Death Means Nothing To Us Analysis

Is it irrational to fear death? Lucretius believes that death is not bad for the one who has died. Imagine that a young John Doe was run over by a trolley and died. If at death, the person ceases to exist, is being dead bad for Doe? It isn’t bad for him because he is no longer here. There is no more to his story. Lucretius presents two arguments to support the view that ‘death means nothing to us’; the first argument is the standard Epicurean notion of the soul, based on their physics; the second is his symmetry argument.
The first argument, the standard Epicurean notion of the soul, states that death means nothing to us, because at death, the soul is detached, and thus we are no longer physically here. This argument relies upon their perception of the soul, and it’s physics. Death is the end of life, nothing more. It is purely the point where the body begins to degenerate and it’s the end of its run, the spirit and mind is gone. “Mind and spirit are interconnected and compose between them a single substance…the spirit, diffused throughout the body obeys the mind and moves under its direction and impulse” (Lucretius 82). The mind by itself experiences thought and joy of its own at a time when nothing moves either the body or the spirit. The mind …show more content…
The status of being dead refers to the eternal time period after one’s death. And the symmetry argument basically depends on the analogy between this period and the period before one’s birth. In both of these two periods, we do not exist and can feel nothing. Therefore, both of these two time periods are not harmful to us. In the eternal period before our birth, we were not present and our sensation was not present. At the same time, in the everlasting time after our death, we will not exist and our sensation or consciousness will disappear. We did not matter before and we will not matter