Category: Montaigne Musings

How can vicious passions, such as inconstancy and sudden dismay, produce in our souls anything right? While my current version of the Apology for Raymond Sebond essay seems rather popular among whatever combination of humans and bots currently visit this site, I have a nagging feeling that I’ve never done the piece justice. After all,…

Before I go further in this essay, I want to take on the matter of Montaigne’s style. How much of what Montaigne states should you take at face value? There’s an excellent book that came out about 10 years ago called “Philosophy Between the Lines” by Arthur Melzer that makes the case that Montaigne had…

What’s it like to read this really long essay from Montaigne? I think Phillipe Desan in his recent biography of Montaigne describes it well: He also takes care to display a flawless faith, but follows Sebond in lines of reasoning that go around in circles and are sometimes completely contradictory. Montaigne notes that “God owes…

I’ve been thinking today about how it’s possible that I could have missed that long segment about beauty from Montaigne in On Physiognomy, so I went back and re-read the essay once more. And it immediately became apparent just how—this is one of the most insanely structured pieces of writing that I’ve ever come across,…

I’ve been thinking this morning about what necessity this project serves for me. It is a similar one Montaigne explained in his essay “On Giving The Lie.” The purpose is certainly not to become better known, for as Montaigne wrote, the general public will only be interested in the thoughts of the most famous anyway:…

I’ve just begun reading Stefan Zweig’s short book on Montaigne. For those unfamiliar with Zweig, he was an extraordinarily popular writer worldwide in the early 20th century for his novels, plays, biographies and literary criticism. He was born in Austria, but fled as Hitler’s power stretched across Europe, first to Great Britain, shortly to the…

I recently spent some time on Montaigne’s 22nd essay, One Man’s Profit is Another Man’s Loss, and I am kind of excited by the new direction I found to examine it. You can read my new take here.  This has never been one of my favorite Montaigne essays, because it’s very short and its view…

Although I enjoyed Stefan Zweig’s book on Michel de Montaigne, I have to admit that it’s the first Montaigne book I’ve read that taught me nothing, other than the ways Zweig thought he was similar to the essayist. Well, I was also reminded that Montaigne died on September 13, so solemn remembrances are in order…

I was re-reading Virginia Woolf’s lovely essay about Montaigne today and it occurred to me—this essay is in the public domain. So why not re-publish it here? So here is the full text of Woolf’s incredible distillation of Montaigne, perhaps the best I’ve read, but more important than that, it’s heartfelt thanks for the hope…

I had to make several tough editorial choices to complete “Essai by Essay,” but by far the hardest was deciding what to do with On Physiognomy. Ultimately, the direction I took with the Virgil essay, the one that took me longest to get a handle on, made the choice for me. Still, I’m fond of…

The second to last paragraph of On Presumption includes this odd inclusion, one that appears in only one edition of Montaigne’s essays—and curiously enough, not in the last one that is considered canon. It is about, and many speculate written by, Marie de Gournay. I’ll go into more detail in a bit about some speculation…

There is controversy among Montaigne scholars about this essay by Etienne de La Boétie. Montaigne claimed he wrote it when he was a very young man–18 or 19, perhaps. Others say it is likely that he wrote it as part of his secondary education, so therefore was more likely to have penned it at the…

To close out my examination of the anima/animus concept within Montaigne’s framework, I need to point out that I’m even more out of my depth discussing Sabina Spielrein’s psychoanalytic theories than I am Carl Jung’s. At least in the case of Jung I have read the original material. Spielrein’s writings have mostly been translated by…

It’s obvious what Montaigne is up to in his project, but it’s nice to get clarifying thoughts like this from time to time (From On The Education of Children:) For likewise these are my humors and opinions; I offer them as what I believe, not what is to be believed. I aim here only at…

Over the last two days, I stopped what I’ve been up to for the last six months or so, which is to continuously re-examine and revise the 107 essays, as well as adding numerous additional pieces to the project, some of which fit into the scheme of the book, some did not. And I have…

This year I have been overjoyed to find a number of wonderful takes on Montaigne, my favorite being the essay by Virginia Woolf. She remains the top of the heap for me, but a close second is now taken up by mid-20th century French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His essay is so rich and so dense…

Now we reach the final part of Etienne de La Boetie’s treatise, and I’m going to begin it with a major plot twist—Montaigne and La Boetie actually weren’t that close. Ok, I shouldn’t say that so definitively, it’s the opinion of one biographer. Still, it’s a startling thought. How can that be? If you’ve read…

