Last week I took another look at Montaigne’s final essay “On Experience” from a practical viewpoint — what personal need was Montaigne fulfilling through his project, especially as expressed in that work. Today, I’m going to take a few steps further back and look at that project and the essay from the vantage of meaning. Was Montaigne merely writing essays as they sprung to mind without a goal in mind or did he have a bigger picture either from the start or one that emerged while creating it all?
Over the last decade, two books have proposed that Montaigne wrote his essays with an end goal to evaluate against. In “Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing,” Arthur M. Melzer puts Montaigne into the category of writers who disguised their controversial beliefs via indirect critiques of similar value systems. This is a commonly expressed view about Montaigne:
Another example, which many scholars have pointed out, is Montaigne’s very explicit critique of Mohammed’s and especially Plato’s doctrine of the afterlife: his true target was something else. As one critic put it: ‘Montaigne stabs the Christian teaching … through the body of Plato.’ It was indeed a very common practice, especially among early modern thinkers, to go on at length about the ancients, the Chinese, the Amerindians, the Hindus — either in extravagant praise or blame — as an in-direct means of criticizing their own government and religion.
This style of writing is all over “On Experience,” but in an even more indirect manner. As noted last week, Montaigne spends most of the essay’s first half returning to his very familiar subject of laws and why it’s foolish to have so many of them because they negate the possibility of judging human actions in their proper context. This leads him to a powerful position that becomes even more striking when applied as a critique of religion and theology, not politics and law:
All this recalls to mind certain opinions of the Ancients: that a man is obliged to do retail wrong if he wants to achieve wholesale right, committing injustices in little things if he wants to achieve justice in great things; that human justice is formed on the analogy of medicine, by which anything which is effective is just and honorable; that, as the Stoics held, Nature herself acts against justice in most of her works; or, what the Cyrenaics hold, that nothing is just per se, justice being a creation of custom and low; and what the Theodorians hold: that the wise man, if it is useful to him, may justifiably commit larceny, sacrilege and any sort of lechery.
Montaigne, On Experience
This is a shocking statement that becomes stronger as the essay progresses and Montaigne takes on the medical profession as knowing nothing about his individual health, which only Montaigne can properly monitor and keep in balance. Think of what Montaigne is saying here in the days we are living in and then consider how Trump and his supporters have behaved over the past year — aren’t they taking a very similar stance, that public health knows nothing of their individual health and wise men, by their approximation Trump, may commit small injustices in the name of a larger good? This is what it means to have a society of men, not laws. Montaigne, throughout his work, stands by the exempla of the great people and in his final essay, makes the case that the great ones must be beyond laws and beyond God.
Montaigne tempers this potentially horrific philosophy by calling for personal moderation and self regulation. He does not believe in a fully hedonistic life, but he is strongly in favor of enjoying all possible human pleasure as well:
I who am always down-to-earth in my handling of anything loathe that inhuman wisdom which seeks to render us disdainful and hostile towards the care of our bodies. I reckon that it is as injudicious to set our minds against natural pleasures as to allow them to dwell on them. Xerxes was an idiot to offer a reward to anyone who could invent some new pleasure for him when he was already surrounded by every pleasure known to Man: but hardly less idiotic is the man who lops back such pleasures as Nature has found for him. We should neither hunt nor run from them: we should accept them. I do so with a little more zest and gratitude than that, and more readily follow the slope of Nature’s own inclining. There is no need for us to exaggerate their emptiness: that makes itself sufficiently known and sufficiently manifest, thanks to our morbid spoilsport of a mind which causes them all to taste as unpleasant to us as it does itself, treating both itself and everything it absorbs, no matter how minor, according to its own insatiable, roaming and fickle condition: If the jug is not clean, all you pour into it turns sour.
On Experience
For Montaigne, that our pleasures can never sate us is sufficient punishment for them. We might as well enjoy them at the moment and understand that the pang of desire will inevitably return. Taken to an extreme, Montaigne is basically arguing for a Godless and stateless universe that is self regulated by all the difficulties of life. If you do not have the sense to self regulate, in Montaigne’s view, nature will exact its own punishment.
With these thoughts in mind, what about the other gloss over the past decade — the more popular one — espoused by Sarah Bakewell in her National Book Award winner “How to Live: Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer”? That question Bakewell poses is “How to Live?” The implication of her book is that Montaigne, having started out on a quest to use Stoic philosophy to figure how to prepare to die, ended up embracing an approach to life that was transferrable to others and more affirming of the journey than the one he intended at the start.
Here is what Bakewell concludes from her examination of Montaigne in this frame:
Some might question whether there is still any need for an essayist such as Montaigne. Twenty-first century people, in the developed world, are already individualistic to excess, as well as entwined with one another to a degree beyond the wildest dreams of a sixteenth-century winegrower. His sense of the “I” in all things may seem a case of preaching to the converted, or even feeding drugs to the addicted. But Montaigne offers more than an incitement to self-indulgence. The twenty-first century has everything to gain from a Montaignean sense of life, and, in its most troubled moments so far, it has been sorely in need of a Montaignean politics. It could use his sense of moderation, his love of sociability and courtesy, his suspension of judgment, and his subtle understanding of the psychological mechanisms involved in confrontation and conflict. It needs his conviction that no vision of heaven, no imagined Apocalypse, and no perfectionist fantasy can ever outweigh the tiniest of selves in the real world. It is unthinkable to Montaigne that one could ever ‘gratify heaven and nature by committing massacre and homicide, a belief universally embraced in all religions.’ To believe that life could demand any such thing is to forget what day-to-day existence actually is. It entails forgetting that, when you look at a puppy held over a bucket of water, or even at a cat in the mood for play, you are looking at a creature who looks back at you. No abstract principles are involved; there are only two individuals, face to face, hoping for the best from one another.
Sarah Bakewell, “How to Live,” Chapter 20
Why yes, Sarah, it would be wonderful if all of us could retire from our professions in middle age and retire to our parapets and well-stocked libraries, overlooking a vineyard, where we could let our minds roam free and begrudge the lack of moderation and civility in life. Montaigne may not have believed in heaven, but given the world he could inhabit on earth, why would he need one? Yes, his day-to-day existence was joyous, despite the sorrows he endured. But isn’t it also a stretch to say that his universe was free of massacres and homicide? His exemplars included Julius Caesar and Alexander, not exactly men of peace, and as noted above, his closing message in “On Experience” specifically exempts all acts of “wise men” if done to promote greater good. Stare into that abyss long enough and Donald J. Trump eventually stares back at you.
Having examined Montaigne over this past decade — in a mostly Bakewell-inspired positive light — I have rejected the “some might” proposition that began that last Bakewell paragraph and agreed with her that the Montaigne approach to assaying the world is both correct and necessary. Now, I am not so sure. I know Bakewell is wrong about Montaigne on the biggest and most important point: he did not provide us with a practical, valuable “way to live.” Given that, do the straw men critics of Bakewell’s conclusion have a point? Aren’t we overrun by narcissism in the world today and couldn’t a theme-driven essay, whether in the style of Montaigne or the New York Times op-ed page, be contributing to this cultural ill?
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