroyed but only rearranged. He didn’t know about the Big Bang, but he did get some of the big picture correct
wow, and yet it seems like he is barely taught in universities since undergrads are only dimly aware of him as a contemporary of Plato and not much else. Would be interesting to learn why he didnt get more recognition and academic prestige to be studied alongside Plato and Aristotle.
Well for one 90% of his work is lost because it was destroyed by Roman Christians who deemed it heathen. What we know of Epicurus is often in short epistles or secondhand from his followers. Cicero devotes a few chapters to him but really strawmans him and is quite uncharitable. The elite of Athens were quite hostile to his thinking, which was mostly to not own slaves, do the minimum required for content conditions and then gain friendships. Those things made it quite the punching bag for the government and the aristocracy, which preferred Plato.
Ah, the base-superstructure relationship strikes again lol
deleted by creator
True, I think the Greeks are overrated except Epicurus who is underrated. Epicurus also shares a lot of philosophy with Buddhism and eastern thought, so it’s easy to see why he was sidelined
deleted by creator
This is why it’s imperative to get assisted suicide available to everyone near death. Let us go out with dignity, painlessly, on our own terms.