Episode 047 - Death Is Nothing To Us
Date: 12/05/20
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/1782-episode-forty-seven-death-is-nothing-to-us/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Episode 47, a three-person session without Elaine (whose father has just passed away), opens the famous final section of Book Three. Charles reads lines 830–930, which include the Carthaginian war analogy (we were not troubled by what happened before our existence; death will be the same), the argument that even if atoms could be rearranged to reconstruct us after death, the lack of any connecting memory means the reconstructed person would not be us, the passage about a man who fears his body will be eaten by wild beasts (“he has a secret sting concealed at his heart” — he has not truly separated himself from his dead carcass), the lament passage (“no more will your glad family welcome you home” — pleasures the dead person no longer desires are mistakenly mourned by the living), and the sleep analogy (death is like eternal sleep without the waking; we do not hunger for anything during sleep).
Most of the discussion centers on the risk that Principal Doctrine 2 (“death is nothing to us”) will be read as flippant or dismissive. Cassius argues that without the surrounding context Lucretius provides — dozens of lines devoted to reconciling us to death — PD2 appears to endorse carelessness about something the Epicurean framework treats as supremely important. Martin contributes the key distinction he worked out on first reading: the phrase refers not to the process of dying (which can be terrible) but to the completed state of being dead. Charles notes that the tetrapharmakon (“don’t worry about death”) makes the problem worse. Cassius quotes the passage from the Letter to Menoeceus that provides fuller context: “our right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable not because it adds to an infinite span of time but because it takes away the craving for immortality, for there is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living.” Charles raises the apparent paradox that to a philosophy built on pleasure and pain, death — the ultimate end of all pleasure — seems as if it should be the ultimate pain, and Cassius acknowledges the answer lies in specifying that the state of death, not its approach, need not concern us.
The episode also touches on Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence (Cassius connects it to Lucretius’s atomic-rearrangement argument; Charles notes Nietzsche was not a nihilist; Martin confesses to knowing little about this aspect of Nietzsche), and includes personal reflections on parental death from Martin (who shared experiences of traveling from Thailand to be present for his mother’s sake at his father’s death, and later not attending his mother’s burial because the family saw her death as a relief from suffering) and from Cassius (distinguishing the death of the first parent from the second). Charles notes his parents are only 39 and 40 years old, drawing a warm remark from Cassius that Charles will hopefully not face these losses for a very long time.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 47 of Lucretius Today. I’m your host Cassius and together with my panelists from the EpicureanFriends.com forum, we’ll walk you through the six books of Lucretius’s poem and discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. Be aware that none of us are professional philosophers, and everyone here is a self-taught Epicurean. We encourage you to study Epicurus for yourself, and we suggest the best place to start is the book Epicurus and His Philosophy by Canadian professor Norman DeWitt. For anyone who’s not familiar with our podcast, please check back to Episode One for a discussion of our goals and our ground rules. If you have any questions about that, please be sure to contact us at EpicureanFriends.com for more information. In today’s episode we’ll cover roughly lines 830 through 930 from Book Three of the Latin text. In this episode we open the famous final section of the book — nature speaks to us about death, and Lucretius will compare the myths of Tityus, Sisyphus, and Tantalus to the tortures that actually exist for some people on Earth. Now let’s join today’s discussion with Charles reading the text.
Charles: (reads lines 830–930)
Death therefore is nothing, nor is it of the least consequence to us, since the nature of the soul is certainly mortal. And as we were not concernedly troubled at what formerly happened when the Carthaginians mustered their armies on all sides against us, and all the world trembled and shook with the dreadful alarms of war, and it was undecided under the power of which empire, the land and the sea, and all things here below, should be subjected — so when we shall be no more, when the separation happens between the soul and the body, which together make up our being, nothing shall befall us, when that shall no more be, nor affect our sense, not though the earth be swallowed up by the sea and the sea confounded with the heavens above.
