The invisibility of philosophy in the Essays of Michel de Montaigne.

Hartle, Ann

IT MUST BE ADMITTED that the Essays of Michel de Montaigne do not look like philosophy: there are no first principles, no arguments, no conclusions, no evident philosophical teaching. True, there are hundreds of quotations from the ancients, but Montaigne's "own" philosophy, his own philosophical teaching (if, indeed, there is one) is nowhere to be seen. On the other hand, Michel de Montaigne himself is always visible: the Essays, as he often tells us, are all about him and only about him.

The invisibility of his own philosophy in the Essays has led many to suppose that Montaigne is not a philosopher at all, but simply the inventor of the new literary form of the essay. Others have focused on the "Apology," where he presents the arguments of the Skeptics, and have concluded that Montaigne himself must be simply a follower of the Skeptics, but not a philosopher with his own philosophical project. Yet Montaigne does describe himself as a philosopher, although only once, in the Essays. In fact, he is "a new figure: an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher." (1) He is an unpremeditated philosopher because he says the first words that come to his mouth. His thoughts are "born with [him] and without a model," yet they resemble and are mistaken for the "humors" of ancient philosophy. (2) His mores are weak for he has not followed any philosophical discipline to strengthen them. When the desire to tell them seizes him, he calls upon the help of ancient philosophy to express them so that he might go out a bit more decently in public. Then he marvels at just how much his weak mores conform, by accident, to so many of the teachings and examples of ancient philosophy. Even in this passage--especially in this passage--where he describes himself as a new figure of the philosopher, his own philosophy is invisible. He simply uses the fragments of ancient philosophy to express what he is.

I

In the absence of an evident philosophical teaching, how can we begin to approach the question of what philosophy is for Montaigne? We can start by looking at two things: his audience and his end or purpose. In "Of presumption," Montaigne asks himself: "And then, for whom do you write?" (3) The learned, who pass judgment on books, recognize only erudition and art and value only learning. Common and popular souls, on the other hand, cannot recognize the grace and the weight of lofty and elevated discourse. These two human types almost exhaust the possibilities. Nevertheless, there is a third type: "The third type into whose hands you fall, that of souls ordered and strong in themselves, is so rare that for this very reason it has neither name nor rank among us: it is time half lost to aspire and strive to please them." (4) The third type has no name because it has no rank. In pointing to the fact that this type has no rank among us, Montaigne implies that his project involves a transcendence of the traditional hierarchy, the traditional order of high and low, strong and weak. The strength of the self-ordered soul is measured not by its place within the hierarchy but by its freedom of judgment: "Indeed there are few souls so regulated, so strong and well-born, that they can be trusted to their own conduct, and who are able, with moderation and without temerity, to sail in the liberty of their judgments beyond the common opinions." (5) This ordering of the self is rare and difficult: "Our mind is an erratic, dangerous, and heedless tool; it is difficult to impose order and measure upon it. And in my time those who have some rare excellence beyond the others, and some extraordinary quickness, are nearly all, we see, incontinent in the license of their opinions and conduct. It is a miracle if you find a sedate and sociable one." (6) Montaigne's primary audience is the self-ordered soul, who is free in his judgments to go beyond common opinions. The philosophical act, then, involves the freeing of judgment through the questioning of common opinions.

