SOURCE: "Existentialism and the Fear of Dying," in Language, Metaphysics, and Death, Second Edition, Fordham University Press, 1994, pp. 80-100.

In the following essay, Slote uses concepts developed in the writings of Blaise Pascal, S0ren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, and Jean Paul Sartre to explain how the fear of death accounts for many aspects of human behavior.

In this paper I shall present a fairly systematic "existentialist" view of human anxiety about death and human responses to that anxiety, based on the work of Pascal, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre. My main purpose is constructive, rather than exegetical. What seems to me most distinctive and important about the work of these existentialist authors is their approach to the fear of dying—or at least the relevance of what they say to that subject, for sometimes, when they deal with other topics, what they say can (I shall attempt to show...