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 be rich by myself, not by borrowing. Strangers see only the results and outward appearances. Any man can put on a good face outside, while full of fever and fright within. They do not see my heart, they see only my countenance.
It has taken me a great deal of time, and much trial and error, to reach Montaigne’s stance, but I now embrace it wholeheartedly. Which isn’t to say that I hold my thoughts only to myself and am disinterested in external opinions. You don’t release a book of philosophy into the world and keep the true nature of the book to yourself unless you have some interest in getting people to read something they’d otherwise ignore. But I have humble expectations of it all. I planned from the start to make no money on the venture, expected few people to acquire it even for free, and fully expect no one to read all 500+ pages of it. The tiniest milestone of interest in it delights me, given these terms.
If I have any complaint about how Montaigne frames this state of mind in that quote, it is by starting with the “I do not care” construction regarding others, because that’s the least important part. It isn’t so much a lack of care driving this position, but the self valuation.
It’s also the kind of statement most prone to posturing. The truth is that we almost always care what the people closest to us think, bccause their actions and reactions shape the atmosphere of our lives. Everyone’s lives are contingent to a certain extent on the wishes of those who matter to us most, so people have the power to disappoint.
What Montaigne is saying, however, is that no one, even those whose opinions we treasure most, should be permitted to determine the validity of your beliefs and your evaluation of your strengths. Once you reach a point of understanding your own strengths and virtues and appreciating them fully, it no longer matters how other people evaluate you. If they cannot recognize what is good, that’s not on you, and not necessarily on them either. Montaigne elaborates:
All these judgments that are founded on external appearances are marvelously uncertain and doubtful; and there is no witness so sure as each man to himself.
And this is why our human values are so badly out of whack. We care so much about gaining the approval of others that we focus on the factors that are most readily apparent from the outside—wealth, possessions, the most obvious and widely accepted definition of beauty.
In fact, I would add a strong claim of my own: that your most important valuations of others, such as who you love, are much more a reflection of your own values and tastes than a determination of the qualities of others. Love is always, first and foremost, a statement about what matters to you most in life.
The feelings others elicit in you is ultimately what matters most. This circles back to Montaigne’s views on solitude. It isn’t necessary to pull yourself out of life, to be completely solitary, so long as you don’t take the opinions and valuations of others too seriously:
As for me, I hold that I exist only in myself; and as for that other life of mine that lies in the knowledge of my friends, considering it naked and simply in itself, I know very well that I feel no fruit or enjoyment from it except by the vanity of a fanciful opinion.
And while Montaigne doesn’t see a problem in a rhetorician like me trying to make a name for himself through his work—and I thank him for this rare hat tip—he believes it is only our personal virtues that ultimately matter:
It might perhaps be excusable for a painter or another artisan, or even for a rhetorician or a grammarian, to toil to acquire a name by his works; but the actions of virtue are too noble in themselves to seek any other reward than from their own worth, and especially to seek it in the vanity of human judgments.
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