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this fate,” he continues, “we are redeemed by death, which denies existence to the self
that might have suffered these tribulations.” The moral of these reflections, he thought,
is “that we have nothing to fear in death,” since “one who no longer is cannot suffer,
or differ in any way from one who has never been born, when once this mortal life has
been usurped by death the immortal.”
6
Classical scholars differ from each other in their translation of these crucial pas-
sages from Lucretius. However, what matters historically is less what Lucretius
actually meant than what he was interpreted by later thinkers to have meant.
7
In
John Dryden’s seventeenth-century translation, which was one of the earliest into
English, the passage is translated as follows: “So when our mortal frame shall be
disjoin’d, / The lifeless Lump uncoupled from the mind, /From sense of grief and
pain we shall be free; / We shall not feel, because we shall not BE. . . . // Nay, ev’n
suppose when we have suffer’d Fate, / The Soul could feel, in her divided state, /
What’s that to us? for we are only we / While Souls and Bodies in one frame agree. .
. . // We, who are dead and gone, shall bear no part / In all the pleasures, nor shall feel
the smart, / Which to that other Mortal shall accrue, / Whom, of our Matter Time shall
mould anew.”
8
In sum, in what seems to have been Lucretius’s own view, and clearly was a
view that some later attributed to Lucretius, even if something that is currently
part of us persists and is capable of having experiences and performing actions, if
this part of ourselves is not attended by the very bodies we have when we die,
then this part is not us and, therefore, is no concern of ours. In order for such a
part of ourselves to be attended by the very bodies we have when we die, these
bodies would have to exist continuously as integrated, functioning entities, which
obviously they do not after bodily death. Lucretius concluded that any such part
of ourselves that persists is, therefore, not us. Hence, the experiences and actions
of any such part of ourselves that persists are not something that we can look
forward to having and performing.
What is impressive in these thoughts is not so much Lucretius’s answer to the
question of what matters in a person’s apparently self-interested desire to persist
(his view was that what matters presupposes personal identity) but rather his
asking the question of what matters. No one previously, at least in the West, had
asked it. Normally, thinkers simply assumed (as many still do assume) that if at
some point in the future they were no longer to exist, but that were they to have
continued, their futures would have been bright, then necessarily something of
inestimable value, at least from their own egoistic points of view, has been lost.
In asking the question of what matters in survival, Lucretius considered the pos-
sibility that we might not persist and yet that, even from our own egoistic points
of view, not much that matters would be lost—not because our lives were awful