Montaigne

Life without Law

Pierre Manent, Paul Seaton

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780268202330, 9780268107215
• eBook ISBN: 9780268107833
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Humanism in Philosophy

In Montaigne: Life without Law, originally published in French in 2014 and now translated for the first time into English by Paul Seaton, Pierre Manent provides a careful reading of Montaigne's three-volume work Essays. Although Montaigne's writings resist easy analysis, Manent finds in them a subtle unity, and demonstrates the philosophical depth of Montaigne's reflections and the distinctive, even radical, character of his central ideas. To show Montaigne's unique contribution to modern philosophy, Manent compares his work to other modern thinkers, including Machiavelli, Hobbes, Pascal, and Rousseau. What does human life look like without the imposing presence of the state? asks Manent. In raising this question about Montaigne's Essays, Manent poses a question of great relevance to our contemporary situation. He argues that Montaigne's philosophical reflections focused on what he famously called la condition humaine, the human condition. Manent tracks Montaigne's development of this fundamental concept, focusing especially on his reworking of pagan and Christian understandings of virtue and pleasure, disputation and death. Bringing new form and content together, a new form of thinking and living is presented by Montaigne's Essays, a new model of a thoughtful life from one of the unsung founders of modernity.

Throughout, Manent suggests alternatives and criticisms, some by way of contrasts with other thinkers, some in his own name. This is philosophical engagement at a very high level. In showing the unity of Montaigne's work, Manent's study will appeal especially to students and scholars of political theory, the history of modern philosophy, modern literature, and the origins of modernity.

PART 1

The War of Human Beings

1

TO SAVE ONE’S LIFE

1. Montaigne has a diagnosis of the contemporary disorder that is very close to that of Machiavelli. The root of the disorder and corruption is still this discosto, the too-great gap between words and actions. He repeats this diagnosis, and in memorable terms, on the last page of the Essays:

Between ourselves, these are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct. . . . They want to get out of themselves and escape from 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, like lofty and inaccessible places; and nothing is so hard for me to stomach in the life of Socrates as his ecstacies and possessions by his daemon, nothing is so human in Plato as the qualities for which they say he is called divine. And of our sciences, those seem to me most terrestrial and low which have risen the highest.¹

If philosophy is here envisaged by means of the names of Socrates and Plato, theology no doubt is included among the sciences that have “risen the highest.” Elsewhere, Montaigne’s distrust extends to the emphatic language of monarchies: “Livy says truly that the language of men brought up under royalty is always full of foolish ostentation and vain testimonies, each man indiscriminately raising his king to the highest level of worth and sovereign greatness.”² Montaigne, therefore, is in search of a word that does not succumb to the all-too-human temptation “to escape from man” by a “supercelestial” philosophy, religion, or politics. He seeks a word that prevents this tendency and arms us against this temptation. He wants to reduce the gap between word and action, word and life, by a distinctive word, an unprecedented word, that establishes a new use, a new regime, of the word.

2. However, the opening address, “To the Reader,” instead of ringing out with these promises, puts one on guard against too great expectations. The book that it opens will not give the reader what he normally expects of a book. In it there is nothing useful for him nor glorious for the author. Montaigne does not promise us anything. It is in this way, first of all, that his book is “in good faith.”

The address restricts the import of the book as much as possible. It limits the number and dignity of its recipients—they are simply “relatives and friends”; and it circumscribes its object, which could not be more unprepossessing: “for it is myself that I portray.”³

What is offered to us is hardly a book. The word is held back from the domain where it would become a public word, a word worthy of being presented to the public, because, for example, it would recount the remarkable actions of the author during the course of his life. What makes it that this book is hardly a book is also what makes it the first of a new genre of book. It is the subject or the matter of the book that allows or provokes this ambiguity: “myself.” Nothing is more puny, nothing is less worthy of being brought to the light of the public, but it is by developing a word capable of applying to this object, and, as it were, conferring on it the reality it lacks, that Montaigne will break with the fatal idealizing tendency of the human word.

As it is a “book of good faith,” Montaigne does not leave his reader entirely ignorant of the extreme audacity of his enterprise. By amplifying “for it is myself that I portray” with “I am myself the matter of my book,” he announces the extraordinary character of his endeavor.

If Montaigne is the matter of his book, it is not of himself, however, that he first speaks in the Essays. One must await chapter 8 of book 1—”Of Idleness”— to read the first formulation, itself quite reserved, of the project or aim of the book. The first seven chapters offer a sketch of the conditions of human life, because it is those conditions that finally give meaning to the enterprise of the Essays. Montaigne’s aim is not arbitrary. It is a response to a certain situation, a certain crisis, a certain condition. It presupposes a certain interpretation of this situation, this crisis, this condition.