Montaigne gives us four descriptions of the way in which common opinions must be examined. First, in "Of presumption" he says that we must "sift" the true from the falser True and false opinions are mixed together, and we must find a way to distinguish them. Second, in "Of vain subtleties" he says that error is "engendered" in us when we "follow the appearance of the first sense." (8) Appearances, then, can be misleading, and we must go beyond them in order to reach the truth. Third, in the "Apology" he tells us that we must "test" our common impressions. (9) Here he provides one of his most explicit criticisms of Aristotle and the hold that Aristotle has on the minds of Montaigne's contemporaries who presume that everything Aristotle says is true. Montaigne objects: "The reason why we doubt hardly anything is that we never test our common impressions. We do not probe the foundation, where the fault and weakness lies; we dispute only about the branches. We do not ask whether this is true, but [only] whether it has been understood this way or that." (10) This presumption imposes a constraint on the liberty of our judgments and tyranny over our beliefs. "It is very easy, upon accepted foundations, to build what you please.... By this path we find our reason well founded, and we argue with great ease." (11) Aristotle's first principles have become our presuppositions, and "whoever is believed in his presuppositions, he is our master and our God; he will plant his foundations so broad and easy that by them he will be able to raise us, if he wants, up to the clouds." (12) Fourth, in "Of custom" he says that whoever wants to "essay himself" and "get rid of this violent prejudice of custom" (13) will find many things accepted with unquestioned belief, which have no support beyond the authority of time and usage. "But when this mask is torn off, and he refers things to truth and reason, he will feel his judgment as it were all upset, and nevertheless restored to a much surer status." (14) Each of these formulations presents an initial situation of error, confusion, and prejudice which the activity of "essaying" or "testing" must overcome.

The most important confusion, the most important instance of the error of following the appearance of the first sense, concerns the confusion of goodness and innocence with weakness and imperfection because they look so much alike. In "Of cruelty" Montaigne describes himself as merely innocent and good, rather than as virtuous. He is, therefore, lower in rank than both the perfectly virtuous whose rule over the passions is absolute and the imperfectly virtuous who must struggle with the passions. This third condition of goodness and innocence is, he says, "so close to imperfection and weakness that I do not very well know how to separate their confines and distinguish them. The very names of innocence and goodness are for this reason to some extent terms of contempt." (15) Even everyday language confuses goodness with weakness and imperfection.

The questioning of common opinions is for the sake of freeing the judgment. Indeed, Montaigne tells us (twice) that the Essays are the essais, the tests, of his judgment. (16) In his essay on the education of children, he works out the distinction between mere learning and true education in terms of the difference between simply borrowing from the ancients, which is only an exercise of memory, and forming one's own judgment. The student should be taught what to do with the pieces borrowed from others: "he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, [that is], his judgment. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this." (17) Judgment, then, is what is all one's own.

Within the Aristotelian tradition, the philosophical act is contemplation. Contemplation is regarded as the highest human activity because, through it, the mind escapes the temporal and is united with the divine, eternal, and unchanging: the philosopher becomes divine. Montaigne, however, replaces contemplation with judgment as the philosophical act. To identify judgment as the defining activity of man is to change everything about what it means to be human.

Montaigne cannot stomach the contemplative ecstasies of Socrates. But he admires the Socrates "who brought human wisdom back down from heaven, where she was wasting her time, and restored her to man, with whom lies her most proper and laborious and useful business." (18) Contemplation is the ecstatic beholding of the thing itself, but judgment is the subjecting of the thing itself, thus making it one's own. Montaigne's praise of Socrates for bringing philosophy back down from the heavens reveals the way in which contemplation has been transformed. "It is only for first-class men to dwell purely on the thing itself, consider it, and judge it. It belongs to the one and only Socrates to become acquainted with death with an ordinary countenance, to become familiar with it and play with it. He seeks no consolation outside the thing itself; dying seems to him a natural and indifferent accident. He fixes his gaze precisely on it, and makes up his mind to it, without looking elsewhere." (19) To dwell on "the thing itself," to fix one's gaze on it, is not to contemplate it but to judge it, subject it, become familiar with it, and make up one's mind to it. Socrates was "always one and the same, and raised himself, not by sallies but by disposition, to the utmost point of vigor. Or, to speak more exactly, he raised nothing, but rather brought vigor, hardships, and difficulties down and back to his own natural and original level, and subjected them to it." (20) Judgment, then, is an act of ordering and reordering, a reordering of the traditional hierarchy of high and low, weak and strong, perfect and imperfect. This can be seen from the very beginning of the Essays in his description of his end or purpose.

Montaigne's end or purpose is stated in the very first sentences of "To the reader": "This book was written in good faith, reader. It warns you from the outset that in it I have set myself no goal but a domestic and private one. I have had no thought of serving either you or my own glory. My powers are inadequate for such a purpose." Here, he goes on to insist that the essays are merely about himself, a common private man, and thus "a vain and frivolous subject." (21) The action of the Essays, then, might be described as bringing the private out into the public. Through this simple act of reordering, Montaigne transforms the human world by bringing into existence a new form of human association.

