Pierre Manent: Montaigne: Life Without Law. Paul Seaton translation. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020 [2014].
By design congenial and elusive, Montaigne invites everyone into his book, whether as characters or as readers. The resulting confusion begs for clarification; the French political philosopher Pierre Manent carefully traces the principal twists and turns of Montaigne’s argument. [1]
After his introduction, Manent divides his book into four parts, nine chapters, thirty-three sections. Thirty-three is no insignificant number in Christian thought; its significance for Montaigne’s Essais will become evident in Manent’s exegesis. Part One is titled, “The War of Human Beings”; Part Two, “The Powers of the Word”; Part Three, “The Mysteries of Custom”; Part Four, “Life Without Law.” Thomas Hobbes would later claim that life without law must be war, but Montaigne demurs in advance, moving from death-dealing war to peaceful, life-preserving liberty through his claims about verbal power and the complexities of customs.
Manent begins where he is, in Europe, currently in the grips of a “malaise,” namely, “lost confidence in our own powers.” This loss of confidence has arisen because although now “in a profound peace, in complete liberty, in a prosperity that is still enviable,” Europeans don’t know what to do with themselves. Having relieved man’s precarious state in nature, having becoming more or less masters and possessors of nature, having won the freedom to pursue happiness, having “aimed at changing the very order of human things” in reality, not imagination, radically reforming human life in politics, religion, and “the order of knowledge,” Europeans cannot even account for how they did those things, let alone what they should do next.
Manent identifies the sources of this transformation of human life in a reform of Christianity, Protestantism, and a reform of philosophy, Machiavellianism. The Protestant Reformation collapsed the distance between God and man by the doctrine of sola Scriptura, the insistence of understanding the Bible directly by each Christian, unmediated by the interpretation by Catholic Church theologians, members of a priestly class, “human intermediaries who confiscate or disfigure” Scriptural truth. Calvin held the truths of Scripture to be self-evident, writing that “Scripture shows no less evidence of its truth than black or white do of their colors, or sweet or bitter things of their taste.” He intends this as a liberation, a liberation from ‘priestcraft.’ “Faith in the saving God fins its certification in the certainty of the believer’s personal salvation.” This isn’t liberation for liberation’s sake but liberation for salvation’s sake; man’s soul thinks God’s word directly. In philosophy, Machiavelli does this too, with his modern ‘state’ (lo Stato), which cuts out the aristocrats of the feudal state, leaving the people either ruled directly by one man, the prince, or electing its representatives to rule on its behalf, again without intermediaries. In effecting this transformation, Machiavelli “undertakes to bring to light what he calls the effectual truth of political things, what one could call the art or logic of action when it is not shackled or falsified by any word, Christian or other.” Thus, “while Luther and Calvin aim to suppress the obstacles that are placed between Christians and the Word of God,” a transformation of the regime of God, His Church, “Machiavelli aims to suppress the obstacles placed between the prince, or the political agent, and the founding, or refounding, action that Europe needs.” Both decry what Manent calls the “play” seen in Catholicism, by which he means not frolic but indeterminacy caused by a regime “formed of elements that need one another,” a sort of tensile structure with no “incontestable foundation”—or, perhaps more precisely, since the Catholic Church emphasizes Peter as the rock upon which Christ founded His Church, with Christ evidently the Rock upon which that rock itself rests, a set of institutional “elements” that prevent the hard surface of rule from abrading those it rules.
The difficulty in modernity comes when the Rock of Christ, interpreted by individual Christians, grinds against those Christians, or is used by Christians to grind one another; it also comes when lo Stato grinds against its subjects, as in absolute monarchy, or is used by citizens to grind one another, as in republican factionalism. Without intermediary men and institutions to soften, to moderate, the exigencies of rule, modern life leaves moderns with the stark choice of submission or rebellion. Modern words and modern actions, intended to be coordinated, seldom are. “We have never arrived at finding a stable formula, a stable arrangement, of separation and union between words and actions,” as “our effort to overcome the Catholic disorder” has never “allowed us to find repose in an assured order and a lasting equilibrium.” We don’t exactly live in a condition of permanent revolution,” as Machiavelli’s modern state could sometimes serve as a protective carapace for Protestant and Catholic civil society, but that carapace in fact consists of men and the institutions men have made, not the sturdy elements of a tortoise shell; lo Stato protects, when it protects, by acting, and its actions can be made to serve the States’ men instead of the persons they are charged to protect.
What is more, the modern dichotomy between State and civil society can easily generate many who are neither politically ambitious nor religiously devout. “How are those going to go about their lives, who, lacking political ambition and little concerned with piety, nonetheless have to lead their lives?” What can Machiavelli say to those uninterested in “the salvation of the city”? What can Calvin say to those uninterested in the salvation of their soul? Other than what they do say, which in both cases is merely exhortative, commands to wake up and smell the coffee? Who would, or could, “extend the reforming gesture” of modernity “to embrace the anecdotes of ordinary life and the little secrets of private life”? Manent has the answer: Michel de Montaigne, “a reformer no less audacious than Machiavelli or Calvin,” but decidedly less forthright in his manner.
To help his readers, especially his European readers, understand themselves, Manent proceeds understandably. “The War of Human Beings” consists of two chapters: “To Save One’s Life” (an activity even war-ready General Patton commended to his troops) and “To Compare Oneself,” an activity that very often leads to strife, if not necessarily to war. “The Powers of the Word” also consists of two chapters: “From Rhetoric to Literature,” which compares and contrasts ancient writing to Montaignian writing, and “The Word and Death,” which compares and the Word, the Word of God, with its teaching about death, to Montaigne’s teaching about death. “The Mysteries of Customs” consists of three chapters: the central chapter of the book, “A New World,” showing how, in Montaigne’s estimation, the European discovery of America required a change in philosophy, “Commanded Reason,” on a new kind of reasoning, one that eschews lawgiving as command, and “Three Conditions of Human Beings,” a classification of the elements of human society with which Montaigne replaces Plato’s three classes in the Republic. “Life Without Laws” consists of two chapters: “Governed Human Beings,” human beings under the sway of “commanded” reason, and “Nature and Truth,” which turn out not to be simply the same thing.
