The best thing this essay has going for it is the title. It’s evocative and highly relatable. Who hasn’t struggled with a tangled mind when faced with difficult decisions or the complexities of life? The title promises insight, maybe even clarity—but Montaigne, true to form, delivers something far more elusive. While he ultimately reaches something profound, it takes him some more time to arrive there.
In this very short essay, Montaigne provides just a bit of what the title promises. In fact, the essay might be better entitled “an additional something.” Here’s why:
It seems to me that we could say that nothing ever presents itself to us in which there is not some difference, however slight: either to sight or to touch there is always an additional something which attracts us even though we may not perceive it.
So, while Montaigne is chiding the stoics in this essay for formulating a series of rules that are supposed to help us reach decisions, he’s more broadly taking on the notion that reason alone can help us understand the world, which is a common theme throughout his project. Here he’s a little more explicit about it. Montaigne says reason will often take us to a location where the decision is 50/50. And when we decide, it will be because of that “additional something,” not some final piece of rational evidence that tips it.
What exactly is that “additional something”? Donald Frame translates it a bit differently. He has Montaigne saying that “there is always something extra that attracts us, though it be imperceptibly.” And what about the Modern French translation? The simplest translation of the French is “some more,” even less vivid. Perhaps I’ve paid too little attention to the “sight or touch” aspect of the phrase, because Montaigne seems to be returning here to embodied consciousness, saying that there is something in the body, in our sense data, that gives us an impulse towards a decision before rationality plays a role.
So, the mind tangles itself up mostly by trying to override a decision the body has already made. Whatever it is that we call the thing that makes the decision—our nervous system, intuition, bias, or the unconscious— this “something” operates in the background, quietly deciding before logic is even asked to weight in. Montaigne’s insight, radical for his time, aligns with modern neuroscience, which suggests that many decisions are made before we’re even consciously aware of them.
This “additional something” reminds us of the limits of human perception—how our understanding of the world and ourselves is always mediated by forces we can’t fully see or explain. Recall in his essay on divination how Montaigne, while rejecting all the folk wisdom about reading natural signs to determine the future, admits that he has followed his intuition on important occasions and been lead down the proper path.
That’s really all there is to this essay, but Montaigne doesn’t just let the matter drop. He eventually reveals significant insights, going into much greater depth about the same topic, in his closing essay On Experience, making this something of a precursor to his grand wrap up.
On Experience is about so many things that I’ve written five essays on it to date, with no guarantee that more won’t be forthcoming. But one of its themes is a deconstruction of reason and celebration of the messy, dynamic nature of life. In that essay, Montaigne sees logic and reason as inherently entangled in the flaws of the human mind. He observes that we often overcomplicate our understanding by attempting to rationalize everything, likening our mental efforts to silkworms entangling themselves in their own webs.
And speaking of entanglement, Montaigne wrote his essays with “my reader” in mind—a concept that starts off as a generic dedication, but takes on different weight when considering the past influence of Etienne de La Boetie and the future assistance of Marie de Gournay. This essay has taken on a similar life of its own in that manner.
As mentioned in other places, I often look at my readership data, limited as it may be, for clues about what is interesting my reader and how I might best relate various pieces in the Montaigne corpus to one another. Most days I assume I know the identify of this reader, but occasionally I wonder if I’m just staring at random noise and tying my own mind up in knots over data that has no rhyme or reason. I also must admit to a certain unease when this essay is pinged, because I have no idea what to make of it. It could signal anything from expressing that something I’ve written recently has put her in a confused state of mind to signaling that her unconscious is rejecting me, or perhaps she just thinks I need to work on the essay some more.
There is nothing more distinctly human that looking for patterns in everything, from lights in the sky, to soap bubbles, to random bits of internet noise. I could chide myself for this, but Montaigne, here quoting Pliny, reminds us that trying to find meaning and direct purpose in our lives is often beyond our strength of will:
There is nothing certain except that nothing is certain, and nothing more wretched than Man nor more arrogant.
This closing thought serves as a reminder that uncertainty is not just inevitable but deeply human. Perhaps it’s this very uncertainty—this silent trust in an “additional something” or my unquestioned faith in a silent, mysterious reader—that keeps us moving forward, weaving meaning out of the tangled threads of our lives.
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