Episode 261 - Death Is Nothing To Us
Date: 12/23/24
Link: https://www.epicureanfriends.com/thread/4194-episode-261-death-is-nothing-to-us/
Summary
Section titled “Summary”Cassius and Joshua explore Principal Doctrine 2 — “Death is nothing to us” — as the second of Epicurus’s foundational teachings, second in importance only to the rejection of supernatural gods. The episode covers: the Epicurean basis for soul mortality in Atomism (nothing exists but atoms and void; if the soul exists and affects the body, it is material and perishes with the body); Lucretius’s Book Three treatment of the soul as a physical part of the body (Sections 94–307), sensation as the basis of all good and evil, and the pre-natal non-existence argument (the Punic Wars did not concern us before birth, just as nothing will concern us after death); Lucretius’s “nature’s rebuke” speech and the mythological figures — Ixion on his wheel, Tityus, Sisyphus, the Danaids, Cerberus — as representations of earthly rather than infernal fears. Practical dimensions are addressed through Pascal’s Wager (critiqued as demanding the sacrifice of one’s actual life), Socrates’s calm at the prospect of death (Phaedo), Thomas More’s Utopia on the social danger of believing the soul dies with the body, John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration on atheists and cosmic justice, and Thomas Jefferson’s letter to John Adams (August 15, 1820) on sensation and materialism as the only reliable foundation. Emily Austin’s Living for Pleasure and the Thucydides passage on the Plague of Athens — “it was only reasonable to enjoy life a little” — anchor the discussion. Joshua closes with James Boswell’s account of David Hume’s deathbed, correcting the false tradition that Hume recanted. Vatican Sayings 14, 19, 30, 38, and 41, Cicero’s On Ends Book One (Torquatus, Sections 12 and 49), and the Roman tombstone inscription Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo round out the episode.
Transcript
Section titled “Transcript”Cassius: Welcome to Episode 261 of Lucretius Today. This is the podcast dedicated to the poet Lucretius, who wrote On the Nature of Things, the most complete presentation of Epicurean philosophy left to us from the ancient world. Each week we walk you through the Epicurean texts and we discuss how Epicurean philosophy can apply to you today. If you find the Epicurean worldview attractive, we invite you to join us in the study of Epicurus at EpicureanFriends.com, where we discuss this and all of our podcast episodes.
This week we are going to focus on one of the most famous lines from Epicurean literature: “Death is nothing to us.” This is Principal Doctrine Number Two. It’s a subject that’s covered very early also in Epicurus’s Letter to Menoeceus, and it’s clearly one of the subjects that the Epicureans thought was important for everyone to understand, as Lucretius explains at the beginning of his poem.
It’s ultimately not possible for most people to overcome the oppression that’s involved in supernatural religion unless we understand that there is no need to fear the threats that the religionists present — that we’re going to be punished for an eternity in hell if we do not follow their prescriptions while we live here on earth. The flip side is also true. It’s extremely, extremely compelling for many people to think that they will survive death and be able to spend an eternity in happiness with their loved ones after they die. So whether it’s the carrot of a reward after death or the stick of punishment for misdeeds in this life, the issue of what happens to you — if anything — after death is of extreme practical importance, and its position as the second of the Principal Doctrines places it second in importance only to the question of whether there is a supernatural God who is directing you or telling you what you should do.
Of course, they are related to each other because in the way most people think about the problem, the issue of life after death is based on the idea that there is some kind of a supernatural force or supernatural being that provides for that life after death and for punishment or reward depending on your actions in life.
As with most things, Epicurus’s view of the correct answer to questions about life after death stems from his understanding of the nature of the universe itself. Epicurus is not one to give in to threats of punishment after death or hope for reward after death if he does not believe that it is possible that those things would or could exist. As we know, Epicurus at the age of 14 became interested in the questions of where the universe came from. And in the course of pursuing all of that — through the Atomism of Democritus, through his own revisions of Atomism with the swerve and rejection of skepticism and determinism — Epicurus is contending that everything operates through matter moving through void, and that there is nothing that ultimately does not fit into one of the two categories of matter and void. That leads him to analyze this and every other question in that context: if we have a soul that could somehow survive after death, how could that possibly be in a material world of atoms moving through the void?
Epicurus is not going to accept a contention without any kind of evidence or proof behind it, and given his Atomistic base for how the universe operates, it does not seem apparent — as we’ll go much further into here today — that there would be any mechanism for the soul to remain after the body has died. We’ve been discussing recently the issue of Epicurean gods and the idea that the gods have a way to replenish the atoms of their body, that they are not made of the same firm type of bodies that human beings or other things we see around us are made of. In the case of gods, Epicurus therefore had to come up with a way that the gods could continue to live by replacing their atoms. Absent such a mechanism in human life, there would be no way for humans to continue to live, or any part of their bodies to continue on, unless they could be replaced and sustained in the same way that the gods do.
And of course, we’re not aware of any such mechanism, with the logical conclusion being that the soul perishes at death like the body. One of the things we’ll want to talk about today as well is the question of what it is we’re talking about that might survive after death. Is it a soul? Is it a mind? Is it some kind of spirit? There are different words that are used in that regard that Epicurus uses in his own discussion of the question.