In his first chapter, addressing the difficulty of saving one’s life under conditions of war (and indeed, Montaigne’s Europe then writhed in uncompromising religio-political wars between Catholics and Protestants), Montaigne diagnoses the malaise very much in the way Machiavelli does, as a split between words and actions, between “supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct.” Both would “break with the fatal idealizing tendency of the human word.” Unlike Machiavelli, however, who seldom writes of himself, Montaigne looks to his own soul or ‘self,’ inviting his readers to do the same, in locating the cause of the malaise. Machiavelli wants to tell his readers how to think and what to do; courteous, civil, frank Montaigne prefers to attract. One can indeed save oneself, but sometimes safety may result from acts of vengeance, audaciously and even fiercely made, and sometimes from acts of submission to those who have us at their mercy, a submission that may arouse their compassion. If “opposed forms of behavior can have the same effect, then there is “uncertainty and fluidity” in “human motives”; the “play” between causes and effects recalls the play in the Catholic Church regime, but as readily without as with the Church. There are, then, two “motives” for human action ‘in play’ in human life: pride and compassion, the sentiment of “strong souls,” “proud souls,” and the sentiment of “women, children, and the ‘vulgar,'” the commoners. Although this resembles Hegel’s master-slave dichotomy, Manent is careful to remark that “there is no dialectic” between them, and therefore no “satisfying or reassuring synthesis” to be had. These “two dispositions” persist, “prevent[ing] them from arriving regularly or surely at their ends.” Man, Montaigne writes in his inimitable phrasing, is “an undulating object.” His problem is that his mind seeks to find a permanent resolution to his permanent, uneasy “condition.” “The human mind spontaneously, naturally, necessarily wants to engrave where there are only fleeting lines, uncertain forms, and unforeseeable metamorphoses.” They want to reform the modes and orders of human life, then fix those reforms in place. Better to leave some play, and for this reason Montaigne inclines toward republicanism more than monarchy, without attempting imprudently to revolutionize politically the monarchies of his time. That would be too direct, too unsubtle, insufficiently attentive to the effectual truth of things.
“At the same time as he makes his first republican declarations, Montaigne begins to consider the question of death.” What is the connection? One might hastily recall that the death of one monarch can readily result in a crisis of succession, a crisis in the regime, whereas the death of one’s elected representative brings only a new election, a new representative freely chosen by those he will contribute to governing. But Montaigne doesn’t intend to stay on the level of politics. Gravediggers go beneath the surface, and so will he, considering death itself. Death takes each individual “out[side] of being,” he writes with “no communication with what is,” as Lucretius, “the great materialistic poet,” affirms. The moment of death, the act of dying is a sort of trial, “the ultimate essay which recapitulates life” because “in the last scene, between death and ourselves, there is no more pretending”; your soul can face its severance from being with steadfastness or not. If the republican regime expresses “human pride,” self-confidence of the people in their ability to rule themselves, death tries that pride in the individual rather than in that collection of individuals which constitutes a people. Later on, Montaigne will eulogize his friend, the proud republican Étienne de La Boétie, who died prematurely. As “for himself,” Montaigne “only proposes to die ‘quietly and insensibly,'” humbly within the civil society of the modern state, without fanfare. At the same time, he is a republican, if not for the proud reasons of most republicans. In the trial of death, “the day of judgment, it is death that is judge and master. There is no other.” But what of God, the supreme Judge? The problem is that to meet death with pride is futile; the prideful, futile response to impending death is anger; anger is the passion of monarchic presumption, which in its pride would take its vengeance against Fortune itself; the ultimate monarch, God, results from “the unruliness of our mind.” Partisans of monarchy expect the monarch to stave off their deaths. That isn’t going to happen, permanently; in the face of death, we are all republicans, all equal not in the eyes of a monarchic god but in the conditions of leveling nature. Prideful republicanism is a contradiction in terms. Montaigne is a new kind of republican.
He is a republican who, like ordinary, unambitious and not-so-pious folk prefers to “retreat in view of repose,” abandoning public life as a judge to become “the spectator of his own mind,” writing a new kind of book that reports the results of that spectating with “frankness,” quite unlike “contemporaries depraved by the vice of dissimulation,” including self-deception, and thereby able “to attain an unprecedented degree of candor and truth about oneself, and thus about human life.” The humble, unambitious, unassuming private man thus entertains a supreme intellectual and literary ambition, answering “the question that, in short, is the first question of philosophy, the question of nature,” not only or even primarily by looking ‘out’ at other men (although he will do that, and in extraordinarily wide-ranging manner) but at himself. “How does our nature, reduced to its own forces, arrive at the degree of being, or rather of movement, that renders it happy?” Montaigne’s introspection discovers a being happily open to accident, to “chance occasions,” which are “the grace [!] that actualizes, completes, and perfects his nature”; “I find myself more by chance encounters than by searching my judgment.” Such passivity requires a certain mental attitude, one suggested by the title of his essay, “That the taste of Good and Evil Depends in Large Part on the Opinion We Have of Them.” Greek philosophers commended the “perfection” of human nature in body and soul, bringing the nature of individual and polis to its natural telos, purpose, ‘end.’ Christians would open our souls to divine grace, our nature having been “wounded by sin” against God. For his part, “Montaigne envisages neither perfection nor healing, only a ‘relief.'” Nor will this be Bacon’s way of relieving man’s estate through active experimentation, torturing Nature to compel her to reveal her secrets. “For Montaigne, nature is not an enemy to defeat,” nor is Fortuna such an enemy, as she is for Machiavelli; nature is “a friend whose gentle and persuasive voice one needs to know how to listen to,” even as Fortuna’s buffetings reveal the nature of oneself.
