Theme
Death
10 philosophers, 4 traditions
What is death, does anything of us survive it, and should we fear it? Greek, Roman, Indian, Chinese and modern European thinkers gave sharply different answers.
Philosophers in every tradition have asked what death is, whether anything of a person outlasts it, and how the living should face it. Condemned by an Athenian court, Socrates reasoned that death might be a dreamless sleep or a passage to further conversation, and Plato shows him spending his last day arguing that the soul cannot die. The Epicureans took the opposite view: the soul is a body of atoms that disperse, so death ends all sensation and is, in Epicurus’ phrase, nothing to us. Lucretius added that we are untroubled by the endless time before our birth, and the time after our death is its mirror image. The Stoics Seneca and Marcus Aurelius treated death as a law of nature, to be accepted and prepared for.
In India the Buddha set death inside a cycle of rebirth kept turning by ignorance and craving, and taught a way out of it, while declining to say either that the awakened person survives death or that they are annihilated. In China under the Han, Wang Chong described death as the body’s loss of its vital qi, and ridiculed the common belief that the dead become ghosts.
In the twentieth century Heidegger made death central to his account of human existence: facing our own death, instead of fleeing it, is what allows each of us to exist authentically. Epicurus’ challenge is still argued over today, as philosophers ask whether death can harm the one who dies by taking away the goods their life would otherwise have held.
Through time
5th century BCE
Socrates
Condemned to die, he suggested that death could turn out to be a good thing: either a sleep without dreams, or a move to a place where he could carry on his conversations. Plato’s account of his last day has him arguing that the soul is immortal.
The Buddha
Ignorance and craving keep beings turning through rebirth, and so through old age, disease and death, until they are released. Asked what becomes of the awakened after death, he rejected both lasting survival and annihilation, since both assume an ‘I’ that could either last or end.
4th century BCE
Epicurus
Death is nothing to us: while we exist our death is absent, and once it comes we no longer exist. The soul does not outlive the body, so there is no punishment to dread, and the fear of death, a main source of anxiety and of limitless desires, rests on a mistake.
1st century BCE
Lucretius
The soul is mortal like the body, so death is the end of all sensation. To dread being dead, as distinct from dying, is a confusion. Our nonexistence after death will be just like our nonexistence before birth, which troubles no one, and only reason can free us from the fear.
Drew on Epicurus
Huan Tan
Death is final. The spirit is to the body what a flame is to a candle, and nothing can halt the body’s natural decline.
1st century CE
Seneca
Death is a law of nature, fixed from the moment we are conceived, and everyone is equal before it. Whether it leads to a better life or is simply an end, it need not be feared. The fear of death tries to protect life but spoils it, and a central task of philosophy is to prepare us to die.
Wang Chong
A person dies when the body loses the qi that animates it, and the body then decays. The dead do not become ghosts: ghosts are reported with bodies, the dead would far outnumber the living, and murdered ghosts would go straight to the magistrate to name their killers.
Drew on Huan Tan
2nd century CE
Marcus Aurelius
Death and transience belong to nature and are not up to us. Whether at death our atoms scatter, as Epicurus thought, or nature extinguishes or transforms us, as the Stoics held, philosophy means rising above it, remembering that we are tiny, temporary parts of the cosmos.
Drew on Epicurus
About 1700 years later
19th century
Hirata Atsutane
The dead do not go down to the foul land of Yomi, as Norinaga had thought. All people become kami and pass into a hidden world, alongside ours, that in its essentials resembles the visible world of the living.
20th century
Martin Heidegger
Death is more than the end of a life: it is the possibility of our no longer being able to exist at all. Anticipating our own death in anxiety, instead of fleeing from it, singles each of us out and makes possible an authentic existence that takes responsibility for itself.
Terms on this page
- qi
- Vital force or material force (氣), the stuff of which all things are made. Neo-Confucians paired it with principle (li), and explained the differences between people by the qi each is endowed with.
- kami
- The powers revered in ancient Japanese religion and in Shintō, often too narrowly translated “gods”, which manifested a power to inspire awe.
Sources
- Steven Luper, Death, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy