Well, we’ve made it. After what has seemed like a never-ending summer, we round out the last two chapters in the Montaigne Selected Essays read-along. And fittingly, I might add, as today and tomorrow seem to be the final days we’ll be seeing 80 degree weather here in Pennsylvania, the Summer of Montaigne officially comes to a close.
As a reminder, here’s what we’ve covered and what’s left for the remainder of this read along.
July 21: To the Reader · Book I-1 We Reach the Same End by Discrepant Means · Book I-8 On Idleness
July 28: Book I-16 On Punishing Cowardice · Book I-18 On Fear · Book I-20 To Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die
Aug 4: Book I-26 On Educating Children · Book I-27 That It Is Madness to Judge the True and the False from Our Own Capacities
Aug 11: Book I-31 On the Cannibals · Book I-32 Judgements on God’s Ordinances Must Be Embarked Upon with Prudence
Aug 18: Book I-39 On Solitude · Book I-56 On Prayer · Book I-57 On the Length of Life
Aug 25: Book II-1 On the Inconstancy of Our Actions · Book II-2 On Drunkenness · Book II-5 On Conscience
Sept 1: Book II-8 On the Affection of Fathers for Their Children · Book II-11 On Cruelty · Book II-32 In Defence of Seneca and Plutarch
Sept 8: Book II-35 On Three Good Wives · Book II-37 On the Resemblance of Children to Their Fathers
Sept 15: Book III-2 On Repenting · Book III-3 On Three Kinds of Social Intercourse ·
Sept 22: Book III-5 On Some Lines of Virgil · Book III-6 On Coaches
Sept 29: Book III-11 On the Lame · Book III-13 On Experience
Oct 6: Live Zoom Q&A Finale
All of these read-along posts are free. I will be doing a Zoom Q&A at the end for paid subscribers. If you want to support my work, consider upgrading to a paid subscription here:
When we first set out on our Summer of Montaigne, I promised you this would be a philosophy book for people not sure how to get started with philosophy namely because, well, Montaigne didn’t consider himself a philosopher.
In that first issue of the read-along, I wrote:
Montaigne is the perfect candidate to begin with, since he makes no pretension about being a philosopher. That was not his goal. He wanted to examine his own mind, and, in doing so, invented the format of the essay. Whereas philosophy, especially Aristotelian philosophy, began with the idea of human beings being roughly identical versions of the same ‘form’ which they could analyze and reason about in the abstract and then apply universally, Montaigne did the opposite. He began with himself.
In these final two chapters, we finally get to the grand finale of this project of his, to examine what it means to live a good and virtuous life.
The first of the two chapters, On the lame, is about how we know what we know, or as is called in academic philosophy, epistemology. Ever the skeptic, Montaigne lays out a series of arguments and anecdotes full of tales from the French countryside where the common folk would claim to have run into witches or experienced miracles.
Montaigne doesn’t so much as reject these out of hand, but admits that the wise approach is to suspend our judgement, “neither believing nor rejecting.”
Instead, he tells us, he would instruct his sons (if he had any) to default to trained responses such as What does this mean?, I do not understand that, It might be so, and even Is that true? so as to behave more like an apprentice at age sixty than a knower of all things at age ten.
“Anyone who wishes to be cured of ignorance must first admit to it.”
A skeptic is not a cynic. He goes on to explain that “amazement is the foundation of all philosophy” and that “inquiry its way of advancing” while “ignorance is its end.”
That last part seems a bit out of place. If we begin with wonder, and use reason and rational thinking to inquire about the world as a means of advancing our knowledge, why on earth would we—should we—be content with arriving at ignorance of all places?
Let’s come back to that in a moment.
Montaigne begins with a story about the Gregorian reform of the calendar of 1582, about two to three years before he wrote the essay, and how nobody around him seemed to notice any difference. If our senses, which help us understand things like time and place, gave no indication of a shorter calendar year, what do our senses actually tell us?
“So gross is our faculty of perception.”
Empiricism, the idea that knowledge comes to us through our senses, dates back to 600 B.C.E with the Vaisheshika school of Hindu philosophy. In Ancient Greece, the proto-empiricists advocated against the idea of innate ideals of the mind we are born with, and instead advocated for the concept of the mind being a tabula rasa, a blank slate, that is filled only through contact with reality. Empiricism, as we know it today, would really come into clarity and detail by Montaigne’s contemporary, Francis Bacon, and later Hobbes, followed by Locke and Hume.
But Montaigne was no rationalist either. He critiques rationalism as well, arguing that there is no way to pure inquiry that is universal since we all have bias, emotion, and custom, leading to “a hundred contradictory ones about one and the same subject.”
Quoting Cicero, he writes towards the end of the chapter:
“Nor, like those other fellows, am I ashamed to admit that I do not know what I do not know.”
If there’s one thing I appreciated in reading Montaigne, it’s his inclination towards moderation. He has no qualms saying that both the rationalists and the empiricists are both wrong for being so stubborn in their extreme positions:
“So as it happened in the school of philosophy: the pride of those who attributed the capacity of all things to the human mind created in others, out of despite and emulation, this opinion, that it is capable of nothing: the one maintain the same extreme in ignorance that the others do in knowledge; to make it undeniably manifest that man is immoderate throughout, and can never stop but of necessity and the want of ability to proceed further.”
If experience and empirical evidence are not the full story, Montaigne begins the next (and final) chapter with a warning:
“Experience is a waker and less dignified means: but truth is so great a matter that we must not disdain any method which leads us to it.”
“No desire,” he quotes Aristotle as saying, “is more natural than the desire for knowledge.” When reason fails us, we should turn to experience.
Not only that, we should never feel satisfied, as there is always more to learn. “When the mind is satisfied,” he continues, “that is a sign of diminished faculties or weariness. No powerful mind stops within itself: it is always stretching out and exceeding its capacities.”
Writing about the lack of original thinkers, he complains there there are more books about other books than any other subject.
“All is a swarm with commentaries: of authors there is a dearth.”
He tells us that freedom should be a high value of all people, and at the bare minimum it is his highest value.
“I so hunger after freedom that if anyone were to forbid me access to some corner of the Indies I would to some extent live less at ease.”
As we’ll see when we get into other philosophical texts, they can at times feel to be so abstract and removed from reality that we lose sight of its true purpose: to better understand ourselves and the world we inhabit. And we, as mortal humans, do not live in the abstract or in some higher dimension of reality, but right here, right now. Even “kings and philosophers shit,” Montaigne reminds us, “and so do the ladies.”
Ultimately, what Montaigne provided humanity with his invention of the essay format was none other than the ability to reason and inquire beginning with ourselves, not the abstract, “universal”, man. “I would rather be an expert on me,” he writes, “than an expert on Cicero.”
“I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics.”
On the “highest throne in the world,” he concludes, “we are seated, still, upon our arses.”
We are a week behind on the schedule. Next week I will send out the Zoom Q&A for paid subscribers, as well as updates for the next read along which will be Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Thank you to everyone who joined along for the ride. I am glad we got through it together and pumped for the next one.
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