Of Montaigne

 

I found myself reading, once again, Montaigne’s Essai, his last, called Of Experience and I was once again startled by this sentence in it, “There is no book to be found, whether human or divine, with which the world busies itself, whose difficulties are cleared up by interpretation.” I assume that self applied to Montaigne’s book as well. And I wondered, after reading and rereading his book for years and years, am I able to form any sort of articulation that might attempt to “interpret” Montaigne’s Essais? What follows is that attempt, as impossible and Quixotic as it may seem.

Montaigne’s essays are very much secular scripture for me, and these thoughts that I have jotted down will never do justice to what Montaigne has meant to me as both a man and as a thinker. I believe that there is no better companion or guide during tough and challenging times than Montaigne is and continues to be for me.

Montaigne urges us in his Essais to realize that the purpose of life is to enjoy life to the absolute fullest without disturbing or hindering another person’s ability to fully enjoy his or her own life. He also wants to convince us that the search for truth is of equal, if not greater importance than finding truth itself. At the age of 38, Montaigne retired from public life to his library to live in “Peace and freedom in order to pursue the truth.”  Montaigne devoted himself to that pursuit for the remainder of his life. And, by writing his Essais, invited his readers to join him on his adventure.

This was a peculiar venture for a man such as Montaigne to embark on. An ex magistrate, ex mayor,  current advisor to the King, and advisor to the future King, and as a well regarded mediator between Catholic and Protestant factions that were literally at war with each other, not to mention a wealthy landowner of the gentry class and a inheritor of his family’s property and vineyard and business, these kind of people do not write, or if they do, they do not write intimately about themselves. But Montaigne did, and this begs the question: why? Why did he do it? He certainly didn’t need to make money by his writing, and he must’ve known there might be repercussions upon his reputation and character. Sometimes after thinking about Montaigne, all I can think about is why did Montaigne write those Essais? Why are we, as Readers, invited into his enterprise?

I don’t think that question can ever be answered satisfactorily. Probably because there is no answer to be had. There is something else. When we read Montaigne’s Essais, we are not reading Montaigne’s daily journal or diary. There is no mention of his day to day; no “During my dinner at Rene’s house, we sat and sipped brandy and his wife served crumpets and we spoke of the costs that the wars in France were invoking on our wineries.” No, instead Montaigne’s focus is entirely inward, microscoped on the workings of his own mind. His own mind investigating his own thoughts and how he came by them. and who or what put them there Like some sort of burrowing animal he tunneled inside himself, trying to discover something, trying to discover “The Truth.” Keep in mind Montaigne wrote his Essais in the second half of the 15th century, 350 years before Freud.

Whether a reader of Montaigne’s “likes” him or not, or whether or not one agrees or disagrees with him, it must be admitted that Montaigne attempted something that had never been done before, and not just as a writer, but as a human being. Socrates believed that the only thing that matters at all in this life is the search for Truth and Wisdom. This is precisely Montaigne’s stance. But, Socrates didn’t write anything down that we know of, he only appears to us as a character in a series of Dialogues written by Plato, or as a tactical teacher to the young warrior/poet/philosopher, Xenophon.

Montaigne was a Socrates who wrote his thoughts down. That is a giant leap beyond Socrates. And, Montaigne not only wrote his thoughts down, but amiably invited the world to witness perhaps the greatest thought experiment ever conducted in the Annals of mankind. His experiment, or his trials (essais), basically record a mind’s search for answers. Real answers to real questions.

I like to imagine that at some point, Montaigne just figured he’d had enough, or seen enough, of public life, and he walked up to his library, wrote his credo above the door frame, and thus announced to the World that he was now retired permanently, and that he wished, and fully intended to, search “In Freedom for the Truth.” He was done with “service to his country,” he was done with being an advisor/mediator, and he was also done with the family business and so he declared that his wife and his friends could run the vineyard and the pastures and the commerce side of things just fine without him. And he walked up the tower stairs to his study, and shut the door, and sat down and wrote the Essais.

Any worthwhile modern English translation, whether Frame’s or Screech’s, shows the self editing that Montaigne performed on earlier essays and so his own self was showing him his past selves and his own mind was constantly in a state of flux. The revisions make clear that at many points, Montaigne completely disagrees with his own past self. By revising the Essais, he was witnessing himself revise himself. As he discarded the views he held in the past to free him for his present views, or his future views, he must have have asked himself, “What is going on here? Is everybody just living unknowingly disingenuously? What can we be certain of now, or even permanently, when our certainties change over time?”

