Lucretius didn’t think he was dead. He thought death had nothing to do with him.
Lucretius, lived between 99 and 55 BC, was one of the great poets and philosophers of the late Roman Republic. Lucretius believed in the school of Epicurus and left behind many poetic works during his lifetime, such as On the Nature of Things and On the Nature of the Universe. Lucretius’s poetry is an important source for our study of Epicurean physics.
Before we understand how Lucretius thought about death, we should first understand what the basic ideas of the Epicurean school were. Epicurean school is a system of thought developed by the greek philosopher Epicurus. The Epicurean school is often confused with hedonism today, but in fact Epicurean school was more concerned with the contemplation of pain than with the pursuit of pleasure. In On the Nature of Things Lucretius wrote:
To avoid bodily pain, to have a mind free from anxiety and fear, and to enjoy the pleasures of the senses.
The above excerpt sums up the core Epicurean idea of avoiding pain and embracing pleasure. So for the Epicureans, how to explain and deal with death was a big problem — people tended to think of death as unending suffering. Accroding to Lucretius, in On the Nature of Things Book 3:
Fear of Hell which blasts the life of man from its very foundations, sullying everything with the blackness of death and leaving no pleasure pure and unalloyed
Lucretius believed that people’s fear of death is profound, innate, and present all the time. It is also because of the fear and anxiety of death that people can not enjoy pure pleasure. Since the fear of death doesn’t stop within any regards, running away from it becomes an unworkable solution — the event of running away from the fear of death is itself deeply surrounded by the fear of death. Lucretius thought reason was the only weapon against death, and therefore, Lucretius embarked on the road of fighting death with reason.
Lucretius based his argument on the cosmology of the Epicurean school. The Epicurean school was a materialist school that believed that everything in the universe was made of atoms. Therefore, there was no such immaterial thing. From this, he explains the mind-body problem: the mind is only a part of the body, and the existence of the mind depends on the fate of the body. He wrote in On the Nature of Things:
The mind is but one part of the human being, which occupies a definite location, just like the ears and the eyes and the other senses that guide our life; and since the hands or eyes or nose cannot feel or function when they are separated from us, but soon putrefy and rot, So the soul cannot exist without the body, or without the whole human being…
Hence, our mind exists only as long as the body is alive, and when our body dies our mind dies with it. Along with the mind, our consciousness ceases to exist. After expounding the relationship between the mind and the body, Lucretius said that death has nothing to do with us. The existence of us and death does not overlap. When we die, the “us” disappears, and death can not bother us. It’s not that we can’t experience death, it’s that in the state of death the experiencer doesn’t exist anymore. All our senses, including our thoughts, die with death. Thus there is no pleasure or pain in death. Therefore, since death does not involve any loss of pleasure and has nothing to do with us, there is no need to worry about what happens after we die.
After agreeing on we don’t have to worry about what happens after death, people state that their fear is not death itself but death’s deprivation of our future life. Of course, death takes away our future life, the people we love, and the things we don’t get to experience. Death deprives us of our future. In fact, Lucretius highly criticized this attitude. He thought that worrying about the future was disrespectful to the present. When people spend too much time thinking about the future, they have less time to devote to the present. Accordingly, Lucretius also demonstrated this view in a reversed way. Since death is an eternity we cannot resist embracing, then the length of life itself is very short. Facing the commonly shared prolong state of non-existence, concentrating on the state of existence rather than worrying about the future comming non-existence is what human should do.
No matter how many generations you live through, the same eternal death is still waiting, and someone who ends life as the sun goes down today will have just as long a period of non-existence as one who died many months and years before.
Extending from Lucretius’ view of death was his famous symmetry argument. The symmetry argument says: we don’t exist before birth, and we don’t exist after death, so before birth and after death are two identical states. Neither of these states has anything to do with “me” because I don’t exist in myself. The symmetry argument fits in perfectly with the whole Epicurean idea, and it’s a unnique perspective explaining why we need to think about reducing pain, seeking pleasure, and enjoying every moment of our lives.
We do not know how Lucretius died. In fact, we know very little about his life. There have even been doubts about whether Lucretius really existed in history or not. But whether Lucretius ever really existed or not, it had nothing to do with Lucretius. Just as death has nothing to do with the individual, what happens after death has nothing to do with him. For Lucretius, Lucretius no longer exists.
Bibliography
On the Nature of Things – Lucretius. – Lucretius | Harvard University Press. (n.d.). https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674992009.
Nussbaum, M. (2013). CHAPTER 6. Mortal Immortals: Lucretius on Death and the Voice of Nature. In The Therapy of Desire (pp. 192-238). Princeton: Princeton University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400831944-010
Sedley, D. (2018, October 17). Lucretius. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lucretius/.
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