Epicurus on death: why it is nothing to us

Epicurus argued that death is nothing to us: while we exist, our death is not here, and when death comes, we no longer exist, so there is nobody for it to be bad for. He thought that seeing this removes the fear of death, and with it one of the largest causes of anxiety. Critics reply that death can still be bad for the person who dies, because it takes away the good things that person would have had.

The argument

The saying comes from Epicurus's Letter to Menoeceus. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it this way: death is nothing to us, since while we exist our death is not, and when our death occurs we do not exist.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy sets out the same thought as a question. If death is bad, for whom is it bad? Not for the living, since they are not dead, and not for the dead, since they do not exist.

The entry on death in the Stanford Encyclopedia reconstructs the argument in steps. It rests on the view that pleasure and pain are what is good and bad in themselves. Something is good or bad in itself only if it is an experience. Death is not an experience, since it is the loss of sensation. So death is not good or bad in itself for the person who dies.

Why it mattered to him

Epicurus did not offer the argument as a puzzle for its own sake. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy says he thought the greatest destroyer of happiness is anxiety about the future, especially fear of the gods and fear of death. If a person can banish that fear, they reach tranquillity, which the Greeks called ataraxia, the most exalted state in his view. The same entry notes that it may be less misleading to call him a tranquillist than a hedonist.

The practical point follows. If death causes you no pain when you are dead, the entry says, it is foolish to let the fear of it cause you pain now.

The mirror

The Epicurean poet Lucretius added a second argument. Before you were born there was an endless stretch in which you did not exist. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives it as: the infinity of prenatal non-existence is like the infinity of post-mortem non-existence, as though nature had put up a mirror to show us what our future non-existence will be like.

Why many people are not convinced

The most common reply is the deprivation account, which the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy credits to Thomas Nagel. Things may be bad for us, it says in effect, by stopping us from having goods. On this view death harms the person who dies by depriving them of the good they would have had if they had lived on. It does not have to be felt to be a loss, in the same way that a person can be robbed of something without ever finding out.

The mirror argument has standard replies too. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives three. Birth and death are not alike, because birth begins a life of good things and death ends it. A stretch of non-existence that is followed by life is different from one that is permanent. And we are rationally more concerned about goods that lie ahead of us than about goods in the past, because our plans and projects look forward.

None of this settles the matter. Epicurus asks what it is about death that is supposed to be bad. The replies say it is the life we lose. Which is the better description is still argued.

What to take from it

You can accept the argument, reject it, or take part of it. Epicurus meant the argument to calm the fear of death. The critics' point is that what people fear may be the loss of the life they have, which the argument does not address. Either way it shows that the question "is death bad?" has more than one meaning, and that the fear of death and the badness of death are not the same thing.

We set the question in context on the page about life after death. You can read about Epicureanism and about Epicurus on their own pages, and see how the school differs from its closest neighbours in atheism versus Epicureanism and Epicureanism versus Stoicism.

If you would like to see where your own answers to questions like these place you on the map, you can take the walk.