New Philosopher – July 2019

NewPhilosopher

I

n his philosophical poem The

Nature of Things, the Roman phi-

losopher Lucretius came up with

a simple but ingenious argument to

overcome our fear of death.

It goes like this: when we die, we

cease to exist. Most of us fear that

non-existence very much. Yet every

single one of us has not-existed before,

in the time before we were born. No-

body, it seems, is frightened, or even

upset, by the thought that they once

did not exist. So if we’re not troubled

by the fact we didn’t exist in the past,

why are we so frightened by the fact

that we won’t exist in the future? Non-

existence is non-existence, whenever

it happens. We’re clearly, according to

Lucretius, being irrational. Either we

should start freaking out about the fact

we weren’t around before we were born

• and nobody is going to do that – or
  we should stop freaking out about the
  fact we won’t be around after we die.

Feel better? Not so fast: philoso-

phers have offered at least two main

counter-arguments.

The first is to insist that there re-

ally is a difference between prena-

tal and posthumous non-existence.

What could such a difference be?

Well, where things start seems to be

essential to what they are. You could

live longer and still be you, but if you’d

been born earlier you would be some-

one else entirely, metaphysically and

psychologically. So it makes sense to

care more about death than about the

time before birth.

The other argument is that we hu-

mans are just weirdly asymmetrical.

We simply can’t help caring about bad

things in the future more than we care

about bad things in the past. Maybe

Lucretius’s biggest mistake wasn’t

misunderstanding the nature of non-

existence, but thinking he could get us

messy humans to be rational at all.

“I think with sadness of all

the books I’ve read, all the places

I’ve seen, all the knowledge I’ve

amassed and that will be no more.

All the music, all the paintings,

all the culture, so many places:

and suddenly nothing. They made

no honey, those things, they can

provide no one with any nourish-

ment. At the most, if my books

are still read, the reader will think:

There wasn’t much she didn’t see!

But that unique sum of things,

the experience that I lived, with

all its order and its random-

ness – the Opera of Peking, the

arena of Huelva, the candomblé

in Bahía, the dunes of El-Oued,

Wabansia Avenue, the dawns in

Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking

to five hundred thousand Cubans,

a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds,

the purple holly, the white nights

of Leningrad, the bells of the

Liberation, an orange moon over

the Piraeus, a red sun rising over

the desert, Torcello, Rome, all the

things I’ve talked about, others I

have left unspoken – there is no

place where it will all live again.”

Simone de Beauvoir,

Force of Circumstance

News from nowhere

Death

and loss

Fear of

non-existence

Reconstitution of a prehistoric tomb, by Rama