Not war but caution should inform our dealings with nature and other accidental forces. After all, the set of opinions that prevail in the civil society into which accident has thrown us can take us so far as to induce us to sacrifice life itself. Opinion gives the soul its form, its determination, and the multiplicity of opinions works on the plasticity of the soul, which has the “capacity to take on a thousand forms, a thousand attitudes, a thousand folds.” This is true of our opinion of death, which is what makes death feared. The opinion of St. Augustine, for example, who teaches that “nothing makes death an evil, except what follows it,” makes of death more than it is, “the movement of an instant.” This republican would refrain from shouting, ‘Liberty or death!’ Beginning with the Apostle Paul, Christians have distrusted philosophy, but Montaigne writes that “we do not escape philosophy by stressing immoderately the sharpness of pain and the weakness of man.” “To Philosophize Is to Learn to Die,” Montaigne proclaims in the title of Book I, chapter 20, which Manent calls his “Marseillaise of the philosopher.” Montaigne there identifies “the three great parameters” of human life wherein lies “the problem of human life.” They are virtue, pleasure, and death. Death is unavoidable; those who give it no thought (and many do not) are stupid and blind. That being so, Montaigne writes, “let us rid it of its strangeness, come to know it, get used to it,” first by meditating upon it beforehand, realizing that since life has an exit you can live it with “interior freedom,” freedom of mind from that indubitable physical necessity. Enjoy life with “soft tranquility,” quailing not at the prospect of losing it. Whereas the ancient philosophers had said, with King Lear, the ripeness is all, the Montaignian philosopher says, with Hamlet, the readiness is all. “We must always be booted and ready to go.” As for Christianity, which also commends readiness while promising ripeness in the life to come after death, the problem is that “the relationship to others, the concern for others, places us in their dependence, and it is because we see ourselves by their eyes that our own life appears to us as a ‘whole’ susceptible of being lost, and this loss then as a terrible misfortune,” one that only God can succor. Better to stay “entirely in oneself, “delivered from that reflection which causes us to consider our being from the outside,” from the opinions of others, including the opinions of those who tell us that God’s opinion, the ultimate, the final opinion, must rule us. Life is “something that by its nature must be lost,” Montaigne observes. “To the alternative between the disdain for death” of the ancients “and the fear of death” of the Christians, “Montaigne substitutes an adhesion to one’s own being that is so serious and affectionate that death comes to lose itself, quite amicably, in a life that is naturally ‘losable.'” Neither disdain nor fear but nonchalance, that is the answer to Hamlet’s future question about being and not-being. Nature itself prepares us for our own natural ‘end.’ Sickness “makes us lose the taste for life and thus detaches us from it,” as does the gradual decline attendant upon old age. “Neither a trial,” as for Socrates, “nor a punishment,” as for Christians, death “is a part of you.”
Since death is but a moment, with only non-being to follow, how shall one live? Human beings tend to live in a state of war, but not usually the violent war that Hobbes fears, making of violent death a hobgoblin that replaces the demons of Hell. Here as in the face of death, imagination too often rules; “Most people live under the empire of the imagination,” especially “in religious matters” and in “sexual matters.” (“How many men owe their sexual fiascos to the vehemence of their imagination!”) Imagination’s empire is even “stronger than nature,” at least in any given moment, producing or conquering male impotence, for example. But what are its real limits. What imaginings are true? Which ones are possibly true? Imaginings can be doubted, so much so that “on the one hand [man] belies, or pretends to believe, everything,” even things counter to nature, miracles; “on the other, [man] believes almost nothing.” The Bible presents itself as a history, just as Plutarch presents his “parallel lives.” What is Montaigne’s “epistemology of history,” his means of separating true accounts from false?
Histories, he contends, are best written by “eyewitnesses,” but especially eyewitnesses who were in command of the action, the ones who exhibit the prudence a surviving commander must have had. Such men were “not rare in pagan antiquity” (Xenophon, Thucydides, Julius Caesar, others), but “the moderns do not have the equivalent” of such men. In bringing the examples of past and present men and women into his book, in writing history, but as an eyewitness mostly to himself, Montaigne “initially receives all the testimonies, all the exempla, without any effort at discrimination.” That is, he acts as the judge he had been, taking testimony. He can claim to be an impartial judge because he has lived “the life of a man whose actions do not merit being recounted, the life of a man whose only ambition is to live advisedly.” Writing history “not only requires the fidelity of witnesses but also the freedom of judgments,” which “depends on the person of the historian” and “the political regime” in which he lives. Montaigne’s judgments manifestly diverge from the prevalent, authorized opinions of his regime, but “he also knows that there is no common life,” no regime, no state, “without authoritative opinions.” His frankness about himself accordingly will not be matched by frankness about his opinions, his judgments, of others. That is, to write good history, one must be among the very few judicious men of his generation, living in a regime that is also rare, a “republic” that is less democratic than aristocratic. “The modern scientific method, as it were, democratizes historical knowledge—anyone can write history as long as he follows the rules of method.” But Montaigne is no Cartesian, among the moderns; in his eyes, technique can never substitute for sound judgment. Good judgment in turn requires sober introspection and observation, enabling the historian to “grasp in the system of human motives the one or ones that are pertinent to the case under consideration,” a task impossible “without going through the gamut of motives that are not only present, but active, in our own soul.” And this is a reciprocal process: “it is the effort of others, living or dead, that we penetrate further into our own motives.” “To write history, to read history, is to compare oneself.”
More generally, Montaigne regards comparison as “the most visible mainspring or affect of human beings, and, at the same time, the most secret.” We compare ourselves with other individuals, our social class with other classes, and not only consciously so. The sentiments aroused by these comparisons—including “love, hate, admiration, disdain, envy”—are seldom simple. They mix. And we also compare ourselves to ourselves, in our happiness and our misery, our “elevation and abasement.” “It is the hesitation, or oscillation, between the love and hatred of others, on one hand, and the elevation and abasement of self, on the other, that is at the source of our action and of that continuous interior movement that we call ‘life.'” Pascal, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Hegel all see this, but not as Montaigne does. Pascal finds sinful pride and the self-hatred that can lead to humility, with the grace of God, the hatred of our enemies transfigured by grace to agape; Hobbes finds in our comparisons with others only a war of all against all; Rousseau finds in civil society only pernicious comparisons; Hegel finds the dialectic of master and slave. Montaigne “does not aim at a peace accomplished in another city, or another world,” by the grace of Christ; he “does not envisage the construction of a new political instrument capable of imposing peace on proud and quarrelsome human beings”; he does not recommend arranging political institutions, including education, aimed at reducing “as much as possible the role of imitation and admiration in the formation of the soul”; and, as mentioned, he does not envisage the dialectical overcoming of the human condition in the course of history. Against all of these future rivals, “Montaigne not only accepts the human encounter but desires and seeks it,” with “an open face,” with good-humored frankness. He is the French charmer among philosophers. “With Montaigne, admiration is the desire to admire and, inseparably, the desire to be a friend.” He is the most congenial of moderns.
