QuestionsShould we fear death?Death is nothing to us
Should we fear death?Nothing to fear

Death is nothing to us

Epicurus' argument on death

Épicure 341 BC · 270 BCHe rejects the fate of the natural philosophers: some things happen by necessity, others by chance, others through our own agency.
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What it claims

Death is nothing to us: it is absurd to fear it.

Why

Good and bad exist only in sensation, and death ends all sensation: when it is here, we are no longer.

The same idea through history
Lucrèce55 BCLucretius, a follower of Epicurus, takes up the same idea in a Latin poem and adds the symmetry argument: the time before our birth did nothing to us.
In short

"Death is nothing to us" is an argument by Épicure (Letter to Menoeceus, 124-125) on the question "Should we fear death?" (answer: nothing to fear). Its claim: Death is nothing to us: it is absurd to fear it. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P3). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Letter to Menoeceus, 124-125
Valid with an implicit premise

Epicurus wants to cure the fear of dying. His idea: for something to be good or bad for us, we must be able to feel it. Death is precisely the end of all sensation. When we are here, it is not; when it is here, we are not. So it never meets us.

P1All good and evil for us consist in sensation: what we cannot feel can do us neither good nor harm.
P2Death is the privation of all sensation: to be dead is to feel nothing any more. When we are, death is not here; when death is here, we are no more.
P3 · implicit premiseWe have reason to fear only what can be good or bad for us. What is neither deserves no fear.
Therefore death is nothing to us: it is absurd to fear it.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P3, the computer finds a case where death cannot be felt, so is neither good nor bad in Epicurus' sense, and where there is still a reason to fear it: for instance because it deprives us of something even when it is not felt.
The argument is valid with the hidden premise P3. If fearing death requires that it can be good or bad for us (P3), and that requires being able to feel it (P1), then, since the dead feel nothing (P2), it cannot be feared. Objections almost always target P1: they say we can lose something without feeling it.
Analogy. Before an operation under anaesthesia, we may fear the needle or the waking up. But we cannot fear the moment when we feel nothing: there is nothing to live through in that moment. Epicurus says death is that moment, without end.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Thomas Nagel 1970 · attacks premise 1

If death is an evil, it is not because we suffer in it but because it makes us lose life, with everything we would have lived. So an evil can exist without being felt: one can be betrayed or deceived without knowing it. What is regrettable in death is the deprivation, not the state of being dead.

a defender replies
see the argument
S
Stephen Rosenbaum ("How to Be Dead and Not Care") defender of the argument · 1986
Rosenbaum defends Epicurus. A loss that hurts, like losing one's business, assumes one still exists after the loss to live it. If the dead no longer exist, being dead is not like those losses. For him, Nagel gives no reason to treat death as a loss of the same kind.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: the whole disagreement is about P1. Epicureans say an evil must be able to be lived by someone. Nagel and the defenders of the deprivation view say we can be wronged by losing what we would have had, without feeling it. The debate is still open.
S
Stephen Rosenbaum (a clarification in Epicurus' favour) 1986 · attacks the conclusion

Dying is not death. Dying is a process that is lived, and it can be long and painful. Fearing the suffering of dying is therefore reasonable. Epicurus' argument says nothing about that process: it speaks only of being dead.

no reply
We have not yet found a direct reply by Épicure in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: Epicurus judges the fear of waiting groundless when the thing, once here, causes no trouble; in this passage he does not treat the suffering of dying itself. His conclusion is limited to the state of being dead: the fear of the pain of dying is not refuted by him.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: fairly wide agreement on the substance. Even Epicurus' defenders admit that dying can be bad. The discussion is about what the argument really proves: serenity about the state of being dead, not about the suffering of dying.
Thomas Nagel (hopes and projects) 1970 · attacks premise 1

One is the subject of good and evil as much through one's hopes and possibilities, fulfilled or not, as through one's capacity to suffer and enjoy. Death therefore cuts off projects: it wrongs us even if we feel nothing afterwards.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1970, after the author's death (-270).
The debate goes on (our summary) Our summary: Epicurus does not answer this objection, which came more than two thousand years after him. He only says the wise do not seek the longest time but the most pleasant, as one chooses food: a finite life can be full. It remains to ask whether a full life can still be cut off in mid-course.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Our summary: an open point. Epicureans reply that a life can be complete at any moment; critics reply that unfinished projects are a real wrong. No widely accepted answer.