The place to start, however, is probably with Principal Doctrine Number Two, because that is probably the pithy statement of the viewpoint that Epicurus held. The Bailey translation of that is: “Death is nothing to us, for that which is dissolved is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.” In combination with that, let me go ahead and include Epicurus’s comments about this in the Letter to Menoeceus, and once we set the stage of how this is also important, we’ll come back and address point by point some of the ramifications of this.
In the Letter to Menoeceus, Epicurus says: “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 concern either the living or the dead. For the former it is not, and the latter are no more.”
There are so many different ways we could take this conversation today, but before we go into further details, let’s stop for a moment and consider simply how much of a problem do we think this is for most people today. With the decline in organized religion, is it still a concern for us who don’t normally talk about supernatural gods intervening? Is the question of what happens at death still something that bothers people in the same way it might have done 2,000 years ago? And in discussing the question, many commentators seem to think that Epicurus was obsessed with death and obsessed with the anxiety that some people feel about it, and that all of Epicurean philosophy places an inordinate emphasis on this when it really doesn’t concern most people in their day-to-day lives. We can really just gloss over the question of whether death is of concern to us, because for most people who aren’t sick or very old, death is not something that confronts them normally every day of their lives. And so they put that question aside and don’t even think about what happens at death. And for them, these commentators will say, let’s just go straight to Epicurus’s discussion of pleasure and how to deal with natural and necessary desires, because that’s what everybody really wants to know about. They don’t really care about death. They want to hear about how to apply the ethics, and in that question death has little or no relevance.
Joshua: Well, in some of the research I’ve seen on this, one of the key components to how you answer this question is confidence. When they’re trying to ascertain the level of the fear of death among a given group of people, what you tend to find is that at the extremes of confidence — in other words, confident in one’s belief that there is no God and there is no life after death, and confident in the belief that there is a God and there is life after death — at the extremes of confidence there is less fear. But in the broad middle is where most of the fear is: fear among the mildly religious that they could be wrong and that this state of affairs they hope for after they die is actually an illusion, and fear among people who have been raised in a culture that has gotten away in many ways from deep religious belief, but who haven’t spent much time thinking about the philosophical implications of religious belief.
So they find themselves caught out in a way — they try to push the question off in their minds, I suspect, and don’t come down to a firm conclusion. And the result of this is that those people in the middle — both the soft believers and the soft non-believers, neither of whom have a great deal of confidence in their position — that’s where the fear is. And so you would have to say in response to that: having confidence in your position is the key to finding a life with death on the horizon. It’s the key to finding a life that you can live with without terror of what’s going to come later. And that’s true at both extremes. The very religious also tend to be less afraid of death. And of course we think they’re wrong about all aspects of it — about the existence of a supernatural God, about the existence of life after death — but that belief in the very confidently religious does appear to decrease the fear.
And fear, I would say, is the main point. When you say what is the importance of the question for the average person today, the point is fear. Epicurus clearly seemed to think that it was the fear or anxiety of death that was a major source of sorrow in people’s lives. This is what’s getting in the way of people’s joy — the knowledge of their own mortality.
Cassius: Yeah, Joshua, and even those who might say, “I have no reason to worry about death, I have no experience with it right now” — it’s something that does impact everyone at some point. It is inevitable for us, it’s inevitable for our friends, for our loved ones, and it’s something that we will confront. And in this context, there’s a statement from Seneca that the Stoics like to use, but when Seneca talks about it, he’s really talking about Epicurus — telling us that Epicurus taught to remember death, to think about death. And it would be for that reason that those who are not prepared for it are going to be most taken back by it when they do have to confront it. If you’re not prepared for it when it comes to your attention, it’s one of those things like lightning or thunder or some semi-miraculous event that you observe around you. You don’t know what to make of it. You’re thrown back into some type of religious frenzy. And in that sense, the very religious people who think about death regularly have a little bit of an advantage on those who don’t think about it at all, because at least they know that it’s a subject that they have to confront.
But the practical aspect of what you just said is that everybody sooner or later is going to face this problem — not necessarily your own death, but the death of your loved ones or your parents, which will come before yours. And so if you’re going to live happily, you’ve got to have a stable, confident viewpoint about it.
One of the lines that we like to quote as much as any other is in the Torquatus section of Book One of Cicero’s On Ends. Torquatus lays it out — what you’ve got to do in order to have the happiest life possible to you. And this is the quote, from Section 12 of Book One: “The truth of the position that pleasure is the ultimate good will most readily appear from the following illustration. Let us imagine a man living in the continuous enjoyment of numerous and vivid pleasures, alike of body and of mind, undisturbed either by the presence or the prospect of pain.” I’ll stop in the middle. That is the expression of the life of pleasure that Epicurus is talking about — after over 200 years of talking about this, this is the way they were describing the best life: a life of numerous and vivid pleasures alike of body and of mind, undisturbed either by the presence or the prospect of pain.
Torquatus goes on and says: “What possible state of existence could we describe as being more excellent or more desirable?” And then he goes on to say what you have to have in order to achieve that. He says: “One so situated must possess in the first place, a strength of mind that is proof against all fear of death or of pain.” And then he continues: “He will know that death means complete unconsciousness and that pain is generally light if long and short if strong.” And then he continues on with the rest of the discussion about having no dread of supernatural power. But here in this statement of the best life — what you must have in order to get it — he’s embedded exactly what you would expect: not only a proper attitude towards the gods, but a proper attitude towards death. And that proper attitude is to know that death means complete unconsciousness, that nothing is going to happen after you die, you will not be punished, there’s nothing to fear in the state of being dead. You’re simply unconscious, as if you were in a dreamless sleep from which you never emerge — or as we will talk about later, you are in the same condition as you were before you were born.
