If it is to succeed, Epicureanism must deliver us not only from physical pain but also from anxiety and mental anguish. The prospect of death, Epicurus knew, upset many people. Hence he and his followers expended a great deal of effort trying to remove the sting, the fear, from the prospect of death.
Epicurus offered two things to battle the fear of death: an attitude and an argument. The attitude was one of mild contempt: the right sort of people, he implies, do not get in a tizzy about things, not even about death. The argument is equally compelling. “Get used to believing,” he says, “that death is nothing to us.”
Why?
Because all good and bad consist in sense experience. Death is the absence of sense experience. Therefore, “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.”
How convincing is this?
Not very. Even if one were to grant the materialism that Epicureanism assumes, one might object that what one resents about death is not the simple absence of sense experience but the loss of the world: one’s friends, engagements, duties, involvements, as well as the panoply of sense experience that attends living.
Death also brings with it the prospect of pain and suffering: few of us can count on a pain-free exit, and that fact also helps to account for the bad reputation death has among non-Epicureans.
Finally, Epicurus and his followers say “death is nothing to us,” but they leave out of account the fact that human beings exist not simply as individuals but as part of a network of family, friends, and a larger community.
Epicurus taught that “self-sufficiency is a great good”. But who, really, is self-sufficient? Let’s say you are married with young children. Your death, quite apart from the inconvenience it might be thought to cause you, would also gravely affect your spouse and children.
There is not much room from children or spouses in the Epicurean philosophy. Why? Because they threaten to compromise the ideal of self-sufficiency. At bottom, Epicureanism is a workable philosophy only for a small subset of people. You must be unafflicted by life’s tragedies: grave poverty or illness or oppression makes being an Epicurean difficult. You must also be largely unafflicted by deep passions. A profound love of life is incompatible with Epicureanism, as is a profound love of one’s children.
The true Epicurean is more of a spectator of than a participant in life. The Roman poet Lucretius (c. 99-c. 55 BC) was one of Epicurus’ greatest disciples. In his long paean to Epicureanism “De Rerum Natura” (“On The Nature of Things”), Lucretius extolled the great sweetness of disengagement, of becoming a spectator rather than a participant in life. In a famous passage, Lucretius warns that “medio de fonte leporum surgit aliquid amari quod in ipsis floribus angat” — “even in the midst of the fountain of pleasure there is something bitter that torments us in the midst of our flowering”. Hence it is better to step back, to watch “the clash of battle / Across the plains, yourself immune to danger”.
One is left with two questions. The first is whether the immunity that Lucretius (like Epicurus) promises is real or illusory. Can we really remain mere spectators of our lives? The second question is whether, even if possible, such disengagement is finally desirable. Perhaps some battles can only be won by engaging with the enemy.
Roger Kimball, “Coronavirus, Flynn and Epicureanism”, American Greatness, 2020-05-02.
April 10, 2025
QotD: Epicurus on death
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