Stoic Reflections on Thomas Nagel’s Account of Death

Abstract

Is death the greatest of all the evils that man can experience, or can one perceive the end of her existence in a neutral way? For Thomas Nagel, death is an evil because it brings to an end not only the goods of life but also the future possibilities of an individual. He attempts to prove this thesis by responding to three main criticisms of his position. First, how can anything be bad if it is not experienced as bad? If something is bad doesn’t there have to be a subject of experience? Secondly, if death is bad who is it bad for—that is, who is the subject who experiences death? Finally, if we don’t find the billions of years of non-existence before our birth disturbing, why do we find the billions of years after our death worrying? This paper will briefly summarize Nagel’s argument that death is the greatest of evils, while also arguing that his position is implausible because the responses he proposes to the above-mentioned criticisms do not satisfactorily answer the critiques. This paper will also advocate the stoic view that the nature of our reality is such that everything decays with time; nothing lasts forever, and therefore death is a natural part of life with no essentially good or bad qualities.