Death Is Nothing To Us: Part One

Length of life is not the point

There is no need for more. The Ponds of Gylieu by Charles-François Daubigny.

Good news everyone! You don’t need to worry about death!

This is a core Epicurean doctrine, but one I’ve been putting off covering. Given my strong predisposition towards Epicurean untroubledness, I’ve always found death to be vastly overrated as a subject of concern. So many people make a big deal about it, but usually I think they fall victim to a habit Emerson described well:

People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say. There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. (“Experience”)

Death seems like a very imposing thing to people in a certain mood, or suffering from certain illusions. But it just isn’t—it is a shallow phenomenon, with very little substance that can profitably be explored without diverging into fantasy. Today and next week, Epicurus and I will plumb those limited depths and put an end to this widespread but largely unnecessary source of grief.

I will present the Epicurean case in three steps. First, their most straightforward and well-known argument: there is no life after death and nothing can be bad without a being capable of perception, so it is neither good nor bad to be dead. To this claim, some respond with what can be called the “deprivation objection,” arguing that if experiencing a pleasurable or otherwise positive existence is good, to no longer have that experience is bad, even if we are no longer conscious of any alternative, worse-off state. Epicurus has a second response to this genre of complaint: the accumulation of pleasurable moments is never the proper metric for the happiness of one’s life. Well-being is a state—our proper goal of happiness is not a scorecard of aggregate points over a lifetime. Third and finally, I will conclude this essay next week with a consideration of some proposed alternatives to Epicurean acceptance. Is death always bad? Is it bad in certain circumstances? Epicureanism finds the common alternative models of a “complete life” problematic and unsatisfactory.

Let’s get to it, and dispel some existential dread.

What cannot be perceived cannot be bad

Death is nothing to us, for what has been dissolved is incapable of sensation, and a state without sensation is nothing to us. (Principal Doctrine 2)

Accustom yourself to believing that death is nothing to us, for all good and bad are rooted in sensation, and death is the ending of sensation… something that causes no trouble when it is actually present can give only an empty and senseless kind of pain in anticipation. Death, the most terrifying of evils, is therefore nothing to us, since whenever we exist, death cannot be present, and whenever death is present, then we no longer exist. (Letter to Menoeceus 124)

Epicurus’ most well-known argument against death is stated repeatedly clearly in the core ethical texts. It follows quite naturally from the underlying tenets of the philosophy, so if you accept that all life is material (and so there is no continued existence or perception after the dissolution of our bodies) and that nothing is ultimately good or bad except our own pleasure and pain (which requires a perceiving individual to exist), then this line of argumentation may be quite comprehensive and convincing to you. Personally, I fall into this category. I was never thoroughly indoctrinated in ideologies with an afterlife or raised with an instinctive belief that “death is bad,” so I find this simple logic perfectly satisfactory and quite comprehensive.

As religious claims about postmortem punishment, reward, or purgatory have faded in the face of growing scientific knowledge and secularism, more and more people have at least partly internalized this Epicurean logic. Perhaps a smaller share of the population than ever before now lives in fear of (nonexistent) posthumous misery. That’s good! I suspect that many people who suffer anxiety about death are experiencing some form of residual influence from religious education, either directly or through cultural diffusion, even if they nominally do not believe in an afterlife.

If you are in that boat and consider the logic fundamentally convincing, but find that your emotions are not quite ready to come along for the ride, it may be helpful to read and contemplate the powerful “symmetry argument” found in Lucretius:

Look back upon the ages of time past
Eternal, before we were born, and see
That they have been nothing to us, nothing at all.
This is the mirror nature holds for us
To show the face of time to come, when we
At last are dead. Is there in this for us
Anything horrible? Is there anything sad?
Is it not more free from care than any sleep? 

(3.972-977, translated by Ronald Melville)

The closest analogue to what it “feels like” after we die is what it “felt like” before we were born—there was and will be no sensation at all. Some people express their fears along these lines: “I know I won’t be anywhere after I die. But right now, I’m enjoying life. I don’t want to leave the party.” This is muddled thinking. Analogies are deceptive. When you are forced to leave a party, you might be forced to go home, sit alone in a room, and do something less pleasant while thinking of all the people still at the party enjoying themselves. That’s not what death is like. You won’t be alone. You won’t be thinking of the party. You won’t exist. The more relevant analogy, as Lucretius suggests, would be to regret at not attending a party that happened in 1894, which I assume has never bothered you. Remind yourself of this regularly.

As a good caveat to mention fairly early in proceedings, there are some death-related phenomena which are perfectly reasonable to wish to avoid. Pain is bad, and death is often preceded by pain. If you can take reasonable steps to safeguard your health and avoid high-risk vocations and hobbies, for instance, that makes complete sense—you might experience pain without dying or pain before dying, and the pain itself would be a bad thing. One’s death can also definitely be a source of pain to other people. If you have dependent children, for instance, their life would probably be worse if you weren’t around. Epicurus doesn’t deny that, and would recommend that you take prudent precautions to ensure their future care and well-being (such precautions will promote trust and security among the whole family body, thereby increasing your peace of mind while you live). What Epicurus denies is that your own death can harm you.

Some people are reluctant to accept this and claim that perception is not required for something to be bad and that the badness exists whether we perceive it or not. They will invoke cases of “unperceived” harm, such as a friend who goes against our wishes or talks badly about us behind our back. Even if we never know of their actions, they assert, haven’t we been harmed?