But if the nature of the soul, and the powers of it, when divided from the body, had the faculty to think, this would signify nothing to us, who were formed and compounded by a strict and inseparable union of soul and body together. Nay, if time could collect together our scattered particles after death, and reduce them into the same frame they are now in, and the light of life were again bestowed upon us, can all this, if it were done, relate anything to us, when all the memory of past life were interrupted and gone?
And now we give ourselves no trouble over what we were formerly, nor are we under any anxiety what persons the time to come will raise from our matter when it is molded up again. For when you look back upon that infinite space of time that has passed, and consider how various are the agitations of matter, you will easily believe those seeds of ours have often been arranged in the same order they are now in, though we can recollect nothing of what was then transacted, for a pause of life is thrown in between, and the seeds, so variously tossed about, took such motions as were averse and opposite to all sense. For whoever is to become wretched and miserable must exist at that very time when such misfortunes are to fall upon him. But since death puts an end to his being and hinders the man from feeling those misfortunes which we, the living, endure, it is plain that we have nothing to fear in death, and none can be unhappy who are not in being, nor is it of the consequence whether such a one had ever been born, whose mortal life immortal death has once put an end to.
And then, when you see a man lament himself because his rotten body shall after death putrefy in the earth, or be consumed by fire, or by the jaws of wild beasts, this man, you must observe, does not speak out, but has some secret sting concealed at his heart within, though he pretends to say that the whole of him is deprived of life when he dies, but, like a fool, that something of himself remains still. When a man alive torments himself that birds or beasts will tear his body to pieces after death, he bemoans the misery of his fate, which he does not fully distinguish, nor set himself at a proper distance from his dead carcass. He believes himself to be that, and rots with all his senses about him. Hence it is that he grieves that he was born mortal, nor sees that in death there can be no other self that can survive and mourn over him after his dead, that can stand by him as he lies along, or suffer pain or affliction for him. For if it be an evil to be crushed after death by the teeth and jaws of wild beasts, I do not see why his fate is not equally wretched to be laid upon a burning pile and consumed to ashes, or to be suffocated with honey, or to be stiff with cold as he lies upon the top of a bleak rock, or pressed with a heavy weight of earth on him.
But now no more will your glad family welcome you home, nor your best of wives, nor sweet children run to meet you and strive who shall have the first kiss and make your heart leap with silent delight. No more shall you be a defence to yourself and your friends by your brave exploits. Ah, wretched one, alas, ah, miserable me — one woeful day has robbed me of so many blessings of my life. But in this case, he never goes on and says that the desire of these things is gone likewise. If men would well consider and accordingly express their complaints, their minds would be free from much anxiety and imaginary fear. For thou, sleeping in the arms of death, shall lie forever discharged from all sorrow and pain, but we shall never cease to lament thee, reduced to ashes near the sad urn, and no time shall remove our never-ending grief from our minds.
Now I would gladly know, if the matter be no more than sleeping and going to rest, what there is so exceeding bitter in death that anyone should upon that account pine his life away in eternal lamentation. And yet this the gayest part of mankind do, even when they sit down at their tables with cups in their hands and their heads crowned with flowers — they turn serious and cry, “Short is the pleasure of us poor creatures, we can just say it was, and once gone it will never return more” — as if the greatest evil in death to them was that a perching thirst should scorch the wretches and burn them up, or an insatiable desire of anything they love should follow them beyond the grave.
No man gives himself any concern about himself or his life when the soul and body are sleeping at rest together, though we were to sleep so eternally, no appetite for anything we love best would then affect us. And yet when the principles of the soul are alive and are moved almost with a sensible motion within us, the man aroused from his sleep soon recollects and recovers himself. Death therefore we should imagine is much less anxiety than sleep, if there could be less than what seems nothing at all, for there is in death a wider separation of the seeds, nor does the man ever awake when once the cold check of life comes upon him.