He can offer himself to others because he guards his frankness by carefully separating admiration and imitation. We tend to attempt to imitate those we admire. Montaigne never does, and so spares himself from the pangs of love and the resentment envy engenders. “Montaigne experiences no desire to become other than he is”; by his account, “he simply developed according to nature, which is to say his nature” to become “an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher!” Although “comparison is the soul of the Essays,” he remains “so calm and confident in his own form that he considers the other forms of life with a gaze that is free of all rivalry,” whether viewing the way of life of Alcibiades or a Capuchin friar. He thereby gives himself the freedom to admire both. Socrates, who “teaches us to walk ‘with a gentle and ordinary step,'” ready to converse with anyone, ‘high’ or ‘low,’ about anything, ‘high’ or ‘low,’ is “the man who is most worthy of being known.” Socrates’ practice of dialogue becomes Montaigne’s practice of “conférance” or “verbal jousting,” whether ‘in person’ or while reading. This, too, is a form of comparison, with the risks attendant upon comparison. “The wellsprings of war, in any case of quarreling and enmity, are here put at the service of the search for truth, but one always risks being carried away by anger, embracing the quarrel for its own sake, and abandoning oneself to hostility while forgetting the truth.” With his lively sense of sin, Pascal denies that such a thing can be, that human beings can “quiet” their “self-love” long enough to seek truth by their own powers. They need the more radical “healing” only God can gracefully provide. Montaigne denies that there can be any such healing, or that there needs to be. Whether in religion or philosophy, there is no use of standards set too high for human achievement. Christian repentance as commended by Pacal makes a futile comparison, a comparison of “the life that is really led with a better life that it images,” substituting the latter from the former. But the “master form” of each individual never really overcomes itself, whatever Christians may believe of themselves and their God. This is Montaigne’s decidedly un-Pascalian version of humility.
There is more. Christian humility and repentance, “the complete healing of evil,” would entail “the destruction of our nature.” Transformed by the grace of the Christian God, we would no longer be ourselves, our master forms having been shattered. “To propose a human life delivered from evil is to give oneself a task that is not only impossible to fulfill but finally is more corrupting than truly reforming” because us draws us away from what we can do to ameliorate our destructive passions by ‘inspiring’ us to chase rainbows. What goes for Christianity, Manent adds, also goes for Rousseau; Montaigne would have viewed the malign effects of Rousseau on the Jacobins with unsurprise. For himself, he prefers to excuse himself and others rather than to accuse them, prefers “the laughing humor” of Democritus to the “tears” of Heraclitus (or of Jesus, or of Rousseau). “Our own peculiar condition is that we are as fit to be laughed at as able to laugh.” Why not admit that, and laugh together? Why not, in Montaigne’s words, “serve life according to itself,” rather than according to any ideal, any god, beyond human life? “What, in truth, is nonchalance, if not an effort, made at each instant, to prefer our life, or our being, to ourselves,” those selves that succumb to the charms of “the high aims of philosophy and theology,” aims that only “stir up the human presumption of which they themselves are the expression”?
Reasoned expression is one of “the powers of the word,” the title of Manent’s Part Two. “The task that Montaigne gave himself of ‘serving life according to itself’ requires a new instrument, that is, a new word, or a new modality of the word.” In a word, he will replace poetry (its tragedy imitating “the actions of persons of high worth, its comedy imitating “the actions of persons who are inferior to us”) with down-to-earth prose, the kind of writing that looks you straight in the eye. He will replace ancient rhetoric—praising, blaming, defending, condemning rhetoric—whose supreme practitioner in antiquity was Cicero, with “the modern word,” the “literary word.” Cicero talks too much, mistakes his words for actions, lacking good judgment, that indispensable Montaignian virtue. For a rhetorician to assume that his saying something will somehow make it so manifests not prudence but vanity. [2] The smart Roman republican was terse Cato. Even Caesar, a man of “pestilential ambition” who wrecked the republic, is to be preferred over Cicero, a man of “ambitious vanity.” “Rhetorical inflation measures the corruption of republics.” [3] Montaigne would advance the republican cause, discreetly, in monarchic modern Europe, by writing a work of “literature,” “the contrary of eloquence.” “He defines himself as one who says the most in the fewest words,” an extraordinary claim from the author of such a long book, unless that author has some very extraordinary thoughts to hint at. “Montaigne describes himself as the antitype of Cicero, as the one who is capable of saying the most things without saying a word,” one who “disdain[s] to speak in order to provoke his reader to think and, eventually, to speak”; after all, the true republican citizen thinks and speaks for himself, stands intellectually and morally on his own two feet, unassisted by patrons, unbowed by mobs. Hitherto, republicanism has exhibited mostly vanity: “So many words for so few actions!” It cries out for ‘executive’ correction and is exceedingly fortunate on those rare occasions when it gets a Cato instead of a Caesar, a de Gaulle instead of a Napoleon (whether the First or, more commonly, the Third). “The Essays deliver republican candor from the folds and the heaviness of the toga.”
Cicero talked too much because he “was torn between action,” which says nothing, “and philosophy,” which says much, even if at times by speaking or writing no words in ways that draw others into thought. “Cicero brings to his retirement the manners of the orator, while he brings to the forum…the erudition and subtleties of philosophy, or the man of leisure.” His private letters read like orations, his public speeches like treatises. A man who attempts to convey philosophic teachings to unphilosophic minds may well end up going on and on and on, explaining. Montaigne’s public word, published as essays, as attempts at understanding, “cuts every tie with the eloquent word of the forum” with its humorous self-examination and self-mockery. In this, he recurs somewhat to the Socratic commendation of self-knowledge, the knowledge “essential to the knowledge of the subject of his study, which is man.” Man’s nature, however, does not open itself to sweeping, general statements, to ‘ideas,’ to Platonic ‘forms’ about ‘Man.’ Each individual man has his own “natural form.” Manent judges this “intention,” “project,” “design” of Montaigne to be “unique.” The unique individual man offers his readers a unique book, a book in which he claims not exactly to be good in the grand sense but rather to be human—excusable and, as our own contemporaries say, ‘relatable.’ Unlike Socrates, who learns about himself by talking with others, or a Christian, who learns about himself by talking with God, Montaigne learns about himself directly, through introspection. “I roll about in myself.” If modernity distinguishes itself from all that went before it by its individualism, Montaigne is about as modern as it gets. For him, “philosophy is nothing more than the attestation of the experience the individual nature makes of itself.” The individual’s master form can only be distorted by reference to a general form, the idea of human nature, or of the perfect Person, the holy God. Since “his ideas draw their force from Montaigne’s nature,” not from themselves, and not from nature ‘at large,” they “cannot be the support of a vigorous dialectical procedure,” as in Socrates or Xenophon. Montaigne distrusts dialectic; like rhetoricians, dialecticians talk too much, fail to get to the core of the matter—which really is matter, and therefore unamenable to understanding by abstraction, with ideas. “The human world contains an opacity impenetrable to reason.”
