The Argument That Death Is Nothing and the Silence Before Birth

Epicurus, who began teaching in Athens in about 306 BCE and died in 270, offered his followers an argument against the fear of death that has lasted twenty three centuries. In his Letter to Menoeceus he observed that death is never present while a person exists, and that once death arrives the person no longer does.

The reasoning is short. Fear is rational only when directed at something bad, and something is bad only if it is felt as bad by someone. Death cannot be felt by the dead, and the living are not yet dead. Death is therefore nothing to either. Epicurus did not claim that dying is painless, since dying can be dreadful. His claim concerned being dead.

About two centuries later the Roman poet Lucretius added a second argument in the third book of On the Nature of Things. He asked readers to look back at the endless ages that passed before their birth and to notice how little those ages trouble them. The time after death, he said, is the mirror image of that time, and a mind calm about the first should be calm about the second.

The symmetry argument has a force that the first one lacks, because it turns a feeling into a test. Most people do not grieve for the centuries before their birth, although those centuries were also times in which they could have lived and did not. If depriving a person of life is what makes death bad, then late birth ought to be as bad as early death.

If depriving a person of life is what makes death bad, then late birth ought to be as bad as early death.

Philosophers have answered in several ways. Thomas Nagel argued in 1970 that death is bad because it deprives a person of the goods that continued life would have brought. Others reply to Lucretius directly. Fred Feldman accepts the symmetry and concludes that late birth is also a misfortune. Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer defend a rational bias toward the future, since the past cannot be changed and the future can still be cared about.

The dispute therefore ends in an odd place. Either people ought to regret the ages before they were born as sharply as the ones after they will die, or the fear of death rests on a preference for the future that nobody has justified without circularity. Both options ask for a change in how ordinary lives are felt, and an argument that began as a consolation has become a puzzle about what grief is for.