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/.

Rosenbaum, S. (1989). The Symmetry Argument: Lucretius Against the Fear of Death. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 50(2), 353-373. doi:10.2307/2107964

Deng, N. (2016). Response to ‘Fear of death and the symmetry argument’. Manuscrito, 39(4), 297–304. https://doi.org/10.1590/0100-6045.2016.v39n4.nd

Warren, J. (2001). Lucretius, Symmetry arguments, and fearing death. Phronesis, 46(4), 466–491. https://doi.org/10.1163/156852801753736508

According to Leibniz’s interpretation of death, he was dead, but not totally dead.

Leibniz, German, was both a philosopher and a mathematician. Leibniz was a representative of rationalists in the seventeenth century and a rare all-rounder in human history. Not only did Leibniz make great contributions to philosophy, but he also invented the symbols of calculus in mathematics that are still used today. Leibnitz, as a modern philosopher, is a representative figure who adopts the ancient Greek Monad theory, which is also the main Angle of Leibnitz’s explanation of death.

In Leibniz’s System of Metaphysics, monads are immaterial basic substances that make up the universe. Each monad lacks spatial extension, and is unique, indestructible, soul-like entity whose properties are a function of its perceptions and appetites. Monads’ property of perception are mainly mentioned under the context of death. From this perspective, Leibniz discusses death in both humans and animals. Leibniz regards death as a diminution that applies to both humans and animals, but the death of the two kinds are different.

In Leibniz’s view, the act of death is the process of body and consciousness becoming innumerable pieces. “Death” itself is a state, that is, a creature being in the state of innumerable monads. Therefore, Leibniz did not agree with Plato on the transfer of the soul, arguing that the soul can change (such as metamorphosis of insects), but does not transfer from one body to another. He wrote: 

The misconception… that preservation of the souls of beasts would lead one to metempsychosis and their transmigration from body to body… has resulted, in my opinion, in their overlooking the natural way to explain the preservation of the soul.

From this point of view, we begin investigating the death of animals first. In Leibniz, the death of an animal is the death of an irrational soul. (If a person is exceptionally stupid, is it also an irrational soul?)

When an animal is deprived of organs capable of giving it sufficiently distinct perceptions, it does not follow that the animal has left no smaller and more uniform perceptions or that it is deprived of all its organs and all its perceptions. Its organs are merely enveloped and reduced to a small volume, but the order of nature requires that everything is developed again sometime and return to a noticeable state and that there be a definite well-regulated progression in its changes which helps to bring things to fruition and perfection

The above excerpt explains how Leibniz thought about the death of animals. Leibniz does not believe that perception disappears when all organs fail to provide it (death). Perceptions become smaller perceptions. In other words, when you are dead, all of your senses are in a “diminished” state. Thus, there is no perception in the state of death, and this “diminished” state is a lower level of perception.

He said that the order of nature would allow these little perceptions to be pieced together again as something that could be perceived. Then the creature returns to a state of being perceived and is able to perceive other things. When all the perceptions are “put together” again, an animal is out of the state of death. (It’s like differentiating and integrating in calculus.) The death of an animal, for Leibniz, is a cognitive and sensory relegation to a minute, imperceptible state. Correspondingly, the state of “death” is not eternal. After a certain amount of time, the monads will come together again and return to a state of higher perception, and begin the next phase of their lives.

But unfortunately, Leibniz himself seems not to know how long the state of “death” will last, and there is no discussion about it in Leibniz’s previous works.

Logically, the death of a human is not that different from the death of an animal. But the perceptions of humans (Rational Souls) are more advanced than those of animals, making them more difficult to explain. As explained in Death of Monads: 

In cognitive terms, the death of human beings does not differ very much from the death of animals, except that the cognitive change is far greater in scope.

The big difference between human perception and animal perception, according to Leibniz, is the ability to know what we are perceiving and to reflect on it — perceive that we are perceiving. Leibniz argues that the prerequisite for thinking is distinguish of perceptions. For any perception people have to be able to distinguish before they can reflect on one or part of it. When humans die, perception is also divided into countless pieces. Different from animals, the death state of human beings is not that the volume of perception is too small and people can’t perceive it. Instead, it is that people are unable to distinguish countless perceptions in a moment, so they can’t reflect and are in a confused state. For example, now when you look at the room you perceive a room, but when all your perceptions are pieces of color you can’t tell whether it is a room or not, and you can’t tell the difference between two similar pieces of color. You’re in a confused state. (When you feel confused solving a math problem, don’t worry, it doesn’t mean you’re dead.) A person who has been in such a confused state for a certain period of time is dead. In a letter to Sophia Charlotte, Queen of Prussia, he wrote:

In death, or rather the appearance of death, since I take it only for an envelopment, we do not lose life, sensation, or reason, but what prevents us from noticing that for a time is the confusion, that is, the fact that at that time we have an infinity of little perceptions all at once, in which there is no single one which is clearly distinguished from the others.

Similarly, the death of the human (rational soul) is not a permanent state. When these perceptions come together again into a discernible perception, man ceases to be “confused” and is freed from the state of death.

Leibniz died, according to himself not totally dead, in Hanover in 1716. Though as a member of the Berlin society of sciences, His grave was unmarked for 50 years. I guess Leibniz himself also didn’t care so much about the grave for one day he will break away from the state of confusion again.

Bibliography

Leibniz G.W. (1989) Reflections on the Doctrine of a Single Universal Spirit. In: Loemker L.E. (eds) Philosophical Papers and Letters. The New Synthese Historical Library (Texts and Studies in the History of Philosophy), vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1426-7_59

Leibniz, G. W. (1925). Monadologie. Sfinx.

