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

by Sarah Bakewell

‘Forget much of what you learn’ and ‘Be slow-witted’ became two of Montaigne’s best answers to the question of how to live. They freed him to think wisely rather than glibly; they allowed him to avoid the fanatical notions and foolish deceptions that ensnared other people; and they let him follow his own thoughts wherever they led – which was all he really wanted to do.

It is more of a job34 to interpret the interpretations than to interpret the things, and there are more books about books than about any other subject: we do nothing but write glosses about each other.

For him, the greatest problem with the law35 was that it did not take account of a fundamental fact about the human condition: people are fallible.

The one good thing about the law was that it made human failings so obvious: a good philosophical lesson.

Calvinism is a minority religion today, but its ideology remains impressively powerful. It takes as its starting-point a principle known as ‘total depravity’, which asserts that humans have no virtues of their own and are dependent on God’s grace for everything, including their salvation and even the decision to convert to Calvinism. Little personal responsibility is required, for everything is pre-ordained, and no compromise is possible. The only possible attitude to such a God is one of perfect submission. In exchange, God grants His followers invincible strength: you give up your personal will, but receive the entire weight of God’s universe behind you. This does not mean that you can sit back and do nothing. While Lutherans tend to stay aloof from worldly affairs, living according to their private conscience, Calvinists are supposed to engage with politics, and work to bring about God’s will on earth.

Tyranny creates a drama of submission and domination, rather like the tense battle confrontation scenes often described by Montaigne. The populace willingly gives itself up, and this only encourages the tyrant to take away everything they have – even their lives, if he sends them to war to fight for him. Something in human beings drives them to a ‘deep forgetfulness of freedom’.

Its reflections on the power of habit, a key theme of his own in the Essays, and its idea that freedom could come from reading historians and biographers, would have resonated with him.

Occasional signs can be found in the Essays that Montaigne was capable of playing the slyboots when he wanted to. Once, he used an elaborate trick to help a friend who suffered from impotence23 and was afraid a spell had been cast on him. Instead of reasoning him out of it, Montaigne gave the friend a robe and a magical-looking coin engraved with ‘celestial figures’. He told him to perform a series of rituals with this medallion whenever he was about to have sex, first laying it over his kidneys, then tying it around his waist, then lying down with his partner and pulling the robe over both of them. The trick worked. Montaigne felt a bit guilty, even though he had done it for his friend’s benefit. Yet this shows that he could practise deception if he felt the situation called for it, or if the psychology of the case fascinated him enough.

A few hours later, still at La Boétie’s bedside, Montaigne told him that he ‘blushed for shame’ to see him showing more courage in the face of his own death than he, Montaigne, was able to find in witnessing it. He promised to remember his example when his own time came. Yes, said La Boétie, that was a good thing to do. He reminded Montaigne of the many enlightening talks they had already had on such subjects. This experience was, he said, ‘the true object of our studies, and of philosophy’.

Taking Montaigne by the hand, he assured him that he had done many things in life that had been more painful and difficult. ‘And when all is said,’ he went on, ‘I had been prepared for it for a very long time and had known my lesson all by heart.’

After all, he went on, still echoing the wisdom of the sages, he had lived healthily and happily for long enough. There was no need for regrets. Had he not already made it to a good age? ‘I was soon to be thirty-three,’ he said. ‘God granted me this grace, that all my life up to now has been full of health and happiness. In view of the inconstancy of things human, that could hardly last any longer.’

La Boétie was dying the perfect Stoic death, full of courage and rational wisdom. Montaigne was expected to do his part: to help his friend to maintain this courage, and then to act as witness, recording the details so others could learn from the story.

Although he transmuted his sorrow into literature, Montaigne’s grief was overwhelming, and it seemed to become greater with time. After La Boétie died, everything was ‘nothing but dark and dreary night’.28 Travelling in Italy nearly eighteen years later, he wrote in his private diary: ‘This same morning, writing to Monsieur d’Ossat, I was overcome by such painful thoughts about Monsieur de La Boétie, and I was in this mood so long, without recovering, that it did me much harm.’ He also wrote in the Essays about how he longed for a true companion in Italy – someone whose ways harmonised with his own, and who liked to do the things he liked to do. ‘I have missed such a man extremely on all my travels.’ No pleasure has any savour for me without communication. Not even a merry thought comes to my mind without my being vexed at having produced it alone without anyone to offer it to.

