How should we learn to live and die?

Does thinking about death set us free, or keep us trapped by fear? In the second episode of our Montaigne series, Samuel Woodall and Jack Thomson explore philosophy as preparation for death, the relationship between virtue and pleasure, and an education that develops judgement rather than merely filling the memory. We then ask how attention to ordinary life and bodily limits changes Montaigne’s approach to mortality.

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Montaigne, Episode 2 of 3.

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Why Practise Dying At All

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Welcome back to Beyond the Text with me, Samuel Woodall. Me, Jack Thompson. We've been looking at Montene, and in this session, we're going to be looking at how should we learn to live and die? Does philosophy defeat the fear of death by rehearsing it or by teaching us to inhabit ordinary life? Imagine knowing the date of our deaths, Jack. What would that knowledge produce? Would it be freedom, obsession, or paralysis, do you think? I think for me it'd be it would be obsession for me. What about yourself?

SPEAKER_01 0:41

Yes. But I I think I think I think a lot of people would resonate with that. I think um, regardless of their religious convictions, something about knowing when one would die that would give one clarity of what really matters, would would inform them exactly how much time they have to put their affairs in order. They I think it would be very sobering for many people.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

Yeah, no,

Premeditation Of Death As Freedom

SPEAKER_00 1:11

exactly. So the pre-meditation of death is the pre-meditation of liberty in what we're looking at today. But there's but there's a complication. The late Montagna sounds less like a man rehearsing death and more like a man learning to enjoy embodied everyday life. So that's a little conundrum for us. But the essay that we're looking at, it takes its title from Cicero's account of philosophy as preparation for death, with Plato and Stoic traditions behind it. So, Jack, does rehearsing death release us from fear or keep death permanently at the center of life? And explain this beautiful text from Montaigne.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

Yes. So the essay is To Philosophize is to learn how to die. It's I think number eight in the first volume. Um it's a very good introduction to Montaigne and his style. It's the first essay of his that we read here in Pascal. Um, and then we paired it with the essay on friendship, which and they go very beautifully together. Um, because you have Montaigne's interest in death on the one hand, and then on the other, his interest in one of life's uh sort of highest treasures, our most beloved treasure, which is which is the uh uh a rare but deep friendship. Yeah. Um so this essay on philosophy learning how to die, he uh tries to sort of show that um our typical attitude of avoiding death is very irrational. Um we get ourselves very worked up about death, and that if we were to prepare ourselves to take it a bit more seriously and prepare ourselves more consciously for it, we would find a lot of freedom.

SPEAKER_00 2:57

And the it would remove the surprise and restore a sense of agency.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

Yes, that that's definitely one element, and so so for this, the connecting concept is virtue. Um so somehow this this preparation for death teaches me what uh what I ought to value, it teaches me not to leave my affairs uh and obligations unchecked and and and and um unkept, as it were. So I'm I'm I he tries to exhort us to live as though if we were to depart this world tomorrow, uh there would not be a great mess left in our wake for others to pick up. Yeah, yeah. Um and on and and connected to this, to that we would um that we would live with as few ties to this world as possible. Yeah ultimately the the body, and this is an interesting point, um, the body is the image and vehicle of death. Uh that comes up in the opening of this essay. Meaning that the the change, the decay of the body is um sort of showing me the transience of things, and it's also the means through which I'm actually dying. So even in the Christian concept of the church.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

You were you were saying yeah, you were saying about freeing yourself, that like freedom from terror should make pleasure, action, and judgment more available to us to free ourselves from that terror of death, right?

SPEAKER_01 4:37

It it's a difficult question what relationship this freedom has to pleasure in this essay. Um I actually see a reverse relationship. He heps he places more emphasis on how we are more pre we are most prepared to die when we are suffering and when we are in pain and privation. And so in that in that case, it actually actually uh putting forward a more aesthetic view, yeah, as in like um uh Christian asceticism. Yeah, so um the denial of the body, the denial of the self. It it it brings us closer to that edge between life and death while we're still living.

SPEAKER_00 5:25

Um but but therefore, inversely, if we are more prepared for death, we can and have been through that sensation, if we're more willing to acknowledge its presence, we can actually more readily in our life be able to engage in action and judgment and potentially pleasure at other times if we are able to accept the reality of the terror and remove ourselves from the terror by experiencing and contemplating death in a more wholesome way, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 5:59

Yeah, it's definitely a subtext of that essay that there now a higher realm of pleasure becomes available to us because of freedom. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um sorry, I'll focus. Um and I see that more coming out in the essay on friendship, this sort of notion of of of the connection between freedom and pleasure.

Virtue Without Misery And Real Education

SPEAKER_01 6:26

But before we move on to that, I do want to say that um there is an interesting commentary at the beginning of this essay on philosophy, learning how to die, that we are mis we we are generally mistaken in our view, our attitude rather, that virtue is something that exacts the like a like a negative price on us. So he says a lot of people see virtue as struggle. Yeah, yeah. That's actually you find that a lot in Christian and Catholic circles. Virtue is something we struggle with. But he actually says, those who think that know neither virtue nor her fruits, he says. Um, no, no, neither, not know neither her graces nor her ways.