Typically, such scenarios represent more sloppy thinking stemming from the difficulty of conceiving nonexistence—the cases again are not analogous. Can a betrayed friend be harmed by an unrecognized betrayal? Certainly! The gossip may change the conduct of others towards us. The act of betrayal indicates the limited trustworthiness of the supposed friend, which may manifest in different unrelated ways. And so on. But what we are dealing with in the case of death is not a case of a friend who will “never know of the betrayal.” Death is the permanent foreclosure of all possibility of any perception whatsoever. The proper comparison is to the case of a friend who will never experience the slightest perceptible pain or downstream negative consequence of the “betrayal,” with 100% confidence. Has this person been harmed? I don’t think so.

Still, some people refuse to accept such “no subject of harm” arguments. One of the most famous framings for this school of thought was Thomas Nagel’s 1970 article “Death”, an undergraduate philosophy staple. According to Nagel and his ilk, what is at stake is what we could have perceived. Even if “what is good” does depend on perception, he asserts, then isn’t it bad if we don’t get to perceive it? But even if we grant this “Deprivation Objection,”—a dubious assertion—Epicurus has another response.

We want more pleasure—but in magnitude, not in duration

Epicurus is a hedonist. He thinks that all creatures want to pursue pleasure, and that achieving greater pleasure is the good and proper object for humans to aim at in life. The notion of achieving “greater” pleasure, however, is prone to misunderstanding. Properly understood, Epicurus argues, what we want is an increase in our level of pleasure, not a chronological accumulation of pleasurable moments over time. Happiness is a state, albeit one enhanced by a sense of confidence about the general stability of our well-being into the future. It is not a scorecard, in which one life can be pronounced happier than another by adding up its accumulated moments of pleasure. A person can go on a hundred luxurious vacations, eat all the tastiest food, sleep with the most beautiful people, never suffer sickness or injury, and still be unhappy. Another person could do none of that and achieve perfect contentment. Moments of pleasure are fine, but they are not the object of our pursuit or the metric of our success. This has big implications for the value of extending one’s life.

Admittedly, some of the confusion stems from Epicurus’ somewhat idiosyncratic use of the word “pleasure.” (Avoiding such confusion is presumably why Utilitarians instead speak of “happiness” or “utility.”) In Epicureanism, maximizing the actual magnitude of one’s pleasure has a very specific meaning: elimination of all pain and worry. This position is stated clearly in the Letter to Menoeceus and in Principal Doctrine 3:

The greatest magnitude of pleasure possible is the removal of all suffering.

In some ways, this is not how people typically think of “pleasure.” Couldn’t one be free of pain, then sip a delicious beverage or listen to beautiful music, thereby increasing one’s pleasure? But from a big picture perspective, I don’t think it is actually that hard to understand: when looking at two human beings, one happy and one not, the real difference between them is not constituted by such little frills. We are certainly free to enjoy whatever sensory pleasures we encounter, but their accumulation does not actually constitute an increase of our happiness in any significant way. Instead, it is more accurate to refer to this as mere “variation” or “embellishment” of pleasure.

Pleasure in the flesh is not increased once the pain of want is removed, but is only varied. (PD 18)

Now consider the implications of this doctrine when it is connected to questions of time and the length of one’s life. This is discussed directly in Principal Doctrines 19 and 20:

Infinite time and finite time contain equal pleasure, when pleasure’s limits are measured by reason. (PD 19)

Since accumulating more instances of pleasure does not increase the actual magnitude of pleasure, greater time does not contain greater pleasure.¹ The goal is to live happily, which can be achieved as easily in a year as in a decade. Fundamentally, happiness is not increased by tasting an endless variety of novel flavors, wearing the finest clothing, or improving your home theater equipment. Happiness can only be experienced—it cannot be accumulated.

I consider the deprivation objection to be a frivolous semantic game that doesn’t truly evade the “no subject of harm” argument, but if you believe in it, then this larger framework addresses its concern from another direction: the good that one is “deprived of” is not the relevant good. At best, it is more time on top of a mountain when the goal is simply to reach the top. (For many people, it is more time stuck halfway up the mountain.) Holding “the happiest life” equivalent to the “the life with the greatest number of pleasurable moments” is a profound mistake, one which the acquisitive side of our brains can be convinced of, but which is not truly integral to our psychology. At root, we are like any other animal. Think of a cat. It wants comfort. It wants pleasure. If it is warm and fed, it is quite content. It doesn’t need to tally up its number of past good days to decide if it is happy, or could be happier. Neither do we.

I think the reasons given so far sufficiently answer the putative philosophical case for why death is bad: it isn’t painful, when it arrives we no longer exist and so cannot be harmed, and if we could be harmed all that death actually deprives us of is unimportant variation rather than an actual augmentation of our happiness. For logically-minded types, or those who have avoided indoctrination in the habit of death-fearing, this might be enough. But if you have long been accustomed to thinking of death in negative terms and need some further retraining of your instincts, there is one further therapeutic perspective I would suggest exploring. Interrogate the proposed alternatives to Epicurean tranquility and ask: do they make sense?

Next week, we’ll do exactly that in the conclusion to this two-part essay.

1. What about PD 9, which seems to advise choosing pleasures based on their “compression in time”? Does this refer to choosing pleasures based on their duration? I take it to primarily refer to a devaluing of the genre of “compressed pleasures,” i.e. momentary, “kinetic” pleasures, in favor of the stable, “katastematic” pleasures. The point isn’t their duration, exactly, but something more like their stability, or ability to be sustained with confidence.