HoP 412 - Not Matter, But Me - Michel de Montaigne

Hi, I'm Peter Adelson and you're listening to the history of philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College of London and the LMU and Munich online at history of philosophy.net. Today's episode not matter but me, Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne is among the most quotable authors in the whole history of philosophy. When discussing him, there's a strong temptation simply to reel off a list of his most memorable and pithy remarks. And as the equally quotable Oscar Wilde said, I can resist anything except temptation. So here is a selection of my favorite Montaigne moments. It is fear that I am most afraid of. The true mirror of our discourse is the course of our lives. There is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and other people. Virtue rejects ease as a companion. Reason is a two handled pot. You can grab it from the right or the left. On any topic, I'd like starting with my conclusions. There are folk on whom fine clothes sit down and cry. I am rarely summoned and I just as seldom volunteer. I do not judge opinions by their age. It is far easier to talk like Aristotle and to live like Caesar than to both talk and live like Socrates. And finally, the unimprovable, when I play with my cat, how do I know she is not passing time with me rather than I with her? These and many other remarks to Saver can be found in Montaigne's essays, first published in 1580, expanded for a new edition in 1588, and published again posthumously under the editorship of Marie de Gaulle in 1595. Taken together, the essays make for an immensely long andlessly entertaining and willfully digressive work, which Montaigne himself compared to a monstrous protest, fused together from mismatching limbs, and to a patchwork of quilted fabrics. They are a monument to Montaigne's favorite subject, namely, Montaigne himself. The style of his writing eloquently expresses his goal to explore and understand, his self. Explaining the disordered appearance of the essays, he says, "I let myself go along as I find myself to be. To account for his habit of adding material and never subtracting it, he admits, 'I never correct my first thoughts by second ones, I want to show my humors as they develop, revealing each element as it is born.' Not since Augustine's confessions have we discussed such a sustained and intimate reflections on the working of an individual mind. Yet, Montaigne's method, such as it is, may be traceable not so much to the confessional mode of Augustine as to the inward turn proposed by Erasmus. Montaigne's essays are a natural, if not predictable, outcome of the brand of humanism initiated by Erasmus. Many of the quotable sayings that appear in Montaigne are, in fact, already being quoted from other sources. Like Bodan or Lipsius, Montaigne was evidently a great exponent of Erasmus' commonplace book method whereby one reads widely and notes striking and limitating or simply interesting passages for later use. The essays are thus stuffed with anecdotes and sayings from his vast reading, mostly from classical antiquity. A useful saying or a pithy remark is always welcome wherever it is put, he says, if it is not good in context, it is good in itself. Inspired by classical authors who were themselves adept at using so-called exempla, like Plutarch, Montaigne likes the way that such material can lightly touch on themes that would need long discussion, if developed properly. The quotations, he says, often bear the seeds of a richer, bolder subject matter. At the same time, he's characteristically relaxed about whether his audience gets the same thing out of this material that Montaigne does. If my example, I do not fit, he instructs the reader, supply your own for me. Montaigne was predestined for humanism. At the age of sex, he was sent to the collège d'ouglienne, where he had teachers, including Nicolas de Horsche, who placed emphasis on moral instruction. This, by the way, after being taught Latin from infancy in an immersive technique once recommended by Erasmus. As a result, Montaigne claimed, French remained a foreign language for him until later in childhood. Though Montaigne said that he never delved deeply into scholastic topics, biting my nails over the study of Aristotle, he was familiar enough with this tradition to reject him. For him, as for Erasmus, the schoolmen were preoccupied with trivial matters when they should be trying to learn how to live. We should imitate the ancient philosophers in this, since they were great in learning, greater still in activities. The schoolmen and many humanist teachers, too, took up bits of wisdom like birds carrying food in their beaks without swallowing. Their students might learn to quote Cicero and Plato, but not to ask, "What have we got to say? What judgments do we make? What are we doing?" Montaigne's approach was different. He was, he said, only seeking to become more wise, not more learned or more eloquent. Yet, I can't help feeling