According to Hannah Arendt, the Greek and Roman world, and even the Christian world of the middle ages, knew only two realms: the public and the private. Arendt explains that "society" is the new, modem form of human association that comes about when the private realm rises into the public sphere. "The emergence of society ... from the shadowy interior of the household into the light of the public sphere, has not only blurred the old borderline between private and political, it has also changed almost beyond recognition the meaning of the two terms and their significance for the life of the individual and the citizen." (22) Society is a third, entirely new, distinctly modem form of human association which is public but not political.

By reordering philosophy to the domestic and private, Montaigne reverses the Aristotlelian order. For Aristotle, the domestic and private is the prepolitical. The household is imperfect and incomplete and finds its perfection and completion only in the city, the political association that is the natural end of human association. Further, for Aristotle and for the ancient world, the domestic and private is hidden and shameful because it is concerned with those aspects of human life that we share with the animals, the needs of the body. The city, on the other hand, is the public sphere in which men display themselves to each other, especially in virtuous and glorious deeds. Yet, here is Montaigne, a common, private man who claims no great learning or great deeds but who emerges into the public wearing only the fig leaf of ancient philosophy.

The private is the hidden and shameful, hidden because it is shameful. The actions of private life are the actions that are merely necessary, that is, unfree or servile, for they are associated with mere life. The deeds of great men, on the contrary, are great because they show contempt for mere life, a contempt that manifests itself most clearly in risking life in the face of imminent and violent death. The great philosophers too show contempt for mere life. This philosophical contempt manifests itself in the view that philosophy is the separation of the soul from the body, in the contempt that the philosopher has for the pleasures of the body, in the claim that philosophy is the highest activity of leisure which is freed from the servility of labor and work, in the philosopher's escape from the temporal and from this world to the eternal and celestial realm. However, Montaigne--a common, private, and weak man--presumes to bring out into public view everything that the philosophers and the great despise. By bringing the private out into the public, into visibility, he overcomes the shame of the private.

Montaigne emerges into the public as a particular. He emerges out of the anonymity of the common in his concrete particularity. Thus, he overcomes the anonymity and invisibility of the individual who is merely an undifferentiated part of the common herd. Without great deeds or learning, the particular is anonymous. The essays, however, are The Essays of Michel de Montaigne. Yet he presents himself as weak: his mores have not been formed by philosophy. It is the accidental conformity of his weak mores to the teachings and examples of philosophy that astonishes him. Philosophy allows him to see and to show the weak, the private, and the shameful in a new light, the light of the good itself.

By bringing the private out into the public, Montaigne invents society as a new form of human association, and he invents the essay as a new form of philosophy. It might be said that he invents society by inventing the essay. David Hume, in his essay "Of essay-writing," argues that the essay form brings together what he calls the learned and the conversible worlds. "The separation of the learned from the conversible world," he says, "seems to have been the great defect of the last age, and must have had a very bad influence both on books and company." The social world suffers because, without the influence of philosophy, conversation is reduced to stories and gossip. Indeed, philosophy itself also suffers from this separation. Cut off from the world, philosophy becomes barbarous because it lacks "that liberty and facility of thought and expression which can only be acquired by conversation." Philosophy, Hume says, "went to wrack by this moaping recluse method of study, and became as chimerical in her conclusions as she was unintelligible in her stile and manner of delivery." Most important, philosophy suffers because experience, upon which philosophy rests, is to be found only "in common life and conversation." (22)

The central action, the great deed, of the Essays is the invention of society. We look in vain for arguments and conclusions, because philosophy is an invisible power. Montaigne's judgment is not expressed in propositions but in the very act of bringing the private into the public, the act of reordering the mind to the common and lowly, of reversing the traditional hierarchy, and finally of subordinating the high to the low. Montaigne subordinates philosophy to the everyday, to the social. Thus, Pascal describes Montaigne's style as composed entirely of thoughts arising from the ordinary conversations life. (24) This act of subordination of philosophy to the everyday is the free act, the generous gesture, of the philosopher. Philosophy becomes merely unpremeditated and accidental. Montaigne himself, then, is the miracle of the self-ordered soul that is sociable.

