Episode 136 - Letter to Menoeceus 03 - On Death (Part One)
Date: 08/23/22
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/2632-episode-one-hundred-thirty-six-the-letter-to-menoeceus-03-on-death-part-one/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Joshua reads sections 124–126 of the Letter to Menoikeus — “become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us” through the wise man neither seeking to escape life nor fearing its end, and “just as with food he does not seek simply the larger share but rather the most pleasant, so he seeks to enjoy not the longest period of time but the most pleasant” — with the group spending most of the episode establishing why this is the most practically foundational section of all Epicurean philosophy. Callistheni opens by sketching Greek underworld mythology: unlike the Christian hell, Hades was not generally a place of punishment but of formless wandering and forgetting, with only a handful of notorious figures — Ixion on his wheel, Sisyphus with his boulder, Tantalus with receding water and fruit — receiving specific punishments, while heroes alone enjoyed the Happy Isles, and ordinary souls simply diminished in a strange alien existence; Cassius supplements this with Lucretius Book 1 line 102, where the fear of “endless torment after death” is identified as precisely what keeps people from resisting the power of religion. The group argues that death is more foundational than even the gods question, because anyone convinced of eternal reward or punishment after death will structure their whole life around that belief: Cicero’s charge that Julius Caesar had Epicurean tendencies — because Caesar argued imprisonment was worse than execution — illustrates the political sharpness of the position, while Pascal’s wager and Thomas More’s Utopia (where disbelief in the afterlife is the one forbidden position) are cited as evidence that this is the real center of the religion-versus-philosophy contest. The core philosophical discussion turns on the foundation stone — “all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation” — with Joshua invoking the argument from symmetry in Lucretius Book 3 (the eternity before birth passed without suffering, so the eternity after death will too), while Martin observes that even non-religious popular German belief holds that the dead can watch the living from heaven, effectively preserving sensation after death, showing how deeply the premise is contested. The episode closes with Callistheni’s mention of the “death cafe” movement and the modern hidden death — the professional apparatus that has removed dying from view — and Cassius’s invocation of Vatican Saying 38 (“he is a little man in all respects who has many good reasons for quitting life”) as the Epicurean affirmation that since death is final and brings no further pleasure, the proper response is to live as fully as possible with the time one has.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 136 of Lucretius Today. I’m your host Cassius, and today we continue with the Letter to Menoikeus, taking up the Epicurean position on death. Before we start recording today, Callistheni raised an important question about what the contemporary view of life after death was in ancient Greece. Let’s join Joshua reading today’s text and we’ll take that up right after.
Joshua: Become accustomed to the belief that death is nothing to us, for all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation, and therefore a right understanding that death is nothing to us makes the mortality of life enjoyable, not because it adds to it 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, so that the man speaks but idly who says that he fears death not because it will be painful when it comes, but because it is painful in anticipation, for that which gives no trouble when it comes is but an empty pain in anticipation. So death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us, since so long as we exist death is not with us, but when death comes then we do not exist. It does not then concern either the living or the dead, since for the former it is not, and the latter are no more. But the many at one moment shun death as the greatest of evils, at another yearn for it as a respite from the evils in life. But the wise man neither seeks to escape life nor fears the cessation of life, for neither does life offend him nor does the absence of life seem to be any evil. And just as with food he does not seek simply the larger share and nothing else but rather the most pleasant, so he seeks to enjoy not the longest period of time but the most pleasant. And he who counsels the young man to live well but the old man to make a good end is foolish, not merely because of the desirability of life, but also because it is the same training which teaches to live well and to die well. Yet much worse still is the man who says it is good not to be born, but once born make haste to pass the gates of death. Or if he says this from conviction, why does he not pass away from life? For it is open to him to do so if he had firmly made up his mind to this. But if he speaks in jest, his words are idle among men who cannot receive them. We must then bear in mind that the future is neither ours nor yet wholly not ours, so that we may not altogether expect it as sure to come nor abandon hope of it as if it will certainly not come.
