Why Does Montaigne Say to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die?

Quick Answer

Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) opens his essay "That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die" with a line he traces to Cicero: "To study philosophy is nothing but to prepare oneself to die." Montaigne makes the claim his own. He argues that the reason most people are terrified of death is that they refuse to think about it; death remains an unfamiliar, shapeless horror precisely because it is never examined. The remedy is philosophical meditation on mortality — not morbid brooding, but the kind of clear-eyed familiarity that strips death of its imagined terrors. Once we have learned to think about death, we are no longer its slaves, and we are free to live.

What Is

The phrase "to philosophize is to learn to die" has two related meanings in Montaigne's essay. The first is practical: philosophy is the discipline that prepares us for the one event none of us can avoid. The second is ethical: learning to die well is the condition of living well, because the person who is afraid of death is ruled by the future, always clinging, never fully present.

Montaigne's method is characteristic. He does not argue from a system of metaphysics; he reflects, quotes, digresses, and draws on experience. He assembles examples of famous deaths — Socrates, who drank the hemlock calmly; Cato, who took his own life rather than submit; peasants who die without drama — to show that death is not uniformly dreadful and that attitude, not circumstance, determines much of our terror. He also reports his own accident: thrown from a horse, he briefly lost consciousness and later reflected that the nearest he had come to death was not painful or frightening at all.

The essay is neither Stoic sternness nor Epicurean calculation in pure form, though it borrows from both. Montaigne's tone is skeptical and humane. He does not promise that reasoning will abolish fear for everyone; he offers meditation as a way of becoming familiar enough with death that it no longer governs us.

Historical Background

Montaigne wrote the essay in the 1570s, during the French Wars of Religion, in a world where plague, war, and sudden death were everyday facts. He retired from public life at thirty-seven to his family estate, where he wrote the Essays — a new literary form in which a man tries to know himself honestly.

The idea that philosophy is a preparation for death is ancient. Plato's Phaedo presents Socrates saying that genuine philosophers practice dying, because the soul attains wisdom only when freed from the body. The Hellenistic schools transformed this into therapy: Epicurus taught that death is nothing to us, and the Stoics recommended daily meditation on mortality. What Montaigne adds is intimacy. Where Socrates argues and Epicurus reasons, Montaigne confesses — he writes about his own body, his own fear, his own narrow escape, and in doing so makes the meditation on death a personal practice rather than a doctrinal exercise.

His essay also reflects the Renaissance recovery of classical texts, especially Seneca, whose consolations and letters Montaigne quotes constantly. But Montaigne is no mere collector of commonplaces: he tests the ancient remedies against his own experience and keeps what works.

Key Arguments

Familiarity dissolves terror. Montaigne's central psychological claim is that we fear what we do not know, and that death is unknown to us largely because we avoid it. "Why are you afraid of your last day?" he asks. "It does not count any more towards your progress than any other day." By thinking about death regularly — imagining it, describing it, even joking about it — we turn it from a monster into a fact.

Not being dead yet is not the same as living. Montaigne argues that the fear of death paradoxically wastes the life it is meant to protect. The person who is always saving life for later never lives it; the person who is always anxious about the end cannot enjoy the means. Learning to die is therefore the cure for this self-defeating anxiety.

Nature shows us the way. Montaigne observes that other animals face death without dread, and that simple people often die more calmly than philosophers. This is not an argument that ignorance is bliss; it is an argument that much of our terror is cultivated rather than given, and that it can therefore be unlearned.

The sovereignty of the present. The payoff of Montaigne's practice is presentness. If death is not a future horror but a fact to be carried with us, then the only time we truly possess is now. "We do not know where death awaits us," he writes, "so let us wait for it everywhere." The thought of death becomes a spur to attention, not a source of paralysis.

Contemporary Relevance

Montaigne's essay anticipates much of the modern death awareness movement. The hospice and palliative care traditions, the revival of memento mori practices, and the popular literature on "living with the end in mind" all repeat his insight: avoiding the thought of death does not make us safer, it makes us less alive. When Atul Gawande writes in Being Mortal that we have made death a medical failure rather than a human fact, he is describing the very evasion Montaigne diagnosed four centuries earlier.

Contemporary existential psychotherapy, particularly the work of Irvin Yalom, likewise holds that facing finitude is a precondition of authentic living — a claim Montaigne would recognize. What remains distinctive about Montaigne is the warmth of his approach: he recommends the meditation on death not as a grim duty but as a way of making life more vivid, more honest, and more fully one's own. This page is philosophical and educational; it is not a substitute for the care of physicians, palliative teams, or counselors when death approaches.

Sources

1. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Michel de Montaigne.
2. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Death.
3. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Seneca.
4. Michel de Montaigne, The Essays (1580–1595), "That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die," trans. M. A. Screech (Penguin, 2003).
5. Seneca, On the Shortness of Life (49 CE), trans. C. D. N. Costa (Penguin, 2005).

Related Topics

• What Is Memento Mori? — the practice of keeping death before the mind as a discipline of attention.
• Why Do We Fear Death? — the diagnosis of death anxiety that Montaigne's meditation aims to cure.
• How Do Stoics View Death? — the Stoic framework on which Montaigne draws.
• Montaigne — the essayist who made the meditation on death a personal literary practice.
• How to Prepare for Death Philosophically? — practical exercises for learning to die in Montaigne's sense.