On The Nature Of Things By Lucretius

In his poem, On the Nature of Things, Lucretius aims to dispel our fear of death through the increased use of reason and knowledge rather than the authority we usually rely on to help make sense of death, which is ordinarily religion. However, rather than allay our fears about death, Lucretius argues that religion thrives off the fear of death and can even exacerbate that fear so that its followers believe that their own authority as the only possible answer. Lucretius’ poem offers a counterargument to religion’s perspective on death and argues against our irrational fear of it. The purpose of this essay is to show that the widespread fear of death is irrelevant, and that the correct feeling, according to Lucretius, and his idol Epicurus, is tranquility. In Epicurean philosophy, one can be unafraid of “death” because “death” is not the process of dying not the moment of death, both of which can be both physically and mentally damaging. “Death” instead means the act of being dead. If we believe that death involves no pleasure or pain and that the only thing in life that is bad is pain, then we can reason that death is not bad, since it doesn’t involve pain. Also, the disregard of death doesn’t imply an indifference to life. If finding pleasure is the purpose to one’s life, and one must be alive to experience pleasure, …show more content…
Lucretius doesn’t distinguish between the endless amount of time before you were born and the endless amount of time after you died. We do not spend much time fearing our pre-birth existence, therefore, we shouldn’t think not existing for an eternity after our deaths to be any different. The fear of death that people experience in life is a terror that only a living mind can feel. Since they are completely devoid of sensation and thought, a dead person cannot miss being