![Sample our Behavioral Sciences journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110801/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Behavioral-Sciences.jpg"})
Abstract
I am interested in fear of non-existence, which is often discussed in terms of fear of one's own death, or as it is sometimes called, fear of death as such. This form of fear has been denied by some philosophers. Cognitive theories of the emotions have particular trouble in dealing with it, granting it a status that is simultaneously paradigmatic yet anomalous with respect to fear in general. My paper documents these matters, and considers a number of responses. I provide examples from philosophy and literature of fear of non-existence, and distinguish it from other death-related fears. I then look at the success that cognitive theories of the emotions have had in dealing with other “problematic” fears, such as phobias, and examine how the solutions here fail to apply to fear of non-existence. The problem lies with the perceptual-centered model of fear that is typically called upon. Against this I recommend a retreat to a belief-centered model for fear of non-existence. I argue that there are other fears that are better explained by a belief-centered rather than a perceptual-based approach. This reinforces the plausibility of the belief-centered model, and goes some way to alleviating the anomalous and problematic status of the fear of non-existence.
Notes
Kathy Behrendt is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Wilfrid Laurier University.
Notes
[1] Granted, like Tolstoy's mortally ill Ivan Ilych, we can be thrown into a state of primal terror and active panic when confronted with the immanent prospect of the all-engulfing “black sack” (Tolstoy, Citation1886/Citation1991, p. 166). But this is a state of mind that Ivan Ilych has to work himself into. His initial responses when coming to terms with the prospect of non-being take the form of a highly ruminative and non-immediate dread that is to this extent disparate from typical fight-or-flight responses to threats of bodily harm.
[2] In many such cases “perception” is characterised in terms of a form of aspect-seeing, or “seeing as”—an attention to certain details of the object as being salient. Aside from this, I do not intend to imply that adherers to a perceptual-centered model of emotions represent a uniform school of thought. A variety of differing approaches adopt some form of the model, including de Sousa, Goldie, Amélie Rorty, and Martha Nussbaum.
[3] A comparable assumption might be Aristotle's similarly constraining view that we can only fear that which we can escape, which is another dictum that seems to rule out making any sense of fear of death. Though I take it that Aristotle's view can be rejected outright (e.g., Nussbaum, Citation2001, pp. 28–29).
[4] It would, however, be acceptable to follow Roberts in isolating fear of death in particular as perhaps a special sub-species of fear, better called “dread,” which concerns aversion to the highly probable or inevitable. Although “fear shades into dread along the avoidability dimension,” they are on the same continuum, according to Roberts (Citation2003, p. 200).
[5] Although there is a case to be made that the deterministic universe and perhaps the godless one as well do not necessarily entail any experiential contrast.
[6] It may have to do with their arguable lack of probability, and of course lack of probability is not a concern when it comes to fear of death.
[7] See for example Stroud (Citation1984, chapter 1). The same point can and has been made about free will: the fact (if it is one) that a universe in which I have some form of free will is indiscernible from one in which I do not, is cold comfort to say the least for many of those who view the matter with seriousness.
[8] Goldie (Citation2000) draws out this objection at length, articulating four specific points of disanalogy between belief and emotion. My claims here are largely a response to those.
[9] Nevertheless, people are ambivalent about their death. Derek Parfit and Galen Strawson are examples of philosophers who, as a result of their beliefs about the nature and identity conditions of persons and selves, both claim to have no reason to fear their own death (Parfit, Citation1971, section 4, 1987, section 95, 1999, p. 266; Strawson, Citation1999). But both admit to fearing their death (Parfit, Citation1987, pp. 279–280, 1995, p. 45; Strawson, Citation1999, p. 16). I doubt they are alone in seeing this fear as not consistent with their avowed beliefs concerning other aspects of themselves and their lives. However, it's worth noting that both Parfit and Strawson try to account for their fear of death in terms of conflicting beliefs whose sources can be traced. Therefore in these cases fear of death arguably still remains within the field of belief proper, rather than some other realm, such as perception or imagination. Indeed Parfit has moved from an earlier account of fear of death in terms of a phobia, to a more conceptual, belief-centered account; see Parfit (Citation1995, p. 45).
[10] If there are further problems here they concern the particular limitations of the abstract conception in the case of conceiving of one's own death, as opposed to conceiving of the possibility of the radical sceptical scenario. As Nagel notes, “the objective self is not in a position of safety” (1986, p. 231) in the case of thoughts of death, in the way that it is in the case of thoughts of evidence-transcendent sceptical hypothesis; “we cannot rise above death by occupying a vantage point that death will destroy” (1986, p. 231).