Of course, those who promote religion, or those who just take what we might describe as a spiritualist view — “I don’t know that there’s a supernatural guide, but I think there’s something more than this life, there’s an aura around us and some mechanism which we may not understand that will allow our consciousness or our souls to survive after death” — that position is supported in the religious communities by scriptural authorities for whatever Bible or Quran or Talmud you might want to consult. People will assert that religious authority is a basis for believing in life after death. People will assert that sometimes people come back after near-death experiences — they see a light at the end of a tunnel when they’re in a coma — and when they come back from the coma, they report that they see these things that are essentially the same as death, and that you can use this near-death experience to infer that there is a life after true death. And you have philosophers who will argue about immortality of the soul based on logical arguments.
The whole dualist position — that there is a mind versus a body — indicates that the mind is somehow not subject to the life requirements of the body. And of course in terms of motivations for people embracing the idea of life after death, not only personal fear of punishment or hope for reward, but there’s an idea of cosmic justice: if people were not rewarded for the bad things they go through in life, how inequitable must the universe be if those who are born in poverty and live short unhappy lives are not somehow compensated for that in relation to those who are much more fortunate and live long, happy, rich lives because of their physical circumstances. In the eyes of such people, the universe would be totally unjust if there were not some mechanism to adjust those inequities. I presume that’s a lot of the motivation behind ideas of karma and reincarnation or transmigration of souls.
There’s this motivation to believe that there’s some compensating method for the universe to ultimately be equitable towards everybody. So there are many different motivations and arguments that people will use to argue that there is indeed a life after death. It’s not simply a matter of old-time religion threatening you with fire and brimstone for doing badly. There are other powerful motivations that have survived here into the modern world. Even those who disregard the idea of a hell or heaven in the way of people playing harps forever singing hymns to a God — even people who reject that traditional religious viewpoint will be concerned and hopeful for a life after death.
And one other aspect of this which we’ve not mentioned so far is the issue of how long you’re going to live, how long you’re going to be conscious, and what relation does that question have to how you spend your time? There’s a well-known meme — “you only live once” — and an implicit understanding that I think most people have that if you’re diagnosed with a fatal disease and you only have six months to live, you’re going to spend your time within those six months that you have left to live much differently than if you thought perhaps you had five years or 10 years or 50 years to live. If you think your consciousness continues on and that this mortal life is a preparation for an eternity somewhere else, then the more time you have available to you, the less urgently you’ll probably seek to use that time, because you think you have plenty of time to do those things that you wish to do.
So that’s another reason why this question is so important. Regardless of whether you’re concerned about a God punishing you in hell for violating his rules, your goals and your desires for your life will be implemented in a different way depending on whether you think there is essentially an overtime — as in a sports game — where after your death you’ll continue to be conscious and have some opportunity of some kind to continue to pursue your interests after that point. If that’s not the case, then that’s going to be a powerful reason for you to focus your attention, not procrastinate, and be more vigorous in pursuing the goals that you have during the time that you will be conscious.
Joshua: Well, you brought up several things, Cassius, in relation to our main question today: we have this craving for a sense of cosmic justice, we have this desire to continue our existence and our happiness and our pleasure. There are a number of reasons why people crave hope for life beyond the grave. But there are also people — and I’m thinking particularly here about Socrates on his deathbed, but also about Blaise Pascal and the wager that he offers — so let’s start with Socrates.
Socrates, of course, he was charged with impiety and corrupting the youth. He was brought before the full judicial system of Athens — if you’re facing 500 people, I think; they didn’t have a jury of 12, you had the whole assembly. And he very narrowly escaped condemnation — the vote was very close. But they also had the requirement that they had to ask the condemned person how they thought they should be punished. Socrates had replied that for all that he had done to educate the city of Athens, he should be given free meals for life and have to pay a small fine. And at that point, the entire assembly turned against him and the vote for condemnation was huge, totally unbalanced.
And so there were those among his followers who suggested it wouldn’t be that hard for him to actually slip away and make it to a city like Lampsacus on the Hellespont — which is where Anaxagoras had fled — a city that isn’t going to punish you just for what you believe. And Socrates declined the offer because he wasn’t afraid to die, and he said he wasn’t afraid to die because certainly one of two things is true: either there is no life after death, or there is, and neither proposition held much terror for him. This is before we have this very Abrahamic idea of horrible punishments when you die. The Greek afterlife was not a place of punishment — it was a place of forgetfulness and regret for the most part. There were exceptions: you had people like Ixion on his wheel and Sisyphus, but those were rare and you had to do something really horrible to get into that position. And so for Socrates, you’ve got either “I’m going to stop existing” or “I’m going to have the opportunity to continue asking my really irritating questions, now about people who are already dead.” And so for him it doesn’t hold much terror.