Cassius: Okay, very good. Thank you Charles for reading that section today. Before we go back to the beginning and go into detail about these passages — on that last passage there were two words that were archaic, and we left them in. “Carousels” and “bumpers”: “even when they sit down at their carousels with bumpers in their hands.” Munro and Bailey update those words with “table” for carousels and “cups” or something similar for bumpers. So that should be something like “even when they sit down at their tables with cups in their hands.”
Alright, and again today, before we go into the detail of these sections, we should note that Elaine is not with us today for a reason that is particularly apt for this topic: because her father has just passed away and she can’t join us, and hopefully she’ll be back soon. But that coincidence gives us a real poignancy and seriousness to what we’re discussing, which is obviously a very serious topic in the first place.
And in fact, today as we discuss this, I’m not sure how far we should attempt to go into each one of these passages, because there’s a tremendous amount of interesting material here that may take us more than one week to discuss, especially if we start off — as I think we probably should — by focusing on the very first lines that are in the passage today: “Death therefore is nothing, nor is it of the least consequence to us.” Munro translates this as “Death therefore to us is nothing, concerns us not a jot, since the nature of the mind is proved to be mortal” and Bailey says “Death therefore is naught to us, nor does it concern us a whit, inasmuch as the nature of the mind is but a mortal possession.”
I think it would be good for us just to start off talking generally about how that relates to Principal Doctrine Two, which is translated by Bailey as: “Death is nothing to us, for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.”
The topic that always comes to my mind — and I think we touched on this a little bit last week — is whether this should be interpreted as a sort of flippant saying. Is Epicurus telling us to be flippant about death and just consider it to be inconsequential and something to never think about? Or is he making a point that’s very different from that? When we go through an episode with someone close to us dying, we certainly don’t consider it to be a flippant matter, and I don’t think Epicurus considered this to be flippant either. There is an implication in many of these translations that he is telling us to be strong about it, but I don’t think he’s telling us to just ignore it. So let’s talk about that for a few minutes. Charles, you got any thoughts on that?
Charles: Well, I want to supplement that by talking about Vatican Saying Number 66: “Let us show our feeling for our lost friends not by lamentation but by meditation.”
Cassius: Yeah, that’s very much on point.
Charles: And the whole “death is nothing to us” — it’s a bit of a contentious point whenever I talk about the philosophy with some of my friends who are inclined to it or are interested, because it’s something that they believe is either flippant — like you said — or blasé, like it’s quite literally nothing. So I have to go into detail and explain the Principal Doctrines and other writings of Epicurus.
Cassius: Well, and when you were raising the Vatican Saying a minute ago — when Epicurus says that we should remember our friends not by lamentation but by meditation — what is it that he is suggesting we meditate on?
Charles: I would say instead of intense grief… let me put into words. I know what it is, I just can’t translate it.
Martin: Which Vatican Saying again were we talking about?
Charles: Sixty-six. And I want to correct myself — I meant the Letter to Menoeceus, not Pythocles — basically we should remember the pleasure that we had knowing them before in the past, and understand that death is inevitable. So that not only do we have to not instill fear and anxiety in ourselves over the thought of our death, but also that we must accept that everyone we know will at some point die.
Cassius: Right. Looking back at 66 again for myself: “Let us show our feeling for our lost friends not by lamentation but by meditation.” That’s the Bailey translation. I have a tendency to think superficially somebody might read that to say he’s saying don’t just lament them but remember them. But remembrance is not exactly the word there. What Bailey is using is “meditation,” which I think would be broader than just having a ceremony to remember the events of this person’s life. When he says “meditation,” that probably includes meditating over just what death means and how it applies to all of us.
Charles: And I mean, there are some alternate translations too. I just pulled one up right now — I don’t know the translator — but this one has “thoughtful concern” in lieu of “meditation.”
Cassius: Martin, have you had any brushes with death lately — or any thoughts you want to add to this?
Martin: Yeah. When it illustrates this thing — that before we were born we didn’t care about anything because we didn’t sense it, we didn’t feel it, we were not there — and it’s the same thing when we die. So that means we don’t have to worry about what happens to us when we are dead, because we are no more.
