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

by Sarah Bakewell

I cannot say which of the things proposed I should find convincing and which I should not find convincing.

To every account I have scrutinised which purports to establish something in dogmatic fashion, there appears to me to be opposed another account, purporting to establish something in dogmatic fashion, equal to it in convincingness or lack of convincingness.

For a Pyrrhonian, this remains true even when the questions get more difficult. Is it all right to lie to someone to make them feel better? Epokhe

The Pyrrhonians did this, not to unsettle themselves profoundly and throw themselves into a paranoid vortex of doubt, but to attain a condition of relaxation about everything. It was their path to ataraxia – a goal they shared with the Stoics and Epicureans – and thus to joy and human flourishing. The most obvious advantage is that Pyrrhonians need never worry about getting anything wrong. If they win their arguments, they show that they are right. If they lose, that just proves that they were right to doubt their own knowledge. This makes them simultaneously very peaceful and very contrary. They are fond of arguing for unpopular points of view, for the fun of it.

He did not want to make himself a stump8 or a stone; he wanted to make himself a living, thinking, reasoning man, enjoying all natural pleasures and comforts, employing and using all his bodily and spiritual faculties.

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 t...

If the medal was indeed designed to remind him of his principles, it worked: Scepticism guided him at work, in his home life, and in his writing. 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’.

To quote Hugo Friedrich again, Montaigne had a ‘deep need to be surprised by what is unique, what cannot be categorised, what is mysterious’. And of all that was mysterious, nothing amazed him more than himself, the most unfathomable phenomenon of all. Countless times, he noticed himself changing an opinion from one extreme to the other, or shifting from emotion to emotion within seconds.

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.

And this is just the point: for Montaigne, philosophy is incarnate. It lives in individual, fallible humans; therefore it is riddled with uncertainty.

‘We have formed a truth by the consultation and concurrence of our five senses; but perhaps we needed the agreement of eight or ten senses, and their contribution, to perceive it certainly and in its essence.’ This seemingly casual remark proposes a shocking idea: that we may be cut off by our very nature from seeing things as they are. A human being’s perspective may not merely be prone to occasional error, but limited by definition, in exactly the way we normally (and arrogantly) presume a dog’s intelligence to be.

We, and our judgement,14 and all mortal things go on flowing and rolling unceasingly. Thus nothing certain can be established about one thing by another, both the judging and the judged being in continual change and motion.

This might seem a dead end, closing off all possibility of knowing anything, since nothing can be measured against anything else, but it can also open up a new way of living. It makes everything more complicated and more interesting: the world becomes a vast multi-dimensional landscape in which every point of view must be taken into account. All we need to do is to remember this fact, so as to ‘become wise at our own expense’,15 as Montaigne put it.

Montaigne’s favourite trick for undermining human vanity was the telling of animal stories like those that so intrigued Florimond de Raemond – many of them liberated from Plutarch. He liked them because they were entertaining, yet had a serious purpose. Tales of animal cleverness and sensitivity demonstrated that human abilities were far from exceptional, and indeed that animals do many things better than we do.

Animals can be good, for example, at working co-operatively. Oxen, hogs and other creatures will gather in groups for self-defence. If a parrotfish23 is hooked by a fisherman, his fellow parrotfish rush to chew through the line and free him. Or, if one is netted, others thrust their tails through the net so he can grab one with his teeth, and be pulled out. Even different species can work together in this way, as with the pilot fish that guides the whale, or the bird that picks the crocodile’s teeth.

Tuna fish demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of astronomy: when the winter solstice arrives, the whole school stops precisely where it is in the water, and st...

Morally, animals prove themselves at least as noble as humans. For repentance, who can surpass the elephant who was so grief-stricken about having killed his keeper in a fit of temper that he deliberately starved himself to death?

Yet still we humans persist in thinking of ourselves as separate from all other creatures, closer to gods than to chameleons or parrotfish. It never occurs to us to rank ourselves among animals, or to put ourselves in their minds. We barely stop to wonder whether they have minds at all. Yet, for Montaigne, it is enough to watch a dog dreaming to see that it must have an inner world just like ours.