that if Erasmus had been able to read the essays he would have said, "This isn't what I had in mind." Montaigne took the private spirituality of Erasmus and mostly dropped the spiritual part, focusing relentlessly on himself as an individual, and reporting on everything from his struggles to be virtuous, to his sex life, food preferences, and bathroom habits. This was very much by design. Montaigne made a point of dealing with both trivial and deep issues, since his goal is to develop his capacity for judgment and apply it to absolutely anything. He could, he said, write about even a fly. In another contrast to Erasmus, he was a humanist without being a philologist. Unlike his rough contemporaries, Scaliger or the younger Casabone, Montaigne devoted his efforts to improving himself, not improving the text of ancient books. "I would rather be an expert on me than on Cicero," he said, or contrasting this project to that of this Scholastics, "I study myself more than any other subject, that is my metaphysics, that is my physics." It's been said that Montaigne brought the private self out of hiding, and for good reason. He was convinced that it would be worthwhile to record his own subjective perspective on the world, despite the fact that that perspective was changing all the time. "My aim is to reveal my own self, which may well be different tomorrow." The point of this is not even as we might expect to discern universal barities by studying closely one particular person. Montaigne's ambition is, rather, limited to the understanding and improvement of his own self. He says that his business and his art are to live his life, so that talking about his life is like when an architect talks about buildings. Because he is so frank about recording his every thought, about myself nothing is wanting who writes, and there is nothing to guess. There is, in the end, no difference between himself and his book, the essays. Touch one, and you touch the other. One might wonder why anyone else should be interested in reading such a determinately self-obsessed work, unless they happen to be intimates of Montaigne who want to know and better, or strangers who are just leafing through out of idol curiosity. Montaigne resolutely resists the idea that talking about himself is an indirect way to talk about some other topic. "I am striving," he writes, "to make known not matter, but me." But he still thinks that people can read his essays with profit, even if he is modest enough to say that they are aimed at a middling group of readers, since the vulgar will find them incomprehensible, and the outstanding readers will find them too easy. If I may follow Montaigne's example by telling you what I myself happen to think, it seems to me that Montaigne is modeling an approach to life, which readers can imitate by inspecting their own lives, as intensely as he does. Each man, he says, is an excellent instruction unto himself, provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close quarters. There's a familiar idea that Montaigne achieved this by withdrawing from society and remaining in solitude, reading and writing in his famous tower, where, by the way, some of his favorite quotations were put up as inscriptions, most famously, "I am a human, so I consider nothing human to be foreign to me," taken from the classical playwright Terence. This cliche is encouraged by Montaigne himself. In an essay on the topic of solitude, he recommends bringing the soul back to itself and making one's happiness depend on oneself and not on friends and family. If you can keep yourself company and, in lonely places, be a crowd all by yourself, then you will be self-sufficient and less subject to the wins of fortune, whose inconstancy and unpredictability is a running theme throughout the essays. In the terms of the standard humanist dilemma, whether to pursue an active life of civic engagement or a secluded one of scholarly contemplation, it sounds like Montaigne has decided for the latter, albeit that what he contemplates is nothing other than his own self. Yet the essays themselves also tell a different story, especially when we supplement this with more information about Montaigne's life. This is the story of a man who was engaged with the world outside his tower, capable of passionate friendship and quietly courageous political action. Some of the most fervent passages in the essays concern Montaigne's friendship with Etienne Le Boitier, whom we met as the young author of the daring political treatise on voluntary servitude. Montaigne, never afraid of exaggerating for effect, once called Le Boitier the greatest man of our century. Given his early death, this incommium may have been based more on Le Boitier's prodigious talents than his actual achievements, especially since Montaigne sought to downplay on voluntary servitude as a youthful excess. But that may have been a disingenuous remark intended to support his claim that there was never a better citizen than his young friend. A bit earlier in the