On politics, then, it makes sense that he “develops his social and political thought most completely” in a chapter titled “Of Vanity,” which Manent treats in the nineteenth, central, of his thirty-three sections. No imagined republics for Montaigne, any more than for Machiavelli, with whom he shares the judgment that “the dialectical quest for ‘the best form of society,’ or the best republic or principality, is a vain exercise that does not aid us in orienting ourselves and acting judiciously in the political order.” Necessity is properly the mother of human invention, and especially of that political invention, the modern state. But Machiavelli wrote in a world in which there were no real modern states; accordingly, he “calls for a redoubling of hope and activity” in order to achieve such states, political conditions in which men ‘of’ the state, statesmen, will no longer be distracted by chimerical ideals. Montaigne, who wrote in a Europe in which the modern state now loomed large, “resolutely chose passivity.” The philosopher now needs to mull things over in the privacy of his mind, requires independence from the forces of custom that assault that mind from ‘outside’ itself.
This mind is not, however and decidedly, a crabbed, closed-in thing. It is accompanied by what Montaigne calls a “generous heart.” Manent now undertakes his own exercise of comparison, setting génerosité next to Aristotle’s megalopsychia. Greatness of soul, magnanimity, “contains a claim of superiority, which is translated in the resolution to speak the truth despite opinion.” The great-souled man is frank in the way of the ancients, the public way, at best the way of vigorous civic action; “magnanimity is an eminent virtue of the acting man,” the citizen. But while the magnanimous man speaks and acts, Montaigne’s generous man judges and speaks. By subtracting from generosity “everything that concerns action and the honors due to noble actions,” which the magnanimous man forthrightly claims, “Montaigne profoundly changes the notion of magnanimity.” The generous man aims not at the goodness that excels that of all others but at the goodness that is humanness, the goodness according to which each unique individual, with his own “master form,” may be judged, humanely. Montaigne inaugurates a moral atmosphere in which we judge not “according to the opposition between good and evil, good and bad, but according to the opposition between human and inhuman.” To err is human and so is to forgive; one need not repent, being ‘only human,’ but one does need to be human rather than angry, presumptuous, cruel. One cannot repent and expect forgiveness for inhumanity; it is “inexcusable.” For the commission of inhumanity, the judging word is irrevocable.
Whether for the Socratic philosopher or the Christian, the word of judgment becomes final upon death. For Socrates, “death appears as an accidental interruption of the conversation concerning wisdom.” Wisdom, and the dialogue concerning it, philosophy, will continue after Socrates the man dies. And although as a Christian, Pascal denies that “a simply theoretical life” is anything more than “an illusion of pride,” his “wager” shows that he retains the Socratic insistence on the attainability of eternity, an even greater eternity than the questionable, self-questioning eternity of philosophic life. Since God either is or is not, and “reason cannot decide” which, “you must wager,” since not-wagering is itself a wager, a wager “that God is not.” The only reasonable wager is to bet that God is, inasmuch as if you’re right you win big or at worst lose nothing and if you lose you lose big. Cheerful Socrates, Pascal sees, “ignores the full range of possibilities,” ignores the possibility of an afterlife that is “infinitely unhappy.”
Montaigne also chooses, according to his own ineluctable natural form. (Calvin would call this “predestination,” except that Montaigne does not think that an omnipotent and all-wise God planned it. If he did meet God in the afterlife, he would simply claim his sin was venial, impossible for him not to commit.) Montaigne proposes a third kind of life, a “natural” life “which does not know the fear of death because death does not even come to its awareness,” rather as a peasant who has never been preached to might think, or as an animal thinks, having no “faculty of imagining or inferring death.” That is, he opposes the fear of death neither by reasoning nor by faithfulness but by “experience.” In life, we only have analogies with death: injury, old age (a sort of gradual, creeping death), and unconsciousness (Montaigne once fell off his horse and hit his head, even as Rousseau got knocked unconscious by a Great Dane). Such bouleversements never change your “natural form.” Unconsciousness, for example, only renders us entirely passive, whereas to “convert,” to turn the soul around to philosophy or to religion requires activity. Montaigne “tells us that he has not been the witness of any conversion that seemed real or effective to him.” Converts “forget that they have a master form that will always end by prevailing.” They will always revert to what they are, passively, by nature and not by choice. To be sure, “there is an enjoyment on the plane of humanity which requires, as such, effort, attention, vigilance,” a “voluntary undoing of human ties, which are necessarily bonds of anxiety.” Contra Aristotle, there is “a science of the individual,” a “new science, the science of the subject.” But it teaches that passivity, not activity, is at the core of each of us, that we may therefore safely await death as life’s inevitable finale. On the deepest level of human life, you can indeed, must indeed, ‘not choose.’ The man on horseback commands; in falling off his horse, Montaigne relinquished command, relinquished the kind of active reason that commands.
As Montaigne has already remarked, judgment often finds itself impeded. Manent turns in Part Three to “The Mysteries of Custom,” beginning with his fifth, central chapter, “A New World.” Most immediately, the New World for Montaigne’s Europeans was the Americas, discovered by modern Europeans only recently. If we moderns now “distrust the great pagan actions, as well as Christian repentance, preferring to “maintain ourselves on the plane of humanity,” “what would a humanity that was neither pagan nor Christian look like, or resemble?” On the one hand, it is a humane humanity, guided by each individual’s introspection. But it is also a humanity that knows the results not only of introspection but of exploration, not only of passivity but of activity that has brought new knowledge to light, knowledge unknown to the ancient philosophers and even to the Romans and to the Christians who took over their supposedly universal empire. The philosophic and religious ‘idealisms’ he has criticized based their generalizations on a too-narrow set of observations, observations confined to the customs of Europe, parts of Asia and of Africa. As a result, their universalisms weren’t really universal. And even within the small ‘universe’ of Europe, they had not seen some of the most malign effects of customs.
