Even though this is an essay mostly about religion, it’s probably a good place to bring Pyrrhonism into the discussion of Montaigne. This ancient Greek philosophy is one type of skepticism, but with a very interesting twist. While most Western philosophies view conundrums of skeptical thought as something that leads to complexity and confusion, what Montaigne later calls tangling one’s mind up, Pyrrhonism proposes that withholding judgment on matters creates ataraxia, a sense of peace.
This is a highly Eastern concept, akin to the use in koans in Zen Buddhism. This isn’t accidental either, Pyrrho, the founder of this philosophy, traveled with Alexander the Great on his campaigns to the east and came into contact with Buddhist philosophy.
It is in An Apology for Raymond Sebond where Montaigne fully outlines his Pyrrhonist beliefs, but this essay serves as an early example of some of its key concepts. This quote ties Christian theology, a belief in the power of nature and Pyrrohonist concepts into a neat little package:
Reason has taught me that, if you condemn in this way anything whatever as definitely false and quite impossible, you are claiming to know the frontiers and bounds of the will of God and the power of Nature our Mother; it taught me also that there is nothing in the whole world madder than bringing matters down to the measure of our own capacities and potentialities.
As he will later do in the Sebond essay, Montaigne uses reason as the human capability that takes us away from both his preferred view of Christianity and his innate skepticism:
How many of the things which constantly come into our purview must be deemed monstrous or miraculous if we apply such terms to anything which outstrips our reason! If we consider that we have to grope through a fog even to understand the very things we hold in our hands, then we will certainly find that it is not knowledge but habit which takes away their strangeness.
And there’s that word habit again, a key concept for Montaigne, and he walks his readers through a very thoughtful argument about why habit determines the way we judge things and not knowledge itself. He writes how a river can seem like a vast body of water the first time we come upon it — perhaps to a small child it might even seem like an ocean. A great example of this can be found in Massachusetts, where a small lake is still known as Billington Sea because two children who came over on the Mayflower discovered it, and it became the colony’s main source of food when they fished it.
The more times we experience something unusual, the less imposing it becomes, the easier it is for us to put it in scale and context. Montaigne’s argument is that, as quick as we may be to reject improbable things that confront us, some of the most noble, wise people in history have testified sincerely to experiencing things that seem beyond all reasonable explanation. We owe it to them not necessarily to believe it based on their testimony, but remain in suspense about the possibility. Or as he put it:
Not to believe too rashly; not to disbelieve too easily.
From here, Montaigne goes into an aside about the religious strife in France at the time and what a mistake it is for Catholics to cede issues of ecclesiastical polity as an attempt to cool tensions. I could apply this thought to politics today, but I’m going to leave it as something for Montaigne’s era and for theological discussions beyond my interests.
Next, I want to draw attention to the second to last paragraph in the essay:
Why cannot we remember all the contradictions which we feel within our own judgement, and how many things which were articles of belief for us yesterday are fables for us today?
This applies to all aspects of human existence, from our religious beliefs, our politics, views of science, and the way we evaluate people. Montaigne likes to hold space for bizarre, unusual events, and calls out numerous examples in history where news of major events seemed to reach people organically, before it would be credible that first hand knowledge could be passed:
When Plutarch (leaving aside the many examples which he alleges from Antiquity) says that he himself knows quite definitely that, at the time of Domitian, news of the battle lost by Antony several days’ journey away in Germany was publicly announced in Rome and spread through all the world on the very day that it was lost; and when Caesar maintains that it was often the case that news of an event actually anticipated the event itself: are we supposed to say that they were simple people who merely followed the mob and who let themselves be deceived because they saw things less clearly than we do!
There’s one more concept of Pyrrhonism that’s worth mentioning here: the philosophy holds curiosity in contempt. Montaigne said curiosity “forbids us to leave anything unresolved or undecided.” This is a difficult argument to hold onto today. The scientific method relies on hypotheses and a hunger to hold as little unresolved as possible.
Montaigne and the Pyrrhonists don’t necessarily refute this, they just argue that this state of mind takes away our ataraxis, depriving us of the ability to hold the world in wonder and gain a sense of peace from this complexity.
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