ARNE MELBERG, Learning from Montaigne (Keynote Lecture on Monday, 28 of May,

2007)

In 1570 Michel de Montaigne resigns from his job as a tribunal lawyer in Bordeaux: he thinks

it is about time to withdraw to his estate in the countryside. Montaigne wants a place where he

can feel undisturbed by the world and where he can dedicate himself to his own thoughts and

to himself. He has come to the age of 38 and he wants to save for himself whatever is left of

“this tail-end of life” (as he calls it in the essay “On Solitude”).1 He wishes to enjoy what the

Renaissance humanists called otium - free time and space – although it should be an otium

cum litteris, a free space filled with literature. Montaigne wants to go behind his public person

to cultivate his private person. His retreat takes place in his famous little tower, its top-room

with his library is his arrière-boutique as he calls it, his “inner room” behind the public room

of duties: “We should set aside a room, just for ourselves, at the back of the shop, keeping it

entirely free and establishing there our true liberty, our principal solitude and asylum.” (I: 39,

270, 235) In this asylum he is about to investigate himself in the kind of writing that 20 years,

three parts and 107 chapters later, will be called essay.

Here, I will invite you to consider this seemingly paradoxical situation: Montaigne´s retreat

from his public world meant the discovery of a new world, or even several worlds. When

Montaigne diminishes himself to go into his tower, he prepares an immense expansion

reaching into our time. The retreat becomes an expedition into the territory of his own self,

intimately connected with his invention of an essayistic aesthetics and an ethics of tolerance.

We do not know what made Montaigne start write his essays. Perhaps he wanted to make a

self-portrait for the benefit of his friends and his family. In any case, he quickly realized that

1
I am quoting Montaigne from M.A. Screech’s translation (Penguin Classics 1991) in comparison with the

Pléiade-edition of Œuvres Complètes edited by Albert Thibaudet & Maurice Rat (1962). Reference is given in

the text as part, chapter, English page, French page. Here: I: 39, 271, 236.

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the scope was bigger due to a simple fact: not only the self-portrait but the self itself depended

on language. Montaigne, the writer, wrote about Montaigne, the man, and the two were the

same but still not the same. When writing Montaigne discovers (or perhaps invents) the

plurality of the self: in his very last essay, “On experience," he admits that his effort “getting

to know myself” has resulted in his finding of “such boundless depths and variety that my

apprenticeship bears no other fruit than to make me know how much more there remains to

learn.” (III: 13, 1220, 1052) And this epochal discovery of the unknown continent of the self

is only the private version of all that is unknown and unknowable in the world, the

permanently changing world.

The essays are rich in examples on the variety and plurality of the self. In the chapter “On

the inconstancy of our actions” we read: “We are entirely made up of bits and pieces, woven

together so diversely and shapelessly that each one of them pulls its own way at every

moment. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and

other people.” (II: 1, 380, 321) The French word for “bits and pieces” is lopins, it could also

be translated as “patchwork” and normally refers to a piece of earth in a field cultivated with

many different crops. There are further metaphorical possibilities in the quotation. When “bits

and pieces” are said to be “woven together” the French has contexture: meaning something

like “text” or even “structure." That “we” can be regarded as walking textual structures must

have been a striking thought for this writer, who actively tried to construct himself by

transforming a medley of literary impressions and quotations into an experience and a text of

his own.

Montaigne is using his drastic metaphors to say that the self is just as manifold as the world,

and that the “bits and pieces” of the self have their own individual projects, and that they are

not necessarily harmonized. Montaigne often states that you and we are different and he

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always pleads respect for difference. Here he is saying more: that my self consists of several

selves, all different.

This idea returns in several versions. In the chapter just quoted we read that “even sound

authors are wrong in stubbornly trying to weave us into one invariable and solid fabric.” (II:1,

373, 315) Again, it is contexture that has been translated as “fabric”. Montaigne prefers a

writer who would “judge a man in his detail, piece by piece, separately” — he wants the

writer to recognize the difference that is already there. Montaigne considers distinguo, “I

make difference”, to be his prime method for describing a reality that is put together in pieces,

pieces rapportées. Another version of the same expression turns up in a later chapter, with this

colorful statement: “Man, totally and throughout, is but patches and many-coloured

oddments”, rapiessement et bigarrure. (II: 20, 766, 656).

