Is to deny life-extension a form of suicide?
If you have profited from life, you have had your fill; go away satisfied. [...] But if you have never learned how to use life, if life is useless to you, what does it matter if you have lost it? What do you still want it for?
This comes from a spread within "To philosophize is to learn how to die," on a page where almost every line is highlighted, meaning my past self, a self from just two weeks ago who I no longer have access to, must have really wanted to internalize all this. Neither the ecstatic nor the cynic has a reason to cling to life.
To not cling for life is to go against what Hobbes calls our primary drive, self-preservation. I could imagine one of today's transhumanists, with hope and conviction that immortality drugs are coming next decades, would loathe Montaigne's sentiment. Life is all we have!
My first impression is that Montaigne is wise in the acceptance of death, but if philosophy is often the rationalization of the stances we are forced to take, then might Montaigne just be coping? If he were to time travel ahead to a time where we had life extension drugs, and mortality were not inevitable, might he not write a beautifully persuasive essay on how we should live forever? The man is known to change his mind.
On where I stand, I don't know. I generally think life extension beyond a few standard deviations (ie: 10 years sure, but 50 or 500 years?) is a Faustian bargain where we can't quite imagine the horrors of changing our one primary constraint: death. In moments of peace, I feel happy to have lived, ready to die, and abstractly and rationally and theologically, I know the importance of dying and death; but in the moment, if I were dying and knew an extension were possible, I couldn't imagine not taking it. And even if I extended just one more year, over and over, might I take that deal for 300 years? When would I not want to extend my own life for just a bit longer? If life extension is possible, but you choose to die, even naturally, is that not a form of suicide?