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Is Lucretius right to insist that it is irrational to fear death?
By: Jon Vacher

It is my thesis that Lucretius is wrong in his insistence that the fear of death is irrational. In his symmetrical belief that we should be as indifferent to the time of our death as we are to the time of our birth he does not have to defend against any accusations that are not born of arguments relating to the self; namely those arguments that attempt to undermine Lucretius’ argument by way of denying the validity of some common epicurean beliefs surrounding this fear of death. There is of course no doubt that the two are intertwined, but nonetheless to properly address Lucretius on his beliefs we should be careful to address his beliefs only.

In his epic six book poem (in which he has been said to be passing on bad news in a sweet form ‘fooling the child with honey-coated medicine’) four arguments effectively satisfy his desire to highlight what he claims few of us want to admit – that as humans we are regularly irrational and no more so than by fearing our mortal end. The first is that of pre natal and post death symmetry, which I have mentioned. The second deals with that of the experience itself; arguing that the subject is not able to experience death and therefore should not fear an experience of nothing. The third turns to the result of a lack of death, and argues consequentially that a rational being could not wish for human immortality. The fourth is an analysis of what we stand to lose through death and how it is the finite nature of such that provides true value to life. I shall present five theses and two sub-thesis that are implied by Lucretius’ arguments, the analysis of which shall hopefully show whether or not Lucretius is right that it is irrational to fear death:

[1] That to fear death is akin to wishing it prevented from happening.

[2] That for the existing individual there is no difference between the two (any?) periods of time in which he does not exist.

[3] That the potential for experience constitutes as much value to us as no potential for experience.

[4] That the loss of something when the subject is not present to suffer it is no loss at all.

[5] That finiteness is a quality that adds value to a thing.
[a] That infinity is a quality that reduces value from a thing.
[b] That immortality is necessarily bad.

For this philosopher poet then, death is simply a void; an end but no great loss. The first troubling point here is the issue of deprivation [4]. Of all possible losses, the loss of our greatest asset will be the most harmful and therefore rationally deserving of fear. There is surely no greater asset for a human than life? If it is accepted that the loss of a house or loved one is fearful, and death may well include both and more, then it would appear we have found a position in opposition to Lucretius.

The deprivation caused by the event of death becomes more serious, and therefore more rationally deserving of fear, when we analyse the specifics of what is lost. Our concern should not just be for the loss of activities or possessions. Life certainly contains all these things of value, but without them we still have life. For Lucretius, it can be doubted that anything is fundamentally bad unless it causes some sort of discomfort or displeasure. In this vein, he would ask how a deprivation can be bad if nobody is around to care about it. This is over simplifying the possibilities however, as a terrible misfortune can effect someone even though they are not around to experience it at the moment. Lucretius seems to ignore the possibility of possible experience outside of the immediate momentary state, which is as much as to reject the potential affecting value of an individual’s history or future and even to reject the negative value of a slight that is unheard or unseen even when alive. The discovery of wrongs done in our absence is considered to be a misfortune not only because they make us unhappy at the immediate moment of discovery. Nussbaum rejects such examples like those of Fischer who provides the example of the loss of a daughter in a far off land and a father who dies later having not heard the bad news. For her, such examples involve a subject who continues to exist, however briefly, during the time when the death takes place. That the occurrence of a bad thing relies on the fact that the subject was alive during the occurrence provides a tangible subject for the bad event to happen to; her. Lucretius asserts that we fear our own death because we imagine ourselves witnessing the event and the associated loss of things. Like Nussbaum, Lucretius responds by asking who it is, then, that suffers the misfortune. Our reply should be to specify the situation and not subject; that even though the subject does not survive his death, the death can still be the subject of the misfortunes. Had the subject not died, he would have continued to live and enjoyed whatever good there is in doing so. I shall turn to [5] later.

We can see [3] to be false as with regards to possibility, we consider it the worst of situations when an athlete suffers a vegetative state regardless of how the athlete himself may feel about it. This is a plea to how he could be, otherwise. We place more value on the possibility of future experience than on none, or no possible experience. A newly born baby does not have the positive experience of ‘life’ yet we do not consider death in such a case to be less of a bad thing. We consider such an event to be ‘more bad’ than a death in later life because we recognise that the good of life increases with time. The more life one has, the better one benefits. Similarly, this intrinsic value life holds does not rely on survival only; we do not like the prospect of a life of unavoidable inactivity through disability.