SPEAKER_00 7:10

That's what But how do we how do we know virtue, Jack? And that is down to education, and I think an important one we should address uh here is of the education and children. Uh sorry, of the education of children, uh where where Montagna attacks education that stuffs memory while leaving judgment unused. So for you, is Montagna describing liberal education, moral formation, or an education available mainly to an elite boy with a private tutor? How does it work for Montagna?

SPEAKER_01 7:47

So I I think uh another person, I think um he is basically allocating what we would today call liberal education, and it had a foundation in virtue.

SPEAKER_00 7:58

But virtue orders So he would be pleased that you're waving to your fellow colleagues at a nice exactly book course liberal education center.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

Absolutely, absolutely. Um I I think there is a lot of commonality between how Montaigne describes education and how we're what we're learning here, which to the audience is is through Socratic conversation with books as our guide, we're trying to understand and interpret exercise of judgment, and then the virtue grows because we're learning to be patient with one another and learning how to speak with brevity and clarity.

SPEAKER_00 8:34

The method of it, and yeah, it's a beautiful thing.

SPEAKER_01 8:37

So, but so we've experienced this in practice. What Sort Montaigne is saying to summarize is um so so learning is about judgment, it's not about facts, it's about judgment. If I just receive facts, I take for granted their truth, I don't know where they've come from, I don't know what they mean. Um, and that's the uh the the dominant attitude, it's so pervasive today. That's why our policies are so shallow, I think, because we take all of the data, but we don't ever ask ourselves why was the data gathered, was it the relevant data, what even was the relevant problem? Who are persons in a non-statistical sense, in a deeper metaphysical sense? This is kind of what Montaigne is already saying, that um there needs to be an awareness of what facts are trying to tell us before we just go and mindlessly use them as though we are merely administrators of facts. No, we are beings who have a relationship to truth, we're accountable for what we utter, what we profess, what we say is true, and therefore we had better understand what we say, or we had better not speak at all. That's basically the end of learning for him, to come to understanding, to assimilation of facts, making them our own, thereby liberating us from any particular authority. So it's I might my role as a learned person is not to be the mouthpiece of Plato or Aristotle or my tutor. It's to it's to have judgment that um where I can I can take the complexity of my experience, distill it into a view, and say that is what I think, and I can defend it.

SPEAKER_00 10:12

So would you say a distrust of universal rules, Jack?

SPEAKER_01 10:17

So he says doubt is preferable to certainty, but um but yeah, the the what this means in relationship to universal rules is difficult because it's hard to read Montaigne without him without noticing some he had opinions about what some universal laws might be, such as the supremacy of nature over custom, um or uh the integrity of the self, uh or whatever.

SPEAKER_00 10:46

Um because so uh because with universal rules, cases and bodies vary, right? And this is something that he addresses in another essay. We're speeding through, I know, but in another essay of experience.

SPEAKER_01 11:04

Of experience. I haven't have I read that one.

SPEAKER_00 11:08

I think you may talk about then the the the final essay which's in the third volume. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the final essay which distrusts universal rules because cases and bodies vary.

Judgement Over Rules Across A Life

SPEAKER_00 11:21

Um but it's it's it's not so much a question on the particular essay, but sort of a general summary of what we've been discussing across these essays, which is that the early Montaigne tries to master death by thinking ahead. The late Montaigne lets mortality teach him how closely to attend to breakfast, pain, and friendship, and the passing day. How do you interpret him, Jack, as a whole across these essays, across what you've read? How uh how do you see his thinking? Do is there a is there a synthesis between this kind of earlier and later Montaigne?

SPEAKER_01 11:58

Yeah, that's it's difficult to say. Um it's one of the things we've noticed, we've only just embarked on the third volume. And we've read we've read the first four essays and uh talking about the fifth um this week. Um and what is clear is that his his thoughts are much more streamlined, there's much more of a unity to his essays, and they even seem to build meaningfully on on and consciously one upon the other, which is true of some of the earlier stuff. So there's something a bit more scattered, a little less refined about the earlier stuff, but he still seems to be concerned with the same fundamental question, but he's penetrating them even even with a more metaphysical depth. He had a new sort of awareness of his project, I find in this this this late um edition. Um, especially with how he talks about himself as trying to distill the essence of the person, he sees himself as a model of the essence of the person, and that that we you you you you go inwards and you you you take inventory of all of the change, and that is part of what it means to be like essentially human. That's quite radical. Um, but that that's always been there, but almost like he hadn't quite formulated it for himself, so succinctly, uh in terms of trying to brand his project as it were.

SPEAKER_00 13:27

Yeah, yeah. No, that's interesting. So a good life combines mortality, trained judgment, and acceptance of embodied limits, but there's a certain sort of humility, um, a certain sense of kind of uh an awareness of other cultures and that that sort of humbleness. So I think the question we're gonna ask in the final part of our massive saga on Montaigne will be can skeptical humanity help us judge another culture, or does it leave us unable to condemn anything? You'll be able to answer that question, Jack, I'm

Final Question And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 14:10

sure, in the next episode. Or maybe not. In the next episode of Beyond the Text, we will be looking third and finally at that question. So thank you, Jack. Thank you, Sam. And we'll see you on Friday. Thank you.

unknown 14:28

Bye.