Michel de Montaigne - Essays, skepticism and free judgment

Michel de Montaigne (Michel Eyquem de Montaigne) was a French philosopher, writer and humanist considered the inventor of the personal essay genre when he published his work Essays, in 1580. In them, he wrote one of the most captivating and intimate self-portraits ever made, along with the of Saint Augustine and of Rousseau. He was influenced by several philosophical currents, especially by renaissance humanism.

Montaigne was born at the Chateau de Montaigne in Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne in the Bordeaux region of France. All his family spoke to him only in Latin. The boy did not learn French until he was six years old, when he was admitted to the Collège de Guyenne, in Bordeaux. It is unclear where or whether Montaigne studied law. The only thing that is known for sure is that his father bought him an office in the Court of Périgueux.

Historical context

Living in the second half of the sixteenth century, Montaigne witnessed the decline of the intellectual optimism that marked the renaissance. The Calvinist Reformation closely followed by religious persecution and the Wars of Religion (1562-1598) shook the immense human possibilities arising from the discoveries of New World travelers, the rediscovery of classical antiquity and the opening of academic horizons through the works of humanists. These conflicts were in fact political and civil wars, as well as religious ones, marked by great excesses of fanaticism and cruelty.

The ideas of Michel de Montaigne

Under the influence of his friend La Boétie, the philosopher adopts the stoic pretension of reaching the absolute truth. However, his spirit lives more with doubt, and the stoic experience certainly marked, forever, Montaigne's break with any idea of absolute truth. Stoicism was a philosophical school and doctrine that emerged in Ancient Greece, which valued fidelity to knowledge and focus on everything that can be controlled only by the person himself, despising all types of external feelings, such as passion and extreme desires.

Montaigne was also seduced by the philosophers of skepticism, a doctrine according to which the human spirit cannot reach any certainty about the truth, which results in an intellectual procedure of permanent doubt and the abdication of a metaphysical, religious, or absolute understanding of reality. According to these philosophers, if man knows nothing about himself, how can he know so much about the world and about God and his will? Doubt is, for Montaigne, a weapon against religious fanaticism.

Education for understanding and awareness

Montaigne believed that education should create human beings oriented towards investigation and conclusions, while they exercise the mind for a critical positioning of the individual. In the words of the philosopher: we only take care of filling the memory, and we leave the understanding and conscience empty. Teaching should be linked to empiricism, a doctrine according to which all knowledge comes only from experience, limited to what can be captured from the external world, through the senses, or from the subjective world, through introspection, that is, through practical experiences.

The memorization scheme and the use of books, based on the bookish culture of the renaissance, would keep students away from knowledge. In the bookish culture, students would not learn quickly and would not have the practice to solve various issues of paramount importance, linked to human development and morals.

In the field of education, the child's personality must be respected to form an honest man capable of reflecting on his own. This man should seek dialogue with others, having a sense of relativity about all things. Thus, he will be able to adapt to the society where he will have to live in harmony with other men and with the world. He will be a free spirit and free from beliefs and superstitions.

Skepticism combined with the desire for truth

Bearing in mind the age of dissimulation, corruption, violence, and hypocrisy in which he lived, it is not surprising that the starting point of the Essays is situated in negativity, the negativity of Montaigne's recognition of the rule of appearances and the loss of connection with truth of being.

Montaigne's skepticism is reflected in the French title of his work, Essais, or Attempts, which implies, not a transmission of proven knowledge or confident opinion, but a trial-and-error project. Neither a reference to an established genre nor an indication of a necessary internal unity and structure within the work. The title indicates an intellectual attitude of questioning and continual evaluation.

Their skepticism does not preclude belief in the existence of truth but constitutes a defense against the danger of locating it in false, unexamined, externally imposed notions. This leads to a rejection of commonly accepted ideas and a deep distrust of generalizations and abstractions; it also shows the way to an exploration of the only realm that promises certainty: that of concrete phenomena, and most importantly, the basic phenomenon of your own “I" body and mind.

