REORDERING THE WORLD: THE MODERN PHILOSOPHICAL ACT IN THE ESSAYS OF MONTAIGNE.

Hartle, Ann

For Plato and Aristotle, philosophy begins in wonder and ends in the contemplation of eternal being. For Montaigne, philosophy begins in the desire to reveal himself and ends in astonishment at what he himself has brought into being. In transforming the philosophical act itself, Montaigne brings the new modern order out of the old classical-Christian order.

I will begin with an account of Montaigne's modern philosophical act and then turn to a description of the new order brought into being by that act. In setting out what I take to be the core of his project, I hope to shed light on the fundamental orientation of modern philosophy as such.

I

Montaigne describes himself as a philosopher only once in the Essays. When the desire to reveal himself seizes him, he calls on the help of ancient philosophy to show himself in public. His thoughts are new, born with him, and "without a model." But when he expresses them spontaneously and in public, they seem to resemble the "humors" of ancient philosophy. His mores or ways of being are weak, but when he expresses them he is surprised to see that they resemble, by accident, the teachings and examples of ancient philosophy. To his astonishment, he finds that he is "a new figure: an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher!" (1) The philosophical act brings into being a new figure of the philosopher out of the fragments of ancient philosophy.

Unpremeditated and accidental philosophy both reveals and conceals him. His accidental similarity to ancient philosophy makes him visible. Montaigne uses ancient philosophy, masters it, subjects it, in order to reveal his particularity as a man. He expresses what he is in the fragments of a shattered philosophical tradition. At the same time, the fragments of ancient philosophy hide him because they cover over what is his own, his "originality." So he looks like a patchwork of these pieces of skepticism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, and many others.

What is Montaigne doing in the interval between the desire that seizes him to reveal himself and the actual revelation of himself? This hidden interval is where his originality lies and the philosophical act occurs.

The philosophical act has two moments: first, the moment of detachment and spying and, second, the moment of invention and reordering. Although he studies only himself, Montaigne describes himself as detached from himself: I dare not only to speak of myself, but to speak only of myself; I go astray when I write of anything else, and get away from my subject. I do not love myself so indiscriminately, nor am I so attached and wedded to myself, that I cannot distinguish and consider myself apart, as I do a neighbor or a tree. (2)

His detachment allows him to spy on himself: "each man is a good education to himself, provided he has the capacity to spy on himself from close up." (3)

Montaigne's detachment from himself means that he separates himself as the philosopher from himself as the natural man. He doubles himself, as it were. Montaigne becomes as unknown to himself as a rock or a tree or another man. He must spy on himself so that he can catch himself unawares. He spies on the movements of his soul, what he calls his "springs of action," as if he, the philosopher, is not the originator or initiator of those actions. Detachment and spying, then, are not the natural attitude of naive "introspection," but rather the nonnatural stance of modern philosophy.

How, precisely, is this new stance of detachment and spying achieved? How is this break with the natural attitude possible? In "Of presumption," 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?" We recognize the superiority of others in courage, strength, and beauty, "but an advantage in judgment we yield to no one." (4) This presumption that our own judgments are true is universal. Montaigne, then, is just like every other man. But 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. (5)

His lack of self-esteem is a new kind of proof: not the proof of demonstration, but proof based on the removal of the bias of self-esteem.

To be "objective," the philosopher must not see himself as he wants to be, or as he wants to be seen as a participant in the order of nature. Montaigne says: "I who spy on myself more closely, who have my eyes unceasingly intent on myself, as one who has not much business elsewhere--I would hardly dare tell of the vanity and weakness that I find in myself." (6) Because he has removed philosophy from the natural man, the natural man is weak. The fact that, when he becomes the invisible observer, he reveals the vanity and weakness of the natural man shows that his self-esteem and his will to recognition are no longer present in his vision of himself as the man. This detachment from himself overcomes his presumption at the deepest level.

Montaigne's stance, then, is very different from the stance of ancient philosophy: the traditional philosopher cannot escape this universal natural presumption of self-esteem. The philosopher in the natural attitude sees where the species fits into the hierarchy of nature, and where the philosopher fits into the species. In taking this approach, the philosopher does not separate himself from the natural man. The classical philosopher remains a participant in nature: his own activity is natural, the highest fulfillment and perfection of human nature. Indeed, philosophy is divine, a participation in the divine activity of thought thinking thought. Philosophy orders the traditional hierarchy by its participation in nature.

