Abstract

Deprivation explains why death is bad, if it is bad, but it cannot explain existential panic, horror, and related emotions that facing the nothingness of death can induce. I consider various attempts to explain those emotions and argue that they arise from the fact that one’s death seems impossible. For Jean-Paul Sartre, horror and related emotions can occur only in a world that is magical in his special sense of the term. A world where impossible things happen is magical in that sense. I conclude that existential terror is a fitting response to the nothingness of death.