Eyeing death, Montaigne negotiates with his reader over the terms of his immortality. He begins by distinguishing the useful from the honorable. The emperor Tiberius said, “The Roman people were accustomed to take vengeance on their enemies by open means, arms in hand, not by fraud or surreptitiously.” But Tiberius was an “imposter.” Montaigne proceeds somewhat differently. He is no Roman, no man of war. He is a peace negotiator. He too claims to proceed unsurreptitously. “I have an open way that easily insinuates itself and gains credit on first acquaintance. Pure naturalness and truth”—he adds, a touch sententiously—”in whatever age, still find their time and their place.” Indeed they do, but not quite in the seeming sense of Montaigne, here.

Is Montaigne too an imposter? Perish the thought, he exclaims. Those who so suspect “make my subtlety too subtle.” “There is no rule” in any “school” that could do what Montaigne does in his negotiations with the armed prophets of the French civil war. One might even say that great philosophers have been “too enslaved to exhibit reverence for the laws.” One should not “call dishonorable and foul” certain “natural actions that are not only useful but necessary.” A prince should “attribute” the necessity for certain actions to God’s action, “a blow from the divine rod.” After all, “no private utility is worthy of our doing… violence to our conscience.” Yes, but: When it is a matter of “the public utility,” and “when it is very apparent and very important”—well, that is another matter. With Montaigne as for Machiavelli, utility quietly replaces honor as the quintessential public virtue.

Certain actions, even if supremely useful, might impel a conscientious man to repentance. But as Montaigne looks at himself in old age he can only sigh, resignedly, “Now it is done.” And besides, he says immediately, he is being remade from one minute to the next. Somehow he is both irremediable and perpetually malleable, undeserving of legal chastisement and unable to conform to any rule. As an author he plays no role—grammarian, poet, jurist. He is himself, he is every man. That is, he plays all the roles. He basks in no glory. His immortality is in his universality, not his distinction. “I do not teach”—the people will not call to him, ‘Rabbi, Rabbi’—but he is a prophet without honor in his own country. Unlike the most honored prophet, he will not find honor or reverent obedience in some other country. Seeking honor can get you crucified; reverent obedience is unproductive. Montaigne is rather a sort of Socrates, leading the life of man “in conformity with its natural condition.” With Montaigne, nature replaces God as the source of ‘prophecy.’

To reach higher is to fail. “Those who in my time have tried to correct the world’s morals by new ideas, reform the superficial vices; the essential ones”—those useful and necessary?—”they leave as them they were, if they do not increase them; and increase is to be feared.” Montaigne says “Pythagoreans” but means Christians in criticizing those who “believe that they feel great regret and remorse within; but of amendment or correction, or interruption, they show us no sign.” There can be no radical conversion, no ‘new man.’ “Repentance does not properly apply to the things that are not in our power.” What Nietzsche says thunderously Montaigne says quietly: Love our own piece of fatum, will the eternal return. “If I had to live over again, I would live as I have lived.” that is a spear in the side of Christian renewal.

As for the philosophical life, like Jesus Socrates arranged his own death, but not out of martyrdom, not to save or transform human beings. Socrates arranged his own death because nature was turning out the lights. A philosopher will adapt to the circumstance, whether it be advancing age or the currently regnant folly that is public opinion. He will know that “the fairest souls are those that have the most variety and adaptability,” and that “life is uneven, irregular, and multiform movement.” The Montaignian Socrates does not point ‘up’ to unchanging forms but ‘around’ to changing ones. That goes for himself, too. “I would rather fashion my mind than furnish it.” Invoking God and Socrates, Montaigne praises useful knowledge.

Of the three kinds of association—with men, with women, with books—women are pleasant if beautiful and well-bred; men are pleasant and useful if they are of that “rarest type among us” who know how to converse. But books are neither so susceptible to aging as women nor so rare as the rarest men. Montaigne retires to his library, where he can read and pace. (This is no nihilistic Flaubert who thinks sitting down, to be caught by some sharp-eyed wanderer of the future.) But finally in his most private moments Montaigne is alone, unmoveable, enthroned. The admirer of Contr’un is secretly solitary, a monarch, a man alone, like Machiavelli’s prince, and even more like Machiavelli himself—in retirement, teaching the princes (he who denies he teaches), an unmoved mover in a skin that always changes its colors to math its background. Christianity presents the miracle of God in a human body. Montaigne presents the greater miracle of a god in the shape of the most inconspicuous reptile, not even so worrisome as a serpent.

