From the Archive (2008): Montaigne

Bill Schraufnagel

RWS 601B, McLish

April 11, 2008

Paper # 1 – Montaigne

Defense and Invention in Montaigne

In his dialogue of Renaissance manners, The Book of the Courtier (1527), Baldesar Castiglione at a certain point contrives a discussion of the relative merits of “arms” and “letters” as human activities. As Castiglione’s company of Italian nobility esteems the study of letters, one character laments that “the French recognize only the nobility of arms and reckon all the rest as nought… they abhor letters, and consider all men of letters to be very base” (Bizzell and Herzberg 671-72). Despite this claim, which finds no disagreement, another character maintains hope that one, at least, will lead to the other: “I think that just as the glory of arms flourishes and shines in France, so must that of letters flourish there also” (672). The issue is never resolved and the dialogue soon turns to other matters. In addition to pointing up a potentially troubled intersection between “arms” and “letters,” Castiglione gives a hint of the social context for early 16^th Century France.

Roughly half a century after The Book of the Courtier, Michel de Montaigne published his first two books of Essays (1580), revising and adding a third book over the next eight years. In an introduction from their anthology The Rhetorical Tradition (2001), Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg cite historian James J. Murphy’s claim that for students of rhetoric, the Renaissance is a period of “one thousand neglected authors” (Bizzell and Herzberg 556). Bizzell and Herzberg do not neglect Montaigne, but mention him only briefly and without much comment as to his potentially rhetorical insights. Instead, the editors emphasize Montaigne’s exploration of “his own opinions” and his ultimate “skepticism,” or conviction “that human reason is incapable of any true knowledge” (575). Rather than focus on the ways in which Montaigne might prepare the way for the growth of modern science, this paper analyzes a sample of the Essays to get at the author’s observation of, and participation in, the rhetorical practices of his time and place. Its goal is to lay groundwork, however preparatory, for further inquiry into Montaigne’s contribution, if any, as both rhetorical critic and innovator.

The French word essaie means “to try,” and Montaigne’s complete edition, edited and translated by Donald Frame (1948), contains one hundred and six “tries” altogether, ranging in length from shorter than one page to the 140-page “Apology for Raymond Sebond.” Due to space and time constraints, this study will involve only Montaigne’s first fifteen essays as published in Frame’s complete edition, written between 1572 and 1580. Three elements will be isolated and presented in the following order. First will be considered Montaigne’s observation of contemporary and ancient rhetorical practice, chiefly as it applies to military conflict. Such observation I will then show to inform Montaigne’s reflections on death which, I argue, spur him to his own method and purpose as a rhetor. Rather than march through fifteen essays in sequence, quotations from the text will be chosen to support the above scheme.

Castiglione’s comment about the French devotion to arms shows up right away in Montaigne’s essays. Of the first fifteen, four essays center directly on negotiations between warring factions as Montaigne seeks, through observation of many examples, to infer something of the relationship between “arms” and the words that accompany them. In Essay # 5, “Whether the governor of a besieged place should go out to parley,” Montaigne recounts the old Roman custom of “starting war only after having announced it, and often after having assigned the time and place of the battle” (Montaigne 16). Similarly, he claims that in his present day

… among those nations that we so smugly call barbarians, custom has it that they never start a war without having first announced it, adding to this an ample declaration of the means that they have to employ in it: what sort of men and how many, what supplies, what offensive and defensive weapons. (Montaigne 16)

The benefit of this strong correspondence between physical battle and verbal engagement, according to Montaigne, is that victories are determined by “strength” or “valor” and not by “stealth” or “trickery.” But he is neither hopeful that civilized Europe of the 16^th Century can hold to that standard, nor sentimentally disappointed that it cannot. On the contrary, Montaigne warns, “there is no time, we say, when a leader must be more on the watch than that of parleys and peace treaties” (17). He points to numerous examples, ancient and modern, of generals and armies that have used the “relaxation” of verbal negotiation as opportunities, in the words of one (from Essay # 6, “Parley time is dangerous”), to take “possession of the place and cut the enemy to pieces” (19). Given the uncertainty of a situation whereby “war has by nature many privileges that are reasonable even at the expense of reason” (18), Montaigne surveys the possibilities of rhetorical response.