Montaigne valued the art of thinking, the practice of reflection and introspection. Montaigne challenges us to find wisdom in ourselves, no matter who “we” might be, and cautions his readers that thinkers like Socrates, Epicurus, Plutarch, and most of all himself, can serve only as guides, not as interpreters or givers of divine “Truth.” 

This is where his devotee Emerson latched onto him, for Waldo also believed in the creed of finding wisdom in oneself, to be self-reliant in thought and action.  

Montaigne’s influence on those who followed his time here in this reality is truly enormous and perhaps unmatched and unmeasurable. Shakespeare, Pascal, Bacon, Kant, Goethe, Emerson, Nietzsche, , Sartre, are among just a few of our greatest thinkers who have joined the untold millions of “regular folk” around the Globe who have enjoyed and benefited from reading the Essais. 

And Shakespeare was one of those “regular folk” who read Montaigne and was immediately won over. The little unexplored link between Montaigne and Shakespeare is crucial if one wants to understand Shakespeare better, and my thoughts now wander to Shakespeare. When Shakespeare read his patron’s friend, John Folio’s , translation of at least the first edition of Montaigne’s Essais, he must have immediately recognized himself there, as so many have. Shakespeare was enormously interested in soaking in wisdom and transforming that wisdom into characters. After being exposed to Montaigne, Shakespeare’s characters become more inward focused, searching within themselves, trying to get to know themselves. From Hamlet through to  Prospero (and others) in The Tempest, the characters in the plays begin to take on an inner dimension not seen before. Hamlet, Iago, Macbeth, Lear, Edgar, etc.

Montaigne intrigued Shakespeare immensely. One would have to be blind to not see that about 90% of both Hamlet the character as well as Hamlet the play is lifted straight from or otherwise directly influenced by the Essays. And one is tempted to see Shakespeare rolling up his sleeves and grabbing his quill pen to write The Tempest with a copy of the Essais near at hand. And The Tempest is practically a paraphrase of many of the Essais and also quotes Montaigne directly.

An approach that Montaigne and Shakespeare both utilized in different ways was absolute perspectivism One of the questions that has plagued Shakespearean commentators, critics and common readers alike is, what did Shakespeare, the man, believe in? He created so many persuasive characters, each with their own and unique viewpoints, that trying to locate Shakespeare in the plays is a dizzying affair. No matter how difficult it is for us to understand, all of these characters came out of a single mind. A singular mind that contained multitudes. 

That same dynamic applies equally to Montaigne. Montaigne created so many Montaignes, each of them persuasive, each of them approaching wisdom with such different perspectives that Shakespeare, upon first reading Montaigne, must have immediately sensed the presence of a kindred spirit. 

I am not implying that Montaigne carried separate heteronyms within himself like Whitman or Pessoa after him did, all of Montaigne’s personas source from the same place within Montaigne. But there is no doubt that Montaigne allowed various objects or beings of thought to exist within his casing. 

It is imperative to understand one thing about Montaigne and that is Montaigne is no Systemizer nor does he develop a Program or Methodology. Montaigne is decidedly and quite deliberately not Spinoza, or Kant, or Leibnitz  or Hegel or Locke or Freud. Montaigne was not bent on creating a “Code of Ethics,” or a “School of Thought.” There is no Final Answer in Montaigne, only questions begetting questions. Once again, Emerson is the closest of kin to Montaigne in this regard, with Nietzsche close behind. And the true precursor is a de-platonized Socrates, if such a thing is possible. 

To write about Montaigne without addressing Socrates is a little like writing about bread without mentioning yeast. Montaigne took the hands of many “guides” on his journeys seeking wisdom, Epicurus, Aristotle, Plutarch, Seneca, Cicero among many others, but none of them meant as much to Montaigne than Socrates. And the Socrates he seemed to love the most was the Socrates facing his own state sponsored murder in the Dialogues; Euthyphro, the Apology, Crito and Phaedo. 

