Can saying "death has no subject it occurs to" be defined as a category mistake?
Is death a misfortune?
Nagel (and commonsense) says yes. Death deprives
us of the praemia vitae, the ‘prizes of life.’
Epicurus/ Lucretius say no, because there is no
subject in existence to experience this deprivation or
harm. But is this a category mistake in that in order to experience death you need an experiencer to experience it when in reality death, in its own category, is something which doesn't need experience. It's almost like an appropriation of life experiences on to the concept of death.
Nagel (and commonsense) says yes. Death deprives
us of the praemia vitae, the ‘prizes of life.’
Epicurus/ Lucretius say no, because there is no
subject in existence to experience this deprivation or
harm. But is this a category mistake in that in order to experience death you need an experiencer to experience it when in reality death, in its own category, is something which doesn't need experience. It's almost like an appropriation of life experiences on to the concept of death.
Comments (7)
If I sent you looking for a wrecked train, would you look for a wrecked car on your drive? If I sent you to look for a lost boy, would you look for a lost girl instead? Or maybe the wrecked car?
Again, if death befalls all of us, how can it be countenanced as a misfortune.
A wrecked car is simply a wrecked car, it is not a car. It is in a new category of its own. "wrecked" is not a variant of a type of form the car is "assuming" much in the same way a dead person is not a form in which the person is "assuming" in form and time.
It can be countenanced as a misfortune because death deprives
us of the praemia vitae.
Once again, death does no depriving. It simply is, it becomes, just as those who live become...dead.
You say, "A wrecked car is simply a wrecked car. It is not a car." Wrong, it is only a wreck...just like all other wrecks that are not what they were prior to the wrecking. At least, as I understand you, that is what you are using for logic. There are no dead people, just dead, or The Dead. So, we can group rotting corpses of all kinds and species, The Dead, into one broad category, indistinguishable. We can't talk of The Dead because they have no identity and therefor no names are useful. We might talk of the memories of The Departed, but we can't call them human, men or women, and not even distinguish between those advanced in age and those who died during childbirth.
To me, a misfortune is something you endure, consciously, for which you must suffer to some extent. We don't suffer death. We experience it while it is happening, however fleetingly or prolonged the experience may be, but when we actually die, when we 'get' death, we don't know it (stories of bright lights and voices notwithstanding). We lose consciousness and die, and the rest is really irrelevant, be it bodily damage, autopsy, dragging by heels through the streets, hanged, quartered, drawn, head displayed on a spike...it's nothing like a misfortune to the dead 'person'. To that person's loved ones, well that's another matter.
That's right, they no longer exist. the funeral is for the memory of who they were.
I see now I misinterpreted "the loss of death" for the "process of death". I thought epicurus was saying death can not occur to anyone, but it is purely about the aftermath of death. Thanks
To the Universe death is just a change, all the elements that used to be a given person, remain inside Universe, even in death person can not fall out of the face of Universe, he's inside our planet, Solar system, galaxy, Universe. We can plant a tree by his grave, and his genetic material will travel into the fruit that someone will eat, may be a human, may be bird, may be a critter. In older times people used to give such fruit to pregnant women, for reincarnation of the deceased, for thousands of years death remains to be mysterious act. Death still holds plenty of mysteries, at times showing us that dead body is just a broken mechanism, and under certain procedures can become alive again. I imagine that even when people learn to prolong life to last thousands of years, or longer, they are still volnurable to the accidents and catastrophs. in relation to overcoming effects of aging and death humans are lesser than in a stone age, we are really beasts in this regard. Humans do not have capacity to store the deceased bodies of all the humans or their genetic material for future scientific progress, to reverse death of every single individual, to at least double the length of life. Death appears as misfortune, as a symbol of our miniscule capabilities to change it from fatal event to simply interruption or temporary delay of life.