Epicurus on why death is nothing for us (and shouldn't be feared)

Epicurus (341-270 BC) developed an important account of happiness that presented a good human life as one free from disturbances. According to Epicureanism, as his philosophical system is now known, there are different kinds of disturbances: some of the body, and some of the mind.

When we eat too much food, for instance, we make ourselves sick. That’s a disturbance of the body. But what are disturbances of the mind?

The most intuitive way to understand the idea of mental disturbances is to think of them as false beliefs that undermine what might otherwise be a tranquil, peaceful existence.

For instance, the idea that death is bad will lead to mental disturbances, for Epicurus. He thinks that this belief is false and pernicious.

That doesn’t mean he thinks that death is actually good for us and will involve an amazing afterlife. Instead, he thinks that death is simply nothing for us at all.

Not only is there no afterlife, death isn’t even something we experience.

Let’s talk about why.

Epicurus thinks that we are entirely made up of atoms. This means that even our souls are made of atoms. When we die, these atoms are scattered. The collection of atoms that held together during our lives has lost its integrity.

The immediate consequence of this is that all of the functions of our body stop: our hearts stop beating, our digestion stops working, and so on. Most importantly for Epicurus’ point, our perception stops working. We no longer see or feel anything.

This is a crucial point because Epicurus thinks that whether something is good or bad depends entirely on our senses. Something cannot be harmful for us if it doesn’t feel harmful. Of course, we always have to take a long-term view of things: I need to assess how eating a large meal feels overall even after it’s done and it’s made me unhealthy, not just in the present moment. But fundamentally, something can’t be harmful or bad for us unless it feels harmful.

So, when we die, perception ceases. That means that there can’t be anything good or bad about death. When we are dead, we are unable to perceive, and goodness/badness depends entirely on perception.

This leads Epicurus to make his famous claim: “since when we exist, death is not yet present, and when death is present, then we do not exist. Therefore, it is relevant neither to the living nor to the dead, since it does not affect the former, and the latter do not exist” (Letter to Menoeceus §125).

Death isn’t something that living people experience (and, in fact, it can’t be experienced at all), so it isn’t relevant to the living. When we are dead, we aren’t experiencing anything at all, so death is simply neither good nor bad.

Of course, one crucial assumption is that we don’t survive our own deaths. This is something that Epicurus argues for at length: everything is made of atoms, so there is nothing immaterial about us. We’ll need another post to discuss this belief, but it’s worth flagging as a crucial part of Epicurus’ argument.

The idea, simply put, is that in order for something to be good or bad, we have to be able to perceive it — and when we’re dead, we’re not perceiving anything at all.

His advice to us, following this argument is this: “just as he [i.e., the wise man] does not choose the largest amount of food but the most pleasant food, so he savours not the longest time but the most pleasant” ((Letter to Menoeceus §125).

Since death isn’t bad, we shouldn’t be aiming to live a life as long as possible. Instead, we should try to live the best life possible. This involves reducing disturbances, both of the mind and the body, and being judicious about which pleasures to include. We definitely don’t want to include pleasures that introduce pains into our lives.

The value of philosophy is that it helps see clearly which beliefs and pleasures might lead to disturbances.

He reveals all this in a letter to a man named Menoeceus, and his very first words in the letter are:

“Let no one delay the study of philosophy while young nor weary of it when old. For no one is either too young or too old for the health of the soul. He who says either that the time for philosophy has not yet come or that it has passed is like someone who says that the time for happiness has not yet come or that it has passed” (§122).

Nobody is too old or too young for philosophy because everybody is exactly the right age for the sort of happiness that we can achieve by eliminating disturbances in our lives.

This doesn’t mean that we can get rid of the fear of death instantly. We might have to accustom ourselves to this way of thinking: death is neither good nor bad; it is nothing for us. It can take a while for us to process this fact, but when we do, and when we habitually change our way of thinking about death, we free ourselves to think more accurately about what sorts of lives we want to live.

We get a better perspective on our lives.

In conclusion, it’s worth pointing out that Epicurus turns on its head the way we sometimes think about the afterlife. In popular media, the afterlife is presented to us as a way of making us feel better about death because it suggests that our identities will continue forever. Epicurus thinks that the better, truer, and more mentally peaceful idea is that the afterlife doesn’t exist.

There is nothing for us but the cessation of experience, which means that there is nothing good or bad about the state of being dead. And so death is nothing for us and should not be feared.