Montaigne's new objective stance is the separation of the philosopher from the natural man. His lack of self-esteem makes possible his separation from nature. Because he has become the observer, he is no longer a participant, as the philosopher, in the natural hierarchy. Therefore, the hierarchy within human nature is destroyed by this simple act of taking the detached observer's stance. Whereas the classical philosopher orders the hierarchy by participating in it as the highest, Montaigne destroys the hierarchy by becoming the observer who does not participate. The stance that Montaigne takes, then, is neither divine nor natural, but it is human. It is the fundamental act of human freedom, the act in which man frees himself from nature.

II

The first moment of the philosophical act is the act of detachment and spying in which the traditional hierarchy is destroyed. By removing himself as a participant from the human world, the philosopher transforms that world. It is no longer a world ordered by the highest status of philosophy: the natural hierarchy collapses and is now in complete disorder.

The second moment of the philosophical act is the act of invention, of reordering the fragments of the shattered tradition. The philosopher confronts the fragments of human nature, which are now in no essential order. The fragments are now just "accidents." Human nature is now just the "matter" on which the philosopher can impose any form he wants. Since nature, now seen without form and final cause, can give him no guidance, the philosopher must decide how the fragments are to be ordered. The moment of freedom is the moment of complete indeterminateness, the moment of the freedom of the philosopher to impose a new order upon the human world. (7) In other words, the philosopher does not simply report on what he observes in the natural man on whom he spies. He actually brings into being a new, reordered man, a new nature.

We catch a glimpse of the hidden philosopher only in this action of the mind, in the movement between the two moments of freeing himself from nature and then reordering nature according to his will. We catch a glimpse of him in the act of becoming, the coming into being of the modern philosophical mind. "Philosophy becomes the self-generation of the mind as something that is not given by nature." (8) At the same time that the mind frees itself from nature, it generates itself, brings itself into being, as judgment.

Contemplation is replaced by the modern philosophical act of judgment. Montaigne says that the essays are the "tests" (essais) of his judgment. (9) 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." (10) Montaigne's bringing the new man out of the fragments of ancient philosophy is precisely this act of forming his judgment which is "a work all his own." (11)

On the one hand, then, what Montaigne wants to produce is already there, in the old, in the fragments of ancient philosophy. On the other hand, the new is not already there. The new is the order that his judgment imposes. Judgment brings the new out of the old by reordering the pieces of the shattered tradition.

Montaigne says that "there are authors whose end is to tell what has happened. Mine, if I could attain it, would be to talk about what can happen." (12) "What is" (being) is reduced to merely "what has been"; the eternal becomes simply the past, opening the mind to the new. The essays are the tests of his judgment because he is testing the possible, testing what can be brought out of the old.

How can judgment be inventive and productive? Whereas contemplation makes the thing itself one's own by receiving the form into oneself, thus subjecting the mind to the thing, judgment makes the thing itself one's own by subjecting it to the mind. Judgment originates the new order because, unlike contemplation, it is an act of the will. The moment of complete indeterminateness is the moment of human action, the moment of freedom and possibility. Montaigne frees action itself from the natural constraint of final cause. Action is now a beginning, without an end, having no natural direction. Action without natural direction is power. The philosophical act is the invisible power that produces the effect, the new order. This is the moment in which action is thought, not of what is given, not receptive, but originative: the moment of bringing the new out of the old, the actual out of the possible.

The new philosophical act of judgment overcomes the classical distinction between actions that are for their own sake and actions that are for the sake of producing something other than the act itself. Judgment overcomes the distinction between theoretical and practical thought. (13) Unlike contemplation, judgment produces an effect, the new order, but unlike practical thought, the effect is not different from the act that produces it.

In other words, judgment itself is the new order, the new relationship between mind and being. Judgment is a new possibility of thought. It is the act in which the mind frees itself from nature and subjects nature to the human will. Judgment does not discover truth, but brings truth into being because it brings the possible into being. In the words of Machiavelli, this is the "effectual" truth."

III

Now we can begin to see why the modern philosopher must turn to himself in order to take the stance of the observer and why the philosophical act ends in astonishment.

First, why must he turn to himself? In "Of experience" Montaigne writes: "I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics, that is my physics." (15) The subject matter of metaphysics was traditionally being as such, eternal and unchanging; the subject matter of physics was traditionally the natural world. For Montaigne, traditional metaphysics and physics have both been pursued in the mode of the presumption of the philosopher, namely, that the philosopher is within the world of nature and that he participates in the divine.