This self, with all its imperfections, constitutes the only possible place where the search for truth can begin, and that is why Montaigne does not fail to affirm that I am myself the subject of my book. He discovers that his identity, his “master form” as he calls it, cannot be defined in simple terms as a constant and stable self, as it is something mutable and fragmented, and that the appreciation and acceptance of these traits is the only guarantee of authenticity and integrity, the only way to remain true to the truth of your being and your nature and not to strange appearances.

However, despite his insistence that the self-retain its freedom from outside influences and the tyranny of imposed custom and opinion, Montaigne believes in the value of going beyond the self. In fact, throughout his writings, as he did in his private and public life, he manifests the need to maintain links with the world of other people and events.

For this necessary coming and going between the interiority of oneself and the exteriority of the world, he uses the image of the living room and the bedroom at the back: the human being has a room facing the street, where he meets and interacts, and a bedroom for the funds. He must always retreat to the back room of the more private self, where he can reaffirm the freedom and strength of inner identity and reflect on the vagaries of experience.

Essay as a new literary genre

In March 1580, Michel de Montaigne published the first edition of Essays, consisting of two books divided into ninety-four chapters. A second edition was published in 1582, and a third appeared in 1588. His book became one of the most important and influential works of the renaissance and had a profound influence on European moral thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

The work established the essay as a new literary genre, where the writer makes personal and subjective reflections on various themes, including religion, education, friendship, love, freedom, war, etc.

Conceptually, the Essays reflect the classical values of skeptical, stoic, and epicurean currents in Hellenistic philosophy. Epicureanism was the philosophical school created by Epicurus of Samos in the mid-fourth century BC. In it, he states that, to reach a state of complete freedom, tranquility and liberation from fear, the individual must remain in search of moderate pleasures.

He gave it that name because the work was neither science nor literature, just individual opinions. Gathered in three volumes, it was the only work published by him that is considered a milestone for the birth of the personal essay genre. The articles that deserve mention are: On Cannibals, On Vanity, On Friendship, On Books and Travel Journal.

Western Europe more barbarian than New World natives

Montaigne extends his curiosity about others to the inhabitants of the New World, whom he came to know through his keen interest in oral and written travel accounts and through his encounter, in 1562, with three Brazilian Indians whom the explorer Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon brought back to France.

Setting an example of relativism and cultural tolerance he finds these people, in fidelity to nature itself and in cultural and personal dignity and sense of beauty, far superior to the inhabitants of Western Europe who, in the conquests of the New World and in their own internal wars, proved to be the true barbarians. The suffering and humiliation imposed on the natives of the New World by their conquerors provoked their indignation and compassion.

Completely original meditation on yourself

Although he was a loyal, if not fervent, Roman Catholic, Montaigne distrusted all human pretensions to knowledge of a spiritual experience that is not linked to a concretely lived reality. He refused to speculate on a transcendence that is beyond human knowledge, believing in God but refusing to invoke him in necessarily presumptuous and reductive ways.

Despite knowing the classical philosophers, his ideas spring less from their teachings than from a completely original meditation on himself, which he extends to a description of the human being and an ethic of authenticity, self-acceptance, and tolerance. The Essays are the record of his thoughts, presented not in artificially organized stages, but as they occurred and were repeated in different forms throughout his thinking and writing activity.

The Essays embody a profound skepticism regarding human beings' dangerously inflated pretensions to knowledge and certainty, but they also assert that there is no greater achievement than the capacity to accept one's own being without contempt or illusion, in the full realization of its limitations and of your wealth.

Montaigne Readers

Not all her contemporaries echoed the enthusiasm of Marie de Gournay, who fainted with excitement on her first reading of the Essays. She recognized in the book all the strength of an unusual mind revealing itself, but most intellectuals of the period preferred to find in Montaigne a safe reincarnation of stoicism.

Montaigne continues to be studied in all aspects of his text by many scholars and to be read by people from all corners of the earth. In an age that can seem as violent and absurd as his own, his refusal of bigotry and bigotry and his lucid awareness of the human potential for destruction, along with his belief in the human capacity for self-evaluation, honesty and compassion, appeal as convincingly as ever. for many who find in him a guide and a friend.