How Should We Learn to Live and Die? Montaigne on Philosophy and Experience

Montaigne: Self, Doubt and Difference · Episode 2 of 3

Does thinking about death set us free, or keep us trapped by fear? The second Montaigne conversation asks what philosophy is for, moving from preparation for death to education, bodily experience and the ordinary business of living.

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Preparing for what cannot be avoided

In That to Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die, Montaigne explores a familiar philosophical promise: thinking about mortality might loosen its grip on us. Fear can make a future event govern the present long before it arrives. Rehearsing death is meant to restore freedom to the person who must still live.

But the method contains a difficulty. A mind constantly preparing for death might find itself unable to attend to anything else. The practical question is whether anticipation reduces fear or gives it a permanent place at the centre of experience. Montaigne’s changing emphases make that question more interesting than a simple instruction to be brave.

Learning judgement, not just answers

Of the Education of Children shifts attention from how much a pupil remembers to what the pupil can do with learning. Borrowed wisdom must be tested and digested. Conversation and comparison matter because they require a learner to encounter reasons other than their own.

This is a demanding account of education. Reciting an authority can leave judgement untouched; understanding an argument requires asking how it applies and where it might fail. Philosophy should bear on conduct, pleasure and choices. Its value cannot be measured entirely by the ability to repeat a lesson.

The ordinary life of philosophy

In Of Experience, Montaigne returns to appetite, illness, ageing and the particularity of bodily life. Experience does not yield a rule that fits every case. It makes us aware of variation, including the variation within ourselves.

Read beside the earlier meditation on death, this brings a different emphasis into view. Learning to live may involve less heroic rehearsal and more attention to the day we actually inhabit. That is not an escape from mortality. It asks whether accepting our limits can help us enjoy life without demanding mastery over it.

Read alongside us

Montaigne, That to Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die (I.20), Of the Education of Children (I.26), and Of Experience (III.13). Numbering follows Screech and Frame; some online editions use I.19 and I.25 for the first two essays.

Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Essays. Translated by M. A. Screech. London: Penguin, 1993. See also Donald M. Frame’s translation, Stanford University Press, 1958.

Read the complete Cotton-Hazlitt translation free at Project Gutenberg.