Uma ética da felicidade na iminência da morte em Michel de Montaigne

Abstract

This thesis aims at showing, in Michel de Montaigne’s Essays, an original conception of happiness as an ethical experience of humans - finite and imperfect beings. Finiteness can be identified in different forms: death, corporeality, pain, pleasure and the contingency (fortune). Despite the emptiness and finiteness which define humans and their condition, there is a possibility to fill this existential void through the human experience itself (by simply being a regular human, not divine). Humans find a possibility of being happy while passing through time and death with the wisdom of concrete and ephemeral existence, together with one’s individual ability of judgment. This means that happiness, for Montaigne, is a matter of opinion and representation, but also the experience of union of body and soul in one time combining pleasure and virtue. This analysis will be made from the interpretation of selected chapters of the Essays: Apology for Raymond Sebond (II, 12), That the taste of goods or evils doth greatly depend on the opinion we have of them (I, 14) and Of experience (III, 13) in dialogue with some previous reflections by other authors.