“Legalizing euthanasia is a choice of freedom”

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INTERVIEW. A defender of euthanasia, the philosopher publishes “La Clé des champs” (PUF). Where it is a question of death, and the possibility of happiness.

Interview by Marion Coquet

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For the philosopher André Comte-Sponville, euthanasia is not a choice of death, but “a choice of freedom”.
© JOEL SAGET / AFP

Published on 03/26/2023 at 5:05 p.m.

Reading time: 13 mins

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André Comte-Sponville is a man who is always affable and often smiling. A philosopher, above all, who worked very early on to rehabilitate the notion of wisdom, relying on the Ancients as well as on Montaigne. A man, therefore, that one would quickly imagine serene, and even joyful. In The Key to the Fields (PUF), a collection of lively and melancholy “impromptu”, he chooses to “lift the veil”.

It is about euthanasia, the legalization of which he has long defended in France, the absurd death of children, his masters and friends Marcel Conche and Jean Salem. It’s also about his unhappy, deeply depressed mother, who let him believe that the truth was on the side of grief, and the lie on the side of truth – and how he unlearned this…