Montaigne can imagine his own portrait as it is given in the essays, as a skeletos, an

anatomy, but also as a patchwork, meaning that veins and muscles are woven together in a

contexture, but that every component lives its own life and that the part is more important

than the whole. If there is something like a whole – Montaigne invites us to think of the part

as primary and the whole as fluctuating and secondary. The different parts of the self can be

distinguished by the eye but they are also temporally separated, if we trust the idea of the

patchwork being not only a contexture of pieces but also of “moments," that play their own

games.

It is of course sequences like these that have tempted contemporary readers to associate the

plural personality of Montaigne with “post modernity” — although “pre modern” is probably

a more accurate word for a French country gentleman at the end of the 16th Century. I doubt

the value of such labels and prefer to think that Montaigne is trying to express an experience

that anyone can have (even if historical conditions make a difference). Let us call it an

experience of the manifold self — together with the suspicion that the components of the self

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are not always adequately coordinated. In the chapter where he describes himself in “bits and

pieces” he also writes that “every sort of contradiction can be found in me, … timid, insolent;

chaste, lecherous; talkative, taciturn; tough, sickly; clever, dull; brooding, affable; lying,

truthful; learned, ignorant; generous, miserly and then prodigal.” (II: 1, 377, 319). Montaigne

not only finds these distinctions within himself, but he means that “anyone who studies

himself attentively finds in himself and in his very judgment this whirring about and this

discordancy.” The different parts of the self live their own life but they also interrelate,

making the self into a contradictory whole (if you can talk about a whole). Montaigne’s

diagnosis is certainly not an attack against this plurality, which he rather registers with a

resignation that sometimes transforms into enthusiasm. He can for instance go polemical

against the epicurean idea that pain should be diminished giving bigger space for lust. “Truly,"

Montaigne exclaims, “anyone who could uproot all knowledge of pain would equally

eradicate all knowledge of pleasure and finally destroy Man.” (II: 12, 549, 473) That man is a

patchwork of “bits and pieces” is so fundamental, that the efforts to eliminate or diminish

contrasts and contradictions must be regarded as against humanity. Pain / lust is still not the

decisive contradiction for Montaigne’s essayistic experience, nor are any other of all the

contradictions that he lists. The experience has rather to do with plurality in itself, and the

experience of plurality is intimately related to the writing project. With stubborn consequence

Montaigne constructs a text based on the experience of contradiction and plurality. The

autobiographer normally presents a homogenous version of a self, that follows a predictable

development; Montaigne, instead, presents his patchwork and leaves harmonizing to the

reader. It is tempting to use a far too often used metaphor, and say that we meet Montaigne as

“text” or, with his own word, as contexture. It depends on our capacity and wishes if we go

for plurality or for the whole in this rich fabric. The essayistic world is in any case a function

of the plurality that Montaigne finds in himself and in the world, and the essayistic project —

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the aesthetics of the essay — is one great effort to preserve this contradictory plurality in

writing.

When Montaigne retreats to his tower, it means that he tries to establish something solid in a

world where nothing is stable, neither himself nor his knowledge. “We grasp at everything but

clasp nothing but wind” according to one of his many statements of resignation. (I: 31, 229,

200) This does not mean, however, that Montaigne’s retreat into his own world excludes his

inquisitive excursions into the outside world. The statement just quoted on our futile grasping

at everything comes in “On the Cannibals," a chapter that is famous due to Montaigne’s

interest in those “barbarians” that had been “discovered” in Brazil. He transforms this interest

into a severe critique of the eurocentric view of the world and of the cruelty of the European

explorers. His so to speak epistemological skepticism — we only clasp “wind” when seeking

secure knowledge — is in other words part of an argument, where Montaigne develops a

critical observation of contemporary events. His skeptical interest in the winds of knowledge

and the vanity of the world is no purely philosophical concern, it there is such a thing. Besides

being an important component in the essayistic project, Montaigne’s skepticism is integrated

in a political argument, allowing him to criticize all possible versions of fundamentalism and

eurocentric cruelty.