II

But what happens to philosophy itself when it descends, so to speak, into the social? It seems to disappear. In becoming merely unpremeditated and accidental, philosophy has reimmersed itself in the prephilosophical and now looks just like presumption, the prephilosophical condition from which anything that can call itself philosophy must surely escape. Indeed, Montaigne creates precisely that impression of immersion in prephilosophical presumption. In "Of presumption" he explains his ability to distinguish between the true and the false:

   This capacity for sifting truth, whatever it may amount to in me,
   and this free humor not to subject my belief easily, ! owe it
   principally to myself: because the most firm imaginations that I
   have, and the most general, are those which, in a manner of
   speaking, were born with me. They are natural and all mine. I
   produced them crude and simple, of a production bold and strong,
   but a little troubled and imperfect. Since then I have established
   and fortified them by the authority of others, and by the sound
   discourse of the ancients, with whom I found my judgment conformed:
   these have assured me a firmer grip on them and have given me the
   enjoyment of them and a more entire possession. (25)

In this passage, which echoes his description of himself as an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher, he seems to be saying that what he has always believed is true simply because he has always believed it. What is "all mine" must be true. Unpremeditated and accidental philosophy looks like presumption. That is why it is invisible: the essays don't look like philosophy, but they do look like presumption.

In "On some verses of Virgil" Montaigne emphatically confirms this appearance of presumption. He tells us that his purpose requires that he write the Essays "at home, in a backward region." There, no one knows enough Latin or French to correct him. He says: "I would have done it better elsewhere, but the work would have been less my own; and its principal end and perfection is to be precisely my own." (26) The Essays are imperfect: they would have been better, more perfect, had they been written among the learned. Yet they are perfect because they are precisely and entirely his own.

Now, what could be more presumptuous than to claim that all of one's own opinions are true because they are one's own? What could be more unphilosophical than contentment with the prephilosophical? Here, we must try to get beyond the appearance of the first sense. The prephilosophical to which the philosopher returns, in which the philosopher reimmerses himself, is not exactly the same as the prephilosophical from which he began, for it is now the prephilosophical without presumption.

Once again, we can see this in the way that Montaigne reverses the Aristotelian order. Whereas for Aristotle, philosophy begins in wonder and ignorance and ends in knowledge, for Montaigne philosophy begins in knowledge and ends in wonder and ignorance. Whereas for Aristotle, philosophy begins in experience and ends in knowledge, for Montaigne philosophy begins in knowledge and ends in experience. (That is why "Of experience" is the last essay.) The knowledge in which Montaigne begins is the knowledge that is just familiarity. The experience in which he ends is what might be called "astonished familiarity." He begins in familiarity and ends in astonished familiarity: unpremeditated and accidental philosophy is just this movement of thought. When he wants to tell his thoughts and mores in public, to tell what is most familiar to him and thus what he already knows, he calls on the help of philosophy to express himself and then is astonished to find that his mere caprices and his weak mores conform, by accident, to so many of the teachings and examples of ancient philosophy.

In "Of cripples" he writes: "I have seen no more evident monstrosity and miracle in the world than myself. We become habituated to anything strange by use and time; but the more I frequent myself and know myself, the more my deformity astonishes me, and the less I understand myself." (27) The more he is familiar with himself the more he knows himself. Familiarity is a kind of knowledge: it is the knowledge that is experience, unpurged of presuppositions, unpurged of the violent prejudice of custom. Nevertheless, this knowledge, this familiarity, has not accustomed him to his own strangeness. The more he knows himself, the more he is astonished at himself, and the more he knows himself, the less he understands himself. He ends in a condition of ignorance and wonder at the most familiar, but this ignorance is a kind of Socratic ignorance, "a certain strong and generous ignorance that concedes nothing to knowledge in honor and courage, an ignorance that requires no less knowledge to conceive it than does knowledge." (28)

