It’s fair to ask—why bother reading a 16th century French civil servants thoughts about himself, life and everything he’s read? To me, what makes Montaigne compelling is his universality. I’m struck by Montaigne’s ability to hone in on the timeless issues of existence, identifying personal conflicts just as relevant in the 21st century.
Montaigne also has a simple and (at times) wise approach to dealing with all of the thorny issues in life—just avoid them. Montaigne is a dedicated naysayer, especially when it comes to following your drives and instincts.
Despite his first person approach, Montaigne does not invite his followers to emote. He cultivates dispassion:
I exercise great care to extend by reason and reflection this privileged lack of emotion, which is by nature well advanced in me. I am wedded to few things and so am passionate about few. My sight is clear but I fix it on only a few objectives; my perception is scrupulous and receptive, but I find things hard to grasp and my concentration is vague. I do not easily get involved.
I am like Montaigne in that I’m good at keeping a distance from other people’s disputes. But I tend to find reason completely worthless in trying to mitigate my emotional reactions to life. If I miss someone or desire closeness that I cannot have, my natural reaction is to retreat into sadness. If reason serves any purpose in such circumstances, it’s in walling off other aspects of my life from this mood, so I am not overwhelmed with feeling, becoming incapable of keeping up with my life. I’m good at such compartmentalization. I can continue on with my life without the use of mental health days, I just take on a different personal atmosphere.
Montaigne’s distance is studied. It springs a conscious effort to keep a distance from enthusiasms that could suck away his time and attention, and in one of his most famous quotes, he takes a strong stand against becoming too attached to anyone:
There are emotions which drag me from myself and tie me up elsewhere: those I oppose with all my might. In my opinion we must lend ourselves to others but give ourselves to ourselves alone. Even if my will did find it easy to pawn and bind itself to others, I could not persevere: by nature and habit I am too fastidious for that: fleeing from obligations and born for untroubled leisure.
For me, this Montaigne idea is so much easier to say than to enact. I cannot easily go unaffected by the actions of others, especially actions designed to provoke me. I think Montaigne’s line has to be taken in context. It comes near the end of his project and life. He has not spent his years avoiding connections to others, he’s just experienced so much loss in life that he’s determined it’s time to stop.
That line about lending ourselves—but not giving ourselves—to others is crucial to understanding Montaigne. He never suggests that we become hermits or adopt selfish attitudes. Rather, he’s suggesting that we avoid the mistake he made when becoming mayor of Bordeaux, becoming so involved in an activity that was not a passion of his, so it became a form of slavery.
He continues:
Any man who forgot to live a good and holy life himself, but who thought that he had fulfilled his duties by guiding and training others to do so, would be stupid: in exactly the same way, any man who gives up a sane and happy life in order to provide one for others makes (in my opinion) a bad and unnatural decision.
Fair enough, but what I’ve found about myself is that I cannot have happiness without a touch of sadness added in. It is the small discontents that drive me to connect more, take on ambitious projects and otherwise prove myself—and it is only when I’m deeply immersed in such activity that I am truly happy. So while someone like Montaigne might find sanity and simplicity a guide to happiness, I need a little chaos and disorder to drive me. I take nothing away from simple pleasures.
Montaigne, however, is not averse to life’s passions and conflicts. Think back to his essay on conversation—he doesn’t want us to be engaged in vague pleasantries, he wants passionate debates. But his belief in balance is always a part of his thinking and here he warns us not to get involved in the competitions that might bring out these agonistic passions to no good end:
Even in vain and trivial pursuits such as chess or tennis matches, the keen and burning involvement of a rash desire at once throws your mind into a lack of discernment and your limbs into confusion: you daze yourself and tangle yourself up. A man who reacts with greater moderation towards winning or losing is always ‘at home’: the less he goads himself on, and the less passionate he is about the game, the more surely and successfully he plays it.
I think I get what Montaigne is talking about here—don’t turn yourself into a John McEnroe and get overly competitive. But I think he expresses the idea a bit more clearly later:
I used to like games of chance with cards and dice. I rid myself of them long ago – for one reason only: whenever I lost, no matter what a good face I put on, I still felt a stab of pain. A man of honor, who must take it deeply to heart if he is insulted or given the lie and not be one to accept some nonsense to pay and console him for his loss, should avoid letting controversies grow as well as stubborn quarrels.
Montaigne doesn’t come up with an absolute answer here, he just provides a simple way of considering what to do with our powerful drives. You could take it or leave it—his approach may work for some but not others. But Montaigne returns to his point about debate to make a point of the kinds of competition that are necessary.
Montaigne’s call for debate is a way of avoid the madness that he describes here:
I want us to win, but I am not driven mad if we do not. I am firmly attached to the sanest of the parties, but I do not desire to be particularly known as an enemy of the others beyond what is generally reasonable. I absolutely condemn such defective arguments …. When my convictions make me devoted to one faction, it is not with so violent a bond that my understanding becomes infected by it. During the present confusion in this State of ours my own interest has not made me fail to recognize laudable qualities in our adversaries nor reprehensible ones among those whom I follow. People worship everything on their own side: for most of what I see on mine I do not even make excuses.
Montaigne suggests that for some matters, we need to expose ourselves regularly, in small doses, to competition and differences so we do not end up demonizing those who we disagree with. There are some powerful passions within us that can do so much danger to us. We’re better off shutting them off completely:
Socrates never says, ‘Do not surrender to the attraction of beauty; resist it; struggle against it.’ He says, ‘Flee it; run from its sight and from any encounter with it, as from a potent poison which can dart and strike you from afar.’ And that good disciple of his, describing either fictionally or historically (though in my opinion more historically than fictionally) the rare perfections of Cyrus the Great, shows him distrusting his ability to resist the attractions of the heavenly beauty of his captive the illustrious Panthea: it was to a man who was less at liberty than he was that he gave the tasks of visiting her and guarding her.
We have a certain social role in life that requires our engagement with a wider world. Shutting ourselves off from the world is impossible, so we should engage with it honestly and directly. Debate issues, take up sides, do so honorably and with loyalty — but try to avoid demonizing those who have taken other positions. But in our personal lives, we are under no obligation to engage our drives as openly as we engage the world. These drives are mysterious and often dangerous … and in living your life, saying no is the best way to keep your freedom:
How much easier it is never to get in than to get yourself out! We should act contrary to the reed which, when it first appears, throws up a long straight stem but afterwards, as though it were exhausted and had lost its wind, makes several dense nodules, as so many respites which indicate that it no longer has its original vigor and drive. We must rather begin gently and coolly, saving our breath for the encounter and our vigorous thrusts for finishing the job off. In their beginnings it is we who guide affairs and hold them in our power; but once they are set in motion, it is they which guide us and sweep us along and we who have to follow.
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