The beginning of a serious endeavor is always to be taken seriously. How does Montaigne begin? He begins in a dramatic, even tragic, way—he mentions a “tragic example of vengeance.” It is a matter of cities taken by assault and put to the sword, of tortures ordered by a tyrant, of being carried away by vengeance. It is a question of the threats that weigh on human life, threats that come not from nature but from human beings themselves. It is a question of the fear of death at the hands of others.

The first chapter therefore attempts to respond to the question, How shall one save one’s life? Entitled “By Diverse Means We Arrive at the Same End,” it begins thus: “The commonest way of softening the hearts of those we have offended, when, vengeance in hand, they hold us at their mercy, is by submission to move them to commiseration and pity. However, audacity and steadfastness—entirely different means—have sometimes served to produce the same effect.”⁴

Here, as suits a beginning, Montaigne begins with a commonplace of rhetoric.⁵ It is a question of persuading, is it not? Now, neither one nor the other of two opposite means of saving one’s life—submission or defiance—clearly appears as the most effective. Submission stirs compassion and therefore can save us—or not. “Audacity” incites “esteem” and can thus also save us—or not. One cannot even trust the ordinary character of human beings to prevail over their conduct in an assured way. Montaigne gives the example of Alexander the Great, “the bravest of men and one very gracious to the vanquished,” who, however, exercised cruel vengeance against Betis, who had fought against him so admirably. How are we to explain this behavior, which we would call “abnormal”? Montaigne envisages three hypotheses: (1) Alexander does not admire a bravery that he himself possess; (2) on the contrary, he was jealous or envious of Betis, not being able to suffer in someone else a boldness that he wanted to reserve to himself; (3) he was simply overcome by anger. It is impossible to choose among these hypotheses. The question is undecidable.

Thus, opposed forms of behavior can have the same effect; and the same behavior can have different causes, even opposed causes. From the very first words, therefore, Montaigne emphasizes the uncertainty and fluidity of human motives, the play, as it were, that there is between causes and effects in the human world; he stresses a certain lack of determination in human things.

Here Montaigne principally considers two motives, or two types of motives: one moves women, children, and the “vulgar”; the other prompts strong souls to act. This is one of the organizing principles of the Essays, the tension between pride and compassion, between the virtue of a vir and the virtue of homo. Commiseration does not occur without “easygoing indulgence,” even “softness”; but proud souls, those capable of “esteem,” are exposed to bouts of quick temper in keeping with the extent of their strength, as the example of Alexander attests. Montaigne notes that, as for himself, he is open to both motives, but with a natural tendency to compassion.

A reader who knows his Hegel is tempted to say that in this opening chapter, the first slice, as it were, of the Essays, we encounter something like the dialectic of master and slave. Except that there is no dialectic. The confrontation between the one who begs for his life and the one who boldly risks his life does not unleash a development, a history capable of leading to the overcoming of these two primordial dispositions. No satisfying or reassuring synthesis is announced. The two dispositions thus constitute one of the fundamental elements of the human world, but they act in a milieu that prevents them from arriving regularly or surely at their ends. In any case, it is in the tension between compassion for the similar and admiration for the different that human life is sought.

Human life seeks itself, but, someone will say, it does not succeed in finding itself because of the play and indetermination of motives about which I spoke earlier. Hence the formulations that, from the beginning, strike what will be a leitmotiv of the Essays: “Truly man is a marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating object. It is hard to found any constant and uniform judgment on him.”⁶ How to judge a world, or in a world, which appears too little solid, too uncertain, too fluid, to support a judgment? The task of man is to judge human things, but these flee from judgment. Man as the object of knowledge steals away from the knowing man. While the Greeks gave the impression that things, as it were, come toward the human mind, that they “voluntarily” come to be known, Montaigne maintains that the human mind always advances too far, that it is always in advance of things. This disequilibrium that constitutes man is the root of our errors. The human mind spontaneously, naturally, necessarily wants to engrave where there are only fleeting lines, uncertain forms, and unforeseeable metamorphoses.

