From an objective sense, Nagel’s essay on death is not consoling. Nagel is an objective narrator reporting expressions and actions revolving around death being evil but good on different grounds. Individuals find various activities desirable regardless of their challenges, so death deprives them of it, making it objectionable (64-69). However, Epicurus argues that the dead do not exist and are in no state of any experience, so they cannot experience any harm in any way, so death does not deprive them of anything. Still, it indirectly affects the bereaved’s family, society, and friends.
According to Nagel, being alive is good if its advantages are attributable to every phase of an individual’s lifetime – “It is a good of which Bach had more than Schubert, simply because he lived longer” or merely because “Shakespeare has so far received a larger portion than Proust” making it difficult to know when death deprives an individual (63), posing the challenge of ascribing the misfortune to the subject. Conversely, Nagel claims that one needs to consider a man’s history to affirm whether they have undergone troubles, which applies to ill deprivation (65). Thus, Nagel states that the experiential state of a man can also be unimportant, especially when they waste their lives within cheerful communication methods pursuits with asparagus plants.
Equally, Nagel classifies deception, ridicule, loss, and betrayal as bad because individuals suffer after learning the deception, lies, insults, or loss. However, he recommends questioning the criteria of constituting human value ideas to accommodate such cases directly (Nagel 65). Nagel also notes that its advantage could enable the logical explanation of why the outcome of these discoveries leads to suffering (65). From a natural perspective, a betrayal discovery makes individuals sad because it is bad; the discovery of being betrayed makes individuals sad, and not the act itself is bad. Thus, it allows Nagel to explore the stance that most ill and good fortune have as its subject persons through their possibilities and histories instead of their momentous categorical states while the subjects are in time and space sequences, which is false for the ills and goods befalling them.
Nagel illustrates the subject person’s notion through deprivation, whose sternness is equivalent to death. When an intelligent individual suffers a brain injury, reducing him to a contented infant-mental state, leaving his desires satisfied by custodians to make him free from care. Nagel regards this scenario as a harsh misfortune for their families, society, friends, and individuals (65). However, he further claims that the contented infant is not unfortunate; instead, the reduced intelligent adult to such a state is ‘a subject of misfortune.’ It is because individuals now pity him even though he does not mind his state amid doubts of his short or long-term existence. Therefore, the contented infant suffering misfortune views are no different from the death objections, so Nagel bases his happiness on a dry diaper and a full stomach (66).
Nagel asserts that objections can be invalid because they fall under fallacious supposition regarding the time-based association amid the subjects of adversity and the constituted conditions (66). In such a case, human beings hardly concentrate on the oversized baby in front of them but consider an individual as their current identity, and the reduction of their condition and the invalidation of their natural growth establish a flawlessly logical misfortune. Nagel states that such a case should convince individuals that limiting the evils and goods that can befall an individual to non-relational details ascribable to him at certain moments is illogical. Such limitations exclude degeneration cases, the good deals of failure and success, and other life facets that possess a process’s trait.
In addition, several evils and goods are irreducibly relational, traits of the individual’s circumstance or temporal and spatial boundaries (Nagel 66). Numerous things happen within the life of a human being but outside their physical boundaries (body and mind). However, Nagel asserts that misfortunes of betrayal, deception, and being despised cross these boundaries. In other words, breaking a deathbed promise is wrong because it could be an injury to a dead man, and so, probably, it makes time an alternative to distance. According to Nagel (66), the mental degeneration case depicts the evil that relies on the disparity between reality and its potent alternatives. Thus, human beings are a subject of good and evil just as they hope they may not be contented or realize possibilities due to their suffering and enjoying capacities.
Meanwhile, when an individual dies, the corpse remains, and any encounter with mishap is unsuitable for pity. However, the individual is dead, but if he could have been alive, he would continue living and possessing every good thing in life. According to Nagel, applying this death account to a dementia case could imply that even though the temporal and spatial locations of the patient are vivid, locating the misfortune could be difficult (67). Only a contented human can claim that his life is over for good, not his current and past condition constituting his misfortunes. Likewise, if a loss happens, anyone with existence and a specific temporal and spatial location will suffer it regardless of the loss. Correspondingly, the news that Beethoven did not sire any children may have made him regret or made the world sad, and for the not-sired children, it is not a misfortune. Nagel believes that humans are fortunate to be born. However, if illness and good are assignable to an embryo or the disparate gametes duo, it is assertable that not being born is an adversity (67). All the same, Nagel’s primary concern is that life makes known human beings the things that death will eventually rob. Furthermore, while alive, human beings can appreciate the goods, but in death, an infiltrator cannot appreciate vision (69).
On the other hand, Barry, the Bakersfield College Professor Emeritus, considered whether death was bad in his prime, Philosophical Thinking about Death and Dying (Messerly). His major focus is on the goodness and badness of death. According to him, death is good, following the Epicurus maxim: ‘When I am, death is not; and when death is, I am not.’ Epicurus’ teachings revolved around the fright of death and gods and panic in general, but specifically the fear of evil. The primary goal of speculative thinking was to use reason to liberate human beings from fear. Presumably, in materialistic psychology, the mind has atoms that death can disperse. For that reason, death is a good thing because it does not affect human beings, yet humans lack sensation upon death, and being dead is also not bad for humans. However, Epicurus’s ideology does not support the idea that the dying procedure or outlook cannot be evil for humans, nor does he refute that humans might desire life to death. In short, Epicurus argues that being dead is good for the dead individual. Epicurus’s argument revolves around two distinct assumptions: experience and existence requirements. The former requirement briefly concerns harm that an individual experience is something bad for the individual; something is only bad if experienced by an individual; death is a no-experience state; hence, it cannot be bad for anyone. The latter requirement is briefly about an individual experiencing harm if they are present; a dead person does not exist; hence, they cannot face any harm.
In comparison, Epicurus and Nagel introduce two perspectives about death, whether it is good or evil. Nagel refers to death as an infiltrator, but Epicurus describes it as a good thing for those already dead. It is because Nagel thinks that death deprives the dead of goods of life since it makes individuals subjects of misfortunes by reducing them to nothing once they die and making them no longer capable of fulfilling their duties and performing their desirable activities as earlier. Contrariwise, Epicurus believes that the dead do not exist and cannot experience any harm. Epicurus’ argument assumption counter nullifies Nagel’s notion that death deprives an individual of goods because the dead do not exist and cannot face harm. Nagel attempts to prove that the dead can be harmed by experiencing the harm directly and the society, family, and friends also indirectly experiencing it. In other words, even if the dead are numb, as Epicurus puts it, those alive or the bereaved will certainly feel the impact of the harm. As a result, it justifies Epicurus’ assumptions about the experience and existence of requirements within the life and death scenarios. Even though Nagel thinks that the dead miss out on life privileges, he still acknowledges that there are individuals who have lived a fulfilled life before dying, which does not make them victims of a deprived life. Therefore, the dead cannot experience anything and are not victims of any death repercussions due to their non-existence, regardless of their deathbed wishes. However, the families, friends, and society of the bereaved can indirectly be affected by death because they exist and can experience harm, ascertaining that death is bad for the living because of losing a loved one.
References
Messerly, John. “Is Death Bad for Us?” Reason and Meaning, 15 Feb. 2014, https://reasonandmeaning.com/2014/02/15/is-death-bad-for-us/. Accessed 27 Nov. 2023.
Nagel, Thomas. “Death.” 1979.
write