Leibniz, G. W. (2019). Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe. De Gruyter. 

Leibniz, G. W., & Gerhardt, C. I. (n.d.). Die philosophischen Schriften. Olms. 

Roinila, Markku, (2016, December 25) The “Death” of Monads: G. W. Leibniz on Death and Anti-Death

Look, B. C. (2013, July 24). Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz/#MonWorPhe.

Wikimedia Foundation. (2021, June 25). Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz#Death.

Encyclopædia Britannica, inc. (n.d.). Monad. Encyclopædia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/topic/monad.

“Death is not the worst thing that could happen to man” (doing western philosophy is)

Now I am dealing with the worst thing that could ever happen to man, and thanks to Plato, by practicing death, i don’t fear death anymore. 

Plato is one of the most representative philosopher throughout western philosophy and even western world. He was the disciple of Socrates and the teacher of Aristotle. Plato is also the inventor of the dialectic forms in philosophy, his books are known for the dialectic wrting style. Plato, with his pure reason thinking, discovered the grand propositions such as the forming of the universe etc. His thoughts deeply influenced later philosophers on similar topics. Plato is also the namesake of Platonic love which an idea that Plato himself never brought up. 

Accroding to Plato, there is death. In his work Phaedo he wrote 

“And that freedom and separation of the soul from the body is called death? That is altogether so.” 

By the voice of Socrates, Plato conveys his view on death. Plato and Socrates define death as the ultimate separation of the soul and body. They regard the body as a prison for the soul and view death as the freedom for the soul. However, it is worth mentioning that all Plato wrote in Phaedo were the conversations between teacher Socrates and others. We cannot prove whether Plato really integrated his interpretation of Socrates’ words (that is, Plato’s view of death himself) into this article. 

Plato thinks death can be practiced, and philosophy is the way of practicing it. Plato states in his Phaedo: 

“It [the soul] reasons best when it is being troubled neither by hearing nor by sight nor by pain, nor by a certain sort of pleasure either, but when it as much as possible comes to be alone by itself, ignoring the body, and, as far as it can, doesn’t associate or have contact with the body when reaching out to what is real.” 

And for philosophy, given the definition of love of wisdom, philosophers are the ones who pursue wisdom. Therefore, philosophy and death are closely linked together, and death has become a problem that philosophers of later generations have been constantly discussing. Of course, Plato’s explanation has left many mysteries about death for posterity, such as the famous mind-body problem, but none of these are now Plato’s business.

“according to us it is those who really love wisdom who are always particularly eager – or rather, who alone are always eager – to release it [the soul], and philosophers’ practice is just that, release and parting of soul from body.”

From his point of view, philosophical thinking is a practice of death, in other words, it prepares us for death. On the path of speculation, death is the end, the freest and most efficient state of the soul, and the state that all philosophers should aspire to. By extension of his own idea, why didn’t Plato just commit suicide? We don’t seem be able to answer this question, but i guess for a world that so far has no immoral livings, death for plato, or human, should not be in a hurry. Despite of a philosopher, Plato is also a man, and man have desires. As a human being, there is no need to be eager to pursue the death, the untimate freedom of one’s soul.

“Haven’t you realized that our soul is immortal and never destroyed?”He looked at me with wonder and said: “No, by god, I haven’t. Are you really in a position to assert that?”

The above excerpt is from Pheado. Plato gives us an explanation of the afterlife from the point of view of the soul. Plato believed the soul would leave the body and move to another body after death, and the soul was immortal. For any body, only the soul can keep it alive and gives it a meaning. A body with out a soul is a car with out the driver. (This also matches up with decartes’ ghost in the machine) In Pheado he wrote:

What is it that, when present in a body, makes it living? — A soul.

As historical evidence have shown, Plato lived until the around the age of 80. But the detailof his death qs quite arguable. About how the famous philosopher died, there are several versions. According to Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Plato died at the age of 81 on the same day he was born. The Suda, a large 10th-century encyclopedia about ancient Mediterranean area, indicates the philosopher lived to 82 years. A variety of sources have given accounts of his death. One story, based on a mutilated manuscript, suggests Plato died in his bed, while a young girl played the flute to him. Another tradition suggests Plato died at a wedding feast. The account is based on Diogenes Laërtius’s reference to an account by Hermippus, a third-century Alexandrian. 

No matter how Plato died, it is sure that his soul is finally free. At this very moment, his soul may be wandering, looking for the next body to attach itself to. Or has it found the body? Maybe it’s you in front of the screen?

Bibliography

Plató, & Rowe, C. J. (1993). Phaedo. Cambridge University Press. 

Wikimedia Foundation. (2021, June 23). Plato. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato.

Kraut, R. (2017, August 1). Plato. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato/#DoePlaChaHisMinAboFor.

UKEssays. (November 2018). Plato’s Practice Of Death. Retrieved from https://www.ukessays.com/essays/philosophy/platos-practice-of-death-philosophy-essay.php?vref=1

Socrates_Death1. (n.d.). https://www.qcc.cuny.edu/socialsciences/ppecorino/intro_text/Chapter%202%20GREEKS/Socrates_deathI.htm.

Austin, Emily, “Fear and Death in Plato” (2009). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 27. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/27

SEFEROĞLU, Tonguç. (2019). The Practice of True Philosophers in Plato’s Phaedo. Dört Öge, 15, 15-36. http://dergipark.gov.tr/dortoge.