The knowledge that is familiarity might be described as presumptuous knowledge or custom. Thus, it could be said that Montaigne begins in presumptuous knowledge or custom and ends in philosophical experience or astonished familiarity. Custom, he says, is the tyrant, the master of thought. "The violent prejudice of custom" is the traditional hierarchy of high and low, strong and weak, in which the familiar and common are despised. Philosophy, understood as astonished familiarity, overcomes the violent prejudice of custom, which dulls the mind and makes it so difficult to recognize the possible and the new. The new is just the most familiar seen in its proper light. The familiar itself is transformed. That is how Montaigne both brings out the familiar into the light and, at the same time, introduces the new: the familiar becomes new. Philosophy, then, is just experience, but it is experience without presumption. (29) Experience, stripped of all presumption, becomes philosophical.

In "Of experience" Montaigne writes: "In my opinion, from the most ordinary, common, and familiar things, if we could put them in their proper light, can be formed the greatest miracles of nature and the most marvelous examples, especially on the subject of human actions." (30) But what is the proper light, and why are the most common human actions astonishing miracles of nature? The domestic and private realm is the place of the most common human actions, which are undifferentiated from man to man. It is only in great deeds that men distinguish themselves and appear as individuals, while the most common human actions display what the individual has in common with all other men, that is, subjection to the necessities of life and the possession of mere life itself. The individual disappears into the common, and the common therefore seems to lack any possibility of provoking astonishment.

Nevertheless, the most familiar and common human actions are astonishing because in them the violence of great deeds is subordinated to the domestic and private. "When I see both Caesar and Alexander, in the thick of their great tasks, so fully enjoying natural and therefore necessary and just pleasures, I do not say that that is relaxing their souls, I say that it is toughening them, subordinating these violent occupations and laborious thoughts, by the vigor of their spirits, to the practice of everyday life: wise men, had they believed that this [the violent] was their ordinary occupation, the other [the everyday] the extraordinary." (31) In their submission to the body's constant demands, Alexander and Caesar are "toughening" their souls: the good is not weak but strong, because it subjects the strong and violent to itself. This is the proper light, the light of the good itself. The most common human actions are not servile but social, and that is what makes them miraculous. Montaigne finds the good in the most common human actions, and the good reveals itself to be strong, not weak as the common prejudice suggests.

If the "proper light" reveals Montaigne's view of the human condition--in which the violent becomes ordinary and the everyday extraordinary--then the human condition must be the condition of war, of violence, and of the natural conflict between masters and slaves. The most common human actions are astonishing miracles because they overcome that natural condition of war. When the violent prejudice of custom is stripped away, when our most common impressions of weakness and strength are called into question, the weak reveals itself as stronger than the strong. When the familiar is seen in its proper light, the divine reveals itself as the good of the everyday. That is why the ordinary is miraculous. The new is just the most familiar, what was there all along, but hidden. The act of reversing the most familiar and the most extraordinary, then, is a kind of revelation, bringing the divine out of its hiddenness. Truth is just this astonishing revelation. (32) The good and the true are embedded, hidden, in the prephilosophical.

In the single philosophical act of making the familiar astonishing, Montaigne both reforms philosophy and frees the servile realm of the domestic and private from its bondage to the violent. That is, the philosophical act itself refounds human association. By that single action, philosophy transcends the Aristotelian distinction between the theoretical and the practical: philosophy is neither theoretical nor practical, yet it displays aspects of both. The philosophical act is not the ascent to the eternal, but neither is it the immersion in the temporal realm of practice or dissipation in the immediacy of the moment. The astonishment of astonished familiarity suggests a kind of contemplative attitude directed toward the temporal realm of human life and action, but it is not a contemplative attitude that disdains the fleeting temporal as nothing. It is not a subjection of the temporal to the eternal but rather a subjection of the contemplative to the merely temporal. In this way, Montaigne's philosophical attitude brings the eternal into the temporal and makes the eternal his own in time. Tzvetan Todorov captures this sense of Montaigne's stance toward the everyday in his explication of Montaigne's admonition that "the practice of everyday life should be an aim unto itself." (33) Todorov writes: "The sage will try to achieve this intransitive state, the rejection of instrumentalization, in each of his actions." (34) The actions of "mere life" become the philosophical experience of life "for its own sake."