There are many instances when writing about the last days of Socrates that Montaigne praises Socrates’ courage, acceptance, and overall amiability shortly before the Republic poisoned him to death. In reading the Apology, for instance, his friends are confused and concerned about Socrates’lack of concern for his own personal mortality. They are aghast that Socrates can remain so calm, and relatively amiable about the prospect of his own demise. In their mind Socrates was being murdered for doing nothing wrong. They get upset when Socrates refuses help getting out of his situation. Socrates considers such concerns immaterial. Socrates did not have a fear of death in the slightest, in fact, in a certain sense he seems to almost welcome it. In Phaedo, Socrates is asked why he seems to believe that suicide is more than justified in certain cases, in certain lives. His reply is telling. He says that all of the situations, both good and bad, that man finds himself in are created by the gods, or by destiny or fate. And it could be that when a man has had enough of it all there is logic in taking his own life instead of waiting for someone else to take it for him. Socrates was no atheist, and he believes that our destinies are not our own. He also believes that a wise man cannot be harmed in life or in death and therefore he has no fear of either. Additionally, Socrates believes that the body is an obstacle imprisoning the soul, that the body is the cave that holds us in dimness, and the light entering the cave, barely perceived by the living, is the realm of death where true wisdom waits for us. So, death is actually a liberation into the true realm, not an ending but a beginning. Of course, Socrates was a philosophical elitist. Socrates seemed to believe that there is a true light of eternal wisdom waiting at the end of life, but he believed that only a precious few among philosophers, and philosophers only, could ever join that post mortem light.

Montaigne was not an atheist. But Montaigne did not believe in a “personal” Jesus or God, and he offers little if any insight into his thoughts about some sort of afterlife. To Montaigne, the afterlife, should it exist or not exist, is none of his concern, as there is no way of knowing. He informs his readers that God is perfect because He Is God. An ideal Good that is impossible for us to live up to, or even to understand, due to our mortality and our circumstances in time. He asserts that to even be pretentious enough to try to comprehend such things is absurd and arrogant. He understood that mankind’s apprehension of God is mutable depending on geography and epoch. And he contemplated that many other contemporaneous factors contributed to man’s view of what God is. He pointed to primitive cultures as examples. To Montaigne, God is very distant and not active in our World. 

Montaigne lived during a time of upheaval and war, religious wars. Or rather, political-power grab wars using religion as their Guise. One can understand that Montaigne was pretty much through with organized church religion for the most part. He probably did believe that the Catholic Church in France at that time was a more stable force than the more radical Protestants. And, to be fair, the Catholic Church was an organization that he himself belonged to, despite the fact that his mother was a Jew. It is probably not a stretch to imagine that if he thought a predominantly Jewish culture was a stabilizing force, he would be for that as well. Montaigne didn’t like conflict, or war, or torture or forcing conversions, or forcing anything. Montaigne relished peace; both for himself and for society at large.

As shall be shown later, Montaigne was all about equilibrium. He did not like his boat being rocked. Montaigne believed that our life here is brief and can be filled with toil and pain, and part of the wisdom he seeks really boils down to a day to day wisdom. A practical wisdom. Not abstract, not artistic. In fact, he thought the human imagination was misleading and harmful for those who seek wisdom. He searched for guides to help him navigate his day to day as peacefully, and as joyfully as possible. Epicurus mixed in with Plutarch were his earliest guides along the path to wisdom, and then Pyrrhonism and Stoicism before asserting Socrates’ to be the wisest human to ever have lived. And those are just the human guides. There are a couple thought patterns in the Essais, especially in the Apology and Of Cruelty, in which Montaigne, in all earnestness believes that animals possess a greater wisdom than humans ever can. Mainly because of their lack of “rationality,” and “intellectualism.” Animals don’t have to put themselves through the torture of thinking, they simply exist, and that is enough.

Understanding Montaigne’s thoughts on the wisdom of animals is crucial to understanding the kind of “Truth” he was pursuing. Montaigne asks the question, Why are we as a human species condemned to wonder at the value of our own existence? Animals live to live, and thoughts of death, their own mortality, and “what it all means” is foreign to them. As Montaigne views it, Animals live to live. They want what they need, and they need only what is necessary to exist. They don’t waste time thinking about it all. To Montaigne, human beings as a species took a wrong turn somewhere, or were led down the wrong path by someone or something; a dark alley of self doubt, self awareness, greed, corruption, cruelty, angst and sorrow. Animals don’t get love sick. Animals feel lust, satisfy their lust, and move on with their lives. And he must have also, as he stood looking out the window of his Tower, been perplexed by the ridiculousness of his own situation, asking himself, “Why am I compelled to exist alone in this Tower trying to figure things out? Squirrels don’t do this kind of thing, horses don’t either. What is going on here?”