And then you have the other argument for why you should accept life after death. This one comes from Blaise Pascal, and it is called Pascal’s Wager. His wager takes the following form. We certainly know that we are going to die, and there are two proposals for what happens when we do: either death is the non-existence that we know very well from Epicurus, or it is a state of rewards or punishments. If you wager that death is non-existence and it turns out to be rewards or punishments, and you fall on the wrong side of that line, then you’ll be punished forever. If you wager that death is continued existence in a state of either rewards or punishments, and it turns out that it is a state of rewards or punishments, you fall on the right side of that line. But if it turns out you’re wrong and death is non-existence, then there’s no problem there. So for Pascal, the idea was that you should default to the position that there is life after death, and that you’re going to accept that and believe in all of the ancillary claims that surround that central claim, because that’s going to put you in the best position at the time of your own death — either non-existence or reward — because what you don’t want is either non-existence or punishment. You don’t want to fall on the side of punishment.
So without going too far in the direction of defending the idea that there is life after death, those are a few of the more considered options, and you still will see these frequently when this topic is discussed — particularly among people who don’t themselves study philosophy. I see this “what have you got to lose, you might as well hedge your bets” kind of thing all the time. Maybe we’ll get into here in a minute the question as to whether Pascal’s Wager bears closer examination, and I think it does.
Cassius: I would say it certainly does, and I almost want to scream in response to somebody who might suggest that there’s no problem or it doesn’t make any difference — “you will have won the wager if there’s no life after death, well, what the hell?” What are you supposed to do with the one life you have? Are you going to just put aside your ability to be happy in this life? That’s the implication. The practical application of accepting the position that there is a life of reward or punishment after death is that you are going to modify your behavior to fall in line with these religionists who are going to tell you that their morality is how you are supposed to live your life. And if you do so, then you are going to be living your life the way they want you to live it as opposed to the way you want to live your life yourself.
And hell yes, there is a lot to be lost by taking that attitude of expectation of punishment or reward or life after death, because you’re giving up the only life that you have. You’re putting aside your own happiness in favor of someone who is suggesting something to you that has no basis in reality whatsoever. When you think about the question as Epicurus does, it’s not an innocent choice that has no ramifications — it’s not like choosing between chocolate and vanilla ice cream. It’s choosing between positions that have a direct, major, huge impact on how you’re going to live your life now. And in fact, if Epicurus is right that you do only have one life, then you are throwing away the only thing that you have for the sake of chasing some dream and letting someone else control how you spend your time. And that is an offensive notion when you analyze it according to the way that Epicurus did.
And so in going further — it’s so tempting to spend all of our time today on these ethical conclusions that come from the question of life after death — but for just a couple of moments, let’s spend some time with Epicurus’s arguments that regardless of what we wish to be the case, regardless of the ethical implications, a proper understanding of the way nature works leads us inexorably to the conclusion that there is in fact no life after death. Again, separate and apart from whether we wish it were or not, this is what you get when you follow Epicurean reasoning about atoms and the nature of the universe.
In fact, the importance of this is so huge that Lucretius devotes essentially the entirety of Book Three of his poem to this one single topic. Almost immediately when Book Three starts, Lucretius turns to one of the arguments that people use in support of life after death, which is that the mind and the soul are not material and that the soul is a harmony that results from the full human constitution rather than a specific part of the body like the hands and the feet. From Sections 94 to 136 of Book Three, Lucretius emphasizes this point: that no less than eyes or feet or toes or any other part of the body, the mind, the soul, the spirit is a physical part of the body. It is not some mystical add-on to the body. It is a part of the body — with the implication of course that the two cannot survive separately. It’s not something added on that can be removed and continue to exist when the body dies.
Then starting at Section 161, Lucretius goes into the argument that because the soul is not something added on, we can conclude that the mind and the soul are material in nature. Of course this is an implication of the basic fundamental part of Atomism — that nothing exists at the ultimate eternal level but atoms and void. The direct implication of that would be that whatever does exist — and we certainly feel that the mind or the soul exists in some way because it affects our body — if it affects our body, if it is part of our body, it is material in nature just like the rest of the body. Lucretius goes on to explore that in considerable detail. The way our minds and souls operate is tied to the makeup of our body. It’s not totally separate and random.
In a well-known conclusion around Section 307 of Book Three, Lucretius observes that the minds and the spirits of men are similar to those of the animals. Some men are more prone to anger, some are more prone to fear, some are more passive than they should be, and these traces of influences cannot be eliminated. But that reason has the power to dispel so much of the original nature that nothing hinders us from living a life worthy of the gods.
Lucretius argues also that the soul cannot survive the death of the body. Since the soul was born with the body and has grown through its entire life with the body, there’s no evidence that there are souls or minds that just float around in the air around us. Instead, what we see is that souls and minds are always contained within bodies and that they can’t be separated without their destruction. As examples of this, he talks about how the mind can be diseased and can be cured with medicine. That would not be the case if the mind were some type of non-physical, disconnected aspect of the human being. Lucretius says: “Trees cannot exist in the sky, nor clouds in water, nor the mind without a body.” And Lucretius says that to be everlasting — this is around line 806 — if things are going to be everlasting, they must be able to survive assaults such as can atoms, or be exempt from blows as is the void, or else because there is no space around it into which it can be broken up or from which an outside force can enter, as in the case with the universe as a whole.
That in itself, around line 806, is very interesting in a number of aspects, because here Lucretius is making the point that in order to be eternal, you have to be either able to survive assaults like an atom, or you have to be exempt from blows as is the void, or you have to be like the universe as a whole — which has nothing else outside of it which can influence it. But we see that disease and cares wear out the soul, so it cannot be everlasting like the atoms or the void or the universe as a whole. The soul both protects and is protected by the body, and they cannot be separated without their destruction.
