Philosophy Essays

Philosophy Essays: Montaigne

For Montaigne being is absolutely, unimaginably and inconceivably transcendent. We cannot know the truth of things because they are simply out of reach.

The world of essences (in the Platonic sense) eludes our grasp and whatever progress we think we are making through science or humaine raison is doomed to failure. Truth belongs to God alone in a Beyond that man can only “imagine unimaginable”.

The only hope for Man is that being and truth may come to us (not us to them) through Divine Grace. ‘Il s’eslevera si Dieu lui prestre extraordinairement la main’ – with a firm emphasis on extraordinairement.

Jean Starobinski describes the last sentence of the Apology as the ‘evocation of a divine and miraculous metamorphosis’

If we are to accept this view, to move towards being would involve becoming another.

Furthermore, the emergence of true being coincides with death in a life that is always in the process of disappearing. In other words, for Montaigne, the Self can either exist here, separated from being (and therefore God), accede to the realm of being by relinquishing one’s hold on the self.

We are therefore left with a pure void. Starobinski argues that in coming back to himself (as Montaigne does through his retirement), in regaining his self-possession in his arriere boutique, rather than achieving fullness the exact opposite happens – he delivers himself to the void.

Monataigne’s skepticism, according to his own avowed intention, is aimed at making man a ‘carte blanche’ upon which the finger of God will write what it pleases Him to write.

Staborinski argues from this that because Montaigne began from a position quite close to the Stoics, ‘it is not unreasonable that we should be reminded of the successive movements in Hegel’s Phenomenology: stoicism, skepticism, and the unhappy consciousness.

It would seem that Staborinski has no qualms about viewing Montaigne through Hegelian eyes. Notwithstanding my reservations about the dangers of anachronistic readings that Burke so often warns against I can see the attractions of such an interpretation.

The passage from stoicism to unhappy consciousness allows Staborinski to do something about what seems like an impasse. He insists that ‘Montaigne is resolute in his determination’ to transform the unhappy consciousness into a happy one.

Yes being is elsewhere. Yes, we live in an apparent void. Yet Montaigne, makes the attraction of the here so strong in the ‘digressions’ that seem to dominate the Apology, in the paradoxical richness of the world of appearances, so that what comes out of his writing is a vigorous preference for what is ours (against the unattainable ‘supercelestes’).

His famous (or notorious) ‘Quoy des mains? Nous requerons, nous promettons, appellons’ passage is just one vivid example of this. As are his ‘ethnographic observations. Montaigne’s inward-turn, his writing as self-portrait, leads to back to phenomena after having established the infinite remoteness of God and of pure essence.

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