Whenever Montaigne sounds cool or detached from other people, as he sometimes does, one has to remember La Boétie. People should not, he writes, be ‘joined and glued30 to us so strongly that they cannot be detached without tearing off our skin and some part of our flesh as well’. These are the words of a man who knows what it feels like to be flayed in this way.

ABOUT ACADEMIC PHILOSOPHERS, Montaigne was usually dismissive: he disliked their pedantries and abstractions. But he showed an endless fascination for another tradition in philosophy: that of the great pragmatic schools which explored such questions as how to cope with a friend’s death, how to work up courage, how to act well in morally difficult situations, and how to make the most of life. These were the philosophies he turned to in times of grief or fear, as well as for guidance in dealing with more minor everyday irritations.

The three most famous such systems of thought were Stoicism, Epicureanism and Scepticism: the philosophies collectively known as Hellenistic

All the schools had the same aim: to achieve a way of living known in the original Greek as eudaimonia2, often translated as ‘happiness’, ‘joy’, or ‘human flourishing’. This meant living well in every sense: thriving, relishing life, being a good person. They also agreed that the best path to eudaimonia was ataraxia, which might be rendered as ‘imperturbability’ or ‘freedom from anxiety’. Ataraxia means equilibrium: the art of maintaining an even keel, so that you neither exult when things go well nor plunge into despair when they go awry.

To attain it is to have control over your emotions, so that you are not battered and dragged about by them like a bone fought over by a pack of dogs.

The original Epicurean community, founded by Epicurus in the fourth century BC, required followers to leave their families and live like cult members in a private ‘garden’. Sceptics preferred to remain amid the public hurly-burly like everyone else, but with a radically altered mental attitude. Stoics were somewhere in between.

Stoics and Epicureans shared a great deal of their theory, too. They thought that the ability to enjoy life is thwarted by two big weaknesses: lack of control over emotions, and a tendency to pay too little attention to the present. If one could only get these two things right – controlling and paying attention – most other problems would take care of themselves. The catch is that both are almost impossible to do.

Accordingly, Stoic and Epicurean thinkers spent much time devising techniques and thought experiments. For example: imagine that today is the last day of your life. Are you ready to face death? Imagine, even, that this very moment – now! – is the last moment of your existence. What are you feeling? Do you have regrets? Are there things you wish you had done differently? Are you really alive at this instant, or are you consumed with panic, denial and remorse? This experiment opens your eyes to what is important to you, and reminds you of how time runs constantly through your fingers.

Seneca wrote of a wealthy man called Pacuvius,3 who conducted a full-scale funeral ceremony for himself every day, ending with a feast after which he would have himself carried from the table to his bed on a bier while all the guests and servants intoned, ‘He has lived his life, he has lived his life.’

The Epicurean writer Lucretius suggested picturing yourself at the point of death, and considering two possibilities. Either you have lived well, in which case you can go your way satisfied, like a well-fed guest leaving a party. Or you have not, but then it makes no difference that you are losing your life, since you obviously did not know what to do with it anyway.

Such shifts of attitude are the purpose of many of the thought experiments. If you have lost someone or something precious, you can try to value them differently by imagining that you never knew that person, or never owned that object. How can you miss what you never had? A different angle produces a different emotion.

The key is to cultivate mindfulness: prosoche, another key Greek term. Mindful attention is the trick that underlies many of the other tricks. It is a call to attend to the inner world – and thus also to the outer world, for uncontrolled emotion blurs reality as tears blur a view. Anyone who clears their vision and lives in full awareness of the world as it is,5 Seneca says, can never be bored with life.

Whatever happens, however unforeseen it is, you should be able to respond in a precisely suitable way. This is why, for Montaigne, learning to live ‘appropriately’6 (à propos) is the ‘great and glorious masterpiece’ of human life.

Stoics and Epicureans alike approached this goal mainly through rehearsal and meditation.

How good it is,7 when you have roast meat or suchlike foods before you, to impress on your mind that this is the dead body of a fish, this the dead body of a bird or pig; and again, that the Falernian wine is the mere juice of grapes, and your purple-edged robe simply the hair of a sheep soaked in shell-fish blood! And in sexual intercourse that it is no more than the friction of a membrane and a spurt of mucus ejected.

