Many of us fear our deaths – or what we presume comes after them – by experiencing existential terror. We experience existential terror if we feel horrified at the thought that one day, we will go out of existence, and remain non-existent forever after. According to the received view, existential terror is a type of fear (and most likely ill-fitting as such, as our non-existence cannot be intrinsically bad for us). This paper argues against the received view. It suggests that existential terror might best be conceptualised not as some kind of fear, but as a kind of negatively valenced awe, namely one that takes the future non-existence of the person who experiences existential terror as its object.  If we experience awe towards something, we represent it as vast, and we feel that our usual conceptual schemes are unable fully to capture it. Once existential terror is understood as a type of awe, it ceases to be obviously ill-fitting. Rather, those who experience existential terror reasonably perceive of their future non-existence as vast, and they are likely correct to judge that their usual conceptual schemes cannot easily accommodate their future non-existence.

Susanne Burri ist ausserordentliche Professorin für angewandte und normative Ethik an der UZH. Sie hat an der Universität St. Gallen und an der London School of Economics (LSE) Volkswirtschaftslehre und Philosophie studiert und an der LSE in Philosophie promoviert. Zu Ihren Forschungsschwerpunkten zählen normative Fragen (i) rund um Sterben und Tod, (ii) zur moralischen Zulässigkeit von Notwehr und kriegerischen Handlungen und (iii) zum Einfluss von empirischer Unsicherheit auf moralische Entscheidungsfindung.