Montaigne created no new philosophical system and to this day, there’s tension between those who read him as someone like Nietzsche, a deep reader of classical philosophy who had his unique take on it, or those who insist that he is purely an essayist, that only his viewpoint of himself should matter.
This dispute has some contemporary importance. Philosopher Agnes Callard argues that the philosophic and essayist worldviews are fundamentally opposed, and where an intellectual lands between these poles tells us a great deal about their long-term value:
Thinking hard makes sense if you want answers; it makes less sense if the highest reward you anticipate from your intellectual efforts is surprise. The difference between a philosophical life and an essayistic one is that the former aims at knowledge, while the latter aims at novelty. The characteristic positive response to an essay is: “I hadn’t thought about it that way before”; the essayist’s chief enemy is boredom….The essayist is a responsive, reactive creature, always aware of the standard way of looking at things, and always on the alert for the path of least resistance to some alternative point of view.
Montaigne is, obviously, a little of both. Some of his deeper essays, in particular “An Apology for Raymond Sebond” and “On Experience” involve some hard thinking, but more important to Montaigne’s project, some deep living. However, he undoubtedly has his share of lighter pieces that aim purely to assay a new subject from his unique point of view.
But what about my project? I feel that I am stuck between the two poles at times as well. My first attempt at Montaigne’s 107 essays was clearly an effort at novelty. I wanted to put my own personal spin on Montaigne’s work, not necessarily to understand what he wrote at any depth. It was an exercise in appreciative reading, but there’s no doubt that I was the “reactive creature” Callard describes.
Over time, however, I have tried to go deeper on Montaigne, to the point this year that I believe I am finally getting a deeper understanding of him. But while doing this, I have also employed my own reactive tool to allay my own boredom and prevent me from undertaking one more one to 107 series of essays.
However, I am still left with a project that is a little of my first Montaigne project and a little of its more recent incarnation. One way that I point myself towards which pieces to re-examine is to look closely at my analytics data, to the stories read and searched on a daily basis. This has led me interesting places this year.
It has also, however, put me in just the type of quandary Pyrrhonism warns against. To believe that the data is telling me a day-to-day story, I’ve bought into a theory that one person is creating these daily breadcrumbs, that she has read and understands the work to date, follows the changes via an RSS feed, and is devoting a significant amount of personal time to providing an interesting alternative point of view on how my essays might interrelate.
I can continue to follow this theory if I find it useful to the project, but a Pyrrhonist would warn that I should not confuse this rationalization with reality. I have no way of knowing if one person in particular is creating the data, or whether more than one is engaged with the essays — or if no one in particular is reading at all, that the data is being created by random people performing web searches and perhaps some web crawlers. It’s also possible that one person is creating the data, but my interpretations of the pings are wildly off base.
There’s another problem with this approach as well — I am supposed to be engaged at this point in a fine tuning project to get all 107 essays into shape so I can try to pitch my collection as a manuscript sometime next year. But the pings are basically sending me back to the same dozen or so essays over and over again. Those essays are getting particularly deep and layered, but perhaps at the expense of the other essays that could use quite a bit more work.
So, something I’m going to need to try in 2025 is applying some Pyrrhonism to my editing approach going forward. I can’t become too attached to any one theory about who is creating the pings and what they might mean. But I also need to be open to anything that might inspire me to keep refining the work. Perhaps my attachment to completing the project on a timeline, or at all, needs to be let go as well.
None of this is to criticize anyone who reads and enjoys these essays or feels any level of personal attachment to the work. If that is in fact happening, I’m deeply grateful for it. This is really just a me issue … how can I learn from the approaches Montaigne is trying to teach me? That is ultimately what this project is all about.
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