“Enlightenment ideals are timeless, but their realization at any moment is the strenuous achievement of nations.”
Steven Pinker · Enlightenment Now, 2018
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Death is nothing to us, since when we are, death has not come, and when death has come, we are not.
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About this quote
Meaning
Epicurus offers a logical argument for why death should not be feared. The reasoning is clean and symmetrical: while we are alive, death is not present to us, and once death arrives, we no longer exist to experience it. There is no moment in which a conscious self is harmed by being dead, because being dead is precisely the absence of any self that could suffer or be aware. Fear of death, on this view, rests on a confusion, a mistaken imagining of ourselves experiencing our own non-existence.
Context
This statement appears in the Letter to Menoeceus, a letter in which Epicurus lays out the essentials of his philosophy for a student. The discussion of death opens the letter because Epicurus considered the fear of death one of the chief sources of human anxiety and therefore a central obstacle to living well. His argument draws on a materialist view of the mind, holding that consciousness is tied to the living body and does not persist after death, which means there is no posthumous suffering to dread.
About the author
Epicurus founded his philosophical school in Athens in the late fourth century BCE and gathered around him a close community of students and friends. His philosophy offered a systematic approach to achieving peace of mind through reason, moderate pleasure, and the removal of irrational fears. He is said to have written prolifically, but the vast majority of his works have not survived. His ideas remained influential for centuries and continue to be studied and debated in philosophy today.
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