Only one man can break free of that presumption of the philosopher for the first time. Only a particular man can become two, separate himself as the philosopher from the natural species, and thus separate philosophy from nature for the first time. Only one man can make this move because the new philosophical act is not the actualization of a potentiality given to human nature as such. It is rather a possibility invented and brought into being by the particular man who doubles himself.

Only the particular man can double himself and take the stance of the objective observer, yet the observer must have within himself nothing of the particularity of the man. His own private will, especially his own private will to recognition, is not present in the observer. In order to become the observer, he must surrender his particularity as a man. The moment of the self-revelation of the man is the moment of the self-effacement of the philosopher. Not only must the philosopher disappear, he must empty himself of himself.

The requirement of the self-effacement of the philosopher helps us to make sense of one of the strangest passages in the Essays. In his discussion of the motives for suicide, Montaigne mentions first the desire to escape the evils of this world. But, as usual, he offers another possible cause: "men also sometimes desire death in the hope of a greater good." Then, as he frequently does, he points to a Christian example and a pagan one: "I desire," says St. Paul, "to be dissolved, to be with Jesus Christ." 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 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." (16) 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." Montaigne has to turn to himself so that he can efface himself, and this act of self-effacement is the invisible power that brings the new order into being.

Second, why does the philosophical act end in astonishment at what he himself has produced? In the first moment of the philosophical act, Montaigne separates the detached observer from the natural man and becomes "double" within himself so that he can spy on himself and catch himself unawares. The action of the Essays is an action in which "the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing." This expression comes from the gospel of Matthew: "when you give alms, your left hand must not know what your right hand is doing; your almsgiving must be secret, and your Father who sees all that is done in secret will reward you." (17) The action must be secret not only from other men but also, in some way, from the agent himself.

Montaigne is astonished to see that his weak thoughts and mores conform by accident to so many of the teachings of ancient philosophy. He uses the language of "astonishment" rather than the traditional philosophical term "wonder." Wonder implies something given, something mysterious. We do not wonder at what we ourselves have made because we already know what has gone into it and how it was produced. Montaigne does not wonder at what he has produced because he himself has produced it and he knows that he has produced it, but he is astonished at what he has produced because he did not know what he was doing. That is why he refers to himself as an "unpremeditated" philosopher: it is as if he says the first words that come to his mouth, without knowing what he is going to say.

Montaigne could not have that experience of astonishment if he knew what he was doing. He is astonished at what he himself has brought forth because there is nothing of himself in it: it is without his own private will. He must not know what he was doing because it cannot be merely his own private will that is being satisfied in the philosophical act. What he brings forth must emerge spontaneously from the philosophical act itself, thus from human freedom.

This is an act that seems simply to "pass through" him, as if he is merely the channel. (18) Therefore, there is a sense in which he does not produce what he (the natural man) wants to produce, but what must be produced out of the philosophical act. The philosopher has become the channel of the pure human will. It is the philosophical act itself, then, that is most astonishing to him. He is astonished at himself as the "new figure" of the philosopher. (19)

IV

The destruction of the traditional hierarchy means that the human is no longer ordered to the divine. Philosophy becomes a human, not a divine, activity. Although philosophy is human, it is not natural: it now belongs to the human to free himself from nature. Man frees himself by himself and for himself. In other words, the mind first brings itself into being, generates itself as judgment, freeing itself from its enslavement to nature and thus to the traditional natural hierarchy that orders the mind to the divine. Then it is able to reorder the fragments of human nature to man himself.

Montaigne's project is the revaluation of all things in relation to the human. (20) The fundamental meaning of the replacement of contemplation by judgment is that value or ranking now comes from man himself. Judgment is the act of weighing, evaluating, and ordering. This is the reversal of the traditional order in which "the good in itself and for its own sake" is given by nature. Nature can no longer give us guidance because, on account of the destruction of the hierarchy, it is no longer the standard of worth. When he speaks about "worth," Montaigne moves between the language of "the good," even "the good for its own sake," and the language of "value," thus conflating these two very different meanings. Values are relative to the human will; the good "in itself' is not. (21)

Montaigne often points to the danger, risk, and boldness of his project. The man who seeks to introduce change "must be very sure that he sees the weakness of what he is casting out and the goodness of what he is bringing in." (22) The moment in which he must choose how to order man to man is the moment of greatest freedom and therefore the moment of greatest risk. Whereas the natural hierarchy was constituted by the direction of man to the divine and thus rested upon what was highest in man, there is nothing in the shattered tradition to help him determine how to direct man to man or how to rank the fragments that confront him. How does he know what the good of man is without an "external" standard, without the standard of something higher than man? If the hierarchy has been destroyed, how can anything be better than anything else?