I hardly need to remind you that Montaigne lived in an epoch where the views of the world

were dramatically changed in their geographical, anthropological and economic structures.

These changes confirm the skepticism of the essayist. In the very first chapter of the first book

he states that “Man is indeed an object miraculously vain, various and wavering.” (I: 1, 5, 13).

The first chapter of the second book is called “On the inconstancy of our actions” and he

starts the following chapter by stating that “The world is all variation and dissimilarity.” (II: 2,

381, 321) In the chapter “On coaches” from the third book, Montaigne combines a

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devastating critique of Spanish actions in Peru and Mexico with equally drastic versions of

the changing plurality of the world. If there is a development within the essays in these

matters it is towards a more radical “relativism” and “skepticism” — although I hesitate to use

these terms since they can today be associated with distance and indifference. I hope to have

shown, already, that Montaigne’s skepticism is instead a part of his humanitarian profile, his

open-mindedness, his pathos of tolerance.

In the second chapter of the third book, “On repenting," we find some interesting lines,

relating all kinds of epistemological variety and change with the essayistic project of writing

the self. Montaigne writes that “The brushstrokes of my portrait do not go awry [they are not

misleading] even though they change and vary.” (III: 2, 907, 782). This autobiographical

inconstancy he relates to a metaphor indicating the law of change: “The world is but a

perennial seesaw”, une branloire perenne, and if we imagine something being stable it is only

because the seesaw moves slowly. The object of the portrait — himself — is in a state of

“natural drunkenness," i.e. in permanent change, but then his intention with the self-portrait is

not to portray “being," l’estre, but “becoming," le passage. Not any specific and changing

passage but all passages and becoming as such.

Montaigne starts this chapter by referring to his essays as a self-portrait and he goes back to

the essayistic project after his anti-metaphysical statement. He also indicates, that if only

being had been different, if it could show stability and substance, then the essays would be

superfluous, the portrait would not “change and vary” but would stabilize. He has also told us

that being and reality has no substance and is perennially on the move: thus Montaigne has to

continue to describe and “assay” himself by writing his essays. It is of course nothing

remarkable in observing that Montaigne’s essays are based on an epistemological skepticism,

nor in the relation between his skepticism and his aesthetics. But it is remarkable that this

relation gives him a foundation for critique of human stupidity, vanity and cruelty The insight

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showing that everything is unstable is the stable basis for Montaigne’s critical activity and his

ethics of tolerance.

Montaigne’s ethic can be approached through his theology. In his early years Montaigne

translated the Latin work Theologia Naturalis into French and he later devoted his longest and

most ambitious essay, “An apology for Raymond Sebond” in the second book, to a discussion

of this work. This includes his most extensive epistemological interrogation into skepticism,

systematic doubt and docta ignorantia, i.e., his idea of ignorance as the most reliable

knowledge. He devotes hundreds of pages to all possible versions of skepticism in this very

ambiguous “apology," and he reaches the conclusion that his own ignorance is not a private

whim. His skepticism seems to be rooted in the very structure of being: “there is no

permanent existence either in our being or in that of objects. We ourselves, our faculty of

judgment and all mortal things are flowing and rolling ceaselessly: nothing certain can be

established about one from the other, since both judged and judging are ever shifting and

changing.” (II: 12, 680, 586)

The latest word in this quotation (“changing”), is translating the French branle, meaning that

we meet again Montaigne’s branloire perenne, the eternal see-saw, situated at the very center

of existence. There are many possible reactions to the predicament that he expresses with his

skepticism concentrated in this metaphor, for instance religious belief or silence. But the

essayist’s reaction is neither to take the leap into faith, nor to observe a skeptical silence. On

the contrary: it is to get moving and the movement of the essayist consists in writing. The first

obligation for the essayist is simply: to keep writing. Only by writing can he construct the

new, movable and so to speak modern self. By writing he shows that the unreliable and

permanently changing reality is the only reality worth writing about. The changing

impressions of the senses may restrict or even invalidate human knowledge, but the kingdom

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of the senses is nevertheless the homeland of the essays and the essayistically constructed

(and constructing) human being.

