Epicurus and Lucretius on Death
Epicurus and Lucretius on how we may achieve happiness in face of inevitable death. Submitted for PHIL 2100 on December 10, 2022.
The recognition of our own mortality is a fundamental motivator of many of our actions, conducted both toward ourselves and others around us. Regardless of our individual outlooks on the subject, what the logical portion of us have conceded is that death is eventual and inevitable; its occurrence is definite and never up to our control. Understandable, then, is the fear that death instills in many of us. But how can we achieve happiness if our demise is ever so nigh? Do not fear, as ancient philosophers Epicurus and Lucretius would prescribe, for our fear of death is unfounded.
As part of his fourfold cure—the other ingredients being the irrationality of the fear of god, the simple attainability of good, and the painless endurance of evil—the Athenian philosopher Epicurus rejects the fear of death. His rejection is based on his notion of physics: our soul is “the chief cause of our sensation,” and once our soul has departed our corporeal form, we can no longer experience the world around us in the physical sense, for “it is not possible to imagine the soul existing and having sensation without the body” (Ep. Herod. 63-66). To Epicurus, death is akin to the dissolution of our body, and a body dissolved cannot experience sensations, because by then the soul, our faculty of sensations, has also dispersed and no longer possesses the same body (Ep. Herod. 65). Because “every good and evil lie in sensation,” and because “the absence of sensation is nothing to us,” death, supposedly the most dreaded evil which deprives us of our body and soul and thus our sensations, is in fact nothing to us (Ep. Men. 124-125; Principal Doctrines II). Death cannot harm the living, for by definition living is the absence of death. And death also cannot harm the dead, for the dead by his definition no longer is.
Solely considering its form, Epicurus’ argument seems reasonable enough. If we accept his premises, namely that (1) what we do not sense cannot harm us and (2) both the living and the dead do not sense death, it is logical to conclude that death cannot harm us, both when we are alive and when we are dead. But one may rightly question the soundness of his argument by questioning the truth of his premises. One may rebut that while we may not sense death directly when we are alive, we can still sense its approach, and that tangibly harms us. Epicurus responds that this “idle worry in anticipation” is foolish, as death “is no trouble” and should not be anticipated in fear in the first place (Ep. Men. 125).
Another challenge is whether it is true that only sensible things can harm us. In other words, can we not be happily oblivious? One would suggest that misfortune is not a simple calculation of immediate consequences. For instance, just because you are not aware you have been drinking water that contains poisonous substances does not mean that you were not harmed as a result. You may not feel anything now, but it is certainly possible that your health suffers in the long term. Defenders of Epicurus may reply that eventually such harm will be sensed; just because the harm was sensed later does not mean that it is not sensed at all, so the first premise is still intact.
Lucretius, in defense of Epicurus’ stance on the irrationality of our fear of death, proposes “the symmetry argument.” He maintains that the future after death affects us no more than the past before our birth, for both are states of nonexistence, mirrors of one another (Book III, II. 973-977). During both time periods, none of what happens in what we know as the physical world can harm us. As such, we should treat both the time before birth and the time after death equally. Since we do not fear the time before which we exist, we should likewise not fear the time after which we exist.
Again, if only judging the merits of the argumentative form, assuming the premises given by Lucretius—which are (1) that we do not fear prenatal nonexistence, (2) that prenatal nonexistence is sufficiently similar to posthumous nonexistence, and (3) that rationality dictates that our emotions towards sufficiently similar things should be the same—then the conclusion that the fear of death is absurd is indeed logical. However, Lucretius’ premises welcome a host of questions. First, if we do fear prenatal nonexistence, then the logical conclusion would be that it is actually reasonable to fear posthumous nonexistence as well. Second, some subscribe to what Nagel puts forth in his essay Death, believing that prenatal nonexistence is fundamentally different from posthumous nonexistence. Whereas we can say that the latter is the deprivation of life which I could have led, the experiences I could potentially have, we cannot say the same for the former, for I could not have been born earlier than I actually was, because then I would not have been the me that I am. Third, one may question whether it is in fact irrational to fear one thing and enjoy its twin. Depending on their age or experience or current predicament, for example, one can equally fear the passage of time as much as they enjoy it.
With Epicurus, we are left wondering what harm really entails, whether it is truly contingent upon our physical existence or whether it can go beyond it. With Lucretius, we take on the bold assumption that we are entities that are destined to exist at some arbitrary point in time, that our identities do not change regardless of the time we are born, and that our legacies remain regardless of when we die. As such questions linger, we still may find ourselves unsatisfied, thinking the cure too bitter and searching for yet more clarity, or too meek and still retaining our fear of death. How we face our mortality should be a quest of our own, and no matter the conclusion, let us at least rejoice in how alive we feel when we converse about death.