Montaigne: Selected Essays

Montaigne compares his essays to the work of a painter who centers a beautiful painting on a wall and surrounds it with grotesqueries. Montaigne’s writings are like the bizarre surroundings, but there is no central work of beauty. For that, he would insert a dissertation by his great friend, Étienne de la Boétie, titled “Discourse on Voluntary Servitude.” It is this essay that causes them to meet and embark on a friendship so perfect and unusual that Montaigne has not seen one since among all the people he has met: “So many circumstances are required to build it, that it would be a great thing were fortune to achieve it once in three centuries” (74).

For Montaigne, friendship is essential; he sees it as “society’s highest peak of perfection” (74). Friendship is limited in most social bonds. Fathers and sons cannot communicate fully all their thoughts; brothers often clash and compete; lovers share not so much friendship as “a feverish fire prone to flaring up and cooling, one that holds onto us only by one angle” (76); marriage burdens friendship with “a thousand extraneous tangles needing to be unraveled” (77). Though he would love a friendship that was physical as well as spiritual, Montaigne believes women do not partake of the type of communion that interests him.

In true friendship, “there is general, universal warmth […] all gentleness and smoothness that has nothing harsh and stinging about it” (76). All the other close bonds are weighed down with obligations, but “in friendship there is no other business or commerce than with itself” (77).

Montaigne tries to explain the unique perfection of his love for La Boétie. He considers the ancient Greek tradition of homosexual love, then seems to dismiss it, as if a truly loving friendship transcends the physical. His connection to La Boétie is unique: “This kind has no other model than itself, and can be compared only to itself” (79).

Still, Montaigne finds a useful example from history in the close friendship between the Roman leaders Gracchus and Blossius, and how Blossius admitted that he would comply with any request of Gracchus, including mayhem and murder. Of his trust in La Boétie, Montaigne claims that “Our souls [were] pulled in such unison […] I would certainly have entrusted myself to him more readily than to myself” (80).

Ordinary friendships pale in comparison. The usual obligations don’t apply when the people involved are “but one soul in two bodies” (81). What belongs to one belongs as well to the other. Only a single such friendship is possible at a time: “If two called on you for help at the same time, which would you run to? If they asked you for conflicting services, how would you reconcile them?” (82).

This type of friendship is “inconceivable to anyone who has not tasted it” (83), and so rare that Montaigne does not “expect to find any good judge of it” (84). Without his dear friend, “I just plod along listlessly: even the pleasures presented to me, instead of consoling me, redouble my grief at his loss” (84).

Montaigne rails at those who have published La Boétie’s essay merely to use its arguments against tyranny as incitement to rebellion against the king: “There never was a better citizen, or one more devoted to his country’s peace, or a greater enemy to the disturbances and revolutions of his time” (86).

There are reports of a strange new land far to the west of Spain and Africa. Montaigne is skeptical of the details in these accounts, since many people “never show you things just as they are, they bend and disguise them according to the way they saw them” (89). He prefers the testimony of a simple man who “has no means of constructing and lending probability to made-up things: one who has no ax to grind” (89). A man in Montaigne’s employ has visited the faraway land and has a simple nature, and so becomes his informant on the natives of Brazil.

People look down their noses at the newly discovered natives and consider them uncivilized. Montaigne disagrees: “I find nothing barbarous or savage in those people, from what I have been told, except that everyone calls what he is not accustomed to barbarity” (90). We think ourselves superior; we judge foreign things too quickly by our own provincial standards, “[a]nd yet the very savor and the delicacy of various uncultivated fruits from those lands are excellent to our taste, compared with ours” (90).

Montaigne believes that the natives, in their natural simplicity, share a society superior even to Plato’s ideal of the perfect republic. He describes how “they live in a very pleasant, quite temperate area of lands” near the sea, are rarely sick, enjoy “a great abundance of fish and meats” (91), dwell in large buildings, eat only one meal per day but drink continuously from a root beverage, and spend the day hunting and dancing. The men are reminded to express “bravery against the enemy and affection for their wives” (92).

Their priests make divinations; if wrong, they are killed. The men are fearless in battle and often eat their dead enemies. Lately, though, they have taken up the more ruthless habits of the Portuguese colonists, “much greater masters of all sorts of nastiness than they were” (94). Europeans are quick to condemn the natives’ ways, but Montaigne is “indeed sorry that when we do judge their faults, we are so blind to our own” (94), especially as Europeans tear apart or roast their enemies alive: “we surpass them in every sort of barbarism” (95).

