Montaigne famously disavows this essay in name, writing in his last two essays that the point of philosophy is to teach us how to live, not die. Even so, it’s one of his most interesting early essays and not as definitive as the title would suggest.
He suggests that philosophy could either be about preparing our soul to accept death and enter into the afterlife or its about helping us find joy in our lives and is therefore focused on living. He’s coy about coming down firmly on one side here, and he seems to disavow the immortality of the soul in the process.
It’s also one of his strongest statements for a form of hedonism.
Even in virtue our ultimate aim – no matter what they say – is pleasure. I enjoy bashing people’s ears with that word which runs so strongly counter to their minds. When pleasure is taken to mean the most profound delight and an exceeding happiness it is a better companion to virtue than anything else; and rightly so. Such pleasure is no less seriously pleasurable for being more lively, taut, robust and virile.
He wasn’t writing about sex in that paragraph, but gets to it soon enough. The prose is tortured here, he gets more comfortable with the subject as the essays progress:
There is that lower voluptuous pleasure which can only be said to have a disputed claim to the name not a privileged right to it. I find it less pure of lets and hindrances than virtue. Apart from having a savour which is fleeting, fluid and perishable, it has its vigils, fasts and travails, its blood and its sweat; it also has its own peculiar sufferings, which are sharp in so many different ways and accompanied by a satiety of such weight that it amounts to repentance.
He then argues that pursuing virtuous forms of pleasure is exactly the same as pursuing sex, most explicitly in the way that the pursuit of all pleasures, and the obstacles necessary to overcome to obtain that pleasure, is what gives us the greatest joy:
In every pleasure known to Man the very pursuit of it is pleasurable: the undertaking savours of the quality of the object it has in view; it effectively constitutes a large proportion of it and is consubstantial with it. There is a happiness and blessedness radiating from virtue; they fill all that appertains to her and every approach to her, from the first way in to the very last barrier.
From here, Montaigne switches from the subject of pleasure to death, and he’s very blunt on the subject – if you fear death, you’re screwed, because it is coming for you, and probably a lot sooner than you assume. His answer is to simply look for ways to find pleasure and avoid pain while you are alive, no matter how that might look to those who disdain pleasure:
If there were any way at all of sheltering from Death’s blows – even by crawling under the skin of a calf – I am not the man to recoil from it. It is enough for me to spend my time contentedly. I deal myself the best hand I can, and then accept it. It can be as inglorious or as unexemplary as you please: “I would rather be delirious or a dullard if my faults pleased me, or at least deceived me, rather than to be wise and snarling.”
But Montaigne admits that it’s not possible to conquer death this way – and instead we need to demystify death so as to make it less shocking to ourselves and to our loved ones when it finally arrives:
Let us deprive death of its strangeness; let us frequent it, let us get used to it; let us have nothing more often in mind than death. At every instant let us evoke it in our imagination under all its aspects. Whenever a horse stumbles, a tile falls or a pin pricks however slightly, let us at once chew over this thought: ‘Supposing that was death itself?’ With that, let us brace ourselves and make an effort. In the midst of joy and feasting let our refrain be one which recalls our human condition. Let us never be carried away by pleasure so strongly that we fail to recall occasionally how many are the ways in which that joy of ours is subject to death or how many are the fashions in which death threatens to snatch it away.
All of this sounds like strong, reasonable advice, but then Montaigne goes even farther:
We do not know where death awaits us: so let us wait for it everywhere. To practise death is to practise freedom. A man who has learned how to die has unlearned how to be a slave. Knowing how to die gives us freedom from subjection and constraint. Life has no evil for him who has thoroughly understood that loss of life is not an evil.
This is very stoic and just a bit too far for me to accept. I agree that we need to demystify the experience and prepare for death, but practicing death? Freeing ourselves from death? But this quote does reasonate with me on many levels:
Being a man who broods over his thoughts and stores them up inside him, I am always just about as ready as I can be: when death does suddenly appear, it will bear no new warning for me. As far as we possibly can we must always have our boots on, ready to go; above all we should take care to have no outstanding business with anyone else.
I can think of no greater sadness than dying without letting people know just how much they meant to you in life, and I applaud Montaigne for agreeing that it makes no sense to brood such thoughts and keep them bottled in your head. But Montaigne has so many thoughts about death that it gets overwhelming.
He wants to be engaged in some kind of work right up to the point of his death – I agree completely. But then he talks about how much he likes to enquire about what people were like at their point of death and would like to write about that subject, and I recoil from those thoughts. He also hopes that a physical decline will make death seem more tolerable for him at the end … which I both understand and don’t want to embrace, for reasons I cannot quite articulate.
But I do like this thought, and will let it cap this essay:
But if you have never learned how to use life, if life is useless to you, what does it matter if you have lost it? What do you still want it for?
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