Cassius: Yes, and what about the very opening words — “death therefore is nothing” — and the issue of whether there’s a flippant aspect to this or not. Again I keep commenting on the fact that you have a German European background that’s different from those of us in the United States. Do you think there’s a European approach to death that is more or less serious than an American or United States approach might be? Is there a degree of flippancy in European views of death, do you think?
Martin: No, no. And I think when of course if we read just a short version of this, it may be interpreted in a flippant way. But the illustration here clearly tells you it’s not about the process of dying. It doesn’t talk about dying. It talks about what happens when actually death is complete, and that is the thing we don’t worry about. Of course we can worry a lot about preventing avoidable deaths — so that is a completely different issue. We can be very afraid of some impending threat which might kill us. So it doesn’t mean we are not afraid of a particular way of dying, but we are just not afraid of death itself.
Cassius: Martin, that’s exactly what I was hoping to discuss. And maybe it’s more of an English or American problem to consider it to be flippant — maybe the English phrasing strikes us in a way that would not strike someone of another primary language background.
Martin: Could be culturally inspired. Yeah, culturally inspired.
Cassius: Martin, do you even get any sense of flippancy out of this at all?
Martin: Because I’ve thought about it and we’ve discussed this before, so to me it’s clear it doesn’t mean this flippant thing. When I encountered it the first time and I wasn’t sure, I did see this flippant aspect in there. So if it refers to the process of dying, then it would be flippant, but it does not refer to that. It refers to when death is there — complete.
Charles: Yeah, and a lot of that flippancy is because most of the time that’s quoted from the Principal Doctrines, where there is no explication or elaboration from Epicurus or in this case Lucretius. So there’s not a lot of context there for people. They see a quotable and they may catch wind of it without that full context. So I think it’s easy to get that impression. But again, it might be a bit of a cultural factor — at the very least, the West, in Christianity and perhaps even monotheism in general, depending on your view of the afterlife.
Cassius: Yeah, Charles, I agree with every aspect of what you just said there. And what’s rolling through my mind now is more the cultural aspect of it. I wonder if in other languages there’s even really the same connotation — you know, in English we’re going to say “that’s nothing.” With just your tone of voice: “That’s nothing.” And then you one-upmanship somebody else by saying something else. “That’s nothing.” It’s just like, “Oh, don’t worry. It’s nothing. I’ll take care of it.”
Martin, when you first read this, did you read the English version or were you reading it in German?
Martin: The first time I read it was in German. That time I didn’t figure it out completely yet, so I kind of guessed it, but that was one of the advantages of joining the Facebook page and this forum, that these things got clear.
Cassius: What Charles has brought up — about the fact that Principal Doctrine Two doesn’t contain any of the context that you have here in Lucretius — that’s just a huge aspect of it. You see again the quotables, the memes, the graphics that just list Principal Doctrine Two, and then it goes right on immediately to talk about pleasure, as if the whole subject is consumed by saying “Death is nothing to us” in an arrogant kind of way. And I don’t think at all that’s what this meant.
In fact, if I started thinking about a list of prominent misconceptions that maybe average people who don’t study Epicurus might have about Epicurean philosophy, this one’s fairly close to the top — that he just takes a, again we may be overusing the word “flippant,” but it’s a sardonic, wise-cracking, smart-alecky kind of posture. Just sitting back with his cup of wine saying “Death is nothing to us,” as if we should just ignore the whole topic.
Charles: Egotistical.
Cassius: Right. When again — in Principal Doctrine Two, if you’re just reading the Principal Doctrines — he doesn’t say anything else about it, other than “that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.” But when you read Lucretius and you see that he’s devoting tremendous attention to the implications of what he’s talking about — going on and showing how we reconcile ourselves with death — there’s a very different picture.
