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 numerous tactics for hiding the true meaning of his words.
The reason he needed to do this was obvious—he’s a public official, living in a period of religious civil war, and he has everything to lose. Montaigne adopted that name from the estate he owned. He was considered third generation nobility, basically nouveau riche by his age’s standards. His grandmother was very likely Jewish, as was his closest friend. He worked in a hornet’s nest of political trecanery and conflict. And meanwhile, he’s decided to seek his own unusual form of fame via writing, an extremely dangerous venture that could lead to political targeting, excommunication and endless misunderstandings that could make his life difficult.
He alludes to this problem several times in the essays. In Three Kinds of Social Intercourse in volume three, Montaigne writes about the difficulties of forming close friendship, but then sneaks in this nugget:
By nature, I find it hard to communicate myself by halves and moderately, and with that servile and suspicious prudence that is prescribed to us for association in these numerous and imperfect friendships; and it is prescribed to us especially in these times when we cannot talk about the world except with danger, or falsely.
And in his essay On Giving The Lie in volume 2, Montaigne notes that people of his age took up grand strategies to hide meaning:
Our truth of nowadays is not what is, but what others can be convinced of; just as we call “money” not only that which is legal, but also any counterfeit that will pass. our nation has long been reproached for this vice; for Salvianius of Massila, who lived in the time of the Emperor Valentinian, says that to the French lying and perjury are not a vice but a manner of speaking. If a man wanted to go this testimony one better, he could say that it is now a virtue to them. Men form and fashion themselves for it as for an honorable practice; for dissimulation is among the most notable qualities of this century.
What’s really fascinating is what Montaigne says next, because any reader of his essays to this point knows that Montaigne has zero tolerance for lying. This is his third essay on the subject, the first two of which he called lying the most intolerable vice. But now Montaigne is delving a bit into the psychology of his aversion:
I find that this is natural to defend ourselves most for the defects with which we are most besmirched. It seems that in resenting the accusations and growing excited about it, we unburden ourselves to some extent of the guilt; if we have it in fact, at least we condemn it in appearance.
And then he really lets himself have it:
Would it not also be that this reproach seems to involve cowardice and lack of courage? Is there any more obvious cowardice that to deny our own word? Worse yet, to deny what we know?
Those words very easily could have come from Freud or Jung, they are right on the mark explaining how our unconscious gives us up—or what Jung calls seeing our shadow. It’s an undeniable part of life in any era. I find, for example, that people who want to call out character defects in me are very often revealing even stronger versions of those traits in themselves. They grow indignant about others’ weaknesses because they are ashamed of their own.
In his fourth to last essay, the remarkable On Restraining Your Will, Montaigne makes the famous quote about lending ourselves to others while giving ourselves only to ourselves. The line is a bit mysterious, but he spells it out very clearly mid-essay:
Most of the rules and precepts of the world take this course of pushing us out of ourselves and driving us into the market place, for the benefit of public society. They thought to achieve a fine result by diverting and distracting us from ourselves, assuming that we were attached to ourselves only too much and by too natural a bond; and they have spared no words to that end. For it is not new for the sages to preach things as they serve, not as they are. Truth has its inconveniences, disadvantages, and incompatibilities with us. We must often be deceived that we may not deceive ourselves, and our eyes sealed, our understanding stunned, in order to redress and amend them. “For it is the ignorant who judge, and they must frequently be deceived, lest they err.” [Quintilian] When they order us to love three, four, fifty degrees of things before ourselves, they imitate the technique of archers who, to hit the mark, take aim a great distance above the target. To straighten a bent stick you bent it back the other way.
I think all of this background is necessary to read the Sebond essay in the correct frame of mind. And there’s one more detail I think is necessary to point out before continuing on the journey. Montaigne gives hints to how to figure out his real meaning. He tells us in On Cicero that his quotes aren’t always there to just illustrate the points he’s making directly—sometimes they hint at a deeper meaning he’d rather not put in his own voice:
And how many stories have I spread around which say nothing of themselves, but from which anyone who troubles to pluck them with a little ingenuity will produce numberless essays. Neither these stories nor my quotations serve always simply for example, authority, or ornament. I do not esteem them solely for the use I derive from them. They often bear, outside of my subject, the seeds of a richer and bolder material, and sound obliquely a subtler note, both for myself, who do not wish to express anything more, and for those who get my drift.
That’s the mission ahead of us—to become Montaigne readers who don’t just take the words he writes at face value, but to get Montaigne’s drift.
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