Since pagan antiquity and the time in which Christ and His Apostles lived, Christendom has seen horrific religio-political wars,” bringing on “an experience of human vices, in particular of cruelty and dissimulation, an experience of the corrupting and murderous power of opinion carried away by presumption” of which both pagans and the early Christians were blissfully ignorant. This experience has “directly attacked the credibility of the Christian religion,” the religion of love and peace. And with the discovery and conquest of the New World, Europeans have discovered a fruitful, kind nature, a nature better even than the Atlantis conceived by Plato. Montaigne describes this New World in one of his most famous chapters, “Of Cannibals.” In the New World, no one needs to desire because all the things human beings need are within his easy grasp, plucked from nature like a juicy mango from a low-hanging branch. There is nothing much to do, to make or organize: no arts, sciences, families, social groups, political organizations. Not only does this defy the teachings of philosophers, it obviates philosophy itself, the highest desire of them all, the desire to find wisdom. “What will later be called historical reality, or historical facts, here begin to be experienced as being ‘stronger’ than philosophy, as henceforth being superior to it in authority, as finally constituting the highest authority, the sole incontestable.” As for human nature, what politics, what logos, O Aristotle? The people of the New World “do not address one another to deliberate, judge, or command”; they only hunt or fish or dance. Nor do they pray. As Montaigne writes, “their whole ethical science contains only these two articles: resoluteness in war and affection for their wives.” Wars arise not out of greed (they already have all the material goods they want) but honor. They would be Spartan timocrats, except that they exhibit none of the underlying cupidity and lubricity of the Spartans, no erotic jealousy. In Platonic terms, the cannibals are governed by thumos, a thumos that does not need to be governed in its turn. But why recur to Platonic terms? In the New World, there is only this one regime, not the several posited by political philosophers; and to say that there is only one regime is tantamount to saying there is no regime, no reason for political classification and comparison, and therefore no such thing as a field of ‘comparative politics.’ Such persons “do not need to be governed by the word in the city,” as there is no city, no civitas, but only families. “The life of the cannibals never becomes greater than itself,” with families becoming tribes, tribes becoming poleis, as in Aristotle’s account. “It escapes this marvelous yet dangerous transformation because it is a life essentially without speech.”
Montaigne never supposes that he as an individual, or Europeans in their states, can imitate the cannibals. Admiration, yes, but imitation would only lead to further perversities, even as the imitatio Christi has only led to the worst violence and hatred. Nor can Machiavelli’s canny orchestration of violence and hatred save us. Rather, attend to Montaigne’s word, not those of God or of earlier, mistaken men, who did not understand themselves because they hadn’t adequately looked into themselves. His Essays “will inventory the infinite diversity of the world,” now known in its entirety for the first time, “and judge all things” according to the new science of the self, supplemented by the new discoveries of the New World and the new discoveries of political modernity.
That is, reason has sought to command, very prematurely at best. What is needed, and what already exists, is “commanded reason” instead of the commanding sort. Custom commands, “gentle as a newborn calf” in its ‘soft power’ over human minds, “harsh like a furious tyrant” when openly flouted (as philosophers, so notably Socrates, have learned by experience, not by theorizing). “The installation of custom is the taking power of a tyrant.” Indeed, custom “can do more than the most furious tyrant” because “it has power even over our senses, thus the way the world appears to us,” as well as over our souls in matters great and small. “It is under the unifying pressure of custom that the world appears to us as such, as the world and our world.” In a sense, then “all customs are equally rational” in that there is always some reason for them; people “can give reasons for all their usages.” But the customs themselves are not determined by reason; “reason is always at work, but it never commands.” Customs make regimes, not the other way around. In this, Montaigne departs sharply from classical political philosophy. “In the immense list of customs that he draws up, political institutions are pretty much lost in the midst of the familial and sexual mores that give the list its color and savor and the customs concerning so-called indifferent things.” This is why Montaigne writes, “Nations brought up to liberty and to ruling themselves consider any other form of government monstrous and contrary to nature,” even as “those who are accustomed to monarchy do the same.” [4] And since custom is tyrannical and universal, “tyranny is customary to man”; “the trait of human nature that renders him malleable by custom renders him docile to tyranny.” Republican liberty comes about by accident, “an exception to the tyranny of custom that is inseparably the custom of tyranny.” Human nature is ambivalent, attracted at once to liberty and to servitude, or, as Machiavelli has it, the desire for liberty becomes the desire for domination, once liberty has been won—and quite possibly, all along. What can make republican liberty no longer an accident, as it was in antiquity, or a nonentity, as it was in almost all of modern Europe? Montesquieu “began to organize his Essays” even as his friend La Boétie wrote his direct “appeal to an immense and impossible action.”
Montaigne judges that effective action must be indirect, that the call to it must not be clarion. “Liberation from the yoke of custom will be principally, if not exclusively interior,” contained first within his own mind but then, through a long, subtly argued book, literature read in private, concerned in large measure to discussion of private customs, customs regulating sexual and familial moeurs, “he formulates his most pressing appeal to shake off the yoke of custom.” On his side, he finds the “tension between the natural docility of human beings vis-à-vis custom and the need or natural movement of the human mind which cannot rest until it finally finds a reason or a valid foundation.” It is by an appeal to the restlessness of reason that he will quietly weaken that natural docility, while carefully avoiding the philosophers’ tendency to put reason at the service of command, to become philosopher-kings or lawgivers. He prefers to relegate politics, government, to a position subordinate to civil society, to customs. And he may well think that customs do in fact predominate, over government and its laws; for Montaigne, political science is no architectonic art, as it is for Aristotle. It is more effective to insinuate oneself into the customs of men, as the customs both rule and prove vulnerable to change, thanks to human docility and restlessness.
Montaigne marshals his astonishing array of diverse customs from around the world, but especially from the new world, initially to show that self-assured Europeans are provincials, that everyone everywhere is a provincial. Diversity, not unity, characterizes the human ways of life. In our language, Montaigne undertakes to ‘relativize’ custom, the convictions custom has ingrained in the men and women of Christendom. But he won’t leave it at that, in the manner of today’s ‘social science.’ While anticipating what Manent calls “the nonpolitical sciences of man,” Montaigne seeks rule, albeit a new sort of rule. The Romans commanded, persecuting Christians; Christians worked beneath the Roman monarchic regime, but also issued commands and eventually won political power, continuing to command but now with physical force. Montaigne will imitate the early Christians in working beneath the modern monarchies, but he will refrain from commanding. He has no pulpit to pound and wants none.
