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

by Sarah Bakewell

Reminds me of Joyce quote about holding water in hands

The Essays are suffused with it: he filled his pages with words such as ‘perhaps’, ‘to some extent’, ‘I think’, ‘It seems to me’, and so on – words which, as Montaigne said himself, ‘soften and moderate10 the rashness of our propositions’, and which embody what the critic Hugo Friedrich has called his philosophy of ‘unassumingness’.

My footing is so unsteady11 and so insecure, I find it so vacillating and ready to slip, and my sight is so unreliable, that on an empty stomach I feel myself another man than after a meal. If my health smiles upon me, and the brightness of a beautiful day, I am a fine fellow; if I have a corn bothering my toe, I am surly, unpleasant, and unapproachable.

Montaigne helped them with his attack on rational hubris, as well as with the many overt statements of Fideism scattered through his work. Religion, he wrote, must come to us from God by means of ‘an extraordinary infusion’,18 not by our own efforts. God provides the tea-bag: we provide the water and cup.

The Essays has nothing to say about most Christian ideas: he seems unmoved by themes of sacrifice, repentance or salvation, and shows neither fear of Hell nor desire for Heaven.

Another topic Montaigne shows no interest in is Jesus Christ. He writes about the noble deaths of Socrates and Cato, but does not think to mention the crucifixion alongside them. The sacred mystery of redemption leaves him cold. He cares much more about secular morality – about questions of mercy and cruelty.

Montaigne’s animal stories and his debunking of human pretensions would prove particularly irksome to two of the greatest writers of the new era: René Descartes and Blaise Pascal.

The work for which Pascal is best remembered, the Pensées (‘Thoughts’), was never meant to terrify anyone except himself: it was a collection of disorderly notes for a more systematic theological treatise which he never managed to write. Had he completed this work, it would probably have become less interesting. Instead, he left us one of the most mysterious texts in literature, a passionate outpouring largely written to try to ward off what he saw as the dangerous power of Montaigne’s Essays.

Of all authors40 Montaigne is one of the least destructible. You could as well dissipate a fog by flinging hand-grenades into it. For Montaigne is a fog, a gas, a fluid, insidious element. He does not reason, he insinuates, charms, and influences, or if he reasons, you must be prepared for his having some other design upon you than to convince you by his argument.

It is the emotional difference that counts. Montaigne and Pascal had similar insights into the less flattering sides of human nature – into the realm of the ‘human, all too human’, where selfishness, laziness, pettiness, vanity, and countless other such failings lurk. But Montaigne gazed upon them with indulgence and humour; in Pascal, they inspired a horror greater even than anything Descartes managed to muster.

Another was Jean de La Fontaine, author of Plutarch-style fables about animals’ cleverness and stupidity. He got away with these by keeping them gentle in tone, yet they still constituted a challenge to human dignity. Their premise was the same as Montaigne’s: that animals and humans are made of the same material.

Nietzsche relished the irony of this because he abhorred professional philosophers as a class. For him, abstract systems were of no use; what counted was critical self-awareness: the ability to pry into one’s own motivations and yet to accept oneself as one was. This is why he loved the aphorists La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère, as well as their forefather Montaigne. He called Montaigne ‘this freest and mightiest58 of souls’, and added: ‘That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this earth.’ Montaigne apparently managed the trick of living as Nietzsche longed to do: without petty resentments or regrets, embracing everything that happened without the desire to change it. The essayist’s casual remark, ‘If I had to live over again, I would live as I have lived’, embodied everything Nietzsche spent his life trying to attain.

He successfully merged his Scepticism with loyalty to Catholic dogma – a combination no one yet questioned.

Does one conclude that Montaigne had a smallish penis? Yes, indeed, because he confessed later in the same essay that nature had treated him ‘unfairly and unkindly’,

Montaigne himself did not brood in his tower like a Gormenghast earl: he liked to be out walking. ‘My thoughts fall asleep12 if I make them sit down. My mind will not budge unless my legs move it.’

Montaigne is often dismissed as anti-feminist, but had he taken part in this querelle, he would probably have been on the pro-woman side. He did write, ‘Women are not wrong22 at all when they reject the rules of life that have been introduced into the world, inasmuch as it is the men who have made these without them.’ And he believed that, by nature, ‘males and females are cast in the same mould’.

We should have wife, children, goods,23 and above all health, if we can; but we must not bind ourselves to them so strongly that our happiness depends on them. We must reserve a back shop all our own, entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude. Here our ordinary conversation must be between us and ourselves, and so private that no outside association or communication can find a place; here we must talk and laugh as if without wife, without children, without possessions, without retinue and servants, so that, when the time comes to lose them, it will be nothing new to us to do without them.

If his type seems familiar, so too does the Montaigne type, whose two mottoes would surely be ‘Anything for a quiet life’ and ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’

‘Extremely idle, extremely independent, both by nature and by art,’ was the way he summed up his character. He was ruled by ‘freedom and laziness’.

