While this is a long Montaigne essay, it’s surprisingly focused. At the core, he’s making a simple point – because humans are capable of reframing death, pain and poverty as tolerable phenomena, and perhaps even good occurrences in some circumstances, then there is no objective happiness, there is only acts of reframing that bring on these states of mind:
So ease or indigence depend on each man’s opinion: wealth, fame and health all have no more beauty and pleasure than he who has them lends to them. For each man good or ill is as he finds. The man who is happy is not he who is believed to be so but he who believes he is so: in that way alone does belief endow itself with true reality.
This is a phenomenon I experience often. Recently, I was working through a day where everything felt difficult and annoying. I was questioning the people closest to me and bemoaning all kinds of connections I’d made. I stopped myself to take note of where I stood, objectively, on a number of measures in my life and concluded that things were fine, there was no cause for despair. But I also knew that I was just in a mood and there was no reframing it in that moment. Sure enough, the mood passed and my negative framing was gone.
I recognize the need for reframing, even though I often can’t force myself to do it in the moment, in large part because of this project and the thoughts and feelings that Montaigne brings up. I constantly have to confront bits and pieces of myself that can have an entirely different look depending on the light cast on them.
Perhaps this is what Montaigne had in mind by helping ourselves incline towards agreeable directions and solutions:
Nature, being equal and common to all, cannot fail to be just. But since we have un-slaved ourselves from Nature’s law and given ourselves over to the vagrant liberty of our mental perceptions, the least we can do is to help ourselves by making them incline towards the most agreeable direction. Plato is afraid of our bitter enslavement to pain and to pleasure, since they too firmly bind and shackle our souls to our bodies; I, on the contrary, because they release them and strike them free.
Because this is one of Montaigne’s earliest essays, there’s still an impulse within him to assign everything to a static, stable human nature, governed by reason. Philosopher Charles Taylor, in his fantastic book “Sources of the Self,” suggests that Montaigne learned early on in his venture that this nature does not exist:
There is some evidence that when he embarked on his reflections, he shared the traditional view that these should serve to recover contact with the permanent, stable, unchanging core of being in each of us. This is the virtually unanimous direction of ancient thought: beneath the changing and shifting desires in the unwise soul, and over against the fluctuating fortunes of the external world, our true nature, reason, provides a foundation, unwavering and constant.
Taylor continues:
But things didn’t work out this way for Montaigne. There is some evidence that when he sat down to write and turned to himself, he experienced a terrifying inner instability. His response was to observe and catalogue his thoughts, feelings, responses. And from this emerged a quite different stand towards the impermanence and uncertainty of human life, an acceptance of limits, which drew on both Epicurean and Christian sources.
This was one of the first essays where that new stand starts to emerge, even if he is still relying on the ancients for support. Montaigne in this essays believes that our beliefs about poverty, pain, even death, are free to our interpretations and values. We are free to not fear death … or to show courage when facing pain … or choose a less prosperous life path. In later essays, he will show examples of other cultures that take different views of these issues as proof.
With this freedom to redefine evil, we also gain the freedom to define good. We can choose to enjoy gourmet food instead of fast food — or art over entertainment. And those decisions are never final, we can contingently decide to gorge on ice cream one weekend if the mood strikes.
All of this is in line with Epictetus, so it’s not original. But what makes the quote about “unslaving us” from human nature so vital and paradoxical is that Montaigne comes to this realization with trepidation—he equates Plato’s fear of soulless hedonism with his own understanding of freedom. He grows more comfortable with the epicurean approach as the essay progress, but this early opinion teases out some interesting conclusions.
Montaigne argues that pain separates us from the experiences of the body and gives what he calls the soul free rein to conflate that pain into something even more powerful. By taking on Plato’s view of the soul, Montaigne is indirectly taking on Christianity. In fact, numerous Montaigne scholars note that whenever Montaigne brings up Plato, it’s a signal to look for the hidden critique of Christianity.
This raises another puzzle about this essay and others to come–what exactly does Montaigne mean when he mentions the soul? Bear in mind that Montaigne does not believe in the immortality of the soul, so the traditional Christian definition won’t suffice. I sought out other sources on Montaigne for some guidance on this and came across this very interesting quote:
For beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself. This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say.
This fascinating take came from no other than Virginia Woolf, who wrote a beautiful essay about Montaigne in the 1920s. She gives support to the Charles Taylor thesis here:
After all, how could he explain other people’s souls when he could say nothing “entirely simply and solidly, without confusion or mixture, in one word”, about his own, when indeed it became daily more and more in the dark to him?
So what is the soul that Montaigne uncovered? Woolf rhapsodizes about it:
Really she [Montaigne’s soul] is the strangest creature in the world, far from heroic, variable as a weathercock, “bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal”—in short, so complex, so indefinite, corresponding so little to the version which does duty for her in public, that a man might spend his life merely in trying to run her to earth.
Charles Taylor believes that Montaigne’s mission was a turning point in how human beings understand their inner lives:
Montaigne strives to come to a certain equilibrium even within the ever-changing by identifying and coming to terms with the patterns which represent his own particular way of living in flux. So although “we have no communication with being,” Montaigne sought, and found some inner peace in, his “mistress form.” Self-knowledge is the indispensable key to self-acceptance. Coming to be at home within the limits of our condition presupposes that we grasp these limits, that we learn to draw their contours from within, as it were.
Woolf builds on this:
The man who is aware of himself is henceforward independent; and he is never bored, and life is only too short, and he is steeped through and through with a profound yet temperate happiness. He alone lives, while other people, slaves of ceremony, let life slip past them in a kind of dream. Once conform, once do what other people do because they do it, and a lethargy steals over all the finer nerves and faculties of the soul. She becomes all outer show and inward emptiness; dull, callous, and indifferent.
According to Taylor, this leads Montaigne with a vision of how to live, but it’s one he can only describe in subjective, personal terms:
To live right is to live within limits, to eschew the presumption of superhuman spiritual aspirations. But the limits which are relevant for me are mine; to live by some universal model is another one of those chimaeric goals which Epicurean wisdom and Christian humility should warn us to avoid.
And I will return once more to Virginia Woolf for her description of how Montaigne advises us to live:
Surely then, if we ask this great master of the art of life to tell us his secret, he will advise us to withdraw to the inner room of our tower and there turn the pages of books, pursue fancy after fancy as they chase each other up the chimney, and leave the government of the world to others. Retirement and contemplation—these must be the main elements of his prescription. But no; Montaigne is by no means explicit. It is impossible to extract a plain answer from that subtle, half smiling, half melancholy man, with the heavy-lidded eyes and the dreamy, quizzical expression.
Leave a Reply