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’[1]
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.[2]’
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’[3]
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.
- Jean Starobinski, Montaigne In Motion,
trans, Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 1985), p86-87[Return]
- Jean Starobinski, Montaigne In Motion,
trans, Arthur Goldhammer, p81[Return]
- Michel de Montaigne, Oeuvres Complètes,
II.12, p431[Return]
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