Wittgenstein on Death
The cover of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.


Ludwig Wittgenstein said the following of death in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus:

'Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits.'



Death, then, is merely the end of life—a timeless, unheralded non-event. And immortality or a soul solves nothing: it just serves to extend the limits of our lives and our current worlds. A similar take was held and expressed brilliantly by Ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus:

'Death is nothing to us. When we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not. All sensation and consciousness ends with death and therefore in death there is neither pleasure nor pain. The fear of death arises from the belief that in death, there is awareness.'