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).

 

Seneca: Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales. Richard M. Gummere translation. 3 volumes. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961.

 

If happiness is liberation from care (XLIV. v.1, 191), and the study of wisdom “gives the soul liberty” (LXXVIII. 2. 349)—liberty is enslavement to philosophy—then philosophy aims at joyful wisdom for the happy few. To be truly well-born is to take the philosophers for your ancestors (XLIV. 1. 289). They are the natural aristocrats.

The liberal arts do not “bestow virtues” upon the student, as any glance around a liberal arts college will demonstrate. But they can “prepare the soul for the reception of virtue” (LXXXVIII. 2. 361). To philosophize, one mustn’t only talk but engage facts and perform acts. Philosophy is a praxis, a way of life (CXI. 2. 279); coherent praxis requires not so much adherence to a theory as cultivation of character. Plato and Aristotle “derived more benefit from the character than from the words of Socrates” (VI. 1. 23). “All study of philosophy and all reading should be applied to the study of philosophy and all reading should be applied to the study of living the happy life” (CVIII. 2. 253). Study is part of that life; thinking and acting are reciprocal events. “Philosophy is the study of virtue, by means, however, of virtue itself, but neither can virtue exist without the study of itself” (LXXXIX. 2. 383).

Syllogisms are verbal proofs, but in practice death is the most rigorous proof. Anyone can speak bravely; Socrates showed philosophers how to die bravely. He proved his philosophic ‘being’ by his philosophic ‘doing.’ A good mind must be developed into a good will (XVI. 1. 103). “A matter not of words, but of facts,” philosophy molds the human soul, ordering the philosopher’s whole life, guiding his conduct, harmonizing inner and outer (XVI. 1. 105). Harmony yields stability: “the primary indication, to my thinking, of a well-ordered mind is a man’s ability to remain in one place and linger in his own company” (II. 1. 7). “Everywhere means nowhere” (II. 1. 7). The perpetual traveler has many acquaintances but no friends, reads many books instead of a few good ones. (Whispered to Aristotle: ‘Sit down, you Peripatetic.’) Standing where you are requires courage; manliness is not boyishness (IV. 1. 15). It requires one identity, not a man of a thousand faces, each of which reflecting some velleity (CXX. 2. 395).

To harmonize inner and outer, shed external superfluities. Externals are not so much goods as advantages; “the essence of goodness is not in them” (LXXIV. 2. 123). Do not chase after them. “Too rich a soil makes the grain fall flat” (XXXIX. 1. 261). The philosopher can offer good counsel, prudent counsel, because he knows nature and therefore can distinguish the needed from the superfluous (XLVIII. 1. 319). Pace Adam Smith, but natural desires are limited. The unlimited desires you mistake for natural ones spring from false opinion (XVI. 1. 109). “The wise man suits his needs to nature” (XVII. 1. 115).

The Stoic life is a joyous quest, but its joys are (famously) austere. Virtue is “the quality of not needing a single day beyond the present” (CXII. 2. 463), as liberation from burdensome desires means liberation from elaborate long-range plans against imagined future failure and for imagined future goods. The truly long life is the full life, the life full of wisdom (CXIII. 3. 7). “One who daily puts the finishing touches on his life is never in want of time” (CI. 2. 163), and seldom in want of money. Wise foresight does not plan; it prepares. “The soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence” (XVIII. 1. 119). Verum gaudium res severa est (XXIII. 1. 161). Seneca prudently appeals to Lucilius’ Romanness while preparing him for philosophy; a mere boy needs maxims but when he becomes a man “it is time to lean on himself” (XXXIII. 1. 237). Begin to write your own maxims.

Stoic joy usually precludes suicide. Seneca praises those “who approach death without any loathing for life, letting death in, so to speak, and not pulling it toward them” (XXX. 1. 221). Suicide makes sense only when pain takes up all of your life, deposing the legitimate rule of wisdom (XCVIII. 3. 129). “He who dies just because he is in pain is a weakling, a coward; but he who lives merely to brave out his pain, is a fool” (LVIII. 2. 59). The wise man will live as long as he ought, not as long as he can” (LXX. 2. 59). He will live and die well, for which activities there is no general rule, only prudence (LXX. 2. 63). The maxims you write are seldom if ever universally generalizable. There is always a counter-maxim; prudence is the umpire.

