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- Author: Terence Cave
- Full Title: How to Read Montaigne
- Category: #books
- The Essais is quintessentially an ‘early modern’ work: it is early modern in that it anticipates a whole range of preoccupations and attitudes that we value, such as tolerance, open-mindedness, a broadly secular view of the world and an acute awareness of the individual self.
- What I mean to capture by means of the word is Montaigne’s enduring preoccupation with thought as an experience to be studied and documented non-judgementally and non-didactically; his elaboration of a mode of writing that meets this requirement; and the value of the Essais as a book to think with, an intellectual resource still remarkably potent more than four hundred years after it was written.
- Note: The word is ‘cognitive ’
- This passage suggests that he had intended to use his leisure to develop a more coherent and mature perspective on life, something like a personal philosophy, perhaps; writing seems not to have formed a part of this original project. What emerged very rapidly was something quite different, almost the opposite of a ‘philosophy’: an awareness of the bizarrely elusive flow of his imaginings when he left his mind to its own devices.
- So it seems natural enough to say that he wrote ‘essays’. Natural, but misleading: the genre of the essay, as cultivated particularly by later writers in the English language (Charles Lamb being the canonic example), sets up an entirely different set of expectations in the reader. It has a belle-lettristic character which is wholly absent from the Essais, while at the same time it lacks the sustained reference to the flow of the writer’s own thought that Montaigne’s use of the word evokes.
- A reflection on poetic structure and how it works thus prompts Montaigne to imagine a graphic illustration of his own very different way of thinking and writing – the ‘essaying’ or probing mode, where outcomes are never anticipated and always provisional.
- The kind of sentence structure I have drawn attention to – the loose-weave, exploratory mode – is at least partly derived from classical models, in particular Seneca’s style in the Letters to Lucilius; several of Montaigne’s chapters (including this one) are in fact framed as letters, usually to well-born women of his acquaintance, and the informal, personal mode of the epistolary genre is a major point of reference for the writing of the Essais as a whole. In fact, Montaigne asserts in a late addition to I.40 (‘A reflection on Cicero’) that he would happily have used the letter form to publish his thoughts if he had had someone suitable to write to.
- Montaigne would have been familiar with the Erasmian technique of imitating past authors, which requires first exhaustive reading, then a process of appropriation or ‘digestion’, and finally a reissuing of these digested materials as the writer’s own personal discourse.
- And above all, in a remarkably pithy sentence that occurs a little later, he asserts his rights of ownership of everything that he says, regardless of where it comes from: ‘I only say other people in order better to say myself.’ Similarly, in ‘On physiognomy’, he goes on to say that, although he may quote and borrow a good deal, he does it negligently, without being too particular about where the borrowing comes from or whether he has remembered it correctly. Quoting is simply a contemporary fashion he feels he has to follow; if he had trusted himself, he would have taken the risk of speaking exclusively with his own voice. From a modern perspective, it is difficult to appreciate the boldness of this intention, the extent to which it is not simply disingenuous. Speaking exclusively with one’s own voice is what nearly everyone tries to do nowadays; in the sixteenth century, virtually no one did, so that even the formulation of the idea is historically interesting. The very act of conceiving the possibility changes things; it creates a kind of mutation in Renaissance practices of writing.
- Or again, it may be expressed as a form of improvisation: ‘essaying’ can only be authentic when it avoids all premeditation and registers the random flow of thought.
- What is more crucial, however, is to perceive that the unity of the book is not to be found in its topics: on the contrary, they proliferate beyond the point at which one might hope to reduce them to a more or less coherent argument. The objects of thought must indeed proliferate in order to provide the raw material on which Montaigne tries out his judgement. The trials themselves, or rather the activity of trying out, become the unifying principle: hence, once again, the emergence of the word essais as the title of the book.
- To this eclectic habit that Montaigne shares with his contemporaries, the principle of the essai gives a special twist: the insights of the Ancients are provisional possibilities to be explored, not systems to be adapted and appropriated.