The only guide that Montaigne has is the purity of his judgment, which makes him the channel of the pure human will. Because Montaigne's judgment has been purified of his particularity as a man, of the desires of his particular will, he can evaluate and redirect the fragments of human nature to their true end, the human good. That is, the philosopher does not discover the good in nature but brings it into being by his revaluation.

What, then, is the good that Montaigne produces, and how does he bring it about? First, he must overcome the contempt for the merely human that he sees in the old order. Montaigne repeatedly decries the contempt we have for ourselves for being merely human: "As for the opinion that disdains our life, it is ridiculous. For after all, life is our being, it is our all.... It is a malady peculiar to man, and not seen in any other creature, to hate and disdain himself." (23) To despise our own being is "the most barbarous of our maladies." (24) The desire to rise above the human is the source of the greatest evils. Those who disdain the merely human, who want to be angels rather than men, "want to get out of themselves and escape from the man. That is madness: instead of changing into angels, they change into beasts; instead of raising themselves, they lower themselves. These transcendental humors frighten me." (25)

According to the tradition, the human is valued in relation to the divine, for the human is fulfilled, completed, and perfected only in union with the divine. Therefore, the standard of man simply as man looks like imperfection from the perspective of the tradition. Montaigne embraces this kind of imperfection and introduces a new kind of perfection. At the very end of the Essays he says: "It is an absolute perfection and Godlike (comme divine) to know how to enjoy our own being rightly. 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." (26)

Contempt for the merely human is the failing of those who aspire to a condition above the human. So Montaigne is especially concerned to remind philosophers that they are not exempt from the accidents of human life and from the demands of the body. "I love to see these leading souls unable to shake off our common lot. Perfect men as they are, still they are men, and most heavily so." (27) The effect of Montaigne's insistence on the "heaviness" of their humanity is to bring them down to our common human condition.

From the perspective of the traditional hierarchy, the ordering of man to man, the valuing of the human as such and for its own sake, looks like a "lowering" of the standard of the good. The "higher tilings" are difficult, rare, and extraordinary, rising above the merely human, which is common and ordinary. Therefore, self-esteem is tied to difficulty. Our natural presumption is that strength means preferring the difficult, the rare, and the extraordinary, that "difficulty gives value to things." (28) But Montaigne says that "it is a marvelous testimony to the weakness of our judgment that it recommends things for their rarity or novelty, or even for their difficulty, even if they are neither good nor useful." (29) In Montaigne's new order, the easy, the common, and the ordinaiy are more highly valued than the "higher things."

Montaigne's reversal of the hierarchy is effected by his renunciation of self-esteem, and he can claim that his judgments are true because he has no self-esteem. But even though he does not esteem himself, he does love himself. By nature, then, man does not separate self-esteem from self-love. In his revaluing of the human for its own sake, Montaigne demonstrates that the removal of esteem for the "highest" in man need not entail contempt for the human as such. The good of man as man requires this separation of self-esteem from self-love. Thus, in ordering man to man, Montaigne is inventing a new human nature in which self-love does not depend upon self-esteem. When Montaigne reveals himself in the Essays, he appears as this new nature that is necessary for the political and social order of the modern world, the new order that is the "greater good" that his self-effacement has made possible.

V

The social and political order that emerges from Montaigne's reordering of human nature is the liberal order of freedom and equality. Montaigne undermines the justification of political rule based on natural superiority and opens the possibility of a free society, a modern form of human association. (30) By eliminating the distinction between actions that are for their own sake and actions that are for the sake of production, he destroys the foundation of the hierarchical classical-Christian civilization, which had been built upon that distinction. In particular, he attacks the status of leisure as superior to work, and thus the subordination of the servile to the free.