Charles: There’s another thing too — another layer — and that is sometimes it’s seen as paradoxical or contradictory to the philosophy as a whole. The statement that if pleasure is to be pursued and pain avoided, death — the ultimate pain, if you will — is a complete end of all pleasure. And also that the pain that overcomes everything. So how could you feasibly say it’s nothing, they say?
Cassius: Yeah, yeah. We could say what you just said in a number of different ways. Normal people are going to, in a common sense way, consider death to be the ultimate pain. And even though Epicurus might be saying that they shouldn’t look at it that way, it’s true that death is the ultimate pain in the sense of being the end of all pleasures. And then how can you say that the ultimate pain is irrelevant to a philosophy which is based on living your life calculating pleasure and pain?
Again, death and all the talk of it is about the actual state of it and not the process. So it answers that — but there’s no context to explain that with just a tiny quote.
Anybody with any common sense knows that what can be more painful than a lingering, painful death from cancer — just innumerable different examples you could give about how the process of dying can be so painful. And so for Epicurus to suggest that that’s nothing just makes him look ridiculous and makes you want to dismiss the whole philosophy, if you take that superficial approach to what he’s saying.
Charles: And I know we’re talking about how little context Principal Doctrine Two provides, but I would actually point instead to the four-part cure — the tetrapharmakon — as much as I loathe it, because it’s even shorter than Principal Doctrine Two, and that’s often the first quotable that people encounter, where it’s “don’t worry about death.”
Cassius: Yeah, so quote the whole tetrapharmakon again.
Charles: “Don’t fear God, don’t worry about death, what is good is easy to get, and what is terrible is easy to endure.”
Cassius: Man, I hate the tetrapharmakon.
Charles: Well, “what is terrible is easy to endure” also lends itself to caricature and ridicule as well. The whole thing — besides “don’t fear God,” but even that implies existence of or a need to be wary of a monotheistic God who is out to get you in the first place.
Martin: It’s not.
Cassius: Yeah, every aspect of the tetrapharmakon requires elaboration in order for it to be clear what it means. But you’re probably right — “don’t worry about death,” if you’re saying don’t worry about the state of being dead, yes, that would be an accurate summary probably. But “don’t worry about the fact that you’re going to die” is probably misleading at best, because the fact that you’re going to die — to me, there are many doctrines in Epicurean philosophy about not wasting your time and not letting life go by without enjoying it. And it seems to me that you need to keep in mind that your life has a limited span in order to make the most use of it.
Charles: Yeah, and that’s what the first parts of the Letter to Menoeceus talk about specifically.
Cassius: I haven’t pulled it up here because I knew I would reference it, and therefore: “our right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable not because it adds to an infinite span of time but because it takes away the craving for immortality, for there is nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living.”
Charles: Yeah, that’s very helpful to quote that in this context. Even that elaboration gives us a lot more context than what’s in Principal Doctrine Two or in the tetrapharmakon.
Martin: Which section was quoted more. Right.
Cassius: Right. You know, maybe in the context of our missing Elaine today because her father has died, I wonder what we can say about how we would deal with the death of other people. We’re making a general point that applies whether it applies to us or to other people — Lucretius tells us that there’s nothing to be feared in the state of being dead. But to continue our theme of interpreting “death is nothing to us” as not being flippant — obviously our own impending death at some point is of relevance to us, as is the death of other people who die before we do. We know from what we’re going to be reading today and the rest of the explanation of Book Three that the person who dies is not in hell, certainly not being tormented, certainly not in a worse place than before — and of course any pain and suffering that person has been going through has now been ended. Martin, any context on dealing with the death of other people?
Martin: It depends on the person and how close they are to you, and it’s really more about the bereaved than the dead person itself. For example, my father died — I was already in Thailand, I was abroad already, and it was actually a time when it was convenient to go there. So if it had just been for the funeral I would not have gone, but it was because I knew it’s difficult for my mother, so that’s why I went. And when my mother died, I didn’t go to the burial of ashes. I was luckily there in the timeframe when she died, but she was cremated and that was weeks later and I had to go back to Thailand. So I didn’t bother to come back for the burial, because we kids could take it. Because we had seen her suffering, we saw it as a relief for her that she finally was about to die, and so I saw no point in going to the funeral to attend for anyone who would be in severe grieving.
