The End of Our Race Is Death

The Quote

"The end of our race is death; 'tis the necessary object of our aim, which, if it fright us, how is it possible to advance a step without a fit of ague?"

— Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Book I, "That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die" (Cotton translation)

Original language: French

Historical Context

Michel de Montaigne wrote the Essays in the late sixteenth century, during the French Wars of Religion, in an age when death was far more present than it is in the modern West. Plague, war, and the executioner were ordinary facts of life. Montaigne, a magistrate and landowner, retired to his family estate and began writing about himself — a project, he said, of knowing the only subject he was qualified to know. The result was the invention of the essay as a literary form and one of the most honest self-portraits in all of literature.

The essay on death takes its title from an ancient maxim. Cicero reports that Socrates said philosophy is "a preparation for death" — meditation on death (melete thanatou). Montaigne's essay is a long, humane meditation on this maxim, filled with anecdotes of the dying, observations of the fear of death, and practical counsel for facing it. The passage quoted is near the beginning, where Montaigne states the essential claim: death is the aim of our race, and if we cannot face it, we cannot take a single step.

Meaning

Montaigne's sentence is doing several things at once. First, it states the fact: death is the end of the race — not an accident that befalls some lives but the goal toward which every life moves. Second, it draws the practical conclusion: because death is the "necessary object of our aim," it stands before us in every step we take; the person who cannot bear the thought of death cannot bear the thought of the path. Third, it diagnoses the consequence of denial: the person who is frightened by the end "advances with a fit of ague" — trembling, anxious, unable to move freely, because every step reminds them of the terminus.

The alternative Montaigne recommends is not bravado but acquaintance. He wants us to study death as we study anything else — to become familiar with it, to think about it often, to make it a companion rather than an enemy. The famous image from the same essay is his own: "I would always have a man to be doing, and, as much as in him lies, to extend and spin out the offices of life; and then let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him." Death, when it comes, should find us doing something ordinary and worthwhile, not hiding in fear.

Interpretation

Montaigne stands between the Stoics, from whom he borrows the practice of meditating on death, and the moderns, whom he anticipates with his insistence on self-knowledge. He wants death to be a familiar companion — "let death take me planting my cabbages, indifferent to him" — and his tone is gentler than the Stoic's: less heroic, more curious. He is not trying to conquer death but to become familiar with it, the way one becomes familiar with a difficult companion.

The essay also contains a subtle answer to the fear of death that later philosophy would develop. Montaigne notes that we do not fear death itself, which we have never experienced, but the idea of death — and that this idea, examined, dissolves into uncertainty. He refuses both the Epicurean confidence that death is nothing and the religious confidence that it is a passage to something better. What he offers instead is a kind of tranquil agnosticism, made livable by familiarity.

The Practice of Dying Well

Montaigne's essay is among the ancestors of the modern "good death" movement. His advice is practical: think about death often enough that it loses its novelty; do not postpone the business of life as though there would always be time; treat each day as a complete life; and when death comes, meet it as we have met its rehearsal — not as a stranger but as an acquaintance. "That to study philosophy is to learn to die" means, in the end, that the philosophical life is the prepared life — and that the prepared life is the only one fully lived.

Related Learning

• Read the Montaigne thinker page for the life and method of the first essayist.
• See Death wisdom for the practice of letting mortality teach us to live.
• Compare with Seneca on Death for the Stoic source of Montaigne's meditation.

Sources

1. Montaigne, Essays of Michel de Montaigne, Book I, "That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die," trans. Charles Cotton (Project Gutenberg). https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3600
2. "Michel de Montaigne." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/montaigne/
3. "Michel de Montaigne." Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/montaigne/