Joshua: That last point that you made, Cassius, turns out to be a sticking point for Thomas More in his Utopia — the idea that the soul dies with the body. He takes this up because the speaker of the book, the narrator, is describing the sort of philosophy or thinking of the Utopians, and he says that actually the society is for the most part built on the pursuit of pleasure. But there are things that are not allowed, and one of the things that is not allowed is this:
“There is a solemn and severe law in Utopia against such as should so far degenerate from the dignity of human nature as to think that our souls died with our bodies or that the world was governed by chance without a wise overruling Providence. For they all formerly believed — they, the Utopians, formerly believed — that there was a state of rewards and punishments to the good and bad after this life, and they now look on those that think otherwise as scarce fit to be counted men, since they degrade so noble a being as the soul and reckon it no better than a beast. Thus they are far from looking on such men as fit for human society or to be citizens of a well-ordered commonwealth. Since a man of such principles must needs, as often as he dares do it, despise all their laws and customs. But there is no doubt to be made that a man who is afraid of nothing but the law and apprehends nothing after death will not scruple to break through all the laws of his country either by fraud or force, when by this means he may satisfy his appetite.”
That passage is not only concerned with the idea that there is no continuance of consciousness after death — that’s certainly part of it — but also the idea that the soul is made of matter, or that the soul dies when the body dies. As it says in the text, people who believe such things — like the Epicureans — “degrade so noble a being as the soul and reckon it no better than a beast.” That offense is almost even worse than just saying there is no life after death.
John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration, did take to task people who said that there was no life after death. But it’s this extra claim that the soul is made of matter and dies when the body dies that is such a problem for Thomas More. John Locke says this in his Letter Concerning Toleration. He stakes out the position that the care of every man’s soul belongs unto himself and is to be left unto himself. And he says: “But what if he neglect the care of his soul?” And Locke answers: “What if he neglect the care of his health or of his estate, which things are nearly as related to the government of the magistrate as the business of the care of the man’s soul.” He goes on to say: “I may grow rich by an art that I take not delight in. I may be cured by a remedy that I have no faith in. But I cannot be saved by a religion I distrust and by a worship that I abhor.” And yet he goes on to say: “Those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist.” And why can they have no hold upon an atheist? Because the atheist denies life after death, denies a system of rewards and punishments to keep people honest in this life, and for that reason they cannot be trusted.
So he’s dealing with a similar question to Thomas More — which is: what should we do with people who deny the most sacred and basic tenets that we have built our lives and our religions and our societies on? But he doesn’t go the extra step that More goes, in saying that this particularly Epicurean view of the soul as being material and destructible is degrading, and that the men who believe in this particular belief are not fit for human society.
Cassius: Yeah, Josh, with that point about the soul being material is where the rubber hits the road on this issue. The religionists take the position that somehow there’s life after death. Epicurus is attacking this from a practical question: “I don’t want to hear groundless speculation. You can say it’s supernatural if you want, but there’s nothing in my universe that I can validate other than matter and void.” And so the soul being matter is the way that this issue spins around, and the position you take on whether the soul is material is going to lead you to one conclusion or the other.
To transition to the next point that Lucretius is going to make, let me remind us of a passage we’ve talked about a lot — from Thomas Jefferson in his letter to John Adams dated August 15th, 1820. Jefferson is criticizing some of Adams’s comments and says this: “Let me turn to your puzzling letter of May 12th on matter, spirit, motion, etc. Its crowd of skepticisms kept me from sleep. I read it and laid it down, read it and laid it down again and again, and to give rest to my mind I was obliged to recur ultimately to my habitual: I feel, therefore I exist. I feel bodies which are not myself. There are other existences, then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need. I can conceive thought to be an action of a particular organization of matter formed for that purpose by its creator, as well as that attraction is an action of matter or magnetism of lodestone. When he who denies to the creator the power of endowing matter with the mode of action called thinking shall show how he could endow the sun with the mode of action called attraction, which reins the planets in the track of their orbits, or how an absence of matter can have a will and by that will put matter into motion — then the materialist may be lawfully required to explain the process by which matter exercises the faculty of thinking. When once we quit the basis of sensation, all is in the wind. To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, God are immaterial is to say they are nothings, or that there is no God, no angels, no soul.”
Jefferson then gives a lengthy list of citations and then concludes this way: “Rejecting all organs of information, therefore, but my senses, I rid myself of the Pyrrhonism with which an indulgence in speculations hyperphysical and antiphysical so uselessly occupy and disquiet the mind. A single sense may indeed be sometimes deceived, but rarely, and never all our senses together with their faculty of reasoning. They evidence realities, and there are enough of these for all the purposes of life, without plunging into the fathomless abyss of dreams and phantasms. I am satisfied and sufficiently occupied with the things which are without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.”
Now the focus that Jefferson places within that passage about sensation is the next aspect of the argument that Lucretius addresses, because as we know from Principal Doctrine Number Two, that which has no sensation is nothing to us. Lucretius begins dealing with that aspect of the argument around line 830 of Book Three, and one of the well-known arguments he makes in that regard is that there is no more reason to think that we will sense anything after death than there is to believe that we sensed the things that were occurring before we were born. He uses the example of the Punic Wars and how traumatic those were for the citizens of Italy, and he says: we who are alive today were not aware that the Punic War was going on before we were born. That is a mirror of the situation that will occur after we are dead. The Punic Wars before our birth did not concern us, nor does anything that will happen after we are dead have any ability to concern us when we are dead.