The central chapter of the Essays, titled “Of Vain Subtleties,” acknowledges the weaknesses of such indirection while vindicating its strength by considering “the relationship of the society in which he lives and its customs.” He identifies three “conditions” of human beings: the ignorant, the sages, and those he calls the “half breeds.” Each relates to custom in a way different from the others. Peasants are ignorant, simply. “Lacking curiosity and instruction, they ‘believe simply and live under the laws,’ in reverence and obedience” and they patiently endure what accident, which they take to be God’s rewards and punishments; consequently, they make good Christians, Montaigne notes. The sages, theological scholars, study Scripture assiduously, but their vast learning ends in another sort of ignorance, “the mysterious and divine secret of our Ecclesiastical polity.” They, too, resign themselves to God’s mysterious ‘ways,’ His regime. (The ancient philosophers do this, too, but their notion of the divine is nature.) “Between the two extremes,” there are the men of the “middle condition,” who “perceive evils, feel them, and cannot endure them.” While they “despise the ignorance and incuriosity of simple minds who make such good Christians,” they have not achieved the serene, contemplative religious conviction of the sages. The restlessness of these half-breed “in understandable, but dangerous” because they would overthrow evils without thinking things through. They “trouble the world” as “irritable and clever members of society who feel very vividly the ills that affect them and society,” as “their quick but superficial minds quickly grasp the weak points in reigning opinions and customs.” They form a party or faction dedicated to reform, “the party of critique.” Because they “have reason on their side,” they may well win their battle, but then what? “How, by mere critique, the simple negation of custom, can one ever arrive at a point of view from which reason can command,” “ever order a human association worthy of being desired for itself”? The answer is, it can’t. The party of critique yields fermentation, “permanent critique and reform”; having overthrown the natural law esteemed in European tradition, long-established customed, it will take historical law as the basis for command in an “effort to bring the interminable process of commanded reason, of weak reason, of critical reason, under the legitimate power of commanding reason, strong reason, reason that is not only critical but in some way affirmative, capable again of discerning and naming its good and its end.”
Montaigne hardly intends to replace one form of dogmatism with another. “In this chapter, which, I repeat, is at the exact center of the entire work, Montaigne establishes with great precision the place that he occupies, or that he gives himself, in this world of custom divided according to the three ‘conditions’ of men.” He classifies himself among the half breeds, but as one who has learned “not to involve himself in any reform whatsoever.” He remains nonchalant, unheated by reforming zeal. He sticks, seemingly, to ordering his own life, “to order it humanly,” to “give oneself a custom.” At the same time, he invites his readers to think about doing that, too, to find and live according to their own natural forms. “If Montaigne wanted to teach, the Essays would teach us the paradoxical art of giving us as a form of life a ‘pliable and supple’ custom, of imitating in ourselves the diversity of human customs, of actively appropriating the plasticity of nature, and finally of finding the form of our life in the detachment from all form.” This is “life without law,” Manent’s title for his Fourth Part and for the book itself.
The ancient philosophers, understanding nature as idea or form, a coherent, rational structure, sought to con-form themselves to it. Montaigne, who denies their physics and metaphysics “aims to install himself in passage, or modification,” moving “from the received form to the detachment from all form.” He endorses Socratic eroticism but eschews its putative end, “the beautiful or the noble.” This might be a feasible project for one’s private life, but it “cannot guide or regulate collective life,” which “must necessarily take on and maintain a form” preserved by “the force of law.” “The truth of things” is elusive, but laws must “ignore uncertainty and doubt.” “The treatment of political law presents a quite particular difficulty for Montaigne.”
Plato met this problem with his teaching on the noble lie, the concoction of such myths as autochthony, the story that the people of the city sprang from the very ground on which the city lies. [5] That’s not for Montaigne. Indeed, “we have difficulty imagining what the city” organized in accordance with the obedience to the laws that he commends “would look like,” since he does not aim at legislating. In following Montaigne, Europeans have held reason “to be incapable of discerning the human good, the good that counts for man a man.” With Montaigne, they want to avoid war, especially civil war, and especially civil war animated by uncompromisable religious convictions. But “how is one to obey for every long a law that no longer claims to be just” in a world that has “no criterion for determining with a minimum of assurance if the law is just or unjust”?
“Modern political philosophy, however, will find a way out.” That way is consent. “The just order, or the order of the only possible justice, is an order in which we ourselves establish the law a law, we ourselves posit the law as law.” Such law “is valid independently of every objective or rational criterion of justice,” perhaps because our consent expresses the “natural form” of each individual who partners in what later would be called the ‘social contract.’ Such a law “will not command, properly speaking, thus separating itself from the ancient law.” We now will obey a law that obeys us, obeys “the rights of man” in “representative government.” “The law obeys the without-law.” Our law oversees “a life without law,” a life of “free movement”—movement being what life and all of nature actually do. “The new law aims to produce the conditions of free movement,” the condition now called liberalism, liberty-ism. “The without-reason and with-law which law and reason obey ultimately reside in the rights of the individual,” which “belong to the individual before he has begun to speak or to establish any relationship whatsoever.” Manent thinks Montaigne would be “very surprised” at this outcome, but it evidently derives the new ‘natural right’ from his claim about each individual’s ineluctable “natural form.”
The question of the basis of right is the question that bedevils Montaigne’s Europe. Manent concludes his book with an exegesis of Montaigne’s longest essay, the “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” A Thomist, Sebond had given a copy of his book, Theoligia naturalis, to Montaigne’s father during the time when Luther’s innovations were spreading. Sebond intended his book to act as an antidote to those innovations. In an unusually bold display of frankness, Montaigne points to what Machiavelli would call the effectual truth of religiosity in Europe. As Manent paraphrases him, “We do not actually believe…we do not have the faith, we do not adhere to God by faith.” By your works you shall know them, and the supposed Christians of today exhibit little justice, charity, or goodness. We rather live in “a human world in which the specifically religious motives, in appearance omnipresent and all-powerful, are in reality impotent, and, as it were, nonexistent” evidence of “a truth of the human condition in which religion does not have an intrinsic content or density; only being a mode or mask of natural passions.” And as for rationality, it isn’t much stronger in humans than in animals, and indeed “there is more difference between a given man and a given man than between a given animal and a given man.” Do not then preen yourselves, my fellows, on either your piety or your rationality. In so arguing, “Montaigne deprives us of any motive, and forestalls all attempts, to confuse man with the divine,” whether it is the God or gods of the religions or the grand nature envisioned by the philosophers.