That leisure is the condition for philosophy is set forth at the beginning of Aristotle's Metaphysics. The sciences, and philosophy in particular, were discovered where men first began to have leisure. " The theoretical stance toward the world is possible when men are freed from the necessities of production to pursue knowledge "for its own sake." Just as a man is free who exists for his own sake and not for another's, philosophy is the only free science because it exists for its own sake. (32) Freedom, then, is freedom from work, from subjection to the necessities of life. Philosophy is best because it is useless, serves no end outside itself, and that is why it is free.

For Aristotle, leisure is the condition for both moral virtue, that is, the development of a noble rather than a servile character, and for the theoretical virtues. The city exists for the sake of noble actions, not merely for the sake of life but for the good life. This requires the presence of philosophy within the city: its presence is essential to the presence of "the higher things" that constitute the good life.

In Leisure the Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper presents a Platonic-Aristotelian-Thomistic account of the relationship between leisure and philosophy. Leisure has its origin in divine worship. It is a setting aside of time from the necessities of work and labor, from the servile, and devoting that time to "higher things," to the divine, the eternal. (So, for example, the observance of the Sabbath requires that we abstain from all work.) Philosophy is the theoretical attitude assumed when we step beyond the world of work to pursue knowledge for its own sake.

For Pieper, leisure and philosophy are essential to human dignity and freedom, for they manifest the fact that the human being is not simply an instrument to be used by others. The establishment of the noninstrumental nature of the human is, in principle, then, a safeguard against tyranny: tyranny is the master-slave relationship writ large. Pieper argues that the freedom of philosophy, the freedom of the theoretical, from the necessities of life, is a freedom that affects the entire community because it stands as the principle that men cannot be reduced to means, that the human being is more than servile and useful, serving an end outside himself. (33)

However, a fatal contradiction lies at the heart of this account of human association. Leisure in the ancient world required slaves: the leisure and freedom of some depended upon the enslavement of others to provide the necessities of life. Aristotle argued that slavery is just only in those cases where it is "natural" and the slave himself benefits from the relationship to the master. It is even possible that that relationship could be a kind of friendship. But, in fact, slaves were simply taken in war, by force. In other words, the arguments of philosophy against the justice of slavery by force were ineffective. (34) The "common good" not only permitted but required the subordination of the lowest to the highest, of work to leisure, of the servile to the free.

Montaigne says that weak and strong, masters and slaves, are by nature at war with each other. (35) If this perpetual war is to be brought to an end, one man must be the first to lay down his arms, to take the greatest risk, by making himself vulnerable, on the chance that the others will lay down their arms and settle for peace. Michael Oakeshott (in his discussion of how the social contract ever gets started in Hobbes) calls this act of submission the "moralization of pride." (36) In the natural conflict between strong and weak, masters and slaves, Montaigne is the first to lay down his arms. Laying down his "arms" is the disappearance of his strength and superiority as a philosopher. This self-effacement is the necessary condition for peace.

The philosopher must be the first to lay down his arms, to surrender, because he holds the highest rank in the traditional hierarchy. One and only one man must act, but his act must look like mere submission motivated by fear of death. He risks his life, but only he knows it. He must be alone, for the motive for his action takes place entirely within himself: his strength must be invisible because it must be impossible to know from the outside that it is not weakness that moves him to be the first to lay down his arms. His voluntary submission looks servile and weak, but his submission is really a free act because it originates not in fear but in his own strength and generosity. At the same time, it is free because he gets nothing out of it: he gets no recognition from it because he disappears into the common and lowest who submit out of weakness.

That the philosopher is actually reordering the fragments of the tradition must be hidden because, if philosophy appears as the origin of the new order, it simply reasserts its superiority, the superiority that had to disappear in order to destroy the old order. Not only does Montaigne perform this generous act that entails nothing less than his own self-effacement; he presents it, and he must present it, as easy and of no great value: It does indeed seem to me that we overvalue [greatness], and overvalue too the resolution of people we have seen or heard of who despised it and laid it down of their own accord. ... To eschew greatness is a virtue, it seems to me, which I, who am only a gosling, could attain without striving. (37)

Montaigne realizes the very difficult and risky nature of his project, but he hides that risk under the appearance of ease: "Nothing noble is done without risk." (38) But "you can more easily dare what no one thinks you will dare, which becomes easy by its difficulty." (39)

Now, it is one thing for the philosopher whose will is purified of self-esteem to disappear into the crowd, but what of "the great" who value honor more than life? The only appeal that would be effective with the great is the appeal to the noble, "the higher things." And this is exactly what Montaigne does: he rises above the highest, making it look easy. Montaigne displays this possibility to the great. He hides it--and he must hide it--in plain sight. His act is effective because he has gone first.