And if we think about the issue of death in relation to the way we look at things that occurred before we were born, we can come to an understanding that neither of them are ultimately things to be concerned about. We learn from the history of things that happened before we were born how we would like to spend our time while we’re alive, but those things that occurred did not affect us at the time they occurred, nor will the things that happen after we die affect us after we die. And so there’s this linkage here to an argument about sensation: ultimately the basis of all good and evil, the basis of everything that happens to us, is the feeling of pleasure and pain — and pleasure and pain can be felt only by the living. If you’re not yet born, you’re not going to feel pleasure or pain. If you’ve already died, you’re not going to feel pleasure or pain. And only if you feel things — have sensations, see, touch, hear, smell, or feel pleasure and pain from something — does anything have any impact on you whatsoever. If we are to feel grief and pain about anything, we must be there to experience it, and since we are not there after we die, we cannot be wretched. And so there’s nothing to fear about the state of being dead. People think about the pleasures that they will not experience after death, but they need to consider that they will also not be experiencing pain.
That leads us to the closing section of Book Three of Lucretius, where he uses the fiction of what would it be like if nature could talk to us directly about our feelings about death? Lucretius says that nature would essentially rebuke us for complaining that life has to come to an end, and he goes into a long series of ways that nature would be right to rebuke us for being concerned about what happens to us when we are dead. He points out that a lot of people spend their time complaining day in and day out about how terrible life is — and nature would say to us: well, you’ve complained so much about your life so far, why would you wish for more life if life has been such a terrible thing to you? Old men who lament the leaving of life are forgetting the enjoyment that they had while they were younger. Epicurus in Vatican Saying 19 said, “Forgetting the good that has been, he has become old this very day.”
Nature would tell us that those fears that we have about things that could happen in hell — such as the rock over Tantalus, or the vultures eating Tityus, or Sisyphus always seeking office — those are horrors that occur right here in this world rather than in a life to come. It’s the powers of this world that you should be concerned about rather than the speculations of things that you have no evidence will ever occur. Rather than be like the mythical story of the Danaids who are constantly trying to fill jars which have holes in them, we should look to fill the jars — which is a figurative reference to the time we have available in our lives — by mending the leaks and thereby enjoying the fullness of life while we have it.
Lucretius talks about how monsters like Cerberus and Tartarus don’t exist, but fear of punishment here on earth can be even worse than that. Here on earth the life of fools becomes a hell of its own. Lucretius says that nature would remind us that we are complaining about losing our lives, but so have all the great men of the past — like Ancus, Xerxes, Democritus, and even Epicurus himself. All of them died too, and if they died, who are you to think that you should be exempt from the same death that came to them?
If men could learn what causes the fears that oppress them, they would not ceaselessly want new things or wish to change places as if those changes could ease their fears. They would not run from place to place as if from a house of fire. If they saw things clearly, everyone would leave what they are doing and put first the study of the nature of things. Since it is our state for all eternity and not just for an hour, that is ultimately the issue that we need to understand. Death is inevitable, and spending our time amidst the same things does not bring new pleasures. No matter how much we constantly seek new things, we cannot shorten the length of death. Live as long as we like, death still awaits us, and our deaths will be just as long as those who perished many months or many years before we did.
Now this subject is so deep, we could spend multiple episodes going through the implications of “Death is nothing to us.” But for purposes of a quicker summary of the most important topics, hopefully we’ve covered the Epicurean position on why the soul does not survive after death, and that we therefore know that because death is nothing to us — because we won’t be punished for an eternity by supernatural gods who are threatening us and requiring us to follow their rules — we can be stronger and have more confidence in the life that we do have, because we know that eternal punishment is not possible.
We often talk in this podcast about Emily Austin’s book Living for Pleasure, and one of the things that I was most impressed about in that book is how she makes the suggestion that the way that Lucretius probably intended to end his poem was to continue on with his discussion of the impact of the Plague of Athens. Dr. Austin points to the way that Thucydides — the source from which Lucretius took most of his description of the plague — continued after describing all these horrors of what people went through because of the plague: with their families, their friends, everyone around them dying, how they were absolutely forced to confront the reality of death. This is what Thucydides said: “Next, men now coolly ventured on what they had formerly done in a corner, so they resolved to spend quickly and enjoy themselves, regarding their lives and riches as alike things of a day. Perseverance in what men called honor was popular with none — it was so uncertain whether they would be spared to attain the object, but it was settled that present enjoyment and all that contributed to it was both honorable and useful. Fear of gods or law of man there was none to restrain them, and as for the first, they judged it to be just the same whether they worshipped them or not, as they saw all alike perishing; and for the last, no one expected to live to be brought to trial for his offenses, but each felt that a far severer sentence had already been passed upon them all and hung over their heads, and before this fell, it was only reasonable to enjoy life a little.”