Prudence and reason generally should ally with the spiritedly irrational part of the soul instead of the appetitively irrational part (XCII. 2. 451). In this Seneca concurs with Plato’s Socrates. Seneca goes further, perhaps for ‘Roman’ rhetorical purposes, associating the good with the honorable, not the useful. He finds Aristotelians too lax in their taming of the emotions (CXVI. 3. 333); like Nietzsche’s democrats, they call moderation what is only mediocrity. To fuse goodness and honor is to take a sterner view; this is what it means to be a citizen-soldier of the universe. Seneca’s apparently apolitical thought is really cosmopolitical (not ‘cosmopolitan’ in the modern, watery, United-Nations sense). The Stoics tend toward natural law rather than natural right, although in Seneca, at least, prudence still rules over explicit regulations.

Contra Machiavelli, “no wall can be erected against Fortune which she cannot take by storm; let us strengthen our inner defenses” (LXXIV. 2. 127). Machiavelli equates nature with Fortuna. Seneca does not. Knowing nature, including our own nature, means knowing what is truly good and bad for us; the conquest of Fortuna is futile and unnecessary. Reason tames desires and calms fears—passions which react to Fortuna’s gifts and blows, not nature’s. Seneca is no less materialistic than Machiavelli. Unlike Machiavelli, however, he despises the body (see LXV) because the finest matter, the matter composing the soul, rules finally but not immediately. This is what Seneca means by ‘Providence.’ Unlike Machiavelli, Seneca formulates a materialism that can account for the life of the mind, the philosophic life.

Materialism also makes it possible for the Stoic to equal ‘God,’ who is also material. The Stoic can have the “true and never-swerving judgment” of ‘God’ (LXXII. 2. 23, 27). Stoic reason resembles Platonic technē. Stoic reason differs from Machiavellian artfulness even as its ‘God’ differs from the Biblical God: Neither Stoic reason nor the Stoic ‘God’ is creative. Nor is he providential. Equality with ‘God’ does not mean control over events (as in Machiavelli) but unperturbed self-sufficiency (XLVIII. 1. 321). Of religious souls Seneca asks: “How long shall we go on making demands upon the gods, as if we were still unable to support ourselves” (LX. 1. 123)? This is the Greek philosophers’ autarchia, translated to Rome. He who requires external good will want to control Fortuna (or nature misdefined as Fortuna) and thus either pray or prey, petition the Creator-God like a Christian or imitate Him like a Machiavellian.

The self-sufficient Stoic can say, after losing children, wife, and country, I have lost nothing (IX. 1. 53). (In contrast, Machiavelli’s Lady of Forli shouts, “I can have more children!”) Stoic self-sufficiency does not require isolation (as does Machiavelli of his prince), although it can tolerate isolation. The philosopher can do without friends, without desiring to do without them (IX. 1. 45). Human nature is social. Friendship rests on the beauty of the soul of the friend, not his utility. Friends are useful to each other only in the noble sense of “giv[ing] practice to the other’s virtues and thus maintain[ing] wisdom at the proper level” (CIX. 2. 255). Philosophic friends may engage in dialogue, oral or written. These letters are written dialogues in two ways. They are addressed to a friend, responding to his letters. They also contain seeming contradictions. In an oral dialogue (or an artful, Platonic dialogue or play) the contradictions are supplied by the dialogic partners. In a monologic work (here we never see even one letter by Lucilius) the author himself must supply the contradictions, rich complexities for the reader to work through, testing his ability to philosophize.

Human sociality does not extend to politics, where contradiction leads to violence and repression, even oppression. Political friends are undesirable. Regimes change; your friends disappear, replace by their enemies—now yours (XIV. 1. 89). More profoundly, wisdom cannot rule, simply. If Wisdom could rub out all our faults “she would be mistress of the universe” (XI. 1. 63). She can’t; she isn’t. Fortuna—randomness, stupidity—has her day. Indeed, many days. A philosopher will settle or second-best; the rule of those who preserve the public peace, the tranquillitas ordinis that will remain Augustine’s best hope for the City of Man. Philosophers particularly esteem such rulers. The more valuable the cargo, the more gratitude the sailor feels towards Neptune, who allows safe passage; the philosophic cargo is the richest treasure (LXXIII).

In peace or in civil strife, the philosopher aims for inconspicuousness. “The mere name of philosophy, however quietly pursued, is an object of sufficient scorn; and what would happen if we should begin to separate ourselves from the custom of our fellow men” (V. 1. 21)? They would attempt to rule the philosopher. Imperara sibi maximum imperium est (CXII. 2. 294). If your own soul is a king, not a tyrant, it needs no other kings, except for the very modest sake of preserving from tyranny the body the soul inhabits.