How can such a weak, lowly chameleon achieve immortality, even rule generations to come more effectively than Jesus? Because Jesus’ followers have a secret weakness. They avert their eyes from death and look to Heaven. They seek vengeance upon atheists who do not aver their eyes; they fix their eyes vengefully upon atheists and other criminals, killing them because to the pious death is a frightening evil. They can be diverted by “the beauty of a contrary picture,” a picture of clemency and kindness winning honor, favor and good will. Political men can always be so diverted. as for the people, they can be diverted by some silly spectacle. Just be sure not to fall in love with your own diversion, as women sometimes do.

The free spirits can look at death without averting their eyes. For them there is la gaya scienza. La gaya scienza teaches that mind and body are really one. La gaya scienza will prefer health as the real good of human being. La gaya scienza will pursue a discreet policy of sexual liberation., recognizing that love and marriage are a dysfunctional couple. Montaigne here attacks fidelity, perhaps fidelity tout court. The key to many a Montaignian essay is to convert the images to their theological equivalents and then prepare to think unfaithful thoughts. Fidelity is itself a policy of diversion—specifically, of sublimation. But sublimation only rechannels natural passions, making them more powerful, converting them into fanaticism, violence. Montaigne diverts the diverted and perverts the perverted. La gaya scienza is never solemn, because men are such fools. “Our delights and our excrements have been lodged together pell-mell, and… the supreme sensual pleasure is attended, like pain, with faintness and moaning.” What god created such animals? And young M. Foucault, I see what you see, feel what you feel, but are you not altogether too serious, too much in earnest, about all these passions, exquisite limit-pleasures, and bondages? Are you sufficiently gay, mon ami?

When it comes to God, the judge of men’s follies, Montaigne mounts not the divine chariot but a down-to-earth coach. When tutoring a prince, “it is all too easy to impress liberality on a man who has the means to practice it all he wants at the expense of others.” Liberality in a prince goes as well with tyranny as with royalty. The real royal virtue is justice. Montaigne always tempers his justice not with mercy but with toleration. Central to Book III is chapter seven, “Of the disadvantage of greatness.” The advantage to being a king is that, like a preacher, you address the people, “an inexact judge, easy to dupe, easy to satisfy.” The disadvantage of kingly greatness is that you never really know yourself, know the truth—never can measure exactly your real abilities against those of others. Your real identity is consumed by your royalty. As solitary as a king but, unlike one, obscure, Montaigne knows himself and thereby has the advantage over kings, human and divine. His spirit someday will permeate the world.

Not that anyone should imitate him. He publishes his imperfections out of caritas, so that others can avoid them. But it is Montaigne’s courage and intelligence in debate that emerge here, not his weakness. Debating “in a small group and for my own sake,” he indulges in “a friendship that delights in the sharpness and rigor of its intercourse, as does love in bites and scratches that draw blood.” This is the advantage of ‘polytheism.’ On the Montaignian throne, there can still be dialogue, if not with rare friends then with good books, if not with good books than with one of the monarch’s many selves. This is Montaigne’s solution to the Machiavellian problem: How can the lone prince know? (Machiavelli’s, too? As when he retired to his chamber to dine on his true food?)

Turning from theological to philosophic dealings, then, “I am no philosopher.” No philosopher-king, at any rate, seeking to revolutionize the polis. Stay out of it. Leave it alone. Revolution only brings some worse tyranny. I am universal, no political philosopher at all—a cosmopolitan, a world unto myself. I do not cling to my own, including my own life. (Mirabile dictu, I am a survivor, though, am I not? Just lucky, I guess.) Facing death as I am, allow me to offer you my confession. You may notice that I change themes abruptly, use false essay titles, and so forth. But really “my ideas follow one another, but sometimes it is from a distance, and look at each other, but with a sidelong glance.” The “more casual and accidental” my remarks “seem,” the more beautiful they are. “It is my inattentive reader who loses my subject, not I.” I confess, but you are the one to do penance. Go back and read my essays again—the most exquisitely pleasurable penance one could endure.

