Even though the earliest Montaigne essays seem like the overture to the symphony, you can start to see the real Montaigne peek out in certain phrases. It’s a common analysis of the essays that Montaigne started off his project and soon discovered that writing can be a terrifying journey. All kinds of feeling started to come up for him. Within a few essays, he will start comparing his mind to a runaway horse.
But here, Montaigne is still concerned with keeping it all under control. He’s writing about ataraxia or equanimity, one of the core goals of stoicism. It is also, incidentally, a key component of Pyrrhonism, which will soon eclipse stoicism among his thought processes.
To the stoics, reaching a level of inner peace and freedom from distress is all about keeping a person from reacting to all of life’s petty injustices and disturbances. Pyrrhonism doesn’t agree entirely. It believes that ataraxia results from applying skeptical thought to the world and allowing life’s mysteries to sit in observable silence.
But without ever mentioning any philosophy by name, Montaigne makes a strong case in this essay that the Stoics are overreaching with this goal, asking humans to put aside something that’s so deeply ingrained in our nature that even other animals sometimes react the same way.
To illustrate, Montaigne gives us a series of historical vignettes on this theme:
It seems that the soul too, in the same way, loses itself in itself when shaken and disturbed unless it is given something to grasp on to, and so we must always give it an object to butt up against and act upon.
Most of the examples are forms of self mutilation — such as banging your head against a wall or cutting yourself. But this kind of displacement can be on the positive side as well — showing warmth and affection towards a pet, for example, that you cannot show to a human at that moment. This recalls one of my all-time favorite scenes in the film “Drive My Car,” where the young woman chauffeur named Watari is so overwhelmed with happiness when her driving skills are complimented that she feels obliged to go to the floor and play with a dog to let out her joy.
Montaigne sums it all up by saying:
We shall never utter enough abuse against the unruliness of our own minds.
But what I find interesting about this line, and the essay in general, is that Montaigne doesn’t write it in the spirit of the Stoics, demanding that moral people do better and find their equipoise. Rather, he seems to be reveling a bit in this unruliness, enjoying this human quirk as something we all do and should just admit as part of our human folly. So while it’s common to believe that Montaigne only slowly challenged stoic beliefs, he is clearly taking on some key concepts very early in his project.
The Stoics wouldn’t approve of what Montaigne writes here. They’d say we should be more above board in our actions. But I think Montaigne is correct in finding that a flaw in their system. You can’t expect people to be perfect and to live in complete control of their feelings. So, accept your outbursts, your instinct to punch the table you just stubbed your toe on, and the extra attention you paid your dog when you can’t connect with someone else.
Achieving genuine equanimity, in Montaigne’s philosophy, is learning to laugh at yourself, admitting there’s a whole lot that you do not know, and trying to do better over time.
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