Montaigne on Learning How to Die

Michel de Montaigne, a French writer who lived from 1533 to 1592, helped establish the essay as a form. One of his best-known essays is about death. Over his life, his thinking about it changed. This article follows that change.

What did he argue?

That we should not run from the thought of death. His essay is titled after a saying from the Roman writer Cicero: to philosophize is to learn to die. According to the Internet Shakespeare Editions introduction, it is his most Stoic essay, and he published it in 1580 in the first edition of his Essays. Like his contemporaries, Montaigne used the word “philosophy” to mean Stoicism. The Stoics taught that facing death calmly is part of living well. See Stoicism and Death.

The essay offers two ideas for why philosophy and death go together, as a Collège de France lecture summary explains. Either philosophy prepares us for death because it resembles it, by drawing the mind away from the body. Or it helps us overcome fear of death, as a kind of training. Montaigne urged readers to do the opposite of what most people do, which is to avoid thinking about death. Instead, he said, we should take away its advantage by getting used to it and facing it steadily.

Was he telling people to give up on life?

No. The Internet Shakespeare Editions introduction says Montaigne is not counseling resignation or self-denial but moderation and sober realism. Death is unavoidable, so the reasonable response is to accept it and live with that in mind.

What shaped his thinking?

Loss, and a near-death experience. Hermitary notes that Montaigne learned from the deaths of his father, his brother, his best friend, and five of his six children. A Collège de France lecture mentions a fall from his horse, and a summary of Sarah Bakewell’s biography How to Live says it left him unconscious. According to that summary, he faced the prospect of dying and found it less frightening than he had expected. A column in The New European adds that after the accident Montaigne wrote about death’s ordinariness, and how the body simply shuts down.

How did his view change?

He moved away from the idea that philosophy should train us to beat the fear of death. The Collège de France summary says that from 1580 onward, Montaigne moved away from that view. Philosopher Peter Levine notes that his last essay, “Of Experience,” revisits the topic with more equanimity, even though Montaigne was by then old and near death himself. Levine’s reading is that, in a sense, a young Montaigne who knew he would one day feel calmer would have had less reason to fear. Hermitary argues that Montaigne did learn to die, through the deaths around him and his own near-death.

Why read him now?

Because he treats death as part of ordinary life. He does not promise to remove fear. He offers a way to look at it. For other attempts, see Memento Mori and Epicurus: Why He Said Death Is Nothing to Us.

Where can I learn more?

See What Do Philosophers Say About Death? and Death Anxiety: What Psychology Says About the Fear of Dying.