I didn’t write music today, I wrote 900 words about death for uni. Please enjoy/do not read some mediocre academic philosophy about Lucretius and the fear of death.
uploaded bc Andrew told me he may or may be uploading a short story so I thought FUCKIT gonna submit gonna do that sweet sweet content
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In Book III of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius expands on an argument from Epicurus’ Principal Doctrines that ‘death is nothing to us’ by couching the argument in terms of Epicurean natural science. The argument can be reframed as follows: death marks the end of existence, and therefore of sensation. The soul does not exist during death because it is mortal, and as such cannot experience any sensation at all, let alone any distressing sensation of being dead. Therefore, ‘there is nothing to fear in death.’ (877) Crucial to Lucretius’ argument is the notion that while the soul (or mind, or ‘nature of the mind’) and the body are understood to be separate and separable entities, the soul itself is taken to be mortal just like the body; and being mortal, it is bound to the confines of existence, which we can take to mean the finite duration of one’s life. Beyond existence is merely nothing, and wholly nothing; neither any content to fear, nor any content to experience at all.
‘Fear of death’ is both universal and personal, and it is difficult as such to state definitively whether Lucretius totally relieves fear of death with this argument – for example, from a religious perspective, it might be horrifying to hear argued the absence of some heavenly afterlife. It is clear to see how this argument might be reassuring – as there is no sensation in death, there is some peace to conceiving of an indisputable and irreversible end to all fear, pain and suffering. However, whether or not Lucretius’ argument relieves fear of death seems to depend on whether the question that it is unreasonable to fear death is answered.
One objection might be that while death itself has no content and no rational reason for fear, dying itself is something that can be rationally feared, if only for the mode of it. Lucretius describes death in terms of ‘undisturbed rest’ and ‘deepest sleep’, seemingly taking for granted the process of dying being akin to simply fading from consciousness. However, there is the prospect of a more turbulent death, for example from illness, natural disasters, torture and murder; all of these for seem reasonably feared, even if the end result, being an end to sensation and any aforementioned suffering, is in and of itself not to be feared.
Lucretius’ possible response to this objection might be found in his discussion of the ‘abysm of Acheron’ or horrors of traditional conceptions of the underworld (979). The closest response seems to frame these fears of illness, torture and natural disasters not as fear of death, but fear that what happens in life is somehow worsened in the event of death; or as a torturous ‘fear of punishment’ and ‘atonement for ...offenses.’ (1013-1015) In other words, these fears are not a fear of death, but fear of suffering and pain in death, or more simply, a fear of dying badly; and on Lucretius’ conception there seems to be a substantial enough difference between ‘dying’ and ‘death’ itself that one may be reasonably feared to be bad, while the other is not to be feared at all. Thus the argument that ‘death is nothing to us’ wherein death refers to the eternal end of experience seems convincing. However, in needing this caveat, it does not seem that ‘death’ and ‘dying’ are sufficiently separable as folk concepts that this argument is ultimately convincing.
Another objection to Lucretius’ argument is that it focuses solely on death in terms of the individual. One thing he does not fully address in this argument is the fear of another person’s death; rather, he only questions how one might respond by ‘[pining] away in undying grief’ at the ‘return to sleep and repose’ (911-912) of another. Again, this seems to rely on a conceptual separation of dying and death; ‘death’ itself being the peaceful cessation of experience; ‘dying’ being everything else surrounding death that might be reasonably feared, such as grief, the potential physical pain of their death, having to live without this person, the loss of their potential. One might similarly fear ‘dying’ in this way in times of war or natural disaster for the lives of masses of people they do not know. Importantly, Lucretius acknowledges that the soul is ‘visited by feelings that torment it about the future, fret it with fear, and vex it with anxious cares’ (825-826), without any statement that these are rational or irrational emotions. With this in mind, having to make a distinction between ‘dying’ and ‘death’ itself does little to strengthen Lucretius’ argument itself. While this distinction may provide clarity to the terms themselves, and make some statement about what is rational and irrational in our conception, on this reading it lessens the emotional potency of the argument; and while it might be reassuring on the ‘death’ portion, the ‘dying’ portion still seems under-addressed, and very reasonably to be feared.
But finally, given the concept of death is both universal and personal, this reading of Lucretius’ argument might be totally convincing for someone. If what comes after death is nothing, and ‘nothing’ is not a fraught concept for them, then they may very well have their fear of death relieved. On a personal level, there is enough that is distressing about ‘dying’, which Lucretius does not discuss, that the argument is not ultimately relieving; even if, again, there is some poetic reassurance in the idea of those of ‘today’s light’ falling into tomorrow’s ‘peaceful ... [and] deepest sleep’ (1092, 977).