essays, Montaigne illustrates Plutarch's aforementioned use of brevity and anecdote by referring with approval to Le Boitier's treatise. This work, he says, extracts the meaning only implied in Plutarch's remark that the inhabitants of Asia were slaves of one tyrant because they were incapable of pronouncing one syllable, no. So, Montaigne may have thought more highly of the message of this youthful work than he wanted to admit. At any rate, Montaigne was plunged into grief by the loss of Le Boitier. He describes their relationship as a perfect friendship, so perfect indeed that it was indivisible, meaning that it could leave room for no other similar relationship. The demise of Le Boitier and the prospect of his own demise led Montaigne to reflect often on death and its meaning for the living. Indeed, he named this as the one philosophical topic that concerned him the most. He found some consolation in philosophy despite his observation that there are so many arguments persuading men to despise death and to endure pain, why do we never find a single one which applies to ourselves? In more serious moods, he treats death as the ultimate proof of our convictions, until we face it, all those fine philosophical arguments may be only opposed. So, he embraces the classical idea of philosophy as being not just a way of life, but practiced for the end of life, and recommends, let us wait for death everywhere, to practice death is to practice freedom. As for politics, Montaigne's efforts in this sphere are often ignored, but some hint is given by the fact that he first met Le Boitier while serving in the Bordeaux-Pallemont in the late 1550s. This was only one of many political appointments he held. He was a courtier under Charles IX, who knighted him in 1571, and he was one of the so-called "politique" who worked to find a pragmatic piece between Protestants and Catholics. This led to more personal misfortune than public success, as he was imprisoned in 1588 after choosing to accompany King Henry III in flight from Paris. Understandably, Montaigne had at best mixed feelings about his various practical entanglements. One of the most amusing passages in the essays relates his approach to the mayorship of Bordeaux, which was thrust upon him in 1581. As soon as I arrived, I spelled out my character faithfully and truly, no memory, no concentration, no experience, no drive, no hatred either, no ambition, no covetousness, no ferocity, so that they should know what to expect from my service. So, Montaigne was not exactly an eager politician, yet it is worth touching on this aspect of his life since the upheavals of France form an important part of the background for his essays. In a way, they are as much a response to the wars of religion as more explicit reactions like the Huguenot political treatises or the works on consolation by Dauvert and Lopsius. When Montaigne does allude to current events, it is sometimes to maintain the pose that they do not touch him. I assay to steal this corner from the public storms as I do for another corner in my soul. Our war can change its patterns, multiply and diversify into new factions, but to no avail, as for me, I do not budge. But he makes no secret about having opinions about the religious uproar, which he sees in part as the result of cynical political exploitations. All are alike in using religions for their violent and ambitious schemes, he says, mentioning in particular the Huguenot idea that it might be alright to defy a sitting monarch on religious grounds. Not unlike Sebastian Castellio, albeit with a more ironic tone, he punctures the overconfidence of persecutors. It is to put a very high value on your surmises to roast a man alive for them. Montaigne was thus disposed to be in the party of peace, especially since he was able to find something to admire in men on both sides of the conflict. But he did have a preference for the Catholic cause, in part because he just wasn't convinced of the Protestant point of view. The idea that theological disputes could be resolved by taking recourse to scripture alone, as the reformers insisted, was one he said he couldn't even take seriously. But his main reason for supporting the established religion was simply that it was, indeed, established. He saw the disasters of his time as being caused by novelties, which were introduced by zealous reformers who did not think to count the cost. While he was open, as we have seen, and we'll see again shortly, to constant change and variability in his own opinions and the world as a whole, when it came to politics and religion, he prized stability above all else. All roads which wander from the norm, displeased me. Despite the radicalism of his philosophical and literary project then, Montaigne can fairly be described as a social conservative. This may have been a matter of temperament, as well as being a conclusion he drew from the chaos of his times. When we look at his views on ethics in virtue, a topic he mentions much more often than the world's