He balances anecdotes that cast doubt upon the reliability of  verbal negotiations with stories of those “who have done very well by [parleying] on the attacker’s word” (17). The first sentence of Montaigne’s first essay, “By diverse means we arrive at the same end,” addresses this question as a choice between alternative forms of pathos:

The commonest way of softening the hearts of those we have offended, when, vengeance in hand, they hold us at their mercy, is by submission to move them to commiseration and pity. However, audacity and steadfastness—entirely contrary means—have sometimes served to produced the same effect. (Montaigne 3)

Essays # 1 and # 15, “One is punished for defending a place obstinately without reason,” show readers cases in which people have been rewarded or punished for rhetorical acts of defiance. In one tale, women of a besieged Bavarian town are permitted to leave safely, taking only what they can carry. When they load husbands, children, and the ruling duke himself on their shoulders, the attacking Emperor’s anger is said to subdue, from which point he treats his adversaries humanely (3-4). In another tale, Alexander is said to drive spikes through an enemy’s heels and drag him alive behind a cart, because this enemy would not bend a knee or supplicate to his conqueror (5). If the merits of various appeals are to be judged by their effects, Montaigne offers no conclusive evidence in support of any, but shows diverse results of diverse means.

The stance that emerges from these speculations combines generosity and wariness. That Montaigne is a “humanist” can be alleged from his claims that “I am wonderfully lax in the direction of mercy and gentleness… I put my trust easily in another man’s word” (4, 17). But the violent reality of Montaigne’s world presses on him in an appendage to the latter claim: “I should do so reluctantly whenever I would give the impression of acting from despair and want of courage rather than freely and through trust in his honesty” (17). With no shortage of real events to draw upon, he evinces a weathered ethos ample enough to gain the 21^st Century American reader’s agreement that “above all we must beware, if we can, of falling into the hands of an enemy judge who is victorious and armed” (48). A preoccupation with death, doubtless related to pervasive European warfare in the 16^th Century, centers six of Montaigne’s first fifteen essays.

One concern is the relationship between an individual and his or her own death. Montaigne notes a widespread tendency to deeply attach life and death. In Essay # 14, “That the taste of good and evil depends in large part on the opinion we have of them,” he writes, “Any opinion is strong enough to make people espouse it at the price of life” (35). In Essay # 3, “Our feelings reach out beyond us,” Montaigne attributes such zealotry to a basic, “humanistic” principle. As with his observations of battlefield rhetoric, Montaigne identifies the principle without approving of it:

We are never at home, we are always beyond. Fear, desire, hope, project us toward the future and steal from us the feeling and consideration of what is, to busy us with what will be, even when we shall no longer be… we transport ourselves by anticipation wherever we please; but once out of being, we have no communication with what is… (Montaigne 8, 10)

To this understandable and common fault Montaigne credits various forms of superstition, roughly summarized by his criticism of those “who, adding impiety to folly, turn their blame against God himself, or against Fortune, as if she had ears susceptible to our assault” (15) in Essay # 4, “How the soul discharges its passions on false objects when the true are wanting.”

The process of working through copious anecdotes of “transport,” or perversions by which death shadows life, enables Montaigne to arrive at positions of his own. In Essay # 2, “Of sadness,” he claims that “[m]y susceptibility is naturally tough; and I harden and thicken it every day by force of reason” (8). To conclude Essay # 7, “That intention is judge of our actions,” he resolves to “keep my death from saying anything that my life has not already said” (20). He synthesizes public lessons of combat with his private meditations in Essay # 12, “Of constancy,” when he confirms that “all honorable means of safeguarding ourselves from evils are not only permitted but laudable” (30). It is in the sense that each individual must provide for his or her own “honorable means” of defense, that leads to the sophisticated argument of Essay # 14, which begins to formulate a methodology of composition.