You really must learn to husband your will. “I keep myself to myself.” As a result—to my astonishment—I am a political philosopher: “I have been able to take part in public affairs without departing a nail’s breadth from myself, and to give myself to others without taking myself from myself.” Now there is the true divine liberality. This divinity is entirely natural. “The laws of Nature teach us what we rightly need”; those who know them “distinguish subtly between the desires that come from her and those that come from the disorder of my imagination.” To be politic, don’t be partisan. My administration “passed without a mark or a trace.” My “gliding, obscure, and quiet life” rules people without their knowing it.

How can Montaigne do that? First he philosophizes without claiming knowledge of causes, at least of ultimate causes. What is a miracle? How would you know one if you saw one? Nature is as obscure as God. You can work wonders, quietly and over time, if you win people’s trust rather than insisting on their fidelity, if you confess your ignorance rather than your sins, if you do not try to explain too much. Be the Montaignian Socrates, not soaring to the good but pulling everything down to earth, “his own original and natural level.” Unlike Jesus, Socrates can be known: “He did a great favor to human nature by showing how much it can do for itself,” not, like Jesus, how much God has done for human nature. “I do not think it becomes us well to let ourselves be taught by a pagan”—Plato—”how great an impiety it is to expect no help from God that is simply his own and without our cooperation.” Or, as Algernon Sidney puts it, God helps those who help themselves. Good men have “nothing to fear from the gods,” Montaigne’s Socrates says. “We naturalists” know: To survive and to triumph, put on an open and useful-looking face. That way, everyone will want you to live, perhaps forever, and everyone will take your advice. Benjamin Franklin will read this, considering it carefully.

“We naturalists” know how to deal with the feverish disease of religious fanaticism. Let nature take its course. Gradually, the fire will burn out. Meanwhile, the prudent man will live, judging naturally, physically, by his own sensations, not by passionate beliefs or overwrought reasonings. (Machiavelli is even more precise: Do not hear, do not look, but touch.) “The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity.” Without Jesus or (the Platonic) Socrates.

Montaigne points back to Machiavelli, ahead to Nietzsche. Like them, he opposes the imaginary republics, religious or philosophic. Like those philosophers, he is alone (except for them, one dead, the other far in the future, and a few others). But he proceeds differently. Unlike Machiavelli, Montaigne finds Christians not weakly self-divided but fanatical, leonine—even if they are at the core cowardly lions. He therefore uses the fox much more than the lion, staying in his den; when he ventures out, he pretends he’s just a lazy dog. Unlike Nietzsche, he doesn’t find Christianity in a state of decadence, ready to collapse after a few strong kicks. This Anti-Christ stays at home, never marching toward Jerusalem. The time is not right.

But the times may be ripening. Religion can be diverted, philosophy seized, with an image of a new, multiform, various, ever-changing sort of beauty. Descartes, Bacon, Locke, Montesquieu: Where would these gods of the new Olympus be, without Montaigne’s example? Montaigne’s conclusion is practically a beginning.

 

Pierre Villey famously argues that Montaigne ‘evolves’ during the course of the Essays, from Stoicism to Pyrrhonism to ‘prudence’ or hedonism. Book I reflects Montaigne’s ‘Stoic’ stage.

This is indeed the impression Montaigne gives. In his book Montaigne in effect ‘tries on’ any number of philosophic identities, Stoicism being the foremost of these in Book I. In so doing, Montaigne invites his readers to do the same, to relax their hold on their own identities, including their opinions, deeply ingrained, which help to constitute those identities. The question to which there can never be any dogmatic answer is: Is Montaigne evolving, or is he deliberately bringing us along toward a goal he knows? Montaigne, it might be said, deliberately makes it very difficult to determine what his intentions are, to say for sure who this apparently open and genial man is. Montaigne deliberately wants to make dogmatism of any sort difficult.

