How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer

by Sarah Bakewell

All Pyrrho renounced, according to Montaigne, was the pretension most people fall prey to: that of ‘regimenting, arranging, and fixing truth’. This was what really interested Montaigne in the Sceptical tradition: not so much the Sceptics’ extreme approach to warding off pains and sorrows (for that, he preferred the Stoics and Epicureans, who seemed more closely attuned to real life), but their desire to take everything provisionally and questioningly. This was just what he always tried to do himself. To keep this goal in the forefront of his mind, he had a series of medals9 struck in 1576, featuring Sextus’s magic word epokhe (here appearing as epekho), together with his own arms and an emblem of weighing scales. The scales are another Pyrrhonian symbol, designed to remind himself both to maintain balance, and to weigh things up rather than merely accepting them.