Essays. Michel de Montaigne
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religious, and political transformation. In the face of this turmoil, he preferred to focus his attention on the present moment, believing it impossible to predict future behaviors and actions. He considered it a waste of time to imagine a better tomorrow, and to focus on the now:
“I do not paint its being. I paint its passage; not a passing from one age to another, or, as the people say, from seven to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute, I must accommodate my history to the hour” (III, 2).
Montaigne made a famous declaration on the wars of religion: “It will be much if, a hundred years hence, it be remembered in general that in our times there were civil wars in France” (II, 16). He was obviously wrong, but that is not the gist of his point. He approached history on a very pragmatic level and could even be labelled a “conservative” when it came to social action. His position was always to avoid turmoil in the public sphere and to therefore make do with the social order in place. Liberty was for him a matter of free speech and freedom of conscience but was never followed by a call to arms. That meant peace at any price, even if the benefits fell to reactionaries. However, this conservatism only applied to public life. His book, on the contrary, represented a personal space to express compassion, respect, and appreciation of differences.
Montaigne theorizes his conception of “immediate history” in several places. For him, events might be given historical importance because they are ideologically invested at different times. The present does not yet have the capacity to “transform documents into monuments” (to cite the French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge), and, for Montaigne, events of his time are purely anecdotal and therefore relegated to an exemplary status. In this sense, Montaigne always remains close to an atomist conception of society and history, rather than looking for great themes or laws that thread through it.
The people, for example, remain an unpredictable entity whose motivations and actions can never be explained in a reasoned way. What is the use of explaining events that respond to other logics, at other times? The social and religious fragmentation of the late Renaissance generated in Montaigne a form of relativism which did not allow any regrouping or organization into rules or laws. We do not learn from the past; it is in this way that the wars of religion can never be invoked in a didactic way. Memory does nothing to help reason.
Let us remind the reader, one last time, that the Essays were written over 20 years. It is therefore normal that political and ideological positions expressed in a specific social and political context would change over time. Montaigne, like many of his contemporaries (Machiavelli for example), is pragmatic when it comes to politics, and his sense of adaptation (not to mention evolution) is reflected in his ability to absorb contradictions within the same book, while claiming that his views do not contradict each other. Montaigne literally puts himself to the test:
“whether it be that I am then another self, or that I take subjects by other circumstances and considerations: so it is that I may peradventure contradict myself, but, as Demades said, I never contradict the truth. Could my soul once take footing, I would not essay but resolve: but it is always learning and making trial” (III, 2).
Montaigne's position towards the Reformation, for example, changed over time, until it became compatible, in the early 1580s, with the current of politics which sought to guarantee civil peace and was therefore ready to grant more freedoms (of conscience and worship) to Protestants. During times as tormented as the civil wars in France, we understand the difficulty of thinking about the social realm in a systematic fashion. Too many counter-examples weaken possible conclusions on political actions and modes of social organization. Moreover, the acceleration of events gives the feeling of a headlong rush. If we are to produce a theory of anything, it is at the daily level – and, in this sense, this is what Montaigne is doing.
Of course, his study of antiquity allowed Montaigne to find a certain stability of example that contemporaneous events did not provide him. But he was fully aware that things were changing fast, and that his world would never be the same – like the world of the cannibals encountering the foreign invaders. Living through the savagery of the religious wars produced a form of skepticism that was far from academic. It also shaped the form of the essay and produced a permanent questioning.
THE MONTAIGNE METHOD
It is true that Montaigne contradicts himself, which makes reading the Essays difficult, and sometimes problematic. The danger with Montaigne is to take him at his word and discover a few pages later that he says the opposite of what he had previously written. An analysis of his declarations organized in themes therefore has its limits. And yet, Montaigne offers personal and social considerations worth meditating on, not as a doctrine or a philosophy, but rather as attempts to seize a problem at a specific time. The Essays work as a laboratory that allows us to identify some essential principles of a model of individual and society that is almost always unrealizable, but nonetheless thinkable. For Montaigne, experimentation prevails over application, and the rules resulting from observation and experience never quite allow us to conceive of a social science, or to pass from theory to practice.
Rather than developing a grand analysis of humankind, Montaigne prefers to describe what he observes on the ground (for example, during his travels through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy) or what has been observed directly and without mediation by others (like the sailor who travelled to the New World and was employed by Montaigne). Thus, his reflections on mores and customs should not be seen as philosophical investigations on an abstract and unattainable human condition. For this reason, we cannot speak of a Montaignian ontology, or philosophy of being.
Montaigne strives to understand his own mores – always in their political, religious, and cultural context – in relation to other cultures, other schools, and other systems of thought. But should we only be amazed at otherness? Is it possible to take an inventory of people around the world and infer fundamental rules? These questions are always present in the Essays. Even a cursory reading makes it clear that Montaigne does not believe in human “essence”. Humans are incredibly varied across cultures, and so the category of “humanity” is problematic. It is safer to just observe singular behaviors and actions.
Until the seventeenth century, resemblance as an organizing principle was enough to create the illusion of a theory of knowledge, of a hidden order which brought together everything that seemed, at first glance, different. The Spanish theologians of the Conquista looked at the Indians of the New World in this way, i.e. as a pretext for the domination of other cultures because they could not find in these societies what the West valued (writing, monuments, private property). This ideological bias is criticized by Montaigne in his essay “On Cannibals”. On the contrary, valuing difference as an enhancement of his own self, Montaigne delights at seeing himself in the eyes of the cannibals.
Because Montaigne is always aware of his own cultural and social environment, he carefully avoids moral judgment; his interest in different cultures and customs is only illustrative of human complexity. He leaves it to others to find an order in the world and its peoples, and the “progress” of civilizations does not interest him very much. As a good observer, Montaigne turns his gaze towards the generic Other (neighbors, foreigners, cannibals) and tries to understand the irreducibility of cultural specificities: “Every nation has particular opinions touching their use, and particular rules and methods in using them” (II, 37). The “empire of custom” (I, 22) makes us confuse the universal qualities of humans with the importance in our own societies of these “qualities”. Being French or German, according to Montaigne, is in fact nothing more than following the customs of these countries. The power of customs even tends to modify human physiology: “You make a German sick if you lay him upon a mattress, as you do an Italian if you lay him on a feather-bed, and a Frenchman, if without curtains or fire. A Spanish stomach cannot hold out to eat as we can, nor ours to drink like the Swiss” (III, 13).
BIRTH OF THE MODERN, SKEPTICAL SELF
Throughout the Essays, freedom of personal judgment