Cicero on the fact that death doesn’t deprive us of anything
Oct 25, 2023
The podcast discusses Cicero's arguments on the fear of death, highlighting how grieving over the dead is about ourselves. It also explores the concept of leaving a legacy as a form of immortality.
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Death Does Not Deprive the Dead
Death does not deprive the deceased of anything because they no longer have consciousness.
Our grief is self-centered, rooted in our pain, not in the condition of the dead person.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Reshape Emotions About Death
Challenge thoughts that the dead are missing life experiences to ease grief.
Reshape patterns of thinking, as emotions are cognitive and can be changed.
insights INSIGHT
Legacy as True Immortality
We achieve a form of immortality by leaving a legacy beyond our physical life.
Our efforts to create laws, children, and monuments reflect this desire to be remembered.
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“Who is there, then, that does not lament the loss of his friends, principally from imagining them deprived of the conveniences of life? Take away this opinion, and you remove with it all grief; for no one is afflicted merely on account of a loss sustained by himself.
Perhaps we may be sorry, and grieve a little; but that bitter lamentation and those mournful tears have their origin in our apprehensions that he whom we loved is deprived of all the advantages of life, and is sensible of his loss. …
Shall the industrious husbandman plant trees the fruit of which he shall never see? And shall not the great man found laws, institutions, and a republic? What does the procreation of children imply, and our care to continue our names, and our adoptions, and our scrupulous exactness in drawing up wills, and the inscriptions on monuments, and panegyrics, but that our thoughts run on futurity?”
(Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, I.13-14)
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