I will start this somewhat lengthy take of an extremely long Montaigne essay by explaining who Raymond Sebond is. I’m going to steal this directly from the Wikipedia page:
Raymond of Sabunde (born Ramon Sibiuda; also known as Sabiende, Sabond, Sabonde, Sebon, Sebond, Sebonde, or Sebeyde; c. 1385[1] – 29 April 1436) was a Catalan scholar, teacher of medicine and philosophy and finally regius professor of theology at Toulouse.[2] He was born in Barcelona(at that time the major Catalan city of the Crown of Aragon), and died in Toulouse.
His Theologia Naturalis sive Liber naturae creaturarum, etc., written 1434–1436 but published in 1484, marks an important stage in the history of natural theology.[2] It was first written in Latin (but not in a strictly classical Latin, since it contained plenty of Catalan-influenced Latin words).[3] His followers composed a more classical Latin version of the work.[3] It was translated into French by Michel de Montaigne (Paris, 1569) and edited in Latin at various times (e.g. Deventer, 1487; Strasburg, 1496; Paris, 1509; Venice, 1581, etc.).[4]
The book was directed against the position then held by some, that reason and faith, philosophy and theology were antithetical and irreconcilable. Raymond declares that the Book of Nature and the Bible are both Divine revelations, the one general and immediate, the other specific and mediate.
There are a couple important things to know about Sebond’s book. First, there’s no English translation. So I have to take everyone’s word for it on what the book is about. And the second thing you need to know is that Montaigne’s “apology” is nothing of the the sort. He’s not defending Sebond in this essay, rather he’s using Sebond as a launching pad for his own attack on reason and his support of Pyrrhonism.
As noted above, Montaigne translated Theology Naturalis into French. There’s some dispute about exactly when he did this, but from what I gather, it was a close to his father’s death. Montaigne confused things by calling it a “schoolboy exercise,” but he in fact was a grown adult when his dad demanded this of him.
Montaigne did something more important than just translate the work, he had it published later— and his translation succeeded in having the text (and then the introduction) removed from the Vatican’s list of heretical works. He did this by fudging some of Sebond’s stronger statements in the introduction … and as a speechwriter and ghostwriter; I feel Montaigne completely in this arduous task. I often feel that the hardest part of my job is just getting people to compromise over language while still making it accessible.
So Montaigne dedicated a great deal of time to this project and already had a favorable inclination towards it. He was also a Roman Catholic and could see value in taking a text that few people read and making a friendly distortion of Sebond’s ideas to attack Protestantism.
Some contemporary atheists have tried to make the argument that the text is actually a refutation of all religions. There’s some subtlety to this point that’s important to point out. Montaigne lived in an age where almost no one questioned the Creation of the universe. There was no Big Bang or Theory of Evolution. It was nearly impossible to express thoughts that questioned the existence of a Creator. However, I do think it’s possible that Montaigne was an eager seeker of alternate theories about creation. You could credibly argue that Montaigne thought all established religions were just inventions of man—extrapolations of philosophy—and the true religion explaining creation was something hidden from our understanding, perhaps beyond reason.
It seems to me that Montaigne’s arguments about Pyrrhonism do not point towards disbelief in creation, but rather a disdain for the rationality that Protestants of the time used to argue for a personal interpretation of scripture. But not only must I fall back on Montaigne’s credo “what do I know?” in this case, I’m not entirely sure that he knew what he was getting at, theologically speaking.
It’s by far Montaigne’s longest essay, and it’s exhausting. Montaigne biographer Phillipe Desan says reading this essay is akin to being lost in a maze, and I agree with him. But with some care and attention, a reader will eventually see that the Sebond essay is essential to Montaigne’s full project and the one place where he takes a clear (and also highly rambling) case for skepticism.
There are so many threads to follow in this essay that it’s impossible to encapsulate them all in one place. He goes on for a long stretch making a case that human reason isn’t unique, that others in the animal kingdom have features of our reason that serve their survival instincts. He spends many pages mocking philosophers and philosophies of all stripes. He makes a powerful case for using debate as the template of all discourse. And then he closes in a striking way, making a closing argument that nothing about human beings can be believed because we have no essential being.
Even Montaigne recognized how radical this argument was:
For your sake, Patroness, I have abandoned my usual practice and have taken some pains to make this into a very long chapter. Sebond is your author: you will, of course, continue to defend him with the usual forms of argument in which you are instructed every day; that will exercise your mind and your scholarship. The ultimate rapier-stroke which I am using here must only be employed as a remedy of last resort. It is a desperate act of dexterity, in which you must surrender your own arms to force your opponent to lose his. It is a covert blow which you should only use rarely and with discretion. It is rashness indeed to undo another by undoing yourself. We must not seek to die as an act of revenge, as Gobrias did when locked in close combat with a Persian nobleman: Darius arrived on the scene, sword in hand, but was afraid to strike for fear of killing him; Gobrias shouted to him to strike boldly, even if he had to run both of them through.