Thus, leisure for Montaigne is not the condition for the philosopher's escape to the eternal and divine. Unlike the ecstatic beholding of the thing itself, which the Aristotelian philosopher experiences in those few moments of his life when he escapes to the eternal and participates in the divine activity of contemplation, philosophical experience is simply the here and now, fully present to the unpremeditated and accidental philosopher. Montaigne's sense of leisure appears especially clearly in "Of experience." Here, he disapproves of Socrates' contemplative ecstasies, of the theologian's "transcendental humors," and of the philosopher's attempt to escape from the man. However, he admires wholeheartedly the Socrates "who never refused to play cobnut with children or to ride a hobbyhorse with them," (35) and he approves of the legendary "theological drinking and feasting" at the Sorbonne. (36) Montaigne hates to be told that we must keep our minds in the clouds while our bodies are at table. He is, he says, "intellectually sensual, sensually intellectual." (37) In keeping with "Of experience," then, we might say that leisure is philosophical drinking and feasting, the bringing together of philosophy and society. This joining of the philosopher with his fellow human beings in the most common actions of mere life is the free act of the philosopher in which he rediscovers and recovers his own humanity.

Montaigne claims that "the surest sign of wisdom is constant joy." (38) Experience, understood as astonished familiarity, is the source of the philosopher's constant joy, for experience is ever present to the whole man, body and soul. Philosophy is constantly joyful because the philosopher actually possesses the good in this world and in this life. The philosopher is not transported to the "other world," but rather experiences "this world" in a new way.

III

What has made it possible to go beyond the appearance of the first sense, the appearance that unpremeditated and accidental philosophy is mere presumption, that it is simply the very unphilosophical prejudice that what is "one's own" is true and good? It seems that the movement of Montaigne's thought begins in what is his own (the knowledge that is familiarity), and then just returns to what is his own and possesses it more securely through judgment. That is, it seems that judgment simply affirms what he has always believed. In order to escape this circle of presumption, we must go back to the essay on presumption, where he tells us that what he has always believed is true because he has always believed it. Montaigne says that the only thing he esteems himself for is just what every man esteems himself for: "My recommendation is vulgar, common, and popular, for who ever thought he lacked sense?" (39) We recognize the superiority of others in courage, strength, and beauty, "but an advantage in judgment we yield to no one." (40) Montaigne, then, is just like every other man. Yet, here he does offer a way in which he can justify the uniqueness and the soundness of his opinions: "I think my opinions are good and sound; but who does not think as much of his? One of the best proofs I have of mine is the little esteem I have for myself; for if these opinions had not been very firm, they would easily have let themselves be fooled by the singular affection I have for myself." (41) His lack of self-esteem is the best proof of the truth of his opinions. The Essays look unphilosophical because there are no arguments and conclusions. Yet here is a new sense of proof: not the proof of the syllogism, but proof based on the removal of the bias of self-esteem, the self-esteem that makes us ashamed to appear in public as weak and common.

The removal of self-esteem or pride from Montaigne's judgment is the condition for his transcendence of the traditional hierarchy, the hierarchy that establishes the superiority of the philosopher to all men, of masters to slaves, and of strong to weak. From the perspective of the purified judgment, then, ancient philosophy never sees itself for what it is. It never purifies itself of the self of the philosopher, in spite of the fact that it claims to go beyond the self to the eternal and divine. Ancient philosophy sees itself as divine: only the philosopher achieves divinity and thus completes and perfects the human form. For Montaigne, however, "each man bears the entire form of the human condition." (42)

Pride is overcome through open speaking about oneself. Montaigne says that custom has made this open speaking about oneself a vice, but he finds more harm than good in forbidding speaking about oneself as the remedy for pride. By essaying himself, he gets rid of that violent prejudice of custom. "The supreme remedy to cure [pride] is to do just the opposite of what those people prescribe who, by prohibiting talking about oneself, even more strongly prohibit thinking about oneself. The pride lies in the thought; the tongue can have only a very slight share in it." (43) In the act of speaking about himself, of bringing the private, common man out into the public, he overcomes the pride of the philosopher. As the philosopher disappears, the common man emerges into the light of the good.

