Of all the subjects that Montaigne assays, nothing is more confusing to me than his thoughts on love. Friendship he examines in emotive detail. Sex he covers thoroughly, even if I find the result something akin to a sex ed lecture about himself. Even beauty he gets around to extolling in On Physiognomy. But love, especially of the romantic sort, is something that Montaigne reveals in small, confusing pieces.
I won’t recap here all of the times he covers the subject, simply because that would take us in little unhelpful circles. Rather, I want to jump to Montaigne’s most striking statement about romantic love, one that he never qualifies or refutes elsewhere:
Speaking more materially and simply, I find after all that love is nothing else but the thirst for sexual enjoyment in a desired object, and Venus nothing else but the pleasure of discharging our vessels—a pleasure which becomes vicious either by immoderation or by indiscretion.
This is in Montaigne’s “On Some Lines of Virgil” essay, where he later expands on the subject to make a strong declaration against romantic love:
A young man asked the philosopher Panaetius whether it would be becoming to a wise man to be in love. “Let us leave aside the wise man,” he replied, “but you and I, who are not, let us not get involved in a thing so excited and violent, which enslaves us to others and makes us contemptible to ourselves.” He spoke truly, that we should not entrust a thing so precipitous in itself to a soul that has not the wherewithal to withstand its assaults and to disprove in practice the saying of Agesilaus, that wisdom and love cannot live together.
This aligns with the rest of Montaigne’s project. Across 107 essays, he never tells of a specific instance where he loved a woman and thought back upon that experience positively. He brings up numerous instances where love drove him out of his mind and he recounts sexual experiences in his youth, but never talks of love. If you think that Montaigne is simply incapable of romantic feeling or expression, consider this from On Affectionate Relationships:
Since that day when I lost him,
[quoting Virgil] quern semper acerbum, Semper honoratum (sic, Dii, voluistis) habebo, [which I shall ever hold bitter to me, though always honour (since the gods ordained it so),]
I merely drag wearily on. The very pleasures which are proffered me do not console me: they redouble my sorrow at his loss. In everything we were halves: I feel I am stealing his share from him:
[quoting Terence] Nec fas esse ulla me voluptate hic frui Decrevi, tantisper dum ille abest meus particeps. [Nor is it right for me to enjoy pleasures, I decided, while he who shared things with me is absent from me.]
I was already so used and accustomed to being, in everything, one of two, that I now feel I am no more than a half:
[quoting Horace] Illam meæ si partem animæ tulit Maturior vis, quid moror altera, Nec charus æque, nec superstes Integer? Ille dies utramque Duxit ruinant. Maturior vis, quid moror altera, Nec charus æque, nec superstes Integer? Ille dies utramque Duxit ruinant.[Since an untimely blow has borne away a part of my soul, why do I still linger on less dear, only partly surviving? That day was the downfall of us both.]
There is no deed nor thought in which I do not miss him – as he would have missed me; for just as he infinitely surpassed me in ability and virtue so did he do so in the offices of friendship.
As I’ve written elsewhere, Montaigne loved Etienne de la Boetie, that is unmistakable. These are not expressions he gives easily. They are heartfelt and painful, filled with longing and loss. This naturally raises the question: was Montaigne gay? Was his relationship with Etienne de la Boetie his sole romantic relationship? Part of that is easy to answer, he clearly loved him. Whether they ever desired, or consummated, a sexual relationship together is something not covered in the essays. But in On Physiognomy, Montaigne gives a clue that this was not a romantic connection. He writes:
The ugliness which clothed a very beautiful soul in La Boétie was in this category. This superficial ugliness, which is very imperious for all that, is less prejudicial to the state of the spirit and not very certain in its effect on men’s opinion. The other, which is more properly called deformity, is more substantial and more apt to strike home inwardly. Not every shoe of smooth leather but every well-formed shoe shows the form of the foot within.
I find it hard to believe that Montaigne would have desired sex with someone he found ugly when you consider his strong physiological belief in attraction and sexual desire, and how they are the only essential elements in what we call romantic love. It’s impossible to square his belief that romantic love is nothing but sexual desire with his thought that La Boetie was unattractive. This brings me to the subject of beauty that Montaigne speaks of glowingly in On Physiognomy. He speaks of it as something that has the power to command men to do things their reason would never allow.