- Having already explored at some length the failures of human knowledge in general, Montaigne proceeds by limiting the discussion to the achievements of the small select band of acknowledged philosophers. If they cannot offer answers, no one can. He divides all of the various known philosophies into three broad classes: the first and largest contains the dogmatic philosophers such as the Aristotelians and the Stoics, those who assert that they have found the truth; the next (the Socratic philosophers or ‘Academic sceptics’) consists of those who insist that nothing can be known; in the third class are those who are unsure whether truth can be found and are still searching. These are the Pyrrhonians, whose doubt is so radical that it is itself subject to doubt.
- They have the effect of creating a pure, complete and absolute withholding and suspension of judgement. They use their reason in order to enquire and debate, but not in order to stop and choose. Anyone who imagines a perpetual confession of ignorance, a judgement that remains level and has no preferences in any conceivable circumstances, will have grasped the nature of Pyrrhonism.
- they follow the rule of the essai and never crystallize into a consistently held doctrine.
- The ‘Apology’ is the essai incarnate because the Pyrrhonist thought to which it insistently returns is a philosophy constantly in suspense, affirming no single opinion or position other than that of perpetual enquiry. No other philosophy is so open to the infinite and indefinite play of the mind in relation to its possible objects. In other words, the elusive flow of thought that fascinates Montaigne from ‘On idleness’ onwards finds its philosophical and conceptual equivalent in Pyrrhonism.
- ‘if it had been my job to train children, I would have put into their mouths over and over again this [C] enquiring rather than assertive [B] way of replying: “What does this mean?”; “I don’t understand it”; “That might be the case”; “Is it true?”’
- The Outlines are written, like most technical philosophical discourse, in the third person; the Essais, by contrast, use the first-person form insistently and as a matter of principle. Montaigne is giving an account of his views, in all their provisionality, not telling others how to think. His own distinctive way of writing takes over and converts the perpetual suspension of judgement advocated by the Pyrrhonists; more precisely, it is the combination of the first-person mode with the endemic use of modalizing expressions that has this effect.
- The practice of citing exemplary cases as a means of developing an argument (usually an ethical one) had been widespread since medieval times, and Montaigne inserts himself into that tradition of ‘exemplarity’. Unlike his predecessors, however, he characteristically reserves his judgement about exemplars. For him, they are virtually always flawed as examples, failing critically to provide a rule for practical action. Many are too extreme, too illustrious, too removed from everyday life. As he himself says, ‘every example is defective’ (more literally and colourfully, ‘every example limps’). The value of examples for Montaigne is that they provide not a rigid moral template, but rather an ever-shifting set of coordinates which, by their very inadequacy to match the experience of a particular individual, allow that individual to measure and take possession of his or her own ethical (or more broadly cognitive) positioning.
- Philosophies have a value for Montaigne in so far as they provide a testing ground in which he can develop his own cognitive faculties, but they have no special status: they are absorbed into the endlessly various flow of thoughts he set himself to observe and capture.
- I present these human reflections of mine simply as human reflections, considered individually; not as if they had been established and regulated by a divine order that is incapable of doubt and controversy. As a matter of opinion, not as a matter of faith. What I think out for myself, not what I believe according to God, in a lay, not clerical fashion; but always a most religious one. As children present their exercises, to receive instruction, not to give it. And it would not be implausible to say that the command that everyone except those who are expressly qualified to do so should only venture to write about religion with great reservation, would not lack some semblance of utility and justice, and that I, as one of them, should perhaps be silent about it. I have been told that even those who are not of our confession none the less prohibit among themselves the use of the name of God in their ordinary speech; they do not wish it to be used as an interjection or exclamation, or in order to make an oath or a comparison, and I think they are right in this. And however we summon God into our dealings and society, it must be seriously and religiously. I.56: ‘On prayers’
- One of his most consistently repeated assertions is his intense dislike of the Reformers’ attempt, precisely, to ‘reform’ religion, an objective which places too much trust in human capacity for bringing a better state of things into existence. Like the Pyrrhonists, he is so unsure of our ability to know the truth and act accordingly that he prefers to follow the customs and traditions of the culture in which he was born;
- Its principal argument is that, despite the constantly shifting character of an individual’s perception of the world and of his or her own consciousness, there is a central core (an ‘innate form’) that remains obstinately true to itself. Although we may recognize that we are not as we should be, it is not open to us to bring about some abrupt conversion to a better state of being; to attempt to do so may only make matters worse by reforming the surface while leaving the root of the problem unreformed.