What is Montaigne’s master stroke argument? He sets it up a bit earlier in the essay:
Philosophy has armed Man well against all the other ills which may befall him, teaching him either to bear them or else, if the cost of that is too high, to inflict certain defeat on them by escaping from all sensation. But such methods can only be of service to a vigorous soul in control of herself, a soul capable of reason and decision: they are no use in a disaster such as this, where the soul of a philosopher becomes the soul of a madman, confused, lost and deranged. This can happen from several causes: by some excessive emotion which snatches the mind away; by some strong passion engendered by the soul herself; by a wound in certain parts of the body; by a gastric vapour subjecting the soul to giddiness and confusion:
Then Montaigne argues that this philosophic soul is more lost at all times than he understands:
Man has no more knowledge of his own body than of his own soul. We have shown Man to himself – and his reason to his reason, to see what it has to tell us. I have succeeded in showing, I think, how far reason is from understanding even itself.
And then Montaigne drives home his point on human passions:
To prove that this is so: ‘if we remained forever one and the same, how ‘is it that we can delight in one thing now and later in another? How can ‘we each be one if we love or hate contradictory things, first praising them, ‘then condemning them? How can we have different emotions, no ‘longer retaining the same sentiment within the same thought? For it is not ‘likely that we can experience different reactions unless we ourselves have ‘changed; but whoever suffers change is no longer the same one: he no ‘longer is. For his being, as such, changes when his being one changes, as each ‘personality ever succeeds another. And, consequently, it is of the nature of ‘our senses to be misled and deceived. Because they do not know what being ‘is, they take appears to be for is.
One caveat to all of this thought: Montaigne gives his own warning about how this view of human character can undermine all foundations of arguments, and that’s true. But there’s an even greater risk from my perspective. This is a perfectly fine tool for self reflection. It can help people note their own inconsistencies, so that they can have humility for their ideas and ethical standards.
But it could also be used by bad actors to give themselves a pass for thoughtless and damaging behavior. Pyrrhonism misapplied can be a get out of jail free card for everyone looking to avoid accountability for their actions. That was not Montaigne’s intention. He maintained high ethical standards even while thinking people cannot expected to be consistent. Know yourself and your quirks, but don’t view your tumultuous feelings as an excuse for treating people poorly.
Montaigne is saying that we are in a constant state of change and everyone we know is constantly changing as well. So we can state with complete sincerity and passion a strong feeling about an idea or person, but not feel the same way moments later.
Montaigne makes a strong argument earlier in this essay for embodied consciousness here, centuries ahead of his time:
It is certain that our conceptions, our judgement and our mental faculties in general are all affected by the changes and alterations of the body. Those alterations are ceaseless. Are our minds not more alert, our memory more ready, our reasoning powers more lively when we are well rather than ill? Does not everything present a different aspect to our minds under the influence of joy and gaiety or of chagrin and melancholy?
There are so many elements that affect our daily moods that it is nearly impossible to catalog all of the factors that can go into these shifts of outlook. Montaigne just noted ones caused by how our body is feeling. In addition, we can have solid, immovable feelings or beliefs that survive all the chaos and change around us, but our ability to communicate these thoughts and feelings in a consistent way can be affected by the atmosphere: who is the present company, what current feelings or expectations are held towards those people, both individually and collectively, are there significant understandings and misunderstandings of thoughts being expressed. If examined day by day, even moment to moment, it may appear that the sentiments are shifting—or even that we’ve even had a dramatic shift in affections—but all that is really changing is our ability to momentarily communicate our interior state in the context of the dynamic world.
Part of the issue is the universal difficulty in expressing any feeling. This is a timeless linguistic issue. In his essay “On Sadness,” Montaigne pointed out Petrarch’s verse that the type of love we can fully express burns on a small pyre. And then there’s Nietzsche saying that all talk has a grain of contempt, because once we get to the point where we can translate a feeling to words, we’ve watered down all the meaning, turned it into a cliche. And as I’ve noted elsewhere, Nietzsche also argues in Daybreak that the clumsy nature of language often leads us to lose all subtlety in our writing and talk. We express thoughts and feelings at the extremes, turning ourselves into personal zealots, when our true feelings might require more poetry to state accurately.
