Lucretius: His Continuing Influence and Contemporary Relevance

Lucretius on Death and Re-Existence

David B. Suits 117 Lucretius on Death and Re-Existence David B. Suits Lucretius, like his master Epicurus, was an atomist. The entire universe was thought to be an infinity of atoms moving in an infinity of space in an infinity of time. Humans too—bodies and souls—are nothing but elaborate and peculiar collections of atoms. Death is the dispersal of these atoms. Although most people fear death and wish to avoid death, in Book 3 of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius makes the Epicurean pronouncement that such a fear is ultimately unfounded—that if we understand death correctly, we will discover that it is “nothing to us”1 (DRN 3.830).2 Shortly thereafter (and parenthetically to his main argument), Lucretius entertains the thought that it is possible that we will have a postmortem re-existence. (An unstated implication is that perhaps we have had prior lives.) The issue is important, because if reexistence is possible, then our souls (spirits, minds) might not be mortal after all, and people who fear annihilation might have some measure of hope. But Lucretius can reject the idea of past or future lives for three kinds of reasons. (1) He has already (3.425–829) presented many arguments in favor of the materiality and the mortality of the soul (or against the immortality of the soul); and if death is the dissolution of both the body and the soul, then there is no longer a body or a soul that can have a next life. (2) The internal evidence—our lack of memories of any prior life—is against the possibility of past lives (see especially 3.670–697 and 3.741–753). (3) But it is a third argument which I want to consider at length. As we will see, it relies in part on internal evidence (that we cannot remember past lives), but it adds a new consideration. At 3.847–861 1 The De Rerum Natura’s 1992 prose translation by Rouse and Smith is used throughout. Bibliographic information for all references can be found in the Select Bibliography at the end of this essay. 2 That is, the prospect of your own annihilation ought to be of no concern to you. (Of course, your death might be important to others.) Epicurus’s original argument, in his Letter to Menoeceus, can be represented in this way: (1) All good and bad consist in sense experience. (2) Death is the destruction of the person; i.e., after death we do not exist. (3) Therefore, there can be no sense experience for dead people. (4) Therefore, death cannot be of any concern to dead people. (5) So long as we are living, we are not dead. (6) So our own death cannot be affecting us now. (7) As for the prospect of our future death, it is silly to worry or be concerned about something that we know will give us no pain when it occurs. (8) Therefore, death does not concern the living. (9) Therefore, death is nothing to us. 118 lucretius: his continuing influence and contemporary relevance Lucretius takes a kind of pragmatic approach, concluding that any hypothesis of multiple existences ought to be, like death itself, nothing to us. Recombination Although we usually think of death as permanent, Lucretius wondered about the possibility that all of a person’s atoms which were dispersed at death might later on accidentally recombine in precisely the way they had been just prior to death. Here is the relevant passage: Even if time should gather together our matter after death and bring it back again as it is now placed, and if once more the light of life should be given to us, yet it would not matter one bit to us that even this had been done, when the recollection of ourselves has once been broken asunder. And even now we are not concerned at all about any self which we have been before, nor does any anguish about it now touch us. For when you look back upon all the past expanse of measureless time, and think how various are the motions of matter, you may easily come to believe [facile hoc accredere possis] that these same seeds of which now we consist have been often before placed in the same arrangement they now are in. And yet we cannot call that back by memory; for in between has been cast a stoppage of life, and all the motions have wandered...