Stoicism? Yes, but…. In Montaigne there is always a ‘Yes, but….’ Consider the very first essay. Montaigne has gone to Italy. He retrieves not Seneca but Machiavelli. There he is, hiding in plain sight, embedded in Montaigne’s account of means and ends. If we have offended someone—surely a serious problem for an essay of heterodox opinions?—shall we throw ourselves on their mercy? Or shall we defy them openly, prepare to fight to the death? There is no dogmatic answer to these questions, Montaigne shows us, as either reaction might work or fail, given circumstances. But if you are a ruler, he more than suggests, the way to end vacillation between cruelty, pity, and admiration for your enemy’s courage is policy: Secretly have your enemies drowned at sea. Or (no dogmatic recommendations for rulers, either) be like Alexander: openly merciless. That is, ‘be’ (that is, use) the fox or the lion. To be able to use the fox or the lion is of course to ‘be’ both, to enlist in the Machiavellian army. Montaigne can ‘be’ lion, fox, Stoic, Epicurean, Pyrrhonist, Socratic, Christian, and—what not?

Is Montaigne a Machiavellian, then? Not so fast, the charming Mayor of Bordeaux says, ‘Stay. Have some wine. Cheer up. Relax for a while. Virtù? What virtù? I’m really quite harmless. Leave your fortress and come out to parley. I am a man of honor, like the ancients, and besides—I haven’t the energy to be a prince. Are my essays not casual, easy, and written in no order? (Not that I am altogether aimless: “The soul that has no fixed goal loses itself”). But my goal is only pleasure, and what harm can my pleasure be to you? “One is punished for defending a place obstinately and without reason,” so open up a bit and converse with me.

‘What shall we talk about?’ you wonder. What not? Sadness, idleness, liars, prognostications, kings, cabbages, fear—the list can go on forever. But centrally, in my First Book, let’s talk about friendship. (Why look at the center in Montaigne’s book? Because he tells us to, at the beginning of his essay on friendship.) I had a true friend once, Montaigne recalls, but now he is dead. Friendship eliminates “separation and distinctions.” I would offer to show you my friend’s uniquely valuable work, “On Voluntary Servitude”—an obligation to top all obligations—but I’ve changed my mind. I forbid you the fruit of his labors, precious and indispensable thought it is, and I substitute for it 29 love sonnets—which, come to think of it, may also disappear from my table before long.’

When, with Adam-like curiosity, the reader seeks out and tastes friend Etienne de la Boétie’s essay, he finds a protest against having one master or several. Neither monotheism nor polytheism, so to speak, satisfies Montaigne’s best friend. Servitude to the one or the many depends finally upon one thing: our own consent. Our manacles are mind-forged. “There is nothing a human being should hold more dear than the restoration of his own natural right” to be a man and not a “beast of burden.” [1]  The violence of tyrannicide—and of wars of religion, too?—is not absolutely necessary if enough of us simply stop believing. (No wonder Montaigne demurs when it comes to show us this work; neither the Protestant nor the Catholic side would find such a solution to the brutal religious strive of Sixteenth-century Europe very satisfying.) The brotherliness of friendship will always undermine the tyranny of the one or the few. As for the One, the Supreme Tyrant, “it is because he doews not know how to love that he ultimately impoverishes his own spirit and destroys his own empire.” Philia can replace agape as agape destroys its devotees in wars spiritual and corporeal.

(As for Montaigne’s twenty-ninth essay, following the one on friendship—by amazing coincidence in a book whose writer professes to proceed in such a desultory fashion, the essay refers us to a collection of exactly twenty-nine sonnets—a glance confirms that love and tyranny go together. The fifteenth or central sonnet of the sequence describes a moment of self-rule or liberty, quickly lost to the power of love’s tyranny. It isn’t easy for a solitary soul to resist tyranny. You need friends, brothers, allies. Montaigne himself gets along without them, now, but not everyone is Montaigne.)

(Montaigne, through de la Boétie, follows the ‘modern’ strategy: deliberately meld agapic with erotic love, interpret the former as the sublimation of the latter, then dismiss both as ineffectual. The difference between Montaigne and Machiavelli seems to be that Montaigne thinks you will need at least one friend, one unindictable co-conspirator. But perhaps you will be able in large measure to invent that friend, even as you invent your variety of selves.)

But all of this is buried deep—not merely in the center of Book I but beneath the text altogether. Everywhere else, Montaigne follows the advice of the forty-seventh essay: “It is dangerous to attack a man whom you have deprived of every other means of escape but that of weapons, for necessity is a violent schoolmistress.” Give your enemy many options; his own uncertainty of judgment will do, or undo, the rest. Montaigne is supremely the writer of many options offered. How to condemn a man with no fixed identity? Pascal formulated a way, but long after Montaigne needed to worry about it.

