Soren Kierkegaard's Die Hard With a Vengeance

Die Hard With a Vengeance was the third of the series starring Bruce Willis. "Die Hard" sounds a little like Fear and Trembling.  Epicureanism has become the existential condition du jour with the help of Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve, which popularized Lucretius’ De Rorem Natura. Taking away the Christian notion of the afterlife is the basic premise from which the great poem begins. But the thing about philosophical premises is they're hard to interpret and even harder to live by. Heidegger said that those who were not aware of death led an inauthentic existence. But death itself is open to interpretation. Batteries die, but how does that compare to organic matter, consciousness? Epicurus who shared Lucretius' stoicism  believed in “the golden mean.” Living in the present was not a  invitation to gluttony. Where does pleasure fit in? And what about pain? Is suffering itself optional, as the saying goes?

Questions of the day: Knock knock? Who's there?