Montaigne produces his thoughts out of himself, and that is why they are his own, but the decisive act, the act that makes them entirely and precisely his own, is the removal of the self. It seems that the more the Essays are his own, the less of himself is present in them. The self-ordered soul can be left to go its own way, beyond the common opinions, in the freedom of its judgments, because his will is purified of self. That is Montaigne's innocence. (44)

The requirement of the self-effacement of the philosopher helps us to make sense of one of the strangest statements in the Essays. In his discussion of the motives for suicide, Montaigne mentions first the desire to escape the evils of this world. Then, as usual, he offers another possible cause: "men also sometimes desire death in the hope of a greater good." (45) Then, as he frequently does, he points to a Christian and a pagan example: "I desire," says Saint Paul, "to be dissolved, to be with Jesus Christ." (46) And Cleombrotus of Ambracia threw himself into the sea because his reading of Plato's Phaedo had given him such a strong desire for the life to come. Montaigne, again, is a third type: "Whence it appears how improperly we call 'despair' that voluntary dissolution to which we are often borne by the ardor of hope, and often by a tranquil and deliberate inclination of our judgment." (47) This third type of voluntary dissolution of the self, this tranquil and deliberate inclination of judgment, refers, I believe, to Montaigne's own self-effacement, the self-effacement of the philosopher for a greater good. In the same act through which he effaces himself, he refounds philosophy, and he refounds human association because he effaces himself.

Montaigne is the new figure of the philosopher: a merely unpremeditated and accidental philosopher. In this recovery of his common humanity, the philosopher gives up his claim to divinity and disappears into the anonymity of the crowd. At the same time, he emerges into the public as "the common man," as every man, in his concrete particularity. The Essays of Michel de Montaigne display, in this single act, the essence of unpremeditated and accidental philosophy as the selflessness of the philosopher and, therefore, as the transparency of philosophy to itself.

Emory University

(1) References to the French text are to Michel de Montaigne, Essais, ed. Pierre Villey and V.-L. Saulnier, 3 vols., 2nd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, "Quadrige," 1992). The English translation is The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1943). Hereafter, the French edition will be abbreviated VS and the English translation will be abbreviated F. For example, the citation for this quotation is VS546, F409, referring to page 546 of the Villey-Saulnier edition and to page 409 of the Frame translation. In some instances, I have emended Frame's translation. I have also consulted the translation by M. A. Screech, The Essays of Michel de Montaigne (London: Penguin Press, 1991).

(2) VS546, F409.

(3) VS657, F498.

(4) VS657, F498.

(5) VS559, F419-20.

(6) VS559, F419.

(7) VS658, F499.

(8) VS312, F227.

(9) VS539-40, F403-4.

(10) VS539-40, F403-4.

(11) VS539-40, F403-4.

(12) VS539-40, F403-4.

(13) VS117, F84-85.

(14) VS117, F84-85.

(15) VS426, F310.

(16) VS301, F219; VS653, F495. In The Concept of Judgment in Montaigne (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968), 12, Raymond La Charite claims that "as far as can be ascertained, no tract of any kind, on psychology, existed which could have provided [Montaigne] with the semantic and ideational possibilities which he attributes to the faculty of judgment in the Essays." See also Paul Mathias, Montaigne ou l'usage du monde (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2006), 84-90, for a helpful discussion of Montaigne's notion of judgment. Hassan Melehy, Writing Cogito: Montaigne, Descartes, and the Institution of the Modern Subject (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 77: "The 'essays' are not of objects but of judgment--the objects enter indirectly, insofar as their constitution in the understanding comes under examination. And judgment is the 'tool' by which the limits of the understanding are scrutinized."

(17) VS152, F111.

(18) VS1038, F793.

(19) VS833, F632.