Cassius: Thank you, Joshua. Callistheni, your question before we started: what was the prevailing Greek view of what happens after death?
Callistheni: In older Greek myth, Hades is the misty and gloomy abode of the dead where all mortals go. Very few could leave — Herakles and Theseus are heroic exceptions. Later Greek philosophy added the idea that mortals are judged after death and are either rewarded or cursed. But Greek religion was never uniform. It was widely diverse, and people accepted myths from other cultures as well. Edward Gibbon put it sharply: the various modes of worship in the Roman world were considered by the people as equally true, by the philosophers as equally false, and by the magistrates as equally useful.
Joshua: What I see as the prevailing view around the time of Epicurus is that Hades is not generally a place of punishment. That applies only in a few famous cases — Ixion tied to his wheel, Sisyphus pushing his boulder up a hill only to have it roll back down, Tantalus standing in a stream of water with fruit hanging overhead, each receding when he reaches for them. On the other end, a few heroes end up in the Happy Isles. But the common fate most Greeks dreaded was simply to be forgotten. You go to the underworld not to be punished but as a kind of endless diminishing of consciousness — shades pale in wondrous wise, as Lucretius says. It is nothing like hell and nothing like heaven. It is a strange alien place where for most people consciousness simply fades.
Cassius: Lucretius at Book 1 line 102 says that men have trembled all their lives at the poets’ frightful tales, and that if men were once convinced that death was the sure end of all their pains they might resist the force of religion and condemn the threats of the poets. We have no power to strive against prejudice, he says, because we fear a scene of endless torment after death. It was probably not universal that people thought they would burn forever — but it was universal that they were afraid of what could happen after death, and that fear was precisely what the religious operators of every age traded in.
Joshua: And the very first word of the Iliad is rage — the rage of Achilles, who sends many heroes down to Hades. That is the first line of the first major literary work of the Greek world. Death is immediate, there from the beginning to the end of Greek literature, and this is why Epicurus deals with it at the very start of his ethics. You cannot get anywhere with a person still in the grip of this fear.
Cassius: I would say this issue of death is more important in practical terms than even the issue of the gods. Pascal’s wager captures it: if you genuinely believe there is an eternity of bliss available by following religious rules, it would be rational to follow those rules because the potential gain is infinite. Thomas More made the same point in Utopia — the one belief you cannot hold in his ideal commonwealth is that when you die you are simply gone, because without eternal punishment and reward the whole apparatus of social control collapses.
Joshua: And Cicero actually accused Julius Caesar of Epicurean tendencies during the Catiline conspiracy. Caesar argued that it was better to send the conspirators to prison than to execute them, because once dead they are no longer being punished, whereas a long imprisonment is worse. Cicero wanted them executed. He could not accept the reasoning of a man who thought that way, and so he accused him of Epicurean tendencies. That shows how politically sharp this question was.
Cassius: So with that background, let’s go back to the most foundational sentence: all good and evil consists in sensation, but death is deprivation of sensation. His entire argument stands or falls on that claim. Joshua?
Joshua: I take a very literal and physical approach. When we continue to exist as conscious beings, death is not with us. When death comes, we are not. The boundary is clear, and the state of being dead does not affect our lives except in anticipation. It is the fear of death before it happens that causes all the grief — not anything we will actually experience when we are dead, because we will not experience anything. And Lucretius adds the argument from symmetry in Book 3: you spent an entire eternity in a non-conscious state before you were born and apparently suffered nothing from it. The cessation of consciousness that comes with death will be identical to that prior eternity. You have already been through one of those eternities and it caused you no harm.
Cassius: And Principal Doctrine 2 confirms it directly: death is nothing to us, for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.