Cassius: Yeah, that’s a point similar to what was raised on the EpicureanFriends forum recently by I think Godfrey, in terms of how the death of the second parent is different than the death of the first. Your example was applicable to me when my father died first — obviously there’s nothing I could do for him after he died, but with my mother still alive there was a much greater need to be present and participate in that bereavement. But when the second parent dies, you’re then in a totally different situation. It just depends on your family circumstances, but it’s very different when the second one is gone from when just the first one leaves.
Charles: I don’t have any examples for this.
Cassius: No?
Charles: My dad just turned 40 this year.
Cassius: Wow, hopefully you won’t have to deal with this kind of thing for a very long time. What about your mother, Charles?
Charles: 39.
Cassius: Wow, many years ahead hopefully.
We’ve changed the topic, so let me clarify: we were previously talking about how the soul and mind cannot survive after the death of the body, and there was a long section in Book Three that gave the different arguments about that. Now for the remainder of Book Three, we will be talking about the fact that after death we are no more, and there will be a series of arguments about why we should realize that that’s not so terrible and reconcile ourselves to it, and not let the fact of death ruin our lives.
Even in this first paragraph here, there’s material that will be very interesting to think about in detail, because this first passage goes into the fact that it makes no difference even if your atoms could be rearranged and brought back into the same position as they are now — which I think is pretty much exactly what is considered in Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence theory, which I understand he thought was his ultimate answer to the problems of nihilism. I don’t know that we want to go too far into all that, but even in this first passage there’s a lot of deep material.
Charles: Just a disclaimer — Nietzsche was not a nihilist, right?
Cassius: Well, that’s the deal. My understanding of Nietzsche is so superficial, but I’m gathering that not only was he not a nihilist but he thought nihilism was awful. Maybe the commentators I read were wrong, but I picked up along the way somewhere that his idea of eternal recurrence was his antidote to nihilism — something about the fact that if you contemplate that what you’re doing now you could be doing for the rest of eternity, then maybe you should be more serious about it. But Martin, do you have any understanding of that?
Martin: No, this part I mean — actually I don’t know that much about Nietzsche either, especially about this one. I know nothing.
Charles: Yeah, I know a die-hard Nietzsche guy but he’s never talked about the eternal recurrence.
Cassius: Well, maybe at some point we’ll come back to that. Over the years in talking about Epicurus on the internet, we’ve had numerous Nietzsche fans come in about this eternal recurrence theory. I don’t know if Nietzsche picked it up from this kind of argument that Lucretius made, or where it came from, but I suppose you could look at it this way: if you thought that in an infinite and eternal universe, everything that has come together at one point sort of rotates around and comes back to the same spot an infinite number of times, that would strike some people as a possibility. And Lucretius and Epicurus are saying that even if that were to happen, it would make no difference, because you can’t remember prior lives. You’re essentially a new being at that time — even if your atoms are rearranged, the people you know would be different, you’d be in a different location and different time. It’s not the same.
So even though he starts out by saying “death is nothing to us,” he’s going to devote the remainder of Book Three to explaining exactly the relevance that death does have to us, and what we should think about it. So with that, for today we’ll bring things to a conclusion and come back in much greater detail to discuss these passages and the remainder of Book Three in the upcoming episodes.
Martin, anything you’d like to add before we close for today?
Martin: No, I mean, as we resume it I don’t really have anything to close.
Cassius: Okay, all right. And Charles?
Charles: No, nothing.
Cassius: Okay, well — once again we express our condolences to Elaine in the passing of her father. She’s one of our regular panelists here on the Lucretius Today podcast and we hope that she’ll be back with us soon. And so with that we’ll close and come back in a week. Thanks very much.
All: Thank you. Thanks. Bye.