In Essay # 4, Montaigne argues that “the soul in its passions will sooner deceive itself by setting up a false and fantastical object, even contrary to its own belief, than not act against something” (14). He picks up this thread again in Essay # 14:

Even as the enemy grows keener at our flight, so pain waxes proud to see us tremble beneath it. It will make itself far easier to deal with to those who stand against it. We must resist it and tense ourselves against it. By turning tail and retreating we call upon us the ruin that threatens us. As the body is firmer against attack when stiffened, so is the soul. (Montaigne 39)

Montaigne’s figurative language here may obscure the precision of his meaning. He sets up an analogy, but still a dichotomy, between “soul” and “body.” Because he argues against those who unnecessarily or harmfully infuse death into life, he depends on a hierarchical separation of body and soul: “[T]he soul is sovereign mistress of our condition and conduct. The body has, except for differences of degree, only one gait and one posture” (39). He musters examples from throughout history of those who have endured pain or death with composure and dignity. Based on this evidence, Montaigne joins a conclusion with a question: “If things give themselves up to our mercy, why shall we not dispose of them and arrange them to our advantage?” (33). By the end of the essay, the “sovereignty” of soul over body becomes transformed into an opposition between the “soul” and “Fortune,” as the constraints of “body” expand to fill the cosmos.

Just as Montaigne decries those who falsely blame God or Fortune “as if she had ears susceptible to our assault,” he scoffs equally at the reverse impulse:

… it is madness to expect fortune itself ever to arm us adequately against itself. It is with our own weapons that we must combat fortune; the accidental ones will betray us at the vital point… Fortune does us neither good nor harm; she only offers us the material and the seed of them, which our soul, more powerful than she, turns and applies as it pleases. (Montaigne 45-6)

That the “soul” is more powerful than “Fortune,” becomes a foundational assumption for Montaigne’s writing practice. From so many arguments that he has provided to “despise death and endure pain,” he reasons that each person should be able to “find one that will do… apply to himself the one that best suits his humor” (47). Of course, we can expect Montaigne himself to do just that. By interrogating into the scene of armed and violent conflict in its origins, we see that a prime motivation of Montaigne’s enterprise is to “stiffen the soul,” a verbal “defense” in counterpart to the surrounding necessity for physical defense.

But what sort of defense, in particular, does Montaigne apply to himself? An answer can be found in Montaigne’s prefatory remark “To the Reader.” The best hint is the already quoted statement that “If I can, I shall keep my death from saying anything that my life has not already said.” The hint is confirmed by the book’s dedication to the author's “relatives and friends, so that when they have lost me (as soon they must), they may recover here some features of my habits and temperament, and by this means keep the knowledge they have had of me more complete and alive” (2). The project of the Essays in fact turns out to be less a simple “application” of arguments to “suit his humor,” than an outright determination of the “humor” itself. At least five of the first fifteen essays demonstrate significant aspects of Montaigne’s writing process, which have less to do with Montaigne himself than with a particular methodology.

As the “soul” is said to rather invent a “false and fantastical object, even contrary to its own belief, than not act against something,” Montaigne acknowledges the requirement of “some definite subject” (21), which subject cannot be simply “himself” or his own “soul”:

The soul that has no fixed goal loses itself; for as they say, to be everywhere is to be nowhere… like a runaway horse, it gives itself a hundred times more trouble than it took for others, and gives birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monsters, one after another, without order or purpose, that in order to contemplate their ineptitude and strangeness at my pleasure, I have begun to put them in writing, hoping in time to make my mind ashamed of itself. (Montaigne 21)

This Essay # 8, “Of idleness,” combats idleness by a kind of dialectical embrace. With a sort of methodical “carelessness,” Montaigne records everything that occurs to him, for good or ill. Readers can observe the care he takes in this calculated haphazardness, and can attempt, as does this paper, to order threads of ideas independent of their sequence as essays.