The strong show themselves in embracing death, thus despising "mere" life, for the sake of something higher. The strength of the great, then, has to be turned into an internal, hidden act of generosity for it manifests itself naturally in the desire for the recognition that comes from the visible display of risking one's life in heroic deeds. Montaigne rises above the highest of the traditional hierarchy by willingly submitting to the lowest. Life itself, "mere life," becomes good in itself, chosen for its own sake. "Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself." (40) Montaigne says: 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. (41)

Caesar and Alexander are toughening, strengthening their souls in submitting to the practice of everyday life, disappearing into the ordinary, and transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.

The role of philosophy in the premodern world was to order that world by its place as the highest. The new philosophical act "frees the slaves" by destroying the hierarchy of action that justifies slavery. By effacing himself and submitting to the lowest, Montaigne takes the generous step that is necessary to bring into being a new order. His internalization of strength is the act in which he judges and subjects the natural desire for recognition as the highest and strongest, the act through which he rises above the natural hierarchy of weak and strong. By overcoming and renouncing the pride of despising death, he rises above the highest and subjects death itself for all men, for the effect that he seeks to produce is peace, the greatest good of the new liberal order, through the resolution of the natural conflict between masters and slaves.

VI

In taking the stance of the detached observer, the philosopher empties himself of his particularity as a man and ceases to be a participant in the social order. He hides himself, his originality, and his strength so that the new order can emerge into the light. The Essays are Montaigne's recovery of his particularity and his return to the world of men as a participant, but in a very different way from the particularity and participation of the classical philosopher in the natural hierarchy of the old order. Leisure takes on a new meaning. It is no longer the philosopher's ascent from the workaday world to the contemplation of the divine and eternal. Leisure is now the philosopher's mode of participation in the here and now of the temporal realm. Philosophy becomes "sociable wisdom." (42)

Montaigne says that the advantage of greatness is that "it can step down whenever it pleases, and that it almost has the choice of both conditions" of greatness or lowliness, while the disadvantage of greatness is the difficulty of enjoying the greatest pleasure of common life. (43) "There is perhaps nothing more pleasant in association with men than the trials (essais) of strength we have with one another, in rivalry of honor and worth, whether in exercises of the body or of the mind." (44) The great cannot share in this pleasure on account of the fear and awe that their power inspires in others: they cannot compete in this rivalry on equal terms. "Stepping down," then, makes this essaying of oneself possible and easy. In the essays of strength in rivalry of honor and worth, Montaigne is the strongest and greatest for he has performed the most bold, daring, and difficult act of all in over-turning the ancient hierarchy and transforming the very meaning of honor and worth.

The Essays are the testing of himself in conversation with the philosophers, poets, and historians of the tradition. At the same time, Montaigne's style (as Pascal describes it) is "totally composed of thoughts born out of the ordinary conversations of life." (45) Montaigne transforms the thoughts of ordinary conversation into unpremeditated and accidental philosophy. Unpremeditated and accidental philosophy is the philosopher's participation in the new world that he himself has brought into being. Philosophy disappears into the practice of everyday life, while the new man reveals himself in his concrete particularity, satisfying the desire in which philosophy began.

Emory University

Correspondence to: ahartle@emory.edu.

(1) References to the French text of the Essais are to the edition by Pierre Villey and V.-L. Saulnier, 3 vols., 2nd ed. (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1992). The English translation is that of Donald Frame, The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1943). The citation VS546, F409 refers to p. 546 of the Villey-Saulnier edition and to p. 409 of the Frame translation.

(2) VS942, F720.

(3) VS377, F272.

(4) VS656, F498.

(5) VS657, F499.

(6) VS565, F425.

(7) See Claude Lefort, Machiavelli in the Making, trans. Michael B. Smith (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 359. Lefort sees a similar indeterminateness, as well as other similarities, in Machiavelli's philosophical act.