And that’s just getting our own words out. Having them understood by another mind is a greater level of complexity. Even if we surpass this, we’re still trapped in the “other minds” problem with everyone, even those we believe we know most deeply. Every action is open to interpretation.
But if we actually focus our attention trying to divine that real meaning, we’ll drive ourselves mad, because even if we get it right, that discovered belief by someone else is just as fleeting as our own thoughts, feelings and beliefs. If this all makes human emotions, especially love, sound like delusion, then welcome to the world of Marcel Proust.
The “problem” of love is the core of Proust’s work and Montaigne’s thoughts here sure sound like an early inspiration. Love often feels like a choice made for us. Once in that state, many become incapable of overcoming projections, turning the beloved into what you want her to be instead of who she is.
Montaigne wrote about the fickleness of human desire earlier in the Sebond essay:
Yet it would seize me, possess me. It was like a kind of drunkenness; everything took on an unaccustomed appearance; I would see the woman I yearned for becoming manifestly more attractive, her qualities swelling and growing as the wind of my imagination blew upon them; the difficulties facing my courtship would seem to become easy and smooth; my reason and conscience would withdraw into the background. Then, with lightning speed, at the very instant when my fire had burned itself out, my soul would recover another state, another judgement, another way of looking at things; it was now the difficulties of getting out of it which seemed immense and insurmountable; the very same things took on very different tastes and appearances from the ones offered me by inflamed desire.
This is one of the few places in his essays where Montaigne will admit that he sometimes lost his mind by falling for a woman. But it’s interesting that he was just as fickle in love as he is in thought.
His phrasing is interesting, especially “my reason and conscience would withdraw into the background.” This is a nearly perfect explanation of how Freud theorized the unconscious works, that it overrides the ego, the rational, judging part of the brain. It also validates Freud’s thought that writers discovered the unconscious long before he did.
I spent a lot of time this year examining the points raised in Montaigne’s paragraph and don’t wish to rehash them all here. But the contigency of feelings is often less about how fleeting those feelings are and more about the internal conflicts that make it impossible to untangle ourselves from the confusion that thinking only compounds.
While stoicism and its modern cousin, cognitive behavioral therapy, see human beings as singular, solid forms, Montaigne in many places hints that we are much more complicated than that, that there are multitudes within us. Freud narrowed that down to three elements of the psyche, but I kind of like the way Montaigne stated it, that we’re all bits and pieces that come together in different ways at different times, sometimes giving weight to our conscious selves, sometimes the unconscious.
Creating a standoff between the conscious and unconscious—or refusing to acknowledge the unconscious at all—leads to unexpected outcomes. But Montaigne argues that the indecision that results from just this kind of emotional whiplash is highly sensible:
There is some advantage, surely, in being detached from the reins of the Necessity which curb others. Is it not better to remain in doubt, than to get entangled in the many errors produced by human fantasy? Is it not better to postpone one’s adherence indefinitely than to intervene in factions, both quarrelling and seditious? ‘What ought I to choose?’ – ‘Anything you wish, so long as you choose something.’ A daft enough reply! Yet it seems to be the one reached by every kind of dogmatism which refuses us the right not to know what we do not know.
All of the paths through this kind of conflict, even with the aid of modern psychology, are perilous. One of Freud’s most brilliant discoveries is that the unconscious is not some irrational gnat to be swatted away, but the intellectual equal of the ego/conscious mind, and if you choose to ignore or suppress it, the unconscious will find a way to torment you. In my experience, it does this multiple ways—by creating a mind/body division, haunting my dreams, driving me to compulsive behaviors and sometimes even talking control of my voice to blurt out the truth at the most inappropriate moments.
But while every attempt to ignore my unconscious feelings ends badly, surrendering to those feelings doesn’t work either. Sometimes the unconscious is replicating bad options, hoping to heal the past by getting it right this time. In the passage above, Montaigne applies Pyrrhonism to this internal struggle and argues that rejecting the dogmatism of required choice might be the wisest, safest path.
Carl Jung tried to articulate a path through these kinds of quandaries by saying that we need to learn how to talk to an anima/animus. Once you get to know your unconscious and treat it as an essential part of you, you can begin to integrate your psyche and make decisions–even highly emotional ones–more in line with your feelings and values. Unfortunately, Jung gave very little guidance for how this should be executed.
Clearly, Montaigne was not writing his essay as an examination of mating styles or modern depth psychology. But his discussions of human passions in the essay are among his clearest and most relatable. Just look what he does next by comparing intense romantic crushes with coming into contact with new ideas, and argues that it makes little sense to adopt them because you will reject them as well.