(20) VS1037, F793.

(21) VS3, F2.

(22) Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 38.

(23) David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1985), 534-35.

(24) Blaise Pascal, Pensdes et opuscules, ed. Leon Brunschvicg, rev. ed. (Paris: Librairie Hachette, 1946), no. 18.

(25) VS658, F499. Emphasis added.

(26) VS875, F667.

(27) VS1029, F787.

(28) VS1030, F788. This strong and generous ignorance destroys pre sumptuous knowledge and replaces it with wonder. Montaigne's "masterform" is ignorance (VS302, F219) because he remains in this condition of astonished familiarity. See Sarah Bakewell, How to Live or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (New York: Other Press, 2010), 17: "The trick is to maintain a kind of naive amazement at each instant of experience." This is Montaigne's "desire to pay astounded attention to life." Ibid.

(29) See Michael Oakeshott's discussion of philosophy in Experience and Its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933).

(30) VS1081, F829.

(31) VS1108, F850.

(32) In his Montaigne en mouvement (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1982), Jean Starobinski claims that Montaigne's purpose is to leave a record of ordinary life: this was what was so outrageous and scandalous about the Essays (ibid., 51). This is "a truth closer to home that philosophy neglects" (ibid., 282). See Marcel Conche, "Montaigne, penseur de la philosophie," in Montaigne: scepticisme, mdtaphysique, thdologie, ed. Vincent Carraud and Jean-Luc Marion (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), 179: with Montaigne we rediscover the astonishment and the attitude of inquiry which are at the heart of Greek thought; we rediscover philosophy in its essence.

(33) VS1052, F805.

(34) Tzvetan Todorov, Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism, trans. Carol Cosman (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 167 (emphasis added). La Charite, ponts out that Montaigne eventually substitutes vie (understood as temperament) for jugement. La Charite, The Concept of Judgment in Montaigne, 48. Thus "the faculty of judgment permeates the whole of one's psyche." Ibid. According to M. A. Screech, the last pages of "Of experience" form the climax of all three books: "For Montaigne, at the end of his quest, had come to terms with melancholy and ecstasy--and so with religion, life and death, and with his being as a man." M. A. Screech, Montaigne and Melancholy: The Wisdom of the Essays (London: Penguin Books, 1983), 13. Concerning Montaigne's discussion of "vanite toute la sagesse," Andre Tournon says that Montaigne opposes to this, not the wisdom of God, but the deliberate choice of earthly life, here below, in its very inanity. See Tournon, "Action imparfaite de sa propre essence," in Montaigne: scepticisme, mdtaphysique, thdologie, 34. Philippe Desan's discussion of the sense of essaying as tasting (ddgustation) fits well with this sense of experience and the practice of everyday life. See Desan, "Essai (genre)," in Dictionnaire de Michel de Montaigne (Paris: H. Champion, 2004), 341.

(35) VS1110, F852.

(36) VS1108, F851.

(37) VS1107, F850.

(38) VS161, F119.

(39) VS656, F498.

(40) VS656, F498.

(41) VS657, F499.

(42) VS805, F611.

(43) VS379, F274.

(44) What T. S. Eliot says of Machiavelli's innocence might well be said of Montaigne. "In Machiavelli there is no cynicism whatever. No spot of the weaknesses and failures of his own life and character mars the clear glass of his vision.... Such a view of life as Machiavelli's implies a state of the soul which may be called a state of innocence" (T. S. Eliot, "Niccolo Machiavelli" in For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran and Company, 1929), 50). Machiavelli was "a man who accepted in his own fashion the orthodox view of original sin" (ibid. 61). "What Machiavelli did not see about human nature is the myth of human goodness which for liberal thought replaces the belief in Divine Grace" (ibid., 62-63). "Only the pure in heart can blow the gaff on human nature as Machiavelli has done" (ibid., 64). "The utility of Machiavelli is his perpetual summons to examination of the weakness and impurity of the soul" (ibid., 65).

(45) VS360, F260.

(46) VS360, F260.

(47) VS360, F260.

Correspondence to: Ann Hartle, Department of Philosophy, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322.