At other times, he imagined flying up to the heavens so that he could gaze down and see how insignificant all human concerns were from such a distance. Seneca did this too: ‘Place before your mind’s eye8 the vast spread of time’s abyss, and consider the universe; and then contrast our so-called human life with infinity.’

Another practice of the Stoics was to visualise time circling around on itself, over aeons. Thus Socrates would be born again and would teach in Athens just as he did the first time; every butterfly would flap its wings in the same way; every cloud would pass overhead at the same speed. You yourself would live again, and have all the same thoughts and emotions as before, again and again without end. This apparently terrifying idea9 brought comfort, because – like the other ideas – it showed one’s own fleeting troubles at a reduced size. At the same time, because everything you had ever done would come back to haunt you, everything mattered. Nothing was flushed away; nothing could be forgotten. Meditating on this...

As the Stoic Epictetus wrote: Do not seek10 to have everything that happens happen as you wish, but wish for everything to happen as it actually d...

Seneca had an extreme trick for practising amor fati. He was asthmatic, and attacks12 brought him almost to the point of suffocation. He often felt that he was about to die, but he learned to use each attack as a philosophical opportunity. While his throat closed and his lungs strained for breath, he tried to embrace what was happening to him: to say ‘yes’ to it. I will this, he would think; and, if necessary, I will myself to die from it. When the attack receded, he emerged feeling stronger, for he had done battle with fear and defeated it.

Stoics were especially keen on pitiless mental rehearsals of all the things they dreaded most. Epicureans were more inclined to turn their vision away from terrible things, to concentrate on what was positive. A Stoic behaves like a man who tenses his stomach muscles and invites an opponent to punch them. An Epicurean prefers to invite no punches, and, when bad things happen, simply to step out of the way. If Stoics are boxers, Epicureans are closer to Oriental martial arts practitioners.

Montaigne found the Epicurean approach more congenial in most situations, and he took their ideas even further. He claimed to envy lunatics, because they were always mentally elsewhere – an extreme form of Epicurean deflection. What did it matter if...

Montaigne retold classical stories such as that of Lycas,13 who went about his daily life and successfully held down a job while believing that everything he saw was taking place on stage, as a theatrical performance. When a doctor cured him of this delusion, Lycas became so m...

A painful notion14 takes hold of me; I find it quicker to change it than to subdue it. I substitute a contrary one for it, or, if I cannot, at all events a different one. Variation always solaces, dissolves, and dissipates. If I cannot combat it, I escape it; and in fleeing I dodge, I am tricky.

He used the same technique to help others. Once, trying to console a woman who was (unlike some widows, he implies) genuinely suffering grief for her dead husband, he first considered the more usual philosophical methods: reminding her that nothing can be gained from lamentation, or persuading her that she might never have met her husband anyway. But he settled on a different trick: ‘very gently deflecting our talk and diverting it bit by bit to subjects nearby, then a little more remote’. The widow15 seemed to pay little attention at first, but in the end the other subjects caught her interest. Thus, without her realising what was happening, he wrote, ‘I imperceptibly stole away from her this painful thought and kept her in good spirits and entirely soothed for as long as I was there.’ He admitted that this did not go to the root of her grief, but it got her through an immediate crisis, and presumably allowed time to begin its own natural work.

Similar tricks worked for another unwelcome emotion, anger: Montaigne once successfully cured a ‘young prince’, probably Henri de Navarre (the future Henri IV), of a dangerous passion for revenge. He did not talk the prince out of it, or advise him to turn the other cheek, or remind him of the tragic consequences that could result. He did not mention the subjects of anger or revenge at all: I let the passion alone17 and applied myself to making him relish the beauty of a contrary picture, the honour, favour, and good will he would acquire by clemency and kindness. I diverted him to ambition. That is how it is done.

Later in his life, Montaigne used the trick of diversion against his own fear of getting old and dying. The years were dragging him towards death; he could not help that, but he need not look at it head-on. Instead, he faced the other way, and calmed himself by looking back with pleasure over his youth and childhood. Thus, he said, he managed to ‘gently sidestep18 and avert my gaze from this stormy and cloudy sky that I have in front of me’.