Pascal feared Pyrrhonian Scepticism because, unlike the readers of the sixteenth century, he felt sure it did threaten religious belief. By now, doubt was no longer thought a friend of the Church; it belonged to the Devil, and must be fought against. And here lay the problem, for, as everyone had always seen, Pyrrhonian Scepticism was almost impossible to fight. Any attempt to quarrel with it only strengthened its claim that everything was open to dispute, while if you remained neutral this confirmed the view that it was good to suspend judgement.

He puts everything into a universal doubt,39 and this doubt is so widespread that it becomes carried away by its very self; that is to say, he doubts whether he doubts, and doubting even this last proposition, his uncertainty goes round in an endless and restless circle. He contradicts both those who maintain that all is uncertainty, and those who maintain it is not, because he does not want to maintain anything at all.

Montaigne is ‘so advantageously positioned in this universal doubt that he is equally strengthened both in success and defeat’. You can feel the frustration: how can anyone fight such an opponent? Yet one must. It is a moral duty, for otherwise doubt will carry everything away like a great flood: the world as we know it, human dignity, our sanity, and our sense of God.

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.

Montaigne hovered over Pascal’s writing as his ever-present enemy and co-author. At the same time, Pascal knew that the real drama was taking place in his own soul. He admitted: ‘It is not in Montaigne41 but in myself that I find everything I see there.’ He could just as well have looked at his own notebook and said, ‘It is not from myself but from Montaigne that I have taken everything I see here’ – for he was in the habit of transcribing quantities of material almost word for word. Montaigne: How we cry and laugh42 for the same thing. Pascal: Hence we cry and laugh at the same thing. Montaigne: They want to get out of themselves and escape from the man. That is madness: instead of changing into angels, they change into beasts. Pascal: Man is neither angel nor beast, and unhappily whoever wants to act the angel, acts the beast. Montaigne: Put a philosopher in a cage of thin iron wire in large meshes, and hang it from the top of the towers of Notre Dame of Paris: he will see by evident reason that it is impossible for him to fall, and yet (unless he is used to the trade of the steeplejacks) he cannot keep the sight of this extreme height from terrifying and paralysing him … Lay a beam between these two towers of such width as we need to walk on: there is no philosophical wisdom of such great firmness that it can give us courage to walk on it as we should if it were on the ground. Pascal: If you put the world’s greatest philosopher on a plank wider than he needs, but with a...

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.

For Pascal, fallibility is unbearable in itself: ‘We have such a high idea44 of man’s soul that we cannot bear to think that this idea is wrong and therefore to be without this esteem for it. The whole of man’s happiness lies in this esteem.’ For Montaigne, human failings are not merely bearable; they are almost a cause for celebration.

Even when Montaigne writes, ‘it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve’ – the sort of thing Pascal says all the time – he writes it in a cheerful mood, and adds that mostly we are just silly rather than wicked.

On contemplating our blindness and wretchedness, and on observing the whole of the silent universe, and humanity with no light abandoned to itself, lost in this nook of the universe not knowing who put us there, what we have come to achieve, what will become of us when we die, incapable of all knowledge, I become frightened, like someone taken in his sleep to a terrifying, deserted island who wakes up with no knowledge of what has happened, nor means of escape.

It makes for exciting reading, but after a few pages one craves a dose of Montaigne’s easygoing humanism. Pascal wants people to remain aware of ultimate things: the huge empty spaces, God, death. Yet few of us find it possible to maintain such thoughts for long. We get distracted; the mind drifts back to concrete and personal matters. Pascal found this infuriating: ‘what does the world think about?46 Never about that! But about dancing, playing the lute, singing, writing verse, tilting at the ring …’ Montaigne liked asking big questions too, but he preferred to explore life through his reading, the animals in his household, incidents he had witnessed on his travels, or a neighbour’s problems with his children. Pascal wrote: ‘Human sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things: sign of a strange disorder.’ Montaigne would have put it exactly the other way round.

A century or so later, Voltaire,47 who thoroughly disliked Pascal, wrote: ‘I venture to champion humanity against this sublime misanthropist.’ He ran through fifty-seven quotat...