I asked ChatGPT this morning something that I’ve been pondering while working my way through the Kenneth Branagh film adaptation of “Hamlet.” I asked, given that it has been well established that Shakespeare read the John Florio translation of Montaigne’s essays before writing Hamlet, is it possible to view Hamlet himself as taking a Pyrrhonist…

My ChatGPT agent yesterday posed this literary theory: While Hamlet’s skepticism and deliberation reflect Pyrrhonist tendencies, they also lead to his downfall. Montaigne might argue that Hamlet’s failure is not in his doubt but in his inability to achieve the equanimity (ataraxia) that Pyrrhonism aims for. Instead of finding peace in uncertainty, Hamlet is tormented…

So, after writing about Montaigne off and on for nearly 14 years now, you’d figure I would have a really strong handle on the essays themselves and would know everything in them. So far from the truth! Over the last couple months, I have been working on a revision of my essay about Montaigne’s “On…

I have noted in some recent essays and revisions the value of Terrence Cave’s book “How to Read Montaigne,” and I want to draw special attention to one unique way Cave analyzes the essays: Perhaps the best way is to read it as a work that seeks above all to devise cognitive strategies: strategies of…

Now that I’ve begun to make up for my error in never writing about Marie de Gournay, I’m fascinated by her and have dug into Phillipe Desan’s book for more information. This might be a good time to point out that I’ve had to put down Desan’s book a couple times because it is so…

Over the years, I have paid very little attention to Montaigne’s short 10th essay “On a Ready or Hesitant Delivery,” and I think that’s unfortunate. For one, it’s the only essay that begins with a quote from Etienne de la Boetie: Never to all men were all graces given. The essay is an admission that…

It is in On Glory where Montaigne makes his most important point about solitude: that it’s in self worth that we find our ultimate inner strength, even if we are never all alone: I do not care so much what I am to others as I care what I am to myself. I want to…

I will be taking a look at Etienne de La Boetie’s essay “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude” in three parts, both because this is a very long piece and because he broke it into those parts himself, so it makes sense to follow his lead. Let me begin with where I left off in my last…

There are many fascinating details about Etienne de La Boetie, but this I find especially interesting: La Boetie was born Jewish, but converted to Catholicism to help advance his political career in Bordeaux, a city that had a heavy “Marranos” influx from Spain. While this population fled to escape Spain’s forced conversions to Catholicism, many…

Yes, Michel de Montaigne had things to say about the Olympics, by way of Pythagoras: Our life, said Pythagoras, is like the vast throng assembled for the Olympic Games: some use their bodies there to win fame from the contests; others come to trade, to make a profit; still others – and they are by…

I’ve written about Montaigne for 13 years without ever mentioning Marie Le Jars de Gournay. This is an oversight on my part, because Sarah Bakewell, whose book “How to Live” introduced me to Montaigne, devoted a full chapter to de Gournay. Where to even begin with Montaigne’s most devoted reader, friend, “adopted daughter,” editor and…

This morning I’m feeling a bit shy about writing anything, because I discovered that a blog post I wrote late last week purely to micro target an audience actually auto posted to my more mainstream blog and I hadn’t gone to that blog in several days, so I didn’t realize it. I’m just hoping no…

The human mind is naturally poetic. We look for analogies constantly to explain the natures of large, complex systems. The mind itself is perhaps our greatest metaphor, seen in different ages as analogous to God, steam machines and, currently, to computers. We have extended that analogy so completely these days that we have, in a…

I am about to attempt something ambitious and it could easily exceed my grasp. At numerous times across several projects, I have attempted to give a detailed analysis of Carl Jung’s concept of the anima and animus. I’d like to pull that analysis into the Montaigne Project, connecting it in a couple ways that I…

I’ll begin my examination of the Anima/Animus concept and Montaigne with the closest example he has to an anima figure, his late career collaborator Marie de Gournay. The more I dig into the history of de Gournay’s work, the sadder her story becomes to me. This is a woman who was treated terribly by her…

In one of my all-time favorite movie scenes, in Jean-Luc Godard’s  “Vive Sa Vie,” the protagonist Nana takes a break from a relentless plot that has driven her into sex work in Paris and made her victim to a series of ridiculous and ill-meaning men. But here, she meets philosopher Brice Parain and the two…

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…