religion, we again see him endorsing moderation. This is why, unlike Deville and Lipsius, he held back from embracing the teaching of the Stoic School. He thought it was unrealistic to teach that pleasure is not worth pursuing and that pain is a matter of indifference. If this is not just playing with words, then it is a doctrine so demanding that no one could live by it, which, of course, would be of little interest to Montaigne, whose ambition was precisely to learn how he should live. In a striking thought experiment, which recalls one devised centuries before by Abesena, Montaigne imagines a supposedly imperturbable philosopher being at the top of the cathedral of Notre Dame. This philosopher would surely be afraid of the height. Rather than regretting such natural reactions, we should be suspicious of extremes in the life of the mind, as in the life of the state. Taken in moderation, philosophy is pleasant and useful, but it can eventually lead to a man's becoming vicious and savage, contemptuous of religion and of the accepted laws, an enemy of our human pleasures. At the very end of the essays, he leaves us with the thought that the best arguments for those which are most human, most ours. Montaigne enjoyed a nice irony, so perhaps he appreciated the fact that this same difficulty arose with his preferred Hellenistic school, which was not stoicism but skepticism. He lived in a moment when this tradition was better accessible than it had been previously, since writings of the pironist skeptic, sexism paracus, had recently been printed in 1562. As the name of this school indicates, it traced its lineage back to the early skeptic piron, who we covered more than a decade ago in episode 69. But he is pretty memorable, so perhaps you'll recall the stories about him almost walking off cliffs and in front of oncoming traffic, because he refused to believe anything, even his own eyes. Referring to these reports, Montaigne says consistently with his response to stoicism that it is one thing to bring your soul to accept such ideas and another to combine theory and practice. But Montaigne was more persuaded, if we can use that term in this context, by the skeptical approach adopted by sexists, according to which one simply follows appearances while remaining profoundly aware of the limitations of one's own knowledge. This may have been another reason for his political conservatism, in fact. Sticking with established custom is exactly how this sort of skeptic negotiates their way through the world, without endorsing potentially controversial doctrines. And as we just saw, Montaigne was scornful of people who were so impressed with their own beliefs that they were willing to kill others who disagreed. The longest entry in the essays is in large part a meditation on the topic of skepticism. This is book two essay twelve, in which Montaigne answers detractors who criticized a work he had translated into French as a young man, at the best of his father. This was The Book of Creatures by Rémon Cébonne. Cébonne was a spaniard who taught it to lose back in the 1430s, which is when he wrote this work of natural theology intended to support Christian belief using rational argument. In this essay entitled An Apology for Rémon Cébonne, Montaigne answers two lines of critique. First, that reason cannot be used to support religion. Second, that Cébonne's rational arguments are weak. To the first, Montaigne argues that rational theology is a perfectly respectable project, though he piously reminds us that faith is a gift that ultimately comes from God alone. More surprising, and in considerable tension with Cébonne's original project, is Montaigne's answer to the second criticism. He admits that the arguments in the book may not be perfectly convincing, but that's hardly surprising because philosophical arguments are never perfectly convincing, especially when it comes to theology. Human reason goes astray everywhere, but especially when she concerns herself with matters divine. Realizing this, we should strive for a form of ignorance that is at least aware of itself, curing ourselves of pretensions to have more certainty than we do. This, says Montaigne, is doubt taken to its limits, it shakes its own foundations. This rather strange line of defense for when Montaigne and other remarks scattered throughout the essays have earned Montaigne a central place in the history of early modern skepticism. He constantly reminded himself to be modest about his knowledge, as with one of the inscriptions he put up in the famous tower, what do I know? In the next episode, we'll get into this aspect of the essays more fully, as we put Montaigne alongside two other important skeptics who worked in France in this period. Francisco Sanchez and Montaigne's friend Pierre Charron. As we'll see, they make a pretty convincing case that nothing is certain, a part of corpse from death, taxes, and the fact that you should not miss the next episode of the history of philosophy without any gaps. (upbeat music)