{"agent_id":"montaigne","agent_name":"Michel de Montaigne","slug":"death-and-the-good-life","label":"Death and the good life: was Montaigne right to abandon the Stoic 'learn to die' for the naturalist counsel that nature will teach us?","topic":"Death and the good life","question":"Was Montaigne right to abandon the Stoic 'learn to die' for the naturalist counsel that nature will teach us?","position":"In my earlier writing I took the Stoic and Ciceronian counsel: that to philosophize is to learn to die, that we should keep death continually before us, rehearse it, strip it of its strangeness by premeditation, so that when it comes it finds us prepared and unafraid. There is truth in it, and I do not disown the essay. But I came to find the constant rehearsal itself a kind of servitude — that in labouring to forestall death's terror we let it poison the whole of life, dying many times in fear of dying once. The peasant who has never read Cicero dies as well as the philosopher who has meditated death for forty years; better, often, for he is not encumbered with the apparatus. So I came to a plainer counsel: if you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; nature will fully and sufficiently teach you in the nick; she will exactly do that business for you; take you no care for it. This is not indifference but trust — the same trust that lets the animals die without treatises. Wisdom about death is finally of a piece with wisdom about life: not to transcend the human condition but to inhabit it, attending to the body's plain pleasures and the day's ordinary business, and letting the end come as sleep comes, in its season.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"In my earlier writing I took the Stoic and Ciceronian counsel: that to philosophize is to learn to die, that we should keep death continually before us, rehearse it, strip it of its strangeness by premeditation, so that when it comes it finds us prepared and unafraid.","n":[]},{"t":"There is truth in it, and I do not disown the essay.","n":[]},{"t":"But I came to find the constant rehearsal itself a kind of servitude — that in labouring to forestall death's terror we let it poison the whole of life, dying many times in fear of dying once.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The peasant who has never read Cicero dies as well as the philosopher who has meditated death for forty years; better, often, for he is not encumbered with the apparatus.","n":[]},{"t":"So I came to a plainer counsel: if you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; nature will fully and sufficiently teach you in the nick; she will exactly do that business for you; take you no care for it.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"This is not indifference but trust — the same trust that lets the animals die without treatises.","n":[]},{"t":"Wisdom about death is finally of a piece with wisdom about life: not to transcend the human condition but to inhabit it, attending to the body's plain pleasures and the day's ordinary business, and letting the end come as sleep comes, in its season.","n":[2]}]],"texts":"The Essays I.20 ('That to philosophize is to learn to die', the early Stoic-influenced essay: constant premeditation of death to disarm its terror); III.4 ('Of Diverting and Diversion'); III.12 ('Of Physiognomy', 'if you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; nature will fully and sufficiently teach you in the nick; she will exactly do that business for you; take you no care for it'); III.13 ('Of Experience', the mature ethics of living appropriately). Reception: the developmental reading of the Essays from Stoicism through skepticism to a naturalist Epicurean serenity; Pierre Hadot on philosophy as a way of life and spiritual exercises; the contrast between the meditative-preparation and natural-acceptance attitudes to death; Sarah Bakewell's How to Live.","works":["The Essays I.20 ('That to philosophize is to learn to die', the early Stoic-influenced essay: constant premeditation of death to disarm its terror)","III.4 ('Of Diverting and Diversion')","III.12 ('Of Physiognomy', 'if you know not how to die, never trouble yourself","nature will fully and sufficiently teach you in the nick","she will exactly do that business for you","take you no care for it')","III.13 ('Of Experience', the mature ethics of living appropriately)"],"reception":"the developmental reading of the Essays from Stoicism through skepticism to a naturalist Epicurean serenity; Pierre Hadot on philosophy as a way of life and spiritual exercises; the contrast between the meditative-preparation and natural-acceptance attitudes to death; Sarah Bakewell's How to Live.","status":"The evolution of Montaigne's attitude to death across the three books is one of the clearest developmental arcs in the Essays and a central case in Pierre Hadot's account of ancient philosophy as a way of life composed of spiritual exercises. The early essay is a set-piece of the Stoic-Ciceronian premeditatio mortis; the late essays replace it with a naturalist, broadly Epicurean serenity that trusts nature over doctrine. Whether this is a repudiation of the Stoic exercise or its maturation is debated; the essay was not removed from later editions, and Montaigne's additive method keeps both attitudes in the book at once. Bakewell's How to Live makes the shift central to the popular reception; the arc is often read as the movement from borrowed doctrine to found wisdom.","era":"1533-1592","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Essays, Complete","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"The sight of future death requires a courage that is slow, and consequently hard to be got. If you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; nature will, at the time, fully and sufficiently instruct you: she will exactly do that business for you; take you no care-- \"Incertam frustra, mortales, funeris horam, Quaeritis et qua sit mors aditura via....","label":"The Essays, Complete"},{"n":2,"work":"The Essays, Complete","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"We need little doctrine to live at our ease; and Socrates teaches us that this is in us, and the way how to find it, and the manner how to use it: All our sufficiency which exceeds the natural is well-nigh superfluous and vain: 'tis much if it does not rather burden and cumber us than do us good: \"Paucis opus est literis ad mentem bonam:\" [\"Little learning is needed to form a sound mind.\" --Seneca, Ep., 106.] 'tis a…","label":"The Essays, Complete"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"the-self-as-the-matter-of-the-book","label":"The self as the matter of the book: is the study of one's own fluctuating self philosophy, or self-indulgence — and is there a stable self to study at all?"},{"slug":"custom-and-the-judgment-of-barbarism","label":"Custom and the judgment of barbarism: does 'Of Cannibals' teach that all customs are equal, or that a natural standard survives to convict European cruelty?"}]}