1) Biography:
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (28 February 1533 – 13 September 1592), also known as Lord of Montaigne, was a French Renaissance philosopher best known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. His work is notable for combining anecdotes and autobiography with intellectual insight.
During his lifetime, Montaigne was regarded as a statesman rather than an author. His tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal musings was seen as a detriment to proper style rather than an innovation, and his declaration that “I am myself the subject of my book” was seen as self-indulgent by his contemporaries. Montaigne, on the other hand, came to be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt that was emerging at the time.
In 1565, Montaigne married Françoise de la Cassaigne, most likely in an arranged marriage. She was the daughter and niece of wealthy Toulouse and Bordeaux merchants. They had six daughters, but only the second, Léonor, lived past childhood. He wrote very little about their marriage, but he did write about his daughter Léonor, “All my children die at nurse; but Léonore, our only daughter, who has escaped this misfortune, has reached the age of six and more without having been punished, the indulgence of her mother aiding, except in words, and those very gentle ones.”
In 1571, he retired from public life and moved to the Tower of the Château, his so-called “citadel,” in the Dordogne, where he virtually isolated himself from all social and family affairs. While imprisoned in his library, which housed approximately 1,500 works, he began work on his Essais (“Essays”), which was first published in 1580. Some of the most influential essays ever written can be found in his massive collection Essays.
Montaigne died of quinsy in 1592, at the age of 59, at the Château de Montaigne. The disease was the culprit in his case “brought about tongue paralysis,” which was especially difficult for someone who once stated that the most vital play of the mind is conversation. It was most important to him than any other action in life, and if he had to choose, he believed he would rather lose his sight than his hearing and voice. He requested Mass while still having all of his other faculties and died during the celebration of that Mass.
2) His essays:
Michel de Montaigne’s Essays (French: Essais) are divided into three books and 107 chapters of varying length. They were first published in the Kingdom of France and were written in Middle French. Montaigne’s stated goal in writing, publishing, and revising the Essays from about 1570 to 1592 was to record “some traits of my character and of my humors.” The Essays, which were first published in 1580, cover a wide range of subjects.
Montaigne heavily edited the Essays at various points in his life. Sometimes he would insert just one word, while at other times he would insert whole passages. Many editions mark this with letters as follows: first set of passages written 1571–1580, published 158, second set of passages written 1580–1588, published 1588 and third set of passages written 1588–1592, published 1595 (posthumously)
Some of the chapters included in these books were, “That Men by Various Ways Arrive at the Same End”, “Of Sadness or Sorrow”, “That Our Affections Carry Themselves Beyond Us”, “That the Soul Expends Its Passions Upon False Objects”, “Whether the Governor Himself Go Out to Parley”, “If the Inconstancy of Our Actions”, “Of Drunkenness”, “A Custom of the Isle of Cea”, “To-Morrow’s a New Day”, “Of Conscience”. “Of Profit and Honesty”, “Of Repentance”, “Of Three Commerces”, “Of Diversion”, “Upon Some Verses of Virgil”.
3) Main themes of his essays:
Human Nature:
Montaigne believes that people are born “by chance” and that “no one lays down a particular design for his life.” He also claims that if human nature could be easily discerned, a brave man would always be brave: he would not charge at enemy lines on the battlefield and then cry because he lost a court case, for example. As a result, Montaigne contends that human nature is transient and that no one is fixated on a particular end. Human nature, he claims, is difficult to grasp because it is constantly moving like water through a palm. He says, “The more you clutch your hand to squeeze and hold what is in its own nature flowing so much the more you lose what you would grasp and hold.” To Montaigne, human nature is difficult to comprehend.
Truth:
Montaigne says that, “There is no desire more natural than that of knowledge”. This is possibly the underlying purpose of his essays. He seeks knowledge of the world’s truth, though he rarely comes to a firm conclusion. The majority of his essays are an argument between various concepts, with no judgement on which is completely correct. It’s not that Montaigne lacks conviction in his beliefs; he does, and he expresses them frequently. However, some deeper concepts are things he does not believe man can comprehend. One difficulty he mentions in “Of Liars” is that truth is only one thing, but a lie can be a thousand things, making discerning the truth even more difficult.
Proper Behavior:
Taken as a whole, the Essays provide a framework for how a person should strive to live their best life. Montaigne provides a set of guidelines that can help a person improve as they try to navigate some of the most universal human experiences. Some of his advice is practical in nature; for example, he advises people not to purge because he believes it is very unhealthy. Some of it is more philosophical in nature. In “Of Drunkenness,” for example, he claims that all vices are the same. However, he goes on to say that drunkenness is a “gross and brutish vice,” implying that he does not believe it is appropriate for men to get drunk.