Why make us feel disgusted with our being? Our existence is not so wretched as we are led to believe. To look on the world as a prison cell and all men as criminals is the idea of a fanatic.

This led Voltaire to rush to the defence of Pascal’s ‘great adversary’: What a delightful design Montaigne had to portray himself without artifice as he did! For he has portrayed human nature itself. And what a paltry project of … Pascal, to belittle Montaigne!

Voltaire was much more at home with a credo like Montaigne’s, as it appears in the final chapter of the Essays: I accept with all my heart48 and with gratitude what nature has done for me, and I am pleased with myself and proud of myself that I do. We wrong that great and al...

he wrote: It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump.

Montaigne’s overriding principle of ‘convenience and calm’,50 as Pascal described it, was pernicious. It worried Pascal and sent him into a helpless rage, as if Montaigne were enjoying some advantage that he could not have.

This easygoing naturalness, together with Sceptical doubt, would make Montaigne a hero to a new breed of thinker: the vague confederacy of wits and rebels known as the libertins

In English, ‘libertine’ brings to mind a disreputable Casanova-like figure, but there was more to them than that (as indeed there was to Casanova). Although some libertins did seek sexual freedom, they also wanted philosophical freedom: the right to think as they liked, politically, religiously, and in every other way. Scepticism was a natural route to this inner and outer liberty.

At times we are as different55 from ourselves as we are from others.

As with Montaigne himself, much of what the libertins and aphorists said revolved around the question of how to live well. Libertins prized qualities such as bel esprit, which might be translated as ‘good spirits’, but was better defined by one writer of the time as being ‘gay, lively, full of fire56 like that displayed in the Essays of Montaigne’.

Someone like Pascal did not even want to live like this: it would entail being distracted by the affairs of this world rather than keeping his eyes fixed on ultimate things. One imagines Pascal staring upwards into the open spaces of the universe, in mystical terror and bliss, just as Descartes stared with equal intensity into the blazing stove. In both cases, there is silence, and there is a fixed gaze: eyes rounded with awe, deep cogitation, alarm, or horror.

Libertins, and all those of the company of the bel esprit, did not stare. My dears! They would not dream of fixing anything, high or low in the universe, with gawping owl-eyes. Instead, they watched human beings slyly, from under half-closed lids, seeing them as they were – beginning with themselves. Those sleepy eyes perceived more about life than Descartes with his ‘clear and distinct ideas’, or Pascal with his spiritual ecstasies.

As Friedrich Nietzsche would remark centuries later, most of the genuinely valuable observations about human behaviour and psychology – and thus also about philosophy – ‘were first detected and stated in those social circles which would make every sort o...

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. Not only did Montaigne achieve it, but he even wrote about it in a throwaway tone, as if it were nothing special.

Montaigne liked sex, and indulged in a lot of it throughout his life. It was only in late middle age that both his performance and his desire declined, as well as his attractiveness – all facts he bemoaned in his final Essays. It is depressing to be rejected, he said, but even worse to be accepted out of pity.

And he hated to be troublesome to someone who did not want him. ‘I abhor the idea of a body void of affection being mine.’ This would be like making love to a corpse, as in the story of the ‘frantic Egyptian hot after the carcass of a dead woman he was embalming and shrouding’. A sexual relationship must be reciprocal. ‘In truth, in this delight the pleasure I give tickles my imagination more sweetly than that which I feel.’

‘What if she eats your bread with the sauce of a more agreeable imagination?’

Montaigne understood that women know more about sex than men usually think, and indeed that their imagination leads them to expect better than they get.

He tutted over irresponsible graffiti: ‘What mischief is not done by those enormous pictures that boys spread about the passages and staircases of palaces! From these, women acquire a cruel contempt for our natural capacity.’ 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’, and he added a classical quotation: ‘Even the matrons – all too well they know – Look dimly on a man whose member’s small.’

He showed no shame about revealing such things: ‘Our life is part folly,5 part wisdom. Whoever writes about it only reverently and according to the rules leaves out more than half of it.’

Montaigne noted that his own age (thirty-three, he says, though he was thirty-two), was close to the ideal recommended by Aristotle, which Montaigne thought was thirty-five (actually it was thirty-seven).