The “Apology for Raymond Sebond” nonetheless resembles Plato’s Apology in one way: it defends philosophy. But it does so on very different grounds than those on which Plato’s Socrates stands. Montaigne presents “the history of philosophy, but a history that for him is living and alive, because the teachings that he going to consider are in his eyes always actual possibilities of the soul.” He identifies three “types” of philosophy. First, there are the philosophers “who thought they found the truth”—Aristotelians, Epicureans, Stoics. There are the Academics, such Platonists as Carneades, “who despaired of finding it,” taking Socrates’ protestation that he knows only that he does not know to the opposite extreme from those they regarded as dogmatists. And there were the Skeptics, most notably Pyrrho, who argue that we cannot even know that we do not know, philosophers “who simply suspend all judgment,” disputing mildly, contradicting others gently, and taking no offense when contradicted. Montaigne sides with the Pyrrhonists. In a sudden show of religiosity, Montaigne describes the right-minded, Pyrrhonist philosopher as “a blank tablet prepared to take from the finger of God such forms as he shall be pleased to engrave on it.” One notices that not only did this give John Locke his ruling metaphor for the human mind as such, but that the referent to “he” could refer to God or the Pyrrhonist. Montaigne then proceeds to rescue some of the dogmatists and Academics, whom he suspects of advancing their doctrines in order to “dissimulate their genuine thought.” “I cannot easily persuade myself that Epicurus, Plato, and Pythagoras gave us their Atoms, their Ideas, and their Numbers as good coin of the realm”; they only wrote such things “for the needs of society,” “so as not to breed disorder in people’s obedience to the laws and customs of their country.” As Manent puts it, “The divergences between the schools bear les upon the truth than on utility.”
Turning again to Christianity, Montaigne presents the God of the Bible as anything but jealous. He cites the controversial contemporary poet Pierre de Ronsard, who praises not so much the Son but the sun, which shines its light on everyone, not only on the chosen. This veers strongly in the direction of paganism, “a religion that worships the impartial planets, the moon and the sun, which are no respecters of persons, in particular treating equally the faithful of the three revealed religions.” Nor is this enough, as he goes on to indicate “what is perhaps a contradiction, and in any case a difficulty, in the religious attitude as such,” which “posits and at the same time cancels an infinite distance between the human condition and the divine condition,” elevating divinity “above all human things” yet “provid[ing] access to it.” In effect, this “bring[s] the divine back into the circle of human interests, sometimes the most degrading human interests,” attributing human passions to the divine—notably jealousy and love—in what Montaigne calls “a marvelous intoxication of the human understanding.” Such an intoxication deranges our minds, making them believe that the Christian promises of life after death, which includes a radical “reform and change” of what Montaigne has identified as the “natural form” of each individual, would make us no longer ourselves. And as to the rewards of Heaven and the punishments of Hell promised by many religions, the “rewards are unjust, because the good actions are produced by the gods,” not by actual human power, and “the punishments are unjust, because it was in the power of the gods to prevent bad actions.” Moreover, how can either eternal reward or punishment be considered proportionate in response to “so short a life” as is allotted to man? Finally, regarding Christianity itself, “the redemption of the guilty by the innocent is essentially contrary to justice,” a remark that speaks to “the very center of Christianity,” which Montaigne places “in the middle of the ‘Apology.'” He tops it all off by quoting Lucretius, no friend of religion, who exclaims, “So many grievous crimes religion has inspired!” In sum, “‘physics’ excludes the rewards and punishments of another life; moral doctrine excludes redemption and penance.”
For all his critique of reason, in his arguments against religion “Montaigne does not cease to positively invoke the strength of reason.” Reason’s strength, however, shows itself in Pyrrhonian criticism, not in establishing positive doctrines. There are, for example, no “parts” of the soul, as adumbrated in Plato’s Republic, only “movements of the soul” which his Socrates presents as if they were parts. If, as he writes, “My morals are natural,” unformed by doctrines religious or philosophic, then they must undulate; even his status as a philosopher was “unpremeditated and accidental.” And that, of course, is his own “apology” or defense: Can you blame a man for something not only unplanned but not even the product of negligence? Philosophy happened to embody itself “in the particularity, the individuality, of Montaigne.” Undulating nature acts a bit like the grace of God, but without God’s intentionality. What Manent calls “the luminous secret of the Essays” may be seen in his refusal to “present his particular life to us so that we would feel authorized to do the same after him; he gives us the touchstone for all the essays that man can make of his faculties,” philosophy being only one among many.
It is only in this latter sense that Montaigne commends himself to our emulation. I am myself, he confesses to us; imitate me not by imitating me but by recognizing your own “natural form” and living in concord with it, and with the natural forms of others. Montaigne announces that his period of gestation in his mother’s womb lasted eleven months. Manent comments, “I will not decide if he is speaking in good faith or, if he is not, why. Perhaps this miraculous gestation announced the birth of a nature without parallel.” Hence Manent’s division of his book in thirty-three sections, the age attained by Jesus? If so, Montaigne is not necessarily an anti-Christ, but he surely is an un-Christ. Christ Himself says, “He who is not with Me is against me.” Montaigne replies, ‘Well, yes and no.’ He surely seeks no Christlike martyrdom, writing, “It is a great rashness to ruin yourself in order to ruin another.” Does that include ruining Satan? (It surely includes Satan’s own actions.) And what if you ruin yourself to save another, even to save all others? Montaigne evidently entertains no such ambition for himself. Montaigne “never departs from his master form.” In so behaving, he writes “the most Machiavellian passage in the Essays, one in which he ascribes repentance and penitence to “laxity of soul,” a laxity “which makes us see evils as God’s punishments, and which makes us docile to the magistrate.”
Manent permits himself to doubt that Montaignian life without law is so genuinely human, or humane, as the philosopher supposes. Life without law, life without shame, the lives of the eminent philosophers as portrayed by Diogenes Laertius, still “makes us blush.” “Despite rather systematic efforts,” up to and including our own time, “we have not arrived at banishing all modesty or shame.” If experience is to be our guide, as Montaigne urges, “our experience rather confirms Augustine’s judgments” of those philosophers, not Montaigne’s judgments. Manent concludes more sympathetically regarding Montaigne’s warnings against “the illusion of governing ourselves and of commanding all of nature and even being,” although he may very well take that to be a vindication of divinity, not of the individual’s “natural form.”
Notes
- He was preceded in a detailed and comprehensive way by David L. Schaefer: The Political Philosophy of Montaigne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).
- In the Bible, God’s Word speaks his Creation into existence. At very least, Montaigne implies that human beings are not God.
- See “An Age of Inflation,” on this website under the category, “American Politics.”
- Notice that Montaigne accepts Machiavelli’s much-simplified regime classification: two regimes, monarchies/principalities and republics, not (for example) the five regimes described by Plato in the Republic or the six described by Aristotle in the Politics. That is why he refers to the “aristocratic republic” as distinguished from the “democratic republic”; instead of being distinct regimes, they are only subdivisions of one regime. Notice also that the one dichotomous regime division in Aristotle is the division between good and bad regimes, a distinction Montaigne deprecates.
- Such is the actual claim made today by the Lakota Sioux, who claim rightful rule over the Black Hills of South Dakota (which they in fact conquered from previous occupiers) on exactly this basis. Platonism is not dead!
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