Why does epicurus not fear death

Cyril Bailey, Oxford University Press, Zalta ed. The Badness of Death by Duncan Purves. Personal Identity by Chad Vance. Origin Essentialism by Chad Vance. Happiness by Kiki Berk.

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Reaction to Epicurus Common sense has long recoiled to Epicurus. Lucretius writes: Look back again to see how the past ages of everlasting time, before we were born, have been as naught to us. A Different Answer to Lucretius Here is a more promising response. Like this: Like Loading Pingback: Is Immortality Desirable? Pingback: Epicureanism: A collection of articles, videos, and podcasts.

Follow Following. Sign me up. Already have a WordPress. Log in now. Loading Comments Interpreters had often thought that Lucretius supplements the arguments of Epicurus to shore up a gap in the argument against feeling distress about mortality. Through an exhaustive analysis of the symmetry argument in Lucretius and other ancient authors, JW proves that such an interpretation misunderstands the argument and that the conclusion of the Lucretian passage is ultimately no different than that of the arguments found in KD 2 58, See T.

This case, and its relevance to the Epicurean argument about death, JW cites from F. Feldman, Confrontations with the Reaper. See p. Plutarch and Philodemus mention an eighteen-year-old Pythocles lauded for becoming an Epicurean sage. See further J. Skip to content. Therefore, knowledge of the truth that death is nothing to us, enables us to enjoy this mortal life, not by adding the prospect of infinite duration, but by taking away the desire of the immortality.

For there is nothing left to fear in life, who really understood that out of life there is nothing terrible. So pronounced empty words when it is argued that death is feared, not because it is painful being made, but because of the wait is painful. It would indeed be a futile and pointless fear than would be produced by the expectation of something that does not cause any trouble with his presence. There is no perspective, no view from nothingness, nothing to which it can be approximated.

He was a saltier and more ironic Epicurean of a later generation, the 1st century BCE, whose unexampled poem On the Nature of Things fell afoul of early Christians because of its crypto-atheism.

Not how the world was, which is the task of historical imagination, but what it was like to be you — before you were created. The symmetrical part of the argument, of course, is that you have the very same difficulty in imagining what it is like to be dead.

Indeed, according to Lucretius, you-pre-existence is the same thing as death or post-existence: both involve the absence of you. That is, are there any good reasons for your pending death to trigger the emotion of fear? It is reasonable to be fearful of things to the extent that those things can cause you harm. None of them would help us in our Epicurean goal of being happy, and so are reasonably feared.

Even something that you dreamed or imagined — say, a stranger standing silently by your bed as you wake — has a kind of existence necessary for it to be the reasonable object of a fear, even if it turns out to have been the shadow of a tree.

And Lucretius would add: it is just as unreasonable to fear nonexistence after life as it is to fear nonexistence before birth. No, the Epicurean argument against the fear of death concerns only your own self and its dissolution. When I think through these steps, I find that their efficacy is largely dependent upon my mood. I like the idea of being able to intellectualise away the fear of death, as if merely thinking philosophical thoughts would be enough to give me courage.

Epicurus recognised this. It can have its fruits. It can lighten a little the fear of death, which in turn can subtly augment your enjoyment of life — and that is, on the whole, one of the great purposes of being here in the first place. Their disagreement goes right to the heart of the Epicurean view. Nagel says that Epicurus is wrong: death obviously does deprive us of the possibility of the joys of life; only airy-headed philosophers indulging in their wanton complexities would deny so simple a truth.

An example: the brilliant philosopher and mathematician Frank Ramsey died at It is reasonable to hold that his death deprived him — and the world — of uncountable, perhaps now-inconceivable, philosophical insights. But it also took away from him the quiet charms of growing older, the wisdom of age such as it is , the elation of having children, and so on.

In that sense, death was very bad for Ramsey, as it is for all of us. For the great majority of lives, death deprives.