The Greeks seemed unconcerned with the existentialist views on the value of activities and possessions. Lucretius did not conclude that life was absurd as a result of his being unconcerned with losing everything he had ever gained. Happily, he is saved from such nihilism by the Epicurean love of the making rather than just the made; there is value in a process just as there is value in a result. Similarly he argues that one can have too much of a good thing; that life has stages and an end and this is why we value things. He points out that an unending orgy of wine and food would become boring and that it would hold little value if it continued forever. What is unclear is if by [5] Lucretius means also to imply [b]. This extrapolation seems satisfactory; none of us would enjoy immortality were we to continue getting old and frail as we currently do.

Nussbaum terms this argument the ‘banquet argument’ and the conclusion of it is that our mortality is a necessary condition of our activities having value of the sort we can understand and enjoy. She asserts that we would not have the virtues without death. Unfortunately she overlooked other possible conditions that might provide a reason for the virtues. Even for the Greek Gods, to whom immortality was no rare thing, there could be long stretches of physical and mental disability, boredom (frequently one might assume), frustration and so on. It is these conditions that, on any timescale but particularly with an infinite one, give meaning to the virtues. Death is not the only source of danger and fear of disability or terrible suffering; on the contrary it is not death that causes fear of suffering, quite the opposite – death would put a sudden stop to our suffering and it is this understanding that many people display through suicide and euthanasia. As for [b] those proponents of the view that an immortal life is a necessarily bad thing; how could we care for something essentially devoid of shape? Analogies are made with every day objects such as rocks and pillows, the borders of which define the object. An inifite pillow would not be a pillow so much as a massive mass of linen and stuffing. Such analogies are misleading though. Even if we disregard the fact that it is not a proven thing that thought-experiments issue in their supposed conclusions, we can still imagine that crucially, we could think of life not as a pillow but as an indefinitely long electrocardiogram. We need not expand to an infinite degree all spatial dimensions of the relevant object, so an electrocardiogram could be given the task of being infinite in its function but not its physical shape. The question here I not about our life as it is but the possibilities that exist within it. What is so wrong with an indefinitely extended orgy of wine and food, with suitable breaks for recovery and pursuing of other activities? Life, unlike a banquet, is not a one function machine.

Lucretius made particular mention of the symmetry argument – that the period of non-existence before our birth is not bad and therefore the period after our death cannot be either [2]. There is a second argument relating to our present retrospective attitudes to the time before our birth, but this is not one Lucretius seems to have thought up, rather one that is developed by the Epicureans in ‘Letter to Menoeceus’. Although both failed to address the fear of a premature death, the Epicureans had other arguments available that are not relevant to this analysis of Lucretius’. The symmetry argument relies heavily on the similarity between the two periods of time. The period of time after death is time that death, by occurring, takes from us. This time is unrealised possibility, and as such is entirely dissimilar to the period of time before our birth. I do not wish to appeal to how humans generally feel about things as being any authority in this question but it is nonetheless interesting to note that the reason we do not mourn our period of non-existence before birth is down to this fact.

Lucretius also appealed to the ramifications of a lack of death as guidance for how a rational being should feel about it [1]. If, he argued, the rational mind accepts that no one dying would lead to negative consequences for the populations of the world, such as overcrowding and birth control and the related loss of joy, it also must accept that to fear something that will prevent such problems from arising is irrational, a mental contradiction for anyone seeking those joys. What is unclear however is if he had considered the contrasting weight of both arguments of deprivation. In what is essentially a pre-emptive counter thesis to the deprivation counter-argument, he wants us to mourn the loss of some joys caused by preventing the loss of all immediate, past and future possible joys (death). It is a contradictory position to take. Additionally, although perhaps I am being uncharitable, the logical leap from the deduction that no rational mind would want to cause overcrowding and birth control to the rational mind not fearing death is not a valid one. It is inductively forceful at best as the implied proposition [1] is unproven.

For some, the question as to whether the non-realisation of the potential for future life is always a bad thing remains open. If we only consider the deprivations that add to our suffering in life as misfortunes then we should conclude that the premature death is the ‘bad’ death. Others question whether it is true to say that death is always a deprivation. Observed from the outside, objectively, a human being cannot live much more than a century. From this point of view, we can only feel deprived of those years which are allotted to beings of our type, but which we do not live long enough to enjoy. When looked at in terms of our own experience, subjectively, our life experience seems open ended. We can see no reason why our normal experiences cannot continue indefinitely. On this view death, no matter how inevitable, is the cancellation of an indefinitely extendible good. The fact that death is inevitable does not affect how it feels in our experience to look forward to the end of our experience, and to fear this end with all its associated issues of loss is entirely rational.

Article Source: http://journal.ilovephilosophy.com

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