Some of his answers to the question of how to live are indeed chilly: mind your own business, preserve your sense of self, stay out of trouble and keep your room behind the shop. But there is another which is almost the exact opposite.

Above all, he deplored the holy zeal of religious fanatics, who believed that God demanded such extreme, unreasoning violence as proof of devotion. Cruelty nauseated Montaigne: he could not help himself. He hated it cruelly23, as he wrote, making a point of the paradox.

how they spoke of men as halves of one another, wondering at the sight of rich Frenchmen gorging themselves while their ‘other halves’ starved on their doorstep.

He indulges his dog because he can imaginatively share the animal’s point of view: he can feel how desperate the dog is to banish boredom and get his human friend’s attention.

The ability to imagine someone elses perspective is at the heart of being able to act with compassion. Montaigne has this skill in abundance.

We live porously and sociably. We can glide out of our own minds, if only for a few moments, in order to occupy another being’s point of view. This ability is the real meaning of ‘Be convivial’, this chapter’s answer to the question of how to live, and the best hope for civilisation.

The encounter stimulated in Montaigne what became a lifelong interest in the New World – an entire hemisphere unknown to Europeans until a few decades before his own birth, and still so surprising that it hardly seemed real.

The noble savage was raised to a more exalted level by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,19 another writer influenced by Montaigne – his annotated copy of the Essays survives. Unlike Diderot, Rousseau took primitive society to be something so perfect that it could not actually exist in any real part of the world, not even the Pacific. It functioned only as an ideal contrast to the mess that real societies had become. By definition, all existing civilisation was corrupt.

Some contemporaries25 noticed suspicious similarities between Rousseau and Montaigne. Rousseau was overtly accused of theft: a tract by Dom Joseph Cajot, bluntly called Rousseau’s Plagiarisms on Education, opined that the only difference was that Montaigne gushed less than Rousseau and was more concise – surely the only time the latter quality has ever been attributed to Montaigne.

The qualities he valued were curiosity, sociability, kindness, fellow-feeling, adaptability, intelligent reflection, the ability to see things from another’s point of view, and ‘goodwill’ – none of which is compatible with the fiery furnace of inspiration.

Be free from vanity and pride. Be free from belief, disbelief, convictions and parties. Be free from habit.

Be free from ambition and greed. Be free from family and surroundings. Be free from fanaticism. Be free from fate: be master of your own life. Be free from death: life depends on the will of others, but death on our own will.

French journalist Joseph Macé-Scaron26 specifically argues that Montaigne should be adopted as an antidote to the new wars of religion. Others might feel that the last thing needed today is someone who encourages us to relax and withdraw into our private realms. People spend enough time in isolation as it is, at the expense of civil responsibilities.

The English writer Thackeray10 joked that Montaigne could have given every one of his essays the title of another, or could have called one ‘Of the Moon’ and another ‘Of Fresh Cheese’:

His adaptability extended to language. In Italy, he spoke in Italian11 and even kept his journal in that language, taking over from the secretary.

He should impose his authority but, at the same time, make conquests through ‘clemency and magnanimity’, since these are better lures for winning people over than threats. The king must be strong, but he must also show trust in people, and be loved rather than feared.

Reminiscent of Game of Thrones

And the essayist William Hazlitt managed to squeeze Montaigne, as well as Rabelais, into a piece called ‘On Old English Writers and Speakers’. He justified their inclusion thus: ‘But these we consider as in a great measure English, or as what the old French character inclined to, before it was corrupted by courts and academies of criticism.’ If they liked the Essays’ style, English readers were even more charmed by its content. Montaigne’s preference for details over abstractions appealed to them; so did his distrust of scholars, his preference for moderation and comfort, and his desire for privacy – the ‘room behind the shop’.

Shakespeare and Florio did know one another, and Shakespeare was among the first readers of the Essays translation. He may even have read parts in manuscript before it went to press: signs of Montaigne seem faintly discernible in Hamlet, which predates Florio’s edition. A much later play, The Tempest,7 contains one passage so close to Florio that there can be no doubt of his having read it. Eulogising his vision of a perfect society in the state of nature, Shakespeare’s Gonzalo says: I’th’ commonwealth I would by contraries Execute all things, for no kind of traffic Would I admit; no name of magistrate;

The Shakespearean scholar J. M. Robertson believed that all literature since these two authors could be interpreted as an elaboration of their joint theme: the discovery of self-divided consciousness.

Even stranger was Sir Thomas Browne14, who produced essayistic investigations into medicine, gardens, burial methods, imaginary libraries and much more in a convoluted baroque style so unlike anyone else’s (even Florio’s) that any Browne sentence is instantly recognisable as his.

Of all Montaigne’s cross-Channel heirs, the one who deserves the last word is an Anglo-Irishman: Laurence Sterne, eighteenth-century author of Tristram Shandy.22 His great novel, if it can be so classified, is an exaggerated Montaignesque ramble, containing several explicit nods to its French predecessor, and filled with games, paradoxes and digressions.