I try to imagine Michel de Montaigne, son of the esteemed Mayor of Bordeaux, third generation nobleman, mourning friend of the late Etienne de La Boetie, taking up his odd, impossible to describe project as something brand new. It’s likely that Michel did not sit at a desk and write the first of his 107 essays by hand, but rather dictated it to a secretary.
He still had one eye on the politics of his time too, according to his biographer Phillipe Desan. Montaigne started with a discussion of military history because it was those types of studies that would raise the profile of a nobleman in his time. Perhaps it was the kind of subject he spoke about with his late friend La Boetie and his father.
When I first read Montaigne in 2011, I had an almost immediate instinct to write about everything that I was reading—or rather to react through writing to everything I was reading. It turned into an odd stunt where I wrote about the essays in order over 107 days. And I began my journey through Montaigne by relating his military wisdom to some issue about politics.
The stunt turned into a mission, or perhaps obsession, that has spanned many years, more than 13 at this time. Often, I return right from the start, again with this essay, even though it has never been a favorite of mine. But it does include a very interesting accidental topic sentence for the full project —“Man is indeed an object miraculously vain, various and wavering. It is difficult to found a judgment on him which is steady and uniform.” This will become a common theme throughout the essays, but only if you substitute the first person singular for man.
I’m not sure if Montaigne even realized just how radical his belief was, because writers from the Renaissance were all glossing classical texts that did not see man as something wavering. There was a solid human nature in there somewhere, and this belief united Plato, the stoics, and the early Christians. Montaigne writes quite a bit about stoicism early in his project, to the point that you start to believe he is one. A mere five paragraphs into this essay, he writes:
Both of these means would have swayed me easily, for I have a marvelous weakness towards mercy and clemency – so much so that I would be more naturally moved by compassion than by respect. Yet for the Stoics pity is a vicious emotion: they want us to succor the afflicted but not to give way and commiserate with them.
This is an intriguing line that leaves me wanting so much more – which Stoics backed this concept? Unfortunately, Montaigne moves on quickly from this point and goes back to military history, neither developing his conclusion nor bringing in any Stoic thinkers. But if we return to that topic sentence paragraph I mentioned before, Montaigne does bring Zeno into the conversation, who he frequently refers to throughout the essays as the leader of the Stoic school. Montaigne writes:
… and great-heartedness of Zeno, a citizen who assumed full responsibility for the public wrong-doing and who begged no other favor than alone to bear the punishment of it.
The Zeno anecdote doesn’t relate to the earlier statement about the Stoics. And according to a footnote by editor/translator M.A. Screech, Montaigne erred here, and really meant Stheno, the Gorgon sister from Greek mythology. But the Screech note doesn’t make sense, there’s nothing in Stheno’s mythological story that relates to this point at all. The closest Zeno comes to it is a story about a slaves who stole from him and remarked that he could help it, he was fated to steal – leading Zeno to remark that, true, but you were fated to be beaten as well.
So is Montaigne being ironic by calling Zeno great-hearted? If so, perhaps the anecdote relates to his earlier point about Stoicism after all. As it’s written, it’s impossible to tell what Montaigne meant about either point.
But let me return to that topic sentence. While Montaigne name checks stoicism, the thought about human variability is not stoic at all, it’s Pyrrhonist. This will be the great faceoff in the early essays that Pyrrhonism will win cleanly. Only when Montaigne brings Socrates into the discussion in the final batch of essays will Pyrrhonism ever have a serious challenger for his philosophic mind.
But we have many essays to go before reaching that destination. His project begins with an odd little piece of military analysis, but is useful mostly for its wonderful title. This is, in fact, the place where I will begin again and will, over time, reach the same ends by discrepant means.
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