“An apology for Raymond Sebond” includes long excursions into cultural history, where

Montaigne piles up examples on human oddities to show the limits of our knowledge, to show

human diversity, and also to show that nothing human is alien to him – I am recycling the

sentence from Terence that Montaigne had inscribed on a beam in his ceiling: Homo sum,

humani a me nihil alienum puto. Montaigne does not stop with the human but includes

curiosities from the animal world with the clear message that man should not automatically

believe himself to stand above the animals.

It is obvious that Montaigne has no empirical experience of all those examples that he writes

about, or rather quotes since most of them are compiled from earlier writers. Without a word

of criticism Montaigne recycles long and improbable catalogues: the skeptic seems no longer

skeptical. I think this surprising turn means that the basic experience of a plurality and

difference overrules his skepticism for a while. The examples should be as many and peculiar

as possible to have their effect. The effect that Montaigne wants to produce seems not to have

to do with any reverence for an inscrutable existence or astonishment over its wonders. His

strategy is rougher: he wants to open our eyes for the unknown, thereby reminding himself

and his readers about plurality. He wants to show that the world is always bigger than we can

imagine; but also that we can accustom and become used to anything in the world. With his

many examples Montaigne tells us that nature is overrated in the sense that customs and

prejudice decide what we think of as natural; underrated in the sense that everything in nature

is according to nature and only convention can make us think of the unusual as unnatural.

Convention, custom and prejudice are decisive. In the short chapter “On a monster-child” in

part two, Montaigne describes his impression of so-called Siamese twins shown for paying

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viewers. He ends his description by saying that it is only our lack of custom that makes us

regard the poor child as monstrous: “Whatever happens against custom we say is against

Nature, yet there is nothing whatsoever which is not in harmony with her.” (II: 30, 808, 691).

This simple statement covers a kind of ethics that I want to call an ethic and pathos of

plurality, and this pathos motivates Montaigne’s often bizarre catalogues over the peculiar.

The ethic of plurality is skeptical and tolerant: it is based on the insufficiency of our

knowledge with a view to the immense richness of an always changing existence. It demands

of us to accept our ignorance as well as accepting the customs of other people (and animals),

whichever they are. And it wants us to realize that our own customs can be regarded as bizarre

for all those that are unused to them.

This ethic of plurality and tolerance has a political dimension in Montaigne’s time, that was

haunted by a civil war in France, a war with strong components of fundamentalist religion.

For obvious reasons Montaigne could not comment on that situation in public writing but he

can express his pathos in another area: the European exploration and exploitation of the “new

world" of North and South America. In the already quoted chapter “On the Cannibals” he is

not far from idealizing the South American “barbarians” in terms that must have impressed

Rousseau: “Those peoples, then, seem to me to be barbarous only in that they have been

hardly fashioned by the mind of man, still remaining close neighbors to their original state of

nature. They are still governed by the laws of Nature and are only very slightly bastardized by

ours;” (I: 31, 232, 204). Their “barbarism” is simply a state of “purity," doomed to be

corrupted by European civilization. They are said to practice human sacrifice, which of course

is bad, but Montaigne is far more indignant over our own attitudes of moral superiority while

we keep torturing opponents and barbarously suppressing the “barbarians." When he returns

to the subject in “On coaches” (third book) his criticism is without compromise: we “took

advantage of their ignorance and lack of experience to pervert them more easily towards

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treachery, debauchery and cupidity, toward every kind of cruelty and inhumanity, by the

example and model of our own manners. Whoever else has ever rated trade and commerce at

such a price? So many cities razed to the ground, so many nations wiped out, so many

millions of individuals put to the sword, and the most beautiful and richest part of the world

shattered, on behalf of the pearls-and-pepper business! Tradesmen’s victories!” (II: 6, 1031,

889). (If you wish to make his indignation up-to-date you can change the “pearls-and-pepper”

into for instance oil).