(8) Francis Slade, "Two Versions of Political Philosophy: Teleology and the Conceptual Genesis of the Modern State," in Natural Moral Law in Contemporary Society, ed. Holger Zaborowski (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2010), 247. See also Francis Slade, "Was Ist Aufklarung? Notes on Maritain, Rorty, and Bloom with Thanks but No Apologies to Immanuel Kant," in The Common Things: Essays on Thomism and Education, ed. Daniel Mclnerny (American Maritain Association, 1999), 62-63: "Philosophy is the creation of the philosopher, something established by his own act.... Philosophy is not something given with the givenness of man, but a manifestation of human freedom."

(9) VS301, F219; VS653, F495.

(10) VS152, F111.

(11) Montaigne is the "self-ordered" soul. When he asks himself, "For whom do you write?" he identifies three types of men. The learned who pass judgment on books recognize only erudition and art and value only learning. Common and popular souls cannot recognize the grace and the weight of lofty and elevated discourse. These two types almost exhaust the possibilities. "The third type into whose hands you fall, that of souls regulated and strong in themselves, is so rare that for this very reason it has neither name nor rank among us" (VS657, F498). 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.

(12) VS105-06, F75.

(13) See Francis Slade, "Rule as Sovereignty: The Universal and Homogeneous State," in The Truthful and the Good: Essays in Honor of Robert Sokolowski, ed. John J. Drummond and James G. Hart (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996), 180. Slade discusses the way in which Machiavelli erases the distinction between theory and practice.

(14) Machiavelli, The Prince, chap. 15.

(15) VS1072, F821.

(16) VS360, F260.

(17) Matthew 6:1-5.

(18) See Lefort, Machiavelli in the Making, 190.

(19) In "Of cripples," Montaigne 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' (VS1029, F787). By referring to himself as a monster and miracle, he points to the fact that what he is is outside of nature.

(20) The Essays are only about man because the philosophical act reorders the world by ordering everything to man. In this paper, I focus on the way in which the modern philosophical act brings into being a new order of human association. However, the new philosophical act also accounts for modern natural science, which takes the stance of the detached observer and imposes a new order on nature for the sake of the improvement of man's condition. See, for example, Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, trans. Peter Urbach and John Gibson (Chicago: Open Court, 1994), bk. 2, aph. 1, p. 133: "It is the task and purpose of human power to generate and superinduce a new nature or new natures on a given body."

(21) In "Of husbanding one's will," Montaigne discusses his own actions as mayor of Bordeaux, emphasizing the fact that he did not seek his own good or his own glory in carrying out the duties of that office. He writes: "those actions have much more grace which escape from the hand of the workman nonchalantly and noiselessly, and which some worthy man later picks out and lifts back out of obscurity to push them into the light for their own sake" (VS1023, F783). This suggests that the "for its own sake" depends upon the purity of the agent's will.

(22) VS121, F88.

(23) VS353, F254.

(24) VS1110, F852.

(25) VS1115, F856.

(26) VS1115, F857.

(27) VS835, F634.

(28) VS613, F464.

(29) VS311, F226.

(30) See my Monta igne and the Origins of Modern Philosophy (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2013), esp. chaps. 5 and 6.

(31) Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.1.981b20.

(32) Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.2.982b10-27.

(33) Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, trans. Alexander Dru (1952; San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 41.

(34) See my "Nothing to Be Ashamed Of: Francis Slade's Apology for Contemplation," in Perspectives on Political Science 45, no. 1 (January-March 2016): 28-31, for a discussion of Slade's claim that modern philosophy is ashamed of the ineffectiveness of ancient philosophy.

(35) VS918, F701.

(36) Michael Oakeshott, "The Moral Life in the Writings of Thomas Hobbes," in Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, ed. Timothy Fuller (1962; Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991), 339. Oakeshott's depiction of the generous man describes precisely Montaigne's character. The man whose pride has been moralized is "a man whose disposition is to overcome fear not by reason (that is, by seeking a secure condition of external human circumstances) but by his own courage; a man not at all without imperfections and not deceived about himself, but who is proud enough to be spared the sorrow of his imperfections and the illusions of his achievements; not exactly a hero, too negligent for that, but perhaps with a touch of careless heroism about him; a man, in short, who (in Montaigne's phrase) 'knows how to belong to himself,' and who, if fortune turned out so, would feel no shame in the epitaph: 'Par delicatessen / J'ai perdu ma vie'."

(37) VS916, F699.

(38) VS129, F94.

(39) VS890, F679.

(40) VS1051-52, F805.

(41) VS1108, F850.

(42) VS1116, F857.

(43) VS916, F699.

(44) VS918, F701.

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