But as I mentioned in my essay on his Virgil essay, I think Montaigne’s examination of beauty is oddly disconnected from his thoughts about love and sexual desire. How we determine what is beautiful is a very profound question, even though we seem to make these kinds of determinations routinely with no thought attached. Sensations either exist or they don’t — a thought Montaigne examines in greater depth in On Experience. But how we process those sensations is tied to our philosophical assumptions about the world. In his Virgil essay, Montaigne relates this anecdote about Socrates:
And Socrates, when older than I am, speaking of an object of his love, said: “When I had leaned my shoulder against his and brought my head close to his, as we were looking into a book together, I suddenly felt, without prevarication, a stinging in my shoulder like some animal’s bite, and I was more than five days with it prickling, and a continual itching flowed into my heart.” A touch, and an accidental one, and by a shoulder, to inflame and alter a soul cooled and enervated by age, and the first of all human souls in reformation! Indeed, why not? Socrates was a man, and wanted neither to be nor to seem anything else.
I think Montaigne is blind to the fact that this tale actually contradicts his opinion that love is nothing but sexual desire. While Montaigne interpreted that bit about Socrates as evidence of his human folly, I would contend that it was actually a highly philosophical, and very human, statement from the sage.
Take something very simple, the swiping dating app such as Tinder, Bumble or Hinge. The entire premise of these apps is that beauty can be judged objectively. If you remove all background and put people on the same terrain, judged mostly by their pictures, these apps make the assumption that you can objectively view who is most attractive to you, and when the judgments are mutual, matches take place and relationships could possibly commence.
But beauty is not an objective sensation, it is a highly subjective evaluation that is most meaningful when it takes in everything about the experience: preconceptions, mood, previous experiences, expectations — and in Socrates’ case, how this young man’s head on his shoulder made him feel. Experiences like this formed the core of the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a French phenomenologist who was overshadowed by the existentialists in his day, but has become increasingly popular as neuroscience finds frequent evidentiary backing for embodied consciousness.
At the risk of being far too reductionist, Merleau-Ponty believed that bodily sensations carry with them an “overflowing meaning” that alter our perception of the world. Beauty, as Merleau-Ponty reminds us, cannot be pinned down or fully understood. It’s not a sum of parts but an overwhelming whole, a Gestalt that transcends sense-data and categorization. It is not merely observed but lived, it affects the nervous system. It moves through us and leaves us changed. It’s something we can neither hold nor fully explain. How exactly does it do this?
Merleau-Ponty hints that it might have something to do with the connection between our nervous system and our system of attention:
At the very moment when I live in the world, when I am given over to my plans, my occupations, my friends, my memories, I can close my eyes, lie down, listen to the blood pulsating in my ears, lose myself in some pleasure or pain, and shut myself up in this anonymous life which subtends my personal one. But precisely because my body can shut itself off from the world, it is also what opens me out upon the world and places me in a situation there. The momentum of existence towards others, towards the future, towards the world can be restored as a river unfreezes.
As I interpret this, because we have an ability to shut ourselves off from experience, to “mindfully” detach, we can then also know that we are capable of attachment. We can choose to open ourselves to the flow of life and to give voice to that we are silencing, mostly by habit. All that we can shut off we can also turn on.
How we spend our attention matters, which also underscores why we need to aggressively fight all attempts to objectify people. When we reduce beauty to something that can be easily catalogued and rated, we shut ourselves off from this deeper, more nuanced understanding of beauty and how our articulation of it says so much about ourselves, our deepest wants and psychic needs.
To Merleau-Ponty, exposing our misunderstandings of beauty helps us discover how we view so much of life in questionable terms, always hunting for objects and subjects, and always dividing the mind from the body. This is the realm of poetry, and Montaigne alludes to this power at the opening of his Virgil essay. But neither in that essay nor anywhere else does he relate that kind of overpowering experience to his readers.
The only time he allows his heart to flow is in his description of La Boetie. So, we’re left with this puzzle. The person who declares that he knows himself better than any human has known any other subject cannot or will not reveal what was in the depth of his heart. It leaves me wondering, can we consider his work a complete success without it?
I’ll close this essay with Adrianne Lenker’s beautiful solo rendition of “Masterpiece,” one of my favorite odes to beauty in all its forms.
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