There seems to be an incongruity between Montaigne’s normally self-conscious and

idiosyncratic way of quoting his sources and authorities and those lists of examples where he

uncritically piles up what he has read of anthropological curiosities, including politically

potent information. Montaigne is quoting much but he is also observing a distance. The

reason is that he wants to transplant what he reads as he puts it in the chapter “On books."

Transplanting means transforming what he reads into an experience of his own. (II: 10, 458,

387) In the chapter “On schoolmaster’s learning” from the first book (French: Du pedantisme)

Montaigne writes scornfully that learned pedants “go foraging for learning in their books and

merely lodge it on the tip of their lips, only to spew it out and scatter it on the wind.” When he

reads these lines in the printed edition he adds in the margin (what we now read in the text):

“Such foolishness fits my own case marvelously well. Am I for the most part not doing the

same when assembling my material?” (I: 25, 154, 135)

That is in any case what he is doing with his anthropological catalogues. The reason he does

not “transplant” in these cases is, I believe both human and political: Montaigne wants to

exercise his pathos of tolerance, and this pathos is founded in a basic experience of plurality.

His examples on the changes and the plurality of existence do not come from (or rarely come

from) his experience but they still answer to a basic experience — and the examples develop

this experience into the political and moral stance that can be called tolerance.

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 Habit is at stake. Habits and custom decide if we find something natural as well as unnatural

and unacceptable. Restricted customs can lead to arrogance, injustice, outrage — while open

customs tolerate other habits and the habits of others. The state of tolerance is far away in

Montaigne’s France with its religious war as well as in the world, with its European

exploitation of the New world. But Montaigne finds an exception: in his travel diary from his

long trip to Italy he is enthusiastic over life in Rome: “it is the most universal city of the

world, where it matters little if you are a stranger or from a different nation: because it is from

the start a city put together by strangers and everyone feels at home.”2 Rome is multicultural

to use an anachronistic term: it allows for plurality and difference.

The example permits some optimism in Montaigne’s views of man in the world. This

optimism which may come unexpected, considering his insights into inescapable pain, into

the cruelties of man and the vanity of all our efforts. Montaigne simply seems to think that a

number of examples on the plurality of existence may loosen our habits and make us more

tolerant. He wants to educate his readers into opening up to the unknown. Being open is the

key to the ethic of tolerance. This gives him a reason for listing examples, that are supposed to

shake the confidence of his readers, as well as his very liberal handling of classics and learned

matters.

The most attractive symbol for this tolerance and openness I find in the chapter “On vanity”

from the third book, where Montaigne writes about his estate, his house: “My house, being

always open, easily approached and ever ready to welcome all men (since I have never let

myself be persuaded to turn it into a tool for a war in which I play my part most willingly

when it is farthest away from my neighborhood) has earned me quite a lot of popular

affection." He calls it a “miraculous and exemplary achievement” that it has been “unspotted

by blood or sack during so long a tempest and so many upheavals and changes hereabouts.”

2
My translation from the Pléiade-edition quoted above, p. 1236.

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The estate Montaigne stays unguarded and unfortified, the squire doesn’t lock his door but

keeps it “always open” (III: 9, 1092, 943).

The house being open means that a friend is just as welcome as an enemy — that strikes me

as an emphatically tolerant gesture during the religiously motivated civil war, that was raging

during the time Montaigne wrote his essays. It means to open up for the unknown. We cannot

know if Montaigne’s openness really included friend as well as enemy and everything

unknown. Such an openness may belong to imagination more than to reality, which does not

mean that it is futile. Montaigne has made his imaginary gesture of tolerance and in the world

of the essays imagination is just as important as reality. The plural world of the skeptical

essayist may be lacking in substance but on the other hand it seems to be open for all the

possibilities that his and our imagination can embrace.

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