Montaigne’s ambivalences on the end of life: A lesson that remains relevant today

Within human life, can we consider there to be delimited periods that each individual goes through one after the other, and in particular a period called “old age”? In this article, Montaigne leads us to shape with him a conception of the end of life that can replace this temptation toward a biological objectification of ages. Conceptual turnarounds are what makes Montaigne particularly enlightening for our times. Between the beginning and the end of his writing of the Essays, he realized that the biological objectification of an end of life is not suitable for human beings. The converging analyses of more recently active philosophers such as Heidegger, Jankelevitch, Ricœur, or Higgins, then reinforce the intuition of this “late Montaigne.”Here our aim is to reassert the lack of robustness of an objective and biological concept of the end of life and to be wary of categories that are merely social constructs, so that at the end, each individual can feel free to have his or her own way to breathe. At the “very end” of life—even though French society has accepted that medicine can dare to define its time limits by characterizing a patient as “at the end of life”—it will be necessary to keep in mind that each person remains “alive until death.”