That last line is the essence of it, so let me repeat it: “And before this fell, it was only reasonable to enjoy life a little.” That’s what happens when you confront the reality of death. You realize that it’s only reasonable — regardless of all these other speculations — to use your time the best way you can. And since Epicurus has identified for us that there are no supernatural gods, there are no absolute ideals, there is no reason to pursue virtue as an end in itself — everything that we do should be evaluated in terms of pleasure, widely understood to be everything that is not painful. So it’s only reasonable to enjoy your life by pursuing pleasure rather than worrying about what’s going to happen after you die, which is of no concern to you whatsoever, because you won’t be there to experience it.
This is a position that’s enshrined over and over again in Epicurean texts. Vatican Saying 14: “We are born once and cannot be born twice, but for all time must be no more. But you who are not master of tomorrow postpone your happiness. Life is wasted in procrastination and each one of us dies while occupied.” Vatican Saying 30: “Some men throughout their lives gather together the means of life, for they do not see that the draught swallowed by all of us at birth is a draught of death.” Those two Vatican Sayings emphasize that death is inevitable and something we need to think about as we go about living our lives.
One corollary to all this that we haven’t touched on today is that Epicurus makes the point that there’s nothing terrible in life for the man who has truly comprehended that there is nothing terrible in not living. We have an explanation of that in Section 49 of Cicero’s On Ends, Book One, by Torquatus, where he says this about courage: “The performance of labors, the undergoing of pains are not in themselves attractive, nor are endurance, industry, watchfulness — nor yet that much-lauded virtue, perseverance — nor even courage. But we aim at these virtues in order to live without anxiety and fear and so far as possible to be free from pain of mind and body. The fear of death plays havoc with the calm and even tenor of life, and to bow the head to pain and bear it crookedly and feebly is a pitiable thing. Such weakness has caused many men to betray their parents or their friends, some their country, and very many utterly to ruin themselves. So, on the other hand, a strong and lofty spirit is entirely free from anxiety and sorrow. It makes light of death, for the dead are only as they were before they were born. It is schooled to encounter pain by recollecting that pains of great severity are ended by death and that slight ones have frequent intervals of respite, while those of medium intensity lie within our own control — we can bear them if they are endurable, or if they’re not we may serenely quit life’s theater when the play has ceased to please us. These considerations prove that timidity and cowardice are not blamed, nor courage and endurance praised on their own account. The former are rejected because they beget pain and the latter are coveted because they beget pleasure.”
So even the virtue of courage, which is so much praised by Stoics and others who disagree with Epicurus, is ultimately placed on a much more firm foundation by Epicurus, who points out that living life without worrying about what’s going to happen to you after death is the best way to proceed. Of course, you’re not going to be endorsing or easily thinking about the idea of suicide unless it’s an extreme situation. Vatican Saying 38 says: “He is a little man in all respects who has many good reasons for quitting life.” But that’s one aspect of what Epicurus tells us — that death can be a release from the worst pains in life if there is no other alternative.
Epicurus says in Vatican Saying 41: “The study of nature does not make men productive of boasting or bragging, nor apt to display that culture which is the object of rivalry with the many, but high-spirited and self-sufficient, taking pride in the good things of their own minds and not of their circumstances.” So an Epicurean is going to be high-spirited and self-sufficient — stronger than other men who have concerns about these issues that they should not be worried about.
So here as we begin to come to the end of our episode today, there are many, many important takeaways from this position that death is nothing to us — again, second only in implication to the view that there are no supernatural gods. But once you realize that death is nothing to us, the state of being dead is nothing to be concerned about, and it is a state of nothingness. Everything we’re going to experience has to be experienced while we are alive. This is not a depressing doctrine — it’s one that motivates us to use our time wisely, to not procrastinate, and to make the best of the time that is available to us. Okay, let’s start to wind up the discussion today and talk about closing comments. Joshua.
Joshua: Well, you said it at the beginning, Cassius — there are any number of directions we could go in a discussion about death. Usually at this point I would embark on a polemic on the contrary opinion that we should hope for life beyond the grave and so forth. But a few weeks ago I watched a video on YouTube, and it was something like “the famous last words of dying atheists.” I could tell almost before I started watching it that most of them were not only misleading — they were flat-out lies. This was confected to produce fear in non-believers and confidence in believers. One of the names who was listed in that video was David Hume, who is said in the video to have cried out in his last moments, “I am in flames!”
I’m going to read today the letter of the very Christian James Boswell, who was at the bedside of David Hume and who was in fact trying to convince Hume to put his hopes in Jesus Christ at the very end — and how it actually ends is James Boswell who walks away somewhat horrified. David Hume is calm and confident and collected. And I hope to achieve three things by this: the first is to correct the lie about David Hume specifically — but there is a general trend to lie about atheists on their deathbed, and I think this needs to be met when it is found. The other thing that I think this will help bring to what we’re talking about today is a way to confront not just death as an abstract concept, but the death of an actual person and his last words in his last moments.
So this is James Boswell on the death of David Hume, and he says: “On Sunday the 7th of July, 1776, being too late for church, I went to see Mr. David Hume, who was returned from London and Bath, just dying. I found him alone in a reclining posture in his drawing room. He was lean, ghastly, and quite of an earthy appearance. He was dressed in a suit of gray cloth with white metal buttons and a kind of scratched wig. He was quite different from the plump figure which he used to present. He seemed to be placid and even cheerful. He said he was just approaching to his end — I think those were his words. He said he never had entertained any belief in religion since he began to read Locke and Clarke.”