Martin: I want to comment on what is the common belief in Germany. People who believe in the afterlife say that once the soul has separated from the body it can still see what the beloved ones do here on earth. So there is still some sensation even without the body — they have a different way of sensing what is going on. My own father was not religious in any church-attending sense, but he referred to this idea that those who are dead and in heaven can see what we are doing. And there is the saying in German that if somebody does something contrary to what was important to the deceased, that person rotates in the grave. So most people I see do not hold to the idea of consciousness without any sensation — they hold to the idea that the soul continues to sense things by different means.
Cassius: Which means they are not accepting Epicurus’s premise, and the whole argument fails for them. You have to grant that consciousness requires sensation to reach his conclusion. This is the real sticking point, and I think it is more important than we tend to acknowledge, because so many people who are drawn to Epicurean philosophy just take for granted in the background that there is something after death, whether it is Christian or just some kind of spiritualism. People rarely take a firm position that when you die you are simply gone.
Joshua: And this goes to the practical implication. If you believe you are going to be held to account after you die according to somebody else’s standard, you are not free to live your life according to your own best judgment. You are a slave of whatever you believe is going to happen to you after death. It is extremely practical to address this issue, not just theoretical.
Callistheni: For me, the practical result is that it really is a choice of worldview. Nobody comes back from the dead to confirm what happens. As human beings we have created stories to make sense of it. The Epicurean story makes sense to me because it leads to peace, removes fear, and aligns with scientific thinking. I accept it as the best available choice.
Cassius: And now the passage Joshua quoted: “become accustomed to the belief.” The word accustomed, as both Bailey and Hicks translate it, means this is not a one-time exercise you do once and then move on. It is a long-term practice. Seneca attributes to Epicurus the instruction to meditate on death — not morbidly but as a way of clearing the ground for living. At the very end of this letter Epicurus says: meditate on these and related things both alone and with like-minded people. The issue of death is something we are meant to return to over the course of a whole life.
Joshua: On the central paradox — “so long as we exist death is not with us, but when death comes we do not exist” — some people read that as dismissive, as if Epicurus is telling us not to bother thinking about it at all. But that is exactly wrong. He means that the state of being dead is not an experience you will have. You will never be a subject of it. What he is asking you to do with the word accustomed is to let that fact settle so deeply that the anticipatory fear dissolves. Christopher Hitchens made a related observation in his memoir: what bothered him about approaching death was not fear of what was on the other side, but the feeling that the party was going to keep going and he was going to have to leave early. For some people the problem is not what death brings but what life loses.
Cassius: And that takes us into the next passage — just as with food he does not seek simply the larger share but rather the most pleasant, so he seeks to enjoy not the longest period of time but the most pleasant. That line, taken seriously, changes everything about how you think about living. You are not simply maximizing years. And he who counsels the young man to live well but the old man to make a good end is foolish — not merely because of the desirability of life, but also because it is the same training which teaches to live well and to die well. The desirability of life is a given in Epicurean philosophy.
Callistheni: I wanted to mention something relevant. There is a movement now called the death cafe — people gathering informally, usually with tea and snacks, to discuss death, because it has become almost taboo in everyday conversation. I nearly attended one in Oregon. There is also what is called the hidden death — the way modern society has removed death from view, with people dying in hospitals rather than at home and professional morticians handling everything, so we no longer have the face-to-face encounter with death that people had for centuries. The question being asked is whether that is good for us or not.
Cassius: And when you do want to talk about death, it immediately runs into religion, because the Epicurean position is directly contrary to every mainstream western religion we have grown up with. That is exactly why the death cafe exists — because the official channels have foreclosed the conversation. I will end on Vatican Saying 38: he is a little man in all respects who has many good reasons for quitting life. For an eternity in the past you were not existing, for an eternity in the future you will not exist, and all you have is the time of your life. The Epicurean position is the half-full glass — a positive and engaged attitude toward whatever time you have. We will come back next week to complete this section on death. Thank you all.
Joshua: Goodbye.
Martin: Bye.
Callistheni: Goodbye.