- the principle of the essai: Montaigne’s reflections are not to be read as determinate propositions but as possible imaginings, as potential ideas. Judgement is suspended or indefinitely deferred.
- We return here once more, then, to the principle of the essai: whatever the eye rests upon becomes, by reflex action, the opportunity for an exercise of the judgement.
- It will by now be apparent that there is no clear borderline between what is ‘outside’ and ‘inside’ in the Essais. The linking thread that is the first-person-singular subject connects them together as the objects of a constantly travelling gaze; things seen, things read and things lived are all transmuted into ‘experience’, the topic of the final chapter. Yet that might still imply that the perspective of Montaigne’s writing is primarily self-oriented. Such a reading would be mistaken. Crucial as Montaigne’s journey into his inner landscape may be, the quoted passage shows that it cannot be considered in itself as the key to the Essais. The word ‘commerce’, in the title of the chapter from which the quotation is taken, means something like ‘relationship’, although the notion of ‘exchange’ conveyed by the economic metaphor is also central. By promoting the importance of engagement with others, Montaigne’s remarks here and elsewhere counterbalance the myth of an exclusively introspective writer preoccupied with the self.
- This is why it is important to retain the notion of conversation. As opposed to debate or even discussion, which imply a more formal philosophical stance, the act of conversing brings two minds into intimate personal contact and exchange. According to this model, the best conversation is a kind of philosophy and conversation the best kind of philosophy.
- Like Pyrrhonist thought, the kind of conversation Montaigne describes in this chapter is a perpetual pursuit of the truth, never reaching anything other than a provisional conclusion but never abandoning the chase.
- What he is looking for is the single-minded pursuit of the truth of the matter in hand, without confusions or distractions or prevarications. That is why, in the model conversation, both participants must be ‘tough jousters’, alert, nimble and responsive to each other’s every move. ‘Order’, then, means something like ‘relevance’, the fine-tuning of mental attention to the particular situation in which the speakers are engaged, as in a hunt: ‘The constant movement and excitement of the chase is itself our true quarry: we cannot be excused if we conduct it badly and irrelevantly; if we fail to catch our prey, that is another matter.’
- Finally, the conversational model is essential to the Essais because, although Montaigne often depicts himself thinking and writing in solitude, he always imagines his writing as directed towards others, whether they are embodied by the perfect friend who might replace the long-lost Estienne de la Boétie, the everyday friends and family that composed Montaigne’s immediate social context, or his innumerable unknown and unguessable readers.
- Picking up the echo, Pascal transmitted it further by inventing a powerful formula to describe his own (mis)reading of the Essais: ‘It is not in Montaigne but in me that I find everything I see there.’65 That, in its briefest form, is how to use Montaigne’s book according to a rule it insistently formulates but with an outcome it could never have predicted.
- The rule only works because every aspect of the way the book is written, from sentence structure upwards, corresponds to the principle of the essai. It is not that Montaigne writes indeterminately; few authors of discursive prose have been as meticulously precise as he was in momentarily arresting and recording the fugitive creatures that passed through his mind. He leaves carefully calculated spaces, gaps, suspensions of assent, shifts of direction, that allow his readers plenty of room to participate in the exercise. The ethical intentions that saturate the Essais thrive on precisely this shifting ground. Montaigne’s relativism is not a passive neutrality: it forces you to take positions of your own, leads you to positions where you have to rethink.
- Tags: #deliberate-practice, #writing
- That range of influence can only be explained by the unique way in which it deflects attention from subject matter to the manner of thinking, inviting the reader to embark on a thought-experiment of his or her own.
- One way of making a preliminary selection would be to read the complete text of the principal chapters referred to in the present study (i.e. I.8, I.20, I.23, I.26, I.28, I.31, I.56, II.5, II.6, II.12, II.17, III.1, III.2, III.5, III.8, III.9, III.12), adding in particular III.13, the final chapter, which is a wonderful summation of many of Montaigne’s themes.