Boswell goes on to say: “I was persuaded from what he now said, and from his manner of saying it, that he did persist in disbelieving in a future state. I asked him if it was not possible that there might be a future state, and Hume answered it was possible that a piece of coal put upon the fire would not burn, and he added that it was a most unreasonable fancy that we should exist forever. I asked him if the thought of annihilation ever gave him any uneasiness. He said not in the least — no more than the thought that he had not been. As Lucretius observes, I felt a degree of horror mixed with a sort of wild, strange, hurrying recollection of my excellent mother’s pious instructions, of Dr. Johnson’s noble lessons, and of my religious sentiments and affections during the course of my life. I was like a man in sudden danger eagerly seeking his defensive arms, and I could not but be assailed by momentary doubts while I had actually before me a man of such strong abilities and extensive inquiry dying in the persuasion of being annihilated. But I maintained my faith.”
“He had once said to me on a forenoon while the sun was shining bright that he did not wish to be immortal. The reason he gave was that he was very well in this state of being, and that the chances were very much against his being so well in another state, and he would rather not be more than be worse. I answered that it was reasonable to hope he would be better, that there would be a progressive improvement. I tried to end this interview with that topic, saying that a future state was surely a pleasing idea. He said that it was not, for it was always seen through a gloomy medium — there was always a hell.” In other words, there’s always something bad that comes along with the idea.
And Boswell continues: “He said, ‘But would it not be agreeable to have hopes of seeing our friends again?’ And I mentioned three men lately deceased for whom I knew he had a high value. He owned it would be agreeable, but added that none of them entertained such a notion — I believe he said such a foolish or such an absurd notion — for he was indecently and impolitely positive in his incredulity. I said, ‘If I were you, I should regret annihilation. Had I written such an admirable history as you have written, I should be sorry to leave it.’ He said, ‘I shall leave that history of which you are pleased to speak so favorably as perfect as I can.’ He said too that all the great abilities with which men had ever been endowed were relative to this world. Mr. Lauder, his surgeon, came in for a while, and Mr. Muir the Baron’s son for another small interval. He was, as far as I could judge, quite easy with both. He said he had no pain but was wasting away. I left him with impressions which disturbed me for some time.”
That was rather long, and I apologize for that. But it leaves a distinct impression on me as I finish reading it, which is several things. One: you have James Boswell here trying to play the part of the deathbed savior, trying to lead David Hume of all people to Christianity, and hopefully to a paradise in the next life. And you had David Hume, as he lay dying, as calm, as sober-minded, as confident, as assured as he had ever been — that there is no life beyond the grave — with the confidence that allowed him to live his whole life with that belief. And it is in fact not David Hume but James Boswell who emerges scathed by their discussion. It’s James Boswell who emerges full of doubts about his own beliefs and his own position and his own relationship with mortality.
David Hume’s ideas relating to death I think are very similar to the ideas that Epicurus held, and so I would recommend people give this whole passage a read. I think it helps to get really up close on this issue of death, and I think this essay is a good way to do it.
Cassius: Yeah, Josh, with the death of David Hume there is a good illustration of how important this issue is. You constantly see misrepresentations about the way that people die, and it reminds me of what Lucretius says about how the priests are always spinning tales to frighten you and to upset your own calculations of your life. And that’s why Epicurus is so correct in talking so much about how it’s important to get a proper attitude about this in your mind.
I can’t let the episode close without mentioning at least once the tradition that there is a Latin inscription on certain Roman tombstones from the period: Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo — which is generally considered to mean something like “I was not, I was, I am not, I have no cares.” That’s the Epicurean attitude towards death — that we have no more concern about what happens to us when we die than we had about the period of time before we were born. They are mirrors of each other in terms of their lack of impact on us.
As we discussed earlier in the episode, we study the past before we were born. We learn from that. We also should think about the future that will be after we die — as did Epicurus when he wrote a will providing for the future of his school and for the daughters of Metrodorus. But we ourselves have no place in that. There is no reason for us to be concerned about our pain or pleasure or our status after we are gone, because we will not be there after we die any more than we were there before we were born.
I always cite this as one of the most important aspects of Epicurean philosophy, because it seems to me that there is nothing more motivational than to realize that your time is limited, and that anything that you might wish to do, anything you might wish to accomplish, or any pleasure you might wish to get out of life — you’ve got to do while you are alive, because there is no second chance after you die. When you look at Epicurean philosophy and look at the pleasure-pain analysis from that perspective, there is no way that Epicurus would wish you to spend your life in a cave eating bread and water, doing absolutely only the minimum that you can do to get by and running from pain at every moment. The purpose of life is pleasure. We sometimes choose pain in order to get pleasure, and it’s that focus while we are alive that’s going to guide us in making the decisions between what to choose and what to avoid. It’s an individual decision we all have to make for ourselves, because there’s no supernatural accounting to tell us that we were right or wrong in our choices. All we can do is the best we can to pursue pleasure while we have the time to do it.
That’s ultimately one of the biggest takeaways from Epicurus’s conclusion that death is nothing to us. Okay, that is all the time we have in this episode to deal with this principle. We’ll come back next week and deal with the Epicurean position on skepticism. In the meantime, until then, please drop by the Forum and let us know if you have any questions or comments about this or any of our other discussions of Epicurus. Thank you for your time today. We’ll be back next week.