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Open inquiry12 min4 historical perspectives

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. Around the fifth century BCE

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

    Early Buddhism — Suffering, its cause, cessation, and a path

  2. Around 300 BCE

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

    Epicurus — Death is nothing to us

  3. 1849

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

    Kierkegaard — Despair as a sickness in the self-relation

  4. 1942

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

    Camus — Lucid revolt without dissolving the absurd

    Paris · 출판