Smith on the way we handle death

Smith mentions our tendency to grieve for those who have passed away, and to believe that “we can never feel too much for those who have suffered so dreadful a calamity” (1.1.13). We feel so much emotion, Smith seems to think, because we put ourselves and our consciousness into the situation of those who have died. We think about how we would feel buried underground, struggling to breathe, never to see the light of day again.

But in actuality, Smith points out, the dead cannot feel in this way at all. If we thought about it, we would realize that “The happiness of the dead … is affected by none of these circumstances” (1.1.13). But yet, we continue to think of the dead and how miserable they must be, and to sympathize accordingly.

“It is from this very illusion of the imagination”, Smith goes on to say, “that the foresight of our own dissolution is so terrible to us, and that the idea of those circumstances, which undoubtedly can give us no pain when we are dead, makes us miserable while we are alive” (1.1.13). By calling this use of our imagination an “illusion”, and by pointing out that there is a disconnect between this strange exercise of our sympathy and reality, my instinct is that Smith is trying to make the point that the way that we handle the deaths of others – and the way that we think about our own impending demise – is misguided.

However, at the end of this paragraph on death, Smith seems to pivot, concluding with the following declaration: “And from thence arises one of the most important principles in human nature, the dread of death, the great poison to the happiness, but the great restraint upon the injustice of mankind, which while it afflicts and mortifies the individual, guards and protects the society” (1.1.13). So, which is it, Smith? Is our conception of death a fallacy and an illusion? Or, somehow, in the way that it restrains men, is it one of the better things to ever happen to society? Or, maybe these two things are not mutually exclusive, and the way that we have and continue to handle death in society is one of the better mistaken beliefs we’ve ever held.