And so near the end of this remarkable Book I, he writes an essay on prayer that makes one smile, or even laugh. In these essays, he says, he puts forth “formless and unresolved notions” in order to “submit them” to the worthy guardians of “the holy proscriptions of the Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman church,” guardians who enjoy “absolute power over me.” Thus he will have his liberty and enjoy protection from Church persecution. Lion and fox, but more often fox, living quietly in his burrow in a lion’s den.

Toward this end, he prudently recommends a means: a division of labor in an age when theologians write too humanly, humanists too theologically. This is the beginning of the ‘secularist’ version of the separation of church and state. In the face of God and His vicegerents, how dangerous can a deferential, self-effacing nice guy like Montaigne possibly be? Pass over him (Montaigne prays), so that he may live into the old age that is the final topic of Book I, and be well on his way to extending his influence everywhere.

 

Note

1. Etienne de la Boétie: The Politics of Obedience. Harry Kurtz translation. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1975, p. 50.

Seneca: Moral Essays. John W. Basore translation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958.

 

The Senecan essays on providence, firmness, anger, and mercy might educate some prince who aspired to a philosophic life. Perhaps the young Nero raised such hopes in old Seneca? It would not be the first time or the last time a tyrannical soul inspired unwarranted philosophic dreams.

Anger is the passion of the political man, unless it is libido dominandi. How often does the rage for justice stand revealed as the rage to rule? In the Republic Socrates seeks to cure this passion. In his judgment, prudence is the crowning virtue of the political man, the one that needs to be made to guide spiritedness, to divert ardent young men from tyranny. Seneca’s essays are more accessible to those who actually may become political men.

If anger animates the desire to repay suffering, as Aristotle teaches (II. i. 115), then the justification of the ways of God to man becomes a prime theological end. God metes out suffering in mysterious ways. Why me? the sufferer asks. Why not that wastrel over there? Why do good men suffer while the bad prosper? To ask these questions insistently betrays a mindset of dependency; rebellion against God only reinforces resentment of and groveling before God—the sort of thing Rousseau satirizes in his pages on “the great conspiracy” against him, at the end of the Confessions.

Anti-theological ire poisons the soul, the potentially philosophic soul above all. Seneca advises a courageous acceptance of the will of God that will weaken superstitious worries about the gods. God makes you suffer because he wants you stronger, not softer. The worst sufferings may injure the individual but benefit onlookers who take heart at courage. Suffering aids philosophy: “To be always happy and to pass through life without a mental pang is to be ignorant of one half of nature,” the philosopher’s object of study (I. i. 25). Suffering brings you back to nature by illustrating the emptiness of things most people regard as desirable or fearful (I. i. 33). the good, man, by contrast, “despises externals” (I. i. 43). Finally, (and here Seneca appeals to the most spirited souls) suffering well is glorious. “In this you outstrip God; he is exempt from enduring evil, while you are superior to it” (I. i. 45). (Hence the theological need for Christ.) Resentment of God or nature (insofar as these can be genuinely distinguished in the thinking of any philosopher) can lead to no good. Indeed, it led to Machiavelli.

“On Firmness” centers not on the sufferings inflicted by God but on those inflicted by men, particularly the mental sufferings caused by insult. Once again, Seneca seeks to liberate the mind of his reader from dependence upon externals. “The wise man can receive neither injury nor insult” (II. i. 49), as “no baneful force can extend its power all the way to him” (II. i. 57). In retaliating against his would-be injurer, he moves not in anger but in benevolence, correcting the vice(s) that impelled his enemy to attack. The wise man “can lose nothing,” having “everything invested in himself” and “trust[ing] nothing to fortune” (II. i. 61). Fortune rules gross externals. Made of finer matter, autarchia or self-sufficiency, self-rule, eludes Fortune’s ham hands.