At the onset of his retirement Montaigne invented the essay, and began writing them to help himself come to terms with the deaths of his father and his best friend. There is nobody in this world better to read than Montaigne if a friend is needed in times of darkness, in times of fear, in times of facing things as they really are, who demands, in his cheerful and wise way, to not worry, that anxiety is useless and absurd. Cheerfully embracing and appreciating all aspects of life is what he tries to teach, what he tries to impart to us. But of course, loss and sorrow may have been the genesis of the Essais, but Montaigne didn’t stop there. The Essais in fact became his life. He read his older Essais and confronted them in newer Essais, challenging his own previously held beliefs. He changed his present self by reading what his past self had written. That is why, depending on which Essay one reads, a different Montaigne is can be found. He constantly reacted to his paste selves. Even more than Socrates or Epicurus, Montaigne was Montaigne’s most important and best teacher. 

But this looking back can also cause anxiety. When one looks back and realizes that the person who existed then no longer exists in the present, almost unrecognizably so, is also to witness the casting away, the death, of former selves. What was once certain, is now discarded, and time keeps pushing us forward to a place where no changes occur. Our own non-existence.

Socrates teaches that nothing can be known, and states explicitly that it’s somewhat ridiculous to believe that there is any real knowledge available to us, at least while we are alive. Socrates ridicules those who think they know something for certain. To Socrates, strict adherence to any belief is wrongheaded. Truth, and wisdom are mutable, because as time passes changes occur. There is nothing fixed in the Universe, nothing stuck. Everything is moving, put into motion by forces we can never understand.

With perspectivism, comes wisdom. But also comes a feeling of chaos. And chaos causes anxiety. Montaigne gives us a choice. Settle yourself with the fact that nothing stops changing until death, or spend your time anxious about it and neglect the pleasures that are graspable to those who embrace unceasing change. At the end of it all, all those pages, all those trials, all those hours of reading and writing and thinking, Michel decided that the only Truth that can be found is already in us, and that we must dig deep and go to great lengths to find it. Do not fear if after digging deep inside and finding nothing despair sets in. Montaigne tells us to keep digging, keep exploring, keep searching, keep challenging yourself, and perhaps it is the search itself that is the wisdom. In a way, one of the most magnificent lessons that Montaigne teaches us is by example. After his twenty years of reading and searching and grasping for “the Truth,” he ended up right where he started, with himself, almost as if he  had journeyed to far away places in search of treasure, and ended up discovering that he had been holding the treasure in his own pocket all along.

One has to be careful when attempting a metaphysical approach to understanding Montaigne. Montaigne was no believer in metaphysics. Before Kant, Montaigne was an empiricist. But Kant didn’t invent empiricism. The Greek Skeptics, Pyrrho primarily, did, and Montaigne often commented that he himself only knows what he himself has observed. Instead of feeling limited by his own skeptical tendencies, he felt instead liberated into letting go of that which he considered outside his purview, and occupying himself  instead with the examination, and enjoyment, of that which he does know, namely himself.

Montaigne’s greatest wisdom he imparts is to not place too much importance on one’s own existence. That time is short. That beliefs and circumstances change and time changes everything. When reflecting on the terrible pain that the kidney stones that would eventually kill him inflicted on his person and on his mental state, Montaigne tells the reader that he realizes that by learning to embrace the pain, and yes to even find pleasure in it, is the best way of dealing with the pain. And that he found that if he could find something pleasurable in pain, how much more pleasurable life free of pain became. He might have been reacting to Socrates who said in Phaedo that pain and pleasure were married, and in fact formed a one two headed beast and that they are really the same reaction to the same thing, to each other. 

But the point is that mitigating pain by accepting it as good because everything that can happen to us in this life is good is a good way to live. That pleasure is a matter of perspective and that just because our perspectives and circumstances change, that doesn’t mean that our pursuits should change. It just means that the pursuit is the wisdom. The only way to discover that you are walking in a circle is if you walk that circle and discover for yourself that you are walking in a circle.

But Montaigne knew, better than most, that life itself is not a circle. Life is a squiggly line with a very definite and definable beginning and an end.

In The Tempest Shakespeare has Prospero say, “ We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

That is pure Montaigne.

In all my years of  reading and thinking about Montaigne, perhaps what I appreciate most in the Essais is a seemingly inconsequential episode from his own life in which Montaigne writes about a time when, while listening to his friends and neighbors complain about their lives, and the little they have made of their time here, and how useless they feel, Montaigne turns to them, astonished, and replies, “But today you have lived! Can you understand? That is everything! You are alive, and that is the greatest of achievements.” 

I am alive today, Montaigne. As I write this, I exist on this Earth, in this reality. That is all I know. And because of reading you, I know that is enough.

These scribblings are humbly devoted and dedicated to Michel Montaigne, my teacher, my mentor, my brother, who indeed means something more to me than a best friend.