One story he relished was that of how Zaleucus,19 prince of the Locrians of ancient Greece, reduced excessive spending in his realm. He ordered that any woman could be attended by several maids, but only when she was drunk, and that she could wear as many gold jewels and embroidered dresses as she liked, if she was working as a prostitute. A man could sport gold rings if he was a pimp. It worked: gold jewellery and large entourages disappeared overnight, yet no one rebelled, for no one felt they had been forced into anything.

From his own experience of nearly dying, Montaigne would learn that the best antidote to fear was to rely on nature: ‘Don’t bother your head20 about it.’ From losing La Boétie, he had already discovered that this was the best way of dealing with grief. Nature has its own rhythms. Distraction works well precisely because it accords with how humans are made: ‘Our thoughts are always elsewhere.’ It is only natural for us to lose focus, to slip away from both pains and pleasures, ‘barely brushing the crust’ of them. All we need do is let ourselves be as we are.

This early request seems to have been Pierre’s attempt to shake his son out of a continuing tendency to idleness; it was another of those ‘tricks’, inflicted for its victim’s benefit. Even in his mid-thirties, Montaigne still had something of the sulky teenager about him. He was dissatisfied with his career as magistrate, disinclined to the life of a courtier, snooty about the law, and indifferent to building and property development. Moreover, despite his interest in literature, he showed no signs of writing much. Pierre may now have guessed that he himself did not have long to live, and he probably felt that Montaigne needed preparing for the responsibilities that would soon descend on him. He needed a challenge. Micheau wanted to write: very well, let him write! Pierre handed him a 500-page folio volume, written by a Catalan theologian over a century earlier, in stilted Latin, and said, ‘Translate this into French for me when you get a moment, will you, son?’

How, then, can he call it an ‘apology’? Montaigne’s trick is simple. He purports to defend Sebond against those who have tried to bring him down using rational arguments. He does this by showing that rational arguments, in general, are fallible, because human reason itself cannot be relied on. Thus he defends a rationalist against other rationalists by arguing that anything based on reason is valueless. Montaigne’s defence undermines Sebond’s enemies, all right, but it undermines Sebond himself even more fatally. Of this, he was obviously well aware.

ALL I KNOW IS THAT I KNOW NOTHING, AND I’M NOT EVEN SURE ABOUT THAT

SET ALONGSIDE STOICISM and Epicureanism, Scepticism looks like the odd one out. The other two seem obvious paths to tranquillity and ‘human flourishing’: they teach you to prepare for life’s difficulties, to pay attention, to develop good habits of thought, and to practise therapeutic tricks on yourself. Scepticism seems a more limited matter. A sceptic is taken to be someone who always wants to see proof, and who doubts things that other people take at face value.

Like the others, Scepticism amounted to a form of therapy. This, at least, was true of Pyrrhonian Scepticism, the type originated by the Greek philosopher Pyrrho, who died about 275 BC, and later developed more rigorously by Sextus Empiricus in the second century AD.

The key to the trick is the revelation that nothing in life need be taken seriously. Pyrrhonism does not even take itself seriously. Ordinary dogmatic Scepticism asserts the impossibility of knowledge: it is summed up in Socrates’s remark: ‘All I know is that I know nothing.’ Pyrrhonian Scepticism starts from this point, but then adds, in effect, ‘and I’m not even sure about that.’ Having stated its one philosophical principle, it turns in a circle and gobbles itself up, leaving only a puff of absurdity.

Pyrrhonians accordingly deal with all the problems life can throw at them by means of a single word which acts as shorthand for this manoeuvre: in Greek, epokhe. It means ‘I suspend judgement’. Or, in a different rendition given in French by Montaigne himself, je soutiens: ‘I hold back.’

Epokhe functions almost like one of those puzzling koans in Zen Buddhism: brief, enigmatic notions or unanswerable questions such as ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ At first, these utterances cause nothing but perplexity. Later, they open a path to all-encompassing wisdom. This family resemblance between Pyrrhonism and Zen may be no accident: Pyrrho travelled to Persia and India with Alexander the Great, and dabbled in Eastern philosophy – not Zen Buddhism, which did not yet exist, but some of its precursors.

The epokhe trick makes you laugh and feel better because it frees you from the need to find a definite answer to anything.