The following chapter (1.2)—“Of Sadness”—confirms that human things are resistant to being engraved, or even sketched. Man is subject to extreme passions that cannot find adequate expression. Montaigne evokes that “degree of grief” that cannot be “represent[ed]”, of which misfortune Niobe transformed into a rock is the type. For these “accidents surpassing our endurance,”⁷ Montaigne principally gives examples pertaining to “grief.” But, he notes, amorous ardor, when it is extreme, sometimes engenders “the accidental failing that surprises lovers so unseasonably” and chills them “in the very lap of enjoyment.”⁸ Montaigne ends the chapter with examples of joy and shame that are so extreme that the individual—it would be better to say: the patient—dies on the spot. All these affects deprive the soul of the “liberty of its actions.” The chapter begins and ends, however, with an “I” that declares itself largely exempt from these passions.

These extreme passions give rise to as many forms of the loss of self. In these initial soundings of the human condition, marked by a funereal tone, Montaigne causes our uncertainties, our weaknesses, to come to light, rather than our capacities.

In fact, the following chapter (1.3)—“Our Feelings Reach Out beyond Us”— still concerns an affect that one can call alienating. It is a question of the concern for future things, in particular the preoccupation with burial ceremonies, with the fate of the corpse. These worries are so lively that “we are never at home, we are always beyond.”⁹

Montaigne now begins to touch explicitly on politics. First of all, he claims the liberty to judge princes after their death. This is the only way of reconciling respect for “the political order”¹⁰—the obedience due to the office of the prince, whether he be good or bad—and the freedom of judgment, without which there is no justice. Further on, in an impressive development devoted to the affair of the Arginusae,¹¹ he poses the question of the care to show to the bodies of soldiers or sailors killed in battle. He concludes that this solicitude is an “unwelcome superstition” if it leads to the loss of the fruits of victory. And in an abrupt manner that ought to make us attentive, in this chapter Montaigne makes two declarations that one must call “republican.” We have already heard the first one: “Livy says truly that the language of men brought up under royalty is always full of foolish ostentation and vain testimonies.” In the second, he affirms in his own name, although under the cover of an indignant critique of the behavior of the assembly of the people in the affair of the Arginusae, that “democratic rule” seems to him “the most natural and equitable.”¹²

The voice of Montaigne is getting more affirmative. Manly harmonics come to the fore. At the same time as he makes his first republican declarations, Montaigne begins to consider the question of death. He begins with a saying of Solon, cited by Aristotle, a saying according to which “no one should be called ‘happy’ before his death.” He has barely entered into the subject, without allowing us time to gather our wits, when he declares, as if it simply goes without saying, that to be dead is to find oneself “out[side] of being” and to have “no communication with what is.”¹³ And in this connection he cites Lucretius, the great materialistic poet, who henceforth will be his most constant companion.

Solon’s saying will furnish the theme of a later chapter, chapter 19, entitled “That Our Happiness Must Not Be Judged until after Our Death.” To be sure, in it Montaigne invokes the sad end of many great personages, including that, both recent and moving, of Mary Stuart. But his real concern is elsewhere. Solon is a philosopher. He is therefore indifferent to the accidents of fortune. What is important to him is the “resolution and assurance of an ordered soul.” And this good order of the soul allows itself to be seen, it is verified, in the trial of death: “But in the last scene, between death and ourselves, there is no more pretending; we must talk plain French, we must show what there is that is good and clean at the bottom of the pot. . . . It is the master day, the day that is judge of all the others. . . . I leave to the test [l’essai] of death the fruit of my studies.”¹⁴

Thus, death is the ultimate essay which recapitulates life. Under the accents of the Dies irae, an entirely different music is heard. If the day of death is the day of judgment, it is death that is judge and master. There is no other.

Here the two themes are interwoven that Montaigne is going to deploy and develop together in the following chapter: that of the republic as the expression of human pride and that of death as the trial and essay of one’s human quality, as the culminating and truly final experience. Moreover, starting from the end of this chapter, the two themes come together in a figure who is not named but whom one must recognize as Étienne de La Boétie. The premature death of La Boétie was “loftier,” it represented a greater accomplishment, than would have been the realization of his “ambitious and courageous designs.” Montaigne goes so far as to write: “By his fall, he went beyond the power and the fame to which he aspired by his career.”¹⁵ Neither here nor elsewhere does Montaigne specify what the “ambitious and courageous designs” of La Boétie were, to what “power” and “fame” he aspired, nor what the “great results” were that he would have been able to produce with fortune’s aid. Despite this reticence, which...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyrights
• Contents
• Translator’s Foreword
• Introduction: The Word and the Promise
• Part 1 The War of Human Beings
• Part 2 The Powers of the Word
• Part 3 The mysteries of custom
• Part 4 Life Without Law
• Notes
• Index