The peoples of this faraway land enjoy plenty of resources and have no need for conquest: “They are still at the happy point of desiring no more than what their natural needs demand: for them anything beyond that is superfluous” (95). Their only purpose in battle is honor; they would rather die than admit defeat. Montaigne admires this: “there are triumphant defeats, rivaling victories” (96), and “honor consists of valor in fighting, not winning” (97). The most successful warriors have many wives, who urge their husbands to take more spouses, as this adds to the family’s glory.

Montaigne feels sad that these people already are tainted by their exposure to European ways, that “the knowledge of the corruption over here will cost them one day, and that this contact will give rise to their ruin, which I presume is already well advanced” (99). A few who visited France wondered why some men should be rich and some beggars, and why the poor “did not seize the others by the throat or set fire to their houses” (99).

Many people make a virtue out of public life, but Montaigne believes this is often an excuse “to derive personal gain from public affairs” (100), and with so many wicked people straining for high office, it may be wise to avoid all of them. A good man can walk among them, “[b]ut if he has the choice he will flee their very sight” (101).

When we retire, we trade the troubles of civic life for those of domestic life: “Domestic concerns may be less important, but they are no less insistent” (101). Worse, our old yearnings may persist: “Ambition, greed, irresoluteness, fear, and lust do not abandon us if we change scenes […] They follow us even into cloisters and schools of philosophy” (102). Instead, “we must get away from what is commonplace within ourselves—we must isolate and get ourselves back” (103).

How do we do this? First, we learn how to get along without others and without worldly possessions:

We must reserve a room all our own […] In it we must hold our regular conversation between us and ourselves, so private no outward contact or communication takes place there—converse and laugh there as if wifeless, childless, and property-less, with no retinue or servants, so that if ever we come to lose them we will not find it strange to do without them (104).

It helps to remember that our ambitions about others become burdens: “Our own affairs do not give us enough trouble? Let us torture ourselves and rack our brains over our neighbors’ and friends’” (105). Instead, we should “rid ourselves of these violent attachments that distract us and distance us from ourselves” (106).

As for our need of things, if a beggar can be “often more cheerful and healthy than I am […] even though I think death, poverty, contempt, or illness are at my heels, I easily resolve not to grow afraid of what a lesser man than me accepts so patiently” (107).

Some men retire to focus on ideas in the hope that, after they are dead, people will admire their writings; to Montaigne, this seems “an absurd contradiction” (109). Besides, “[g]lory and repose are two things that cannot go together” (111). Others practice self-abnegation in the belief that they will be rewarded in the afterlife, which Montaigne admires, even if it is not for him. As to a life of study, he says that “[o]ccupying ourselves with books is as difficult as any other occupation, and just as bad for our health” (109).

Retirement should be for oneself and not for the admiration of others: “It is no longer how everyone speaks of you that you should seek, but how you should speak to yourself” (112).

For his essays, Montaigne is open to any topic: “I take the first subject offered up by chance. For me they are all equally good” (113). He brings his judgment to each topic, not to flesh it out completely—“I do not see the whole of anything; neither do those who promise to show it to us” (113)—but to see if he can bring some new insight: “I give it a jab, not as broad but as deep as I can; more often than not I like to take hold of it from some unusual angle” (113).

Others will approach the same topics in their own way. Every mind is different and brings a unique perspective, “[a]nd so let us not take things’ external qualities as a pretext; it is up to us to take responsibility for them” (114). We can see how other’s minds operate in the way they handle the activities of daily life. A game of chess brings out the thinking styles of the players: “What passion does this game not arouse in us: anger, spite, hatred, impatience, and the intense ambition to win” (114). But their minds are equally betrayed by any activity: “[E]very particle of a man, every pursuit, shows him and reveals him as well as any other” (114).

Both Democritus and Heraclitus see the world as “vain and ridiculous” (114), but Democritus mocks it, while Heraclitus feels sad for it. Montaigne prefers Democritus’s attitude because “we can never be disdained as much as we deserve […] We are not evil so much as we are pointless” (115).

Other famous pessimists react differently: “Timon wished us ill […] Diogenes valued us so little, that our contagion could neither trouble nor taint him” (115). Hegesias says that “a wise man should do things only for himself, since he alone is worth acting for,” and Theodorus believes “it is wrong for a wise man to risk his life for the good of his country, and jeopardize wisdom for the sake of fools” (115).

Montaigne has his own view: “[W]e are just as much laughable as we are prone to laugh” (115).