This otherwise straightforward essay about divination is very much what you would expect from Montaigne: amusing, sometimes ridiculous anecdotes about signs of future events that people believe in, and plenty of analysis about why it’s all a waste of our time that takes us away from the present.
But there is a stunner of a closing paragraph that I have not paid ample attention to in my many readings:
The daemon of Socrates was perhaps a certain impulse of the will that came to him without awaiting the advice of his reason. In a well-purified soul such as his, prepared by a continual exercise of wisdom and virtue, it is likely that these inclinations, although instinctive and undigested, were always important and worth following. Everyone feels within himself some likeness of such stirrings of a prompt, vehement, and accidental opinion. It is my business to give them some authority, since I give so little to our wisdom. And I have had some as weak in reason as violent in persuasiveness—or in dissuasiveness, as was more ordinary in Socrates—by which I let myself be carried away so usefully and fortunately that they might be judged to have in them something of divine inspiration.
Let me unpack this a line at a time. All we directly know of Socrates comes via Plato and Xenophon, Socrates left no personal writing, and from Plato’s writing, especially the Apology, there is discussion of Socrates and his daimonion. Socrates claimed to have an inner voice that would warn him if the action he was about to take was ill advised. If he did not hear a voice, he assumed all was ok. While Plato sometimes used Socrates as a stand in for his own ideas, this daimonion was well known in Athens and even became an issue during his trial, where there was some concern that Socrates was inventing his own religion. So in this opening sentence, Montaigne is taking a guess at what this daemon might be—he calls it an impulse of the will that supersedes reason. I think a more contemporary description might be to call it his unconscious, intuition or inner voice.
In the second sentence, Montaigne refers to Socrates as having a “well-purified soul” that continually exercised its wisdom and virtue. He will return to very similar language in “On Drunkenness” in another paragraph that throws me for a loop, where Montaigne basically argues that very few people, or perhaps none, have the inner serenity to act as the stoics advise us. But within that text, Montaigne hints that maybe a near superman of philosophy could achieve it, and here he seems to be saying Socrates is such a man. So what Montaigne is saying is that because Socrates pays so much attention to his thoughts and impulses, when he catches something in his intuition, it’s worth paying attention to it. I find this rationale wise—if only Montaigne had kept it in mind while examining Socrates’ anecdote about a young man’s head on his shoulder, which he badly mangles in his “On Some Verses of Virgil” essay.
Next, Montaigne extends the idea of intuition to everyone. We all have these stirrings, which in most of us just lead to strong impulses or opinions. But then he brings Pyrrhonism into the discussion in the next sentence. Because Montaigne will not allow wisdom to be all-important, and will always take a “what do I know?” stance whenever possible, he also pays attention to this intuition. If we cannot trust our brain to come up with a rational answer all the time, why not be open to whatever flies through the window of our mind?
Then he comes to the concluding sentence, which is a stunner, considering how he has thoroughly debunked the concept of divination through the rest of the essay. Montaigne concludes this piece by stating, in ununsually complicated language for him—probably by design—that he has been divinely inspired at times. He says that these intuitions are unreasonable and carried a heavy force of emotion in them, but they pushed him towards an outcome that was so positive, he can only consider them “something of divine inspiration.”
If only Montaigne had used that as his starting point, told us some of those stories, and built historical anecdotes around that idea. It might have been one of his most memorable essays. Instead we get this one which, as I said in the opening, is (no pun intended) predictable.
Human beings are pattern seeking beings. We are constantly assessing risk, making forecasts about whether one meal or another will be more satisfying, determining how to best spend our money and free time. All human investing is based on forecasts of future profitability or risk. Life is full of risk assessment and all of it requires our talent for pattern recognition. And we make many of these decisions intuitively.
Roughly a third of the way through his essay, Montaigne throws on the table the possibility that our belief or disbelief in divination – the concept that we can make forecasts based on some kind of natural pattern, such as the stars in the sky – is the same as having a belief in a god (or series of gods.) He quotes Cicero:
‘Ista sic reciprocantur, ut et, si divinatio sit, dii sint: et si dii sint, sit divinatio.’ [If there is divination there are gods, and conversely, if there are gods there is divination.]
Montaigne frames this quote by saying that those who agree with Cicero are wrong. But notice that Cicero’s quote is not about a monotheistic God, but rather the pantheistic Roman gods. While a reader would naturally believe that Montaigne is staking a claim that a belief in God does not require a belief in divination – and therefore Montaigne’s disbelief doesn’t disqualify his belief – he is making a different, narrower claim that divination and belief in the old patheon of gods is not inextricable.
I’ve noted before Montaigne’s interesting, very contemporary belief in presence, and he applies that stance here to argue that all forms of divination and forecast push us towards the kind of future mindset he warned against in that earlier essay:
There remain among us it is true some means of divination by the heavens, by spirits, by bodily features, by dreams and so on: that is a remarkable example of the mad curiosity of our nature which wastes time trying to seize hold of the future as though it were not enough to have to deal with the present.
Notice here how radical Montaigne’s position is – even our act of dreaming, or perhaps more accurately, dream analysis, is deemed an act of time wasting and an attempt to steal the present by pushing us to the future by examining the past.
He makes his positive claim more explicitly here:
That man will be happy and master of himself who every day declares, ‘I have lived. Tomorrow let Father Jove fill the heavens with dark clouds or with purest light’… Let your mind rejoice in the present: let it loathe to trouble about what lies in the future.
There is some wisdom here – we cannot dwell on the aspects of lives out of our control – and I will mention later how central Socrates is to this thought. But ignoring the future is also insane. Paying no attention to the weather forecasts can get you killed, just ask anyone who stayed put during a deadly hurricane. Not paying attention to all forms of prediction, even those that reveal themselves from within, is also a form of divination. It’s a radical belief that life is entirely contingent and that most of the important information available to us is in a continuous present.
And if you think I’m being to harsh on Montaigne, he then makes explicit his belief in radical contingency:
I would rather order my affairs by casting dice, by lots, than by such fanciful nonsense. And truly all States have always attributed considerable authority to them.
But if you take what I wrote about the closing paragraph together with this thought, there is some logic here. Montaigne is making a case for the existence of some kind of personal divination through our intuition, although he does not believe in any kind of mass divination open to everyone who knows how to interpret a flock of birds or discern tea leaves.
Even though I think Montaigne is being extreme in his rhetoric about being future facing, I have a soft spot for rolling the dice on their choices in life and figuring out how to live with the consequences rather than living in the suspended animation of indecision. Given Montaigne’s extremism here, it also wouldn’t surprise me if he was aware of and a supporter of the Taoist I Ching. Personally, I enjoy using an I Ching app to make forecasts about difficult issues I am facing, in part because it really doesn’t make predictions, it just finds another clever way to apply the same basic Taoist teaching to every predicament.
Despite his more radical moments, Montaigne is not a believer that wisdom always points us in the right direction, and he closes with a belief that we must remain open to inspiration in life. To give a personal example, I look at the search data on this website on a daily basis and revisit stories here based on the pings. I also sometimes let the search data influence my day — yesterday I noticed a ping for a story that focused on Tolstoy, so I spent much of the day watching the 1960s Soviet Union-financed, 7 hour adaptation of “War and Peace,” which was a great use of my time, by the way.
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