4) The concept of self in Montaigne:
Montaigne’s pursuit of the character he called Myself—”bashful, insolent; chaste, lustful; prating, silent; laborious, delicate; ingenious, heavy; melancholic, pleasant; lying, true; knowing, ignorant; liberal, covetous, and prodigal”—lasted twenty years and resulted in over a thousand pages of observation and revision that he called “essais,” taking that ordinary word and turning it into a literary occupation.
It only takes a cursory glance through the Essais to notice that the words most frequently used to describe the functions of the self. He tells us that he discusses all of the various subjects to exercise himself and to provide the reader with the opportunity to view the workings of this object on multiple levels. He is using these topics to demonstrate his esprit, judgement, and comprehension.
Michel de Montaigne does not seek to build himself. His sole mission is to reveal that which is an expression of what is hidden within. He himself observes that most of us do not live out our own selves, but rather act out what we have learned elsewhere. One of Montaigne’s best indications of the division of the human into two parts, the âme and the corps. He considers the corps and âme separately, and has even given the âme a higher value. Why? Because it is one’s own self. Surprisingly, Montaigne has almost reduced the body to the status of a mere tool, a mere shell for the âme (the self).
5) His Influence:
Montaigne’s essays were arguably the most prominent work in French philosophy until the Enlightenment because of the remarkable modernity of thought evident in them, as well as their sustained popularity. Their impact on French education and culture is still felt today. Former French President François Mitterrand was portrayed in an official portrait facing the camera, holding an open copy of the Essays in his hands. J. M. Robertson, an English journalist and politician, claimed that Montaigne’s essays had a profound influence on William Shakespeare’s plays, citing similarities in language, themes, and structures.
Montaigne influenced other Western writers as well such as Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, Montesquieu, Edmund Burke, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, Virginia Woolf, Albert Hirschman, William Hazlitt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Henry Newman, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Alexander Pushkin, Charles Darwin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan Zweig, Eric Hoffer, and Isaac Asimov.
6) His Relevance in Today’s World:
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was a 16th-century philosopher who proposed no theories, had no faith in reason, and had no desire to persuade his readers of anything. He contradicted himself, preferred specifics to generalities, embraced uncertainty, and followed his thoughts wherever they led in his massive book Essays. Was he even a philosopher? He was, in his opinion, but only in an “unpremeditated and accidental” way. He wrote about so many topics, he claimed, that his essays were bound to coincide with ancient wisdom from time to time. Others regard him as the world’s truly modern thinker, rather than just a philosopher, because he was acutely aware of his complexity and self-divergence, as he put it, he was “always double in himself.” In my opinion, he was the first and greatest philosopher of life as it is lived, and he may have the most to offer our troubled twenty-first century.
What does it mean to be human, he wondered? Why do people behave the way they do? He observed his neighbors, colleagues, and even his cat and dog, as well as looking deeply into himself. He attempted to capture what it was like to be angry, exhilarated, vain, bad-tempered, embarrassed, or lustful. Or to float in and out of consciousness, as if in a half-dream. Or to become dissatisfied with your responsibilities. Or to have feelings for someone. In a nutshell, he was a brilliant psychologist who was also a moral philosopher in the truest sense of the term. He did not tell us what we should do, but instead investigated what we actually do.
In 1580, he published the results for the first time, and his Essays quickly became a Renaissance best-seller. Subsequent editions performed even better and grew in size, as he continued to add material to old chapters while also writing new ones. The appeal has persisted throughout the centuries, owing to the fact that his investigations are not haphazard; they all center on one great question that concerns us all: how does one live? That is, how does one make wise and honorable decisions, understand oneself, act as a fully human being, treat others well, and find peace of mind? We can learn from Montaigne about coping with fears (especially the fear of death), managing questions of belief and self-doubt, relating to others, avoiding cruelty and bigotry, and paying proper attention to the experience of life as it unfolds in the modern era.
7) A Few Quotations:
“Lend yourself to others, but give yourself to yourself.” – Michel de Montaigne
“We can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge but we cannot be wise with other men’s wisdom.” – Michel de Montaigne
“A man who fears suffering is already suffering from what he fears.” – Michel de Montaigne
“Stubborn and ardent clinging to one’s opinion is the best proof of stupidity.” – Michel de Montaigne
“Ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head.” – Michel de Montaigne
“There are some defeats more triumphant than victories.” – Michel de Montaigne
“There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.” – Michel de Montaigne
“Let us permit nature to have her way. She understands her business better than we do.” – Michel de Montaigne
“A wise man never loses anything, if he has himself.” – Michel de Montaigne
“Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside equally desperate to get out.” – Michel de Montaigne