Splitting the fear into two branches. The classic disjunctive argument against the fear of death: death is either ἀναισθησία (the complete cessation of sensation) or αἴσθησις ἑτεροία (sensation of a different kind). Marcus exhausts the possibilities and shows that neither branch contains an evil. If there is no more sensation — "you will not feel any TERMevil either" (οὐδὲ κακοῦ τινος αἰσθήσῃ): there is no subject left for whom things could go badly — the argument familiar from the Epicurean "death is nothing to us." And if sensation gives way to another kind — "you will be a different living being (ἀλλοῖον ζῷον) and will not cease to live": death then is not annihilation but a EXERCISEchange, μεταβολή, a passage into another order of being.

A Stoic frame over an Epicurean move. The first branch is close to Epicurean; the disjunction itself goes back to Plato's Apology (40c: death is either an absence of all sensation or a change and migration of the soul). Marcus seems to read the second branch in a Stoic way: death as change (μεταβολή), not annihilation. Both branches lead to the same place: there is nothing to fear. Cf. the disjunction at 7.32 ("About death: whether it is a dispersion, or a resolution into atoms, or annihilation, it is either extinction or change") and death as "a mystery of nature" (4.5; cf. 2.12, "an operation of nature"). The governing discipline is desire: to remove death from the class of supposed evils.