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How should we face suffering and death?

Follow fear before death, enduring suffering, and absurd repetition to compare accounts in terms of sensation, craving, selfhood, despair, and revolt.

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  1. 1Around the fifth century BCEEarly Buddhism — Suffering, its cause, cessation, and a path

    Early Buddhist tradition · Early discourses on the Four Noble Truths

    What changes if suffering is read not as a pessimistic verdict on all life but as a diagnosis with causes and a possible cessation?

    The Four Noble Truths distinguish dukkha, its arising centered on craving, its cessation, and a path leading toward cessation.

    Source and exact locator

    The text is a Korean-English summary of the source, not a direct quotation.

    • Mind in Indian Buddhist Philosophy

      Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

      Locator: §1 Early Buddhist conceptions of mind; Four Noble Truths and dependent arising

      Open source

    Reducing the teaching to “life is only suffering” misses its therapeutic structure, which allows pleasant experience while analyzing the conditioned arising and cessation of dukkha.

    Source and exact locator

    The text is a Korean-English summary of the source, not a direct quotation.

    • Mind in Indian Buddhist Philosophy

      Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

      Locator: §1–§2, dukkha, impermanence, craving, and liberation

      Open source
    1. Early discourses frame suffering not as an inescapable fate but as a problem with causes and practices.

      Around the fifth century BCE

  2. 2Fourth to third century BCEEpicurus — Death is nothing to us

    Epicurus · Letter to Menoeceus

    If death is absent while we exist and we are absent when death arrives, what reason remains to fear it in advance?

    Epicurus argues that good and bad depend on sensation and death is the deprivation of sensation, so death is nothing to us.

    Source and exact locator

    The text is a Korean-English summary of the source, not a direct quotation.

    • Epicurus

      Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

      Locator: §4.1 Fear of Death; Letter to Menoeceus 124–127

      Open source

    Whether the argument addresses the pain of dying, survivors’ loss, and future possibilities deprived by death remains open to separate objections.

    Source and exact locator

    The text is a Korean-English summary of the source, not a direct quotation.

    • Epicurus

      Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

      Locator: §4.1–§4.2, death, pleasure, and later objections

      Open source
    1. The Letter to Menoeceus dismantles fear of death through an argument about sensation and time.

      Around 300 BCE

  3. 31849Kierkegaard — Despair as a sickness in the self-relation

    Søren Kierkegaard · The Sickness Unto Death

    If despair is not merely sadness but a failed relation of not willing—or willing by oneself alone—to be oneself, what requires care?

    The pseudonymous Anti-Climacus describes the self as a relation relating to itself—a synthesis of finite/infinite and possibility/necessity—and despair as a misrelation.

    Source and exact locator

    The text is a Korean-English summary of the source, not a direct quotation.

    • Søren Kierkegaard

      Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

      Locator: §5 Religion; The Sickness Unto Death and the self as relation

      Open source

    Reading despair as another name for depression or physical death confuses existential-religious diagnosis with a clinical category; the pseudonym's elevated Christian standpoint must also be distinguished from Kierkegaard's direct voice.

    Source and exact locator

    The text is a Korean-English summary of the source, not a direct quotation.

    • Søren Kierkegaard

      Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

      Locator: §2 Aesthetics of Authorship; §5 Religion and Anti-Climacus

      Open source
    1. The Sickness Unto Death develops despair as a problem in self-relation rather than a passing mood.

      1849

  4. 41942Camus — Lucid revolt without dissolving the absurd

    Albert Camus · The Myth of Sisyphus

    If the clash between our demand for meaning and a silent world persists, can one live on without suicide or false hope?

    Camus begins The Myth of Sisyphus with the question of suicide and describes the absurd as the confrontation between the human demand for meaning and an unanswering world.

    Source and exact locator

    The text is a Korean-English summary of the source, not a direct quotation.

    • Albert Camus

      Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

      Locator: §3.1 The Absurd and Suicide

      Open source

    His response is to live with lucidity, revolt, freedom, and passion without dissolving the absurd in a transcendent answer; Camus rejected the label “existentialist.”

    Source and exact locator

    The text is a Korean-English summary of the source, not a direct quotation.

    • Albert Camus

      Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

      Locator: §3.2 Limits of Reason; §3.3 Criticism of Existentialists; §3.4 Happiness in Facing One’s Fate

      Open source
    1. Published in Paris, The Myth of Sisyphus proposes lucid persistence and revolt rather than suicide before the absurd.

      1942 · Paris · 출판