To so redefine what is ‘one’s own’ is to politicize philosophy even as Stoicism seems to depoliticize it. Stoicism depoliticizes philosophy ‘externally’—not for it the careful Aristotelian classification and weighing of regimes—but politicizes it ‘internally.’ When considering Aristotelian ethics, Seneca combines the great-souled man with the philosopher. For Aristotle’s philosopher, the love of one’s own is unphilosophic, as the philosopher directs his gaze at nature, ‘inner’ and ‘outer.’ For Seneca’s philosopher, and for his wise man, love of one’s own means love of one’s own soul, whose finest element is identical to the finest element of the cosmos, the natural law. Accordingly, the Senecan conquest of Fortune (II. I. 93) is exactly the opposite of Machiavelli’s conquest of Fortune. Aristotle—ever the moderate—lands in-between, albeit closer to Seneca.

Human nature is social, not punitive; reason cannot listen to others when anger towards others—gods or men—blinds it. Do not écrasez l’infame; learn from it, then correct it. Seneca can propose this dispassionate view in part because he does not regard reason or passions as essences. “[P]assion and reason are only the transformation of the soul toward the better or the worse” (III. i. 127). Unlike Plato’s Socrates, unlike Aristotle, who enlist the thumotic ‘part’ of the soul in alliance with reason against the appetitive ‘part,’ Seneca can make reason entirely self-sufficient. This is how he can conflate the philosopher and the great-souled man. His great-souled man is less thumotic than Aristotle’s, and so reconcilable to philosophy. (At the same time, as noted above, his philosopher and his wise man are more assiduous than Aristotle in loving ‘their own’ to the exclusion of political life, and thus more animated by what Plato and Aristotle call thumotic desire.)

Following Socrates, Seneca ascribes evil to error. Why get angry at a mistaken man? (This is not to be confused with sentimental compassion: “Sometimes the truest form of pity is to kill” (III. i. 147), a remark Rousseau endorses when he writes, “such pity is a great cruelty toward men.”) To give scope to anger is dangerous because anger will rule or ruin, being “enraged against truth itself if this is shown to be contrary to its desire” (III. i. 157). Indeed, as imperial Rome and modern America so amply confirm, “What vice, pray, has ever lacked its defender” (III. I. 195)? Worse still anger is the only vice that can seize the public as a whole” (III. i. 157). Seneca may have somewhat underestimated greed. (Living in a regime with a substantial aristocracy, the mistake is understandable, but here attention to Aristotle’s fully-developed regime theory would have prevented the error.)

Seneca recommends six techniques in avoiding error. Arraign and convict it in your own heart—presumably with such arguments as Seneca provides. Consider that the highest heaven is unperturbed by storms. Attempt neither too little nor too much, thus avoiding restlessness and frustration. Live with a calm and good-natured person, rather than, say, Xanthippe. Soothe yourself with music and poetry (Seneca was of course innocent of the likes of Beethoven). Know your own weaknesses, so as to avoid being injured and thereby angered; this is another way in which wisdom or self-knowledge encourages the tranquillitas ordinis of the soul. If angry already, do nothing; “fight against yourself,” not the other (III. ii. 287); and think of mitigating circumstances.

This sequence of essays culminates in an essay on mercy, dedicated to Nero. Seneca commends mercy to Nero as one of the virtues of the great-souled man. Appropriately enough, the essay is incomplete. Its conclusion may have remained unwritten, or severed.

Seneca contends that cut-off lives (unlike cut-off essays) can be said to have been full, if well-lived. Virtue “is her own reward,” meaning, there is nothing higher than “a mind made perfect” (“On the Happy Life,” i. 123). Euthymia or good-spiritedness makes the present perfect; the rest is only multiplication of that perfection (“On the Tranquilllity of the Soul,” ii). “[L]ife, if you know how to use it, is long” (“On the Shortness of Life,” ii. 289). “He who bestows all of his time on his own needs, who plans out every day as if it were his last, neither longs for nor fears the morrow” (Ibid. 308). A short life, which may linger chronologically, consists in having the fears of mortals and the desires of immortals (Ibid. 295). “Who of these would not rather have the state disordered than his hair” (Ibid. 323)?

And so the philosopher “argue[s] with Socrates, doubt[s] with Carneades, find[s] peace with Epicurus, overcome[s] human nature with the Stoics, exceed[s] it with the Cynics” (Ibid. 335). The philosophers of the past are added to his life, and his to theirs—”the only way of prolonging mortality, nay, of turning it into immortality” (Ibid. 339).