Welcome back, last week I covered some ideas discussed in Seneca’s letters to a friend of his. I’ve now finished the book which had several great letters that focused on interesting topics. Over the next coming weeks, I will go through the letters which I felt were worth talking about.

Thoughts about death aren’t regular in these letters but they do come up more than rarely. Letter 54, in its last page or so, does just that. It gives us insight into the stoic philosopher’s attitude towards this topic.

When I read it, I instantly clicked with what he was saying, mainly because I have seen it referred to in a similar way before. A great line which really encapsulates the core idea that he is touching on, goes as follows

“Death is just not being. What this is like I already know. It will be the same after me as it was before me.”

It says a lot doesn’t it, and that’s even with few words. In the letter he is detailing to his friend Lucilius, how he was recently ill and how he wasn’t too worried about dying. The main reason why he feels that us humans shouldn’t fear death is because we have done it before.

He classifies as death as not being, this is different from existence, which is about being. Before he was born, he was in a state of non being, then life happened and his death is just a return to non being. Having gone through it once already, and having no indication that the time spent in nonexistence, was tormenting. He concludes that death and the subsequent non being, isn’t something to be feared.

Seneca deploys a clever analogue to explore this belief further. He asks, whether a lamp is worse off from being put out, as opposed to before it was lit at all. He links humans to the allusion by saying, “we like lamps, are lit and then put out”. However, he does mention that during this period of life we are bound to suffer, but that’s much of what makes up the human experience.

I believe this is a powerful belief to hold, it isn’t meant to be taken as a depressing observation about life and death. It is meant to encourage the holder to make the most of their time, which is something regularly extolled by Seneca throughout his letters; and to do that, one must be unafraid of what follows when our time is up.

Lastly, it isn’t about trying to seek death out. Instead; knowing that at some point all of us will go, it is about shifting our attitudes towards an aligned acceptance of this fact.

Thanks again my gang of Hedites