Thus, whenever some new doctrine is offered to us we have good cause for distrusting it and for reflecting that the contrary was in fashion before that was produced; it was overturned by this later one, but some third discovery may overturn that too, one day.
The new doctrine he’s writing about here is protestantism. But it could apply just as well to Catholic dogma—or any school of thought. Montaigne believed that all human knowledge will eventually be overturned. Only the act of creation points at a singular being, everything else, perhaps including all religious faiths, are human acts of becoming.
So, returning to the romantic love analogy, if you can fend off the most intense, out of mind crush you have on a woman, then you should have enough self control to avoid religious and political fads as well.
Montaigne’s point is that only God is … God is timeless, unchanging, outside of the whims of personality and the tidal climate changes of the earth. Everything else we know was and exists in the process of changing yet again and forever. And more than that, reason isn’t all it’s cracked up to be … because so much that makes us do what really matters in life comes from folly and out-of-nowhere impulses:
Here is a pleasant thought: when the passions bring dislocation to our reason, we become virtuous; when reason is driven out by frenzy or by sleep, that image of death, we become prophets and seers. I have never been more inclined to believe Philosophy! It was a pure enthusiasm – breathed into the spirit of Philosophy by holy Truth herself – which wrenched from her, against her normal teaching, that the tranquil state of our soul, the quiet state, the sanest state that Philosophy can obtain for her, is not her best state. Our waking sleeps more than our sleeping; our wisdom is less wise than our folly; our dreams are worth more than our discourse; and to remain inside ourselves is to adopt the worst place of all.
That’s a very beautiful embrace of the unconscious from Montaigne, especially given that he attacks dreams in other essays as idle wastes of time. This is, oddly, also his argument for Catholicism. Montaigne was not at all a believer in the rational church, he embraced the frenzied spirit of the faith over Thomist (and in turn Aristotelian) theology.
Montaigne argues that we cannot be expected to rationally parcel out the biggest questions, including those of faith, because we can never ground our thoughts in a single place:
There can hardly be found a single hour in an entire lifetime when our powers of judgment are settled in their proper place; our bodies are subject to so many sustained changes and are composed of so many kinds of principles that there is always one pulling the wrong way
Or, as I mentioned earlier, everything we do is open to interpretation. Our judgment cannot remain “in a proper place” when so much of what we decide about others depends on how we view the action and whether we choose to see it positively or negatively.
American philosopher Richard Rorty argued we need to think of all human opinions as contingent because even the most rational formulation of a sentence will change as humanity adopts new metaphors and new grammar. All of civilization is an ever-changing carnival of reconstituted words to describe the world as it exists in this moment, not how it was or how it will be.
But back to Montaigne, he was such a strong skeptic at this point in his writing that he refused to believe that human beings have higher consciousness than animals. This passage ends with his most famous quote:
The natural, original distemper of Man is presumption. Man is the most blighted and frail of all creatures and, moreover, the most given to pride. This creature knows and sees that he is lodged down here, among the mire and shit of the world, bound and nailed to the deadest, most stagnant part of the universe, in the lowest storey of the building, the farthest from the vault of heaven; his characteristics place him in the third and lowest category of animate creatures, yet, in thought, he sets himself above the circle of the Moon, bringing the very heavens under his feet. The vanity of this same thought makes him equal himself to God; attribute to himself God’s mode of being; pick himself out and set himself apart from the mass of other creatures; and (although they are his fellows and his brothers) carve out for them such helpings of force or faculties as he thinks fit. How can he, from the power of his own understanding, know the hidden, inward motivations of animate creatures? What comparison between us and them leads him to conclude that they have the attributes of senseless brutes? When I play with my cat, how do I know that she is not passing time with me rather than I with her?
From this sublime thought, Montaigne goes on for about 40 pages about animals. The quip about the cat probably would have sufficed, but I must admit that this section is entertaining even in its excess. For example, he has numerous anecdotes about the valor and intelligence of elephants. This recent story on NPR about how elephants give names to each other would fit comfortably in this essay.
But at its core, the essay is a frontal assault on classical philosophy and its assertion that God’s form can be deduced through reason. Montaigne comes down on the side of radical skepticism, even when he’s warning that belief in his strongest ideas undermine his own arguments. Montaigne would be okay with that, though:
Pyrrhonians have given themselves a wonderful strategic advantage by shrugging off the burden of self-defence. It does not matter who attacks them, as long as somebody does. Anything serves their purpose: if they win, your argument is defective; if you do, theirs is. If they lose, they show the truth of Ignorance; if you lose, you do. If they can prove that nothing is known: fine. If they do not succeed in proving it, that is fine too.
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