3. Michel de Montaigne: Essays on Mutinous Organs and Cultural Relativity
“I am not excessively fond of salads or of any fruit except melons. My father disliked every sauce; I like them all. […] I do not yet know for certain that any food disagrees with me. […] We are subject to irregular and inexplicable changes.” (Essays, III, 13)
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592) was a 16th century humanist and could be considered one of the first modern philosophers. Although he was extremely well versed in ancient philosophy, he eschewed many tenets of Scholasticism in favour of casual musings springing from his own sensory experiences. The result was his decades-long project Essays, a novel merging of autobiographical character sketches with serious intellectual insight that would inspire authors of fiction, epistemologists, and social theorists alike.
As a child, Montaigne was raised on a rigid pedagogical plan developed by his humanist father. Everyone in the Dordogne château where he was raised was instructed to speak exclusively Latin, which was deeply influential on Montaigne’s later love for ancient Roman authors, particularly Plutarch, Lucretius, and Seneca. In Montaigne’s essay On Experience, he describes the time in his early youth when he was sent to live with a peasant family for three years by his father. This was in order to, in Montaigne’s words, “unite me with the common people, and with that class which needs our aid. [My father] considered it my obligation to consider a man who stretches out his arm to me, rather than one who shows me his back. ” (III, 13) After spending much of his life as counselor of the Parlement in Bordeaux and a courtier at the court of Charles IX, he temporarily retired from public life to his family estate. In 1571, on the day of his 38th birthday, he entered an nearly ten-year period of self-imposed reclusion to compose his ‘essais’ — or ‘attempts/trials’ — coining the term that would come to characterize short written pieces. The subjects of these essays ranged from the candid Of Smells and Of Thumbs to the astute textual analysis of Observation on a War According to Julius Caesar and Of Democritus and Heraclitus. While it could be said that Montaigne’s style of writing was inspired by the likes of St. Augustine’s Confessions, it was virtually without literary precedent, and was poorly received in his time for its pretentious concern with the self as subject.
Nearing the completion of the first volume of his Essays, Montaigne started suffering from painful kidney stones. From 1580 to 1581, Montaigne traveled across Europe in search for a cure while keeping a journal to record regional differences and customs, eventually having some of his writings deemed heretical and confiscated by the Pope. While abroad, he learned that, like his father before him, he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux. He was re-elected multiple times, overseeing his constituency through the Wars of Religion and a Plague. After having published three volumes of his Essays, each version heavily revising the previous editions with additional notes and digressions, Montaigne passed away of quinsy in 1592.
One could write tomes on each of Montaigne’s essays, each composed with a wit and candour matched only by his encyclopedic knowledge of the Classics. As such, I will focus only on three elements of his corpus, namely his humility, his humour, and some arguments he makes against Euro-centrism.
Firstly, Montaigne introduces himself to the reader with the following epistle:
This, reader, is an honest book. It warns you at the outset that my sole purpose in writing it has been a private and domestic one. I have had no thought of serving you or of my own fame; such a plan would be beyond my powers. I have intended it solely for the pleasure of my relatives and friends so that, when they have lost me — and soon they must — they may recover some features of my character and disposition, and thus keep the memory they have of me more completely and vividly alive.
Had it been my purpose to seek the world’s favour, I should have put on finer clothes, and presented myself in a studied attitude. But I want to appear in my simple, natural, and everyday dress, without strain or artifice; for it is myself that I portray. […] Thus, reader, I am myself the substance of my book, and there is no reason why you should waste your leisure on so frivolous and unrewarding a subject. Farewell then, from Montaigne. (Epistle to the Reader)
The humility and sense of proportion exhibited in these writings betray a startling lucidity and contemporary sense of self that is not often associated with 16th century authors. In a dry, self-deprecating tone, he writes in his essay On Liars:
There is no man so unsuited for the task of speaking about memory as I am, for I find scarcely a trace of it in myself, and I do not believe there is another man in the world so hideously lacking in it. All my other faculties are poor and ordinary, but in [my hideous lack of memory] I think I am most rare and singular, and deserve to gain name and fame thereby. (I, 9)
His sarcasm is punctuated by Latin verse and autobiographical insight in a perpetually intriguing way, which perhaps exemplified best in the following passage from On The Power Of The Imagination, in which he argues that human will cannot overpower the passions of the body:
The organs that serve to discharge the bowels have their own dialations and contractions outside the control of the wishes and contrary to them. […] St. Augustine claims to have seen a man who could command his bottom to break wind as often as he wished [and another] who could synchronize his blasts to the metre of verses. [However,] this does not imply the complete obedience of this organ, for usually it is most unruly and mutinous. Indeed, I know one such that is so turbulent and so intractable that for the last forty years it has compelled its master to break wind with every breath. So unremittingly constant is it in its tyranny that it is even now bringing him to his death. (I, 21)
This crude humour proved to be deeply influential to writers like William Shakespeare, who had essentially plagiarized a passage from Montaigne’s essay On Cannibals for his play The Tempest. This particular essay, however, has proven to stand the test of time not only for its wit, but for its political foresight.
Despite its reactionary title, On Cannibals can be interpreted as an essential text in the articulation of humanism and cultural / moral relativity. Much like contemporaneous Spanish authors Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de las Casas, Montaigne spoke out against the brutal treatment of Indigenous peoples by European colonizers in the so-called ‘New World’. Recalling tales told to him by a friend who travelled to modern-day ‘Brazil’, Montaigne writes:
I do not believe, from what I have been told about these people, that there is anything barbarous or savage about them, except that we all call barbarous anything that is contrary to our own habits. Indeed we seem to have no other criterion of truth and reason than the type and kind of opinions and customs current in the land where we live. (I, 31)
While such an obvious claim — that genocidal Euro-centric thought ought to be denounced — should necessarily not be celebrated for its foresight, given that non-European authors have also been arguing this for centuries, it is worth noting that Montaigne is one of the first authors in the ‘Western canon’ to explicitly de-centre Western ways of thinking and being. The essay unfortunately devolves into poor third-person anthropology of the Tupi and Tapuia peoples, a commendation of the ‘noble savage’ stereotype, and a naïve proto-Rousseauian anarcho-primitivism, but Montaigne’s Othering of familiar practices in favour of unbiased reason is a key tenet of both the Enlightenment and Postmodern tendencies. Because of this essay, along with his other writings, we can consider Montaigne an early member of the canon of radical French political philosophers.
While Montaigne lacks the systemic philosophical thrust that characterized much of the preceding Scholastic tradition and the following Enlightenment period, the beauty of his prose and progressive nature of his writings stem from his qualities of exhaustive knowledge and striking honesty. While Montaigne dabbled in the Hellenic schools of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and even Cynicism throughout his works (see Essays (I,7), (I, 12), and (III, 13), respectively), one could argue that his most enduring contribution was renewing European interest in Skepticism, having throughout his life borne a medal engraved with the phrase “Que sçay-je?”, translated from Middle French as “What do I know?”. The skepticism of Blaise Pascal’s Pensées has been attributed to the influence of Montaigne, Ralph Waldo Emerson chose Montaigne; or, the Skeptic as a subject of one of his lectures, and Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in his Untimely Meditations: “I know of only one writer whom I would compare with Schopenhauer, indeed set above him, in respect of honesty: Montaigne. That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy ofliving on this earth. Since getting to know this freest and mightiest of souls […] I could endeavour to make myself at home in the world with him.” (Nietzsche, 135) I would recommend, if you have the time, seeking out a copy of Essays, flipping to a random section, and learning about what a witty, honest, and erudite man from the 16th century can teach us about ourselves and the world around us.