Montaigne gives further insight as to how it all seems from his end, which puts into writing well before it contemplates the “ineptitude and strangeness” of its own fantastic monsters. He admits that his memory is terrible, but accounts that same fact an advantage, “[f]or the magazine of memory is apt to be better furnished with matter than that of invention” (22). Memory, he argues, fixes or “lodges” something in the “consciousness and knowledge” that may well be false but prevents us from receiving new stimuli. So he expresses gratitude that remaining sensitive to present experience (as opposed to past or future), “the circumstances that were learned first [i.e., in the “now”], slipping into the mind every moment, tend to weaken the memory of the false or corrupted parts that have been added” (23). Furthermore it assists conversation, as Montaigne does not begin cluttered with past arguments, but “topics arouse the faculty, such as it is, that I have of handling and treating them, warming up my arguments and leading them on” (22). Another advantage, perhaps one Montaigne shares mostly with himself, is that “the places and books that I revisit always smile at me with a fresh newness” (23). This “newness” appears mysterious at first, but in Essay # 11, “Of prognostications,” Montaigne clarifies what he might mean.

Referring to what Socrates calls his “daemon,” Montaigne reasons it must be analogous to a “certain impulse of the will” experienced by all people, which he claims can have an even “rhetorical” power over us, as he reveals his customary response to such impulses:

Everyone feels within himself some likeness of such stirrings of a prompt, vehement, and accidental opinion. It is my business to give them some authority, since I give so little to our wisdom. And I have had some as weak in reason as violent in persuasiveness—or in dissuasiveness, as was more ordinary in Socrates—by which I let myself be carried away so usefully and fortunately that they might be judged to have in them something of divine inspiration. (Montaigne 29-30)

Montaigne, who so often rails against transcendental aspirations, no doubt holds his tongue in his cheek somewhat. Yet is there a methodical way to grasp after such “accidental opinion”? Essay # 10, “Of prompt or slow speech,” employs again the verb “to rouse,” as when Montaigne speaks of “topics” arousing his “faculty” of handling and treating them. Memory must give way before a “temperament” that wants to be “roused and warmed up by external, present, and accidental stimuli… Agitation is its very life and grace” (26). Here we begin to see more specifically the relationship between Montaigne’s writing and his “self.”

We have arrived at a paradox. On the one hand, Montaigne argues for the soul’s power over both Fortune and the  body. On the other, he insists that:

I have little control over myself and my moods. Chance has more power here than I. The occasion, the company, the very sound of my voice, draw more from my mind than I find in it when I sound it and use it by myself… I do not find myself in the place where I look; and I find myself more by chance encounter than by searching my judgment. I will have tossed off some subtle remark as I write… Later I have lost the point so thoroughly that I do not know what I meant… If I erased every passage where this happens to me, there would be nothing left of myself. (Montaigne 26-7)

“I” and “myself” in this passage are neither the “soul” with power to “despise death and endure pain,” nor the body that will (soon enough) die and decay. It rather seems like a studied accumulation of accident, and more importantly, the writing that comes of such accidents. This is not to exclude speaking. Because the very sound of his voice conspires with the occasion and the company, he declares his speaking better than his writing, although he happily affirms that the choice is not necessary (26). Montaigne thereby gets around to rhetoric from another angle, not as observer, but here as a participant.

He receives more of the “self” in chance encounters, one can assume alone, while reading or writing, and in the company of others. Since this paper aims at a rhetorical evaluation of Montaigne’s work, it makes sense to look for any sense of speech or writing as a social interaction. Here, as elsewhere, Montaigne does not disappoint. Essay # 13, “Ceremony of interviews between kings,” returns to the theme of diplomatic or military parley, but with a more peaceful, or domestic twist. Montaigne notes the customs governing hospitality in late 16^th Century France, assures his readers that he is well acquainted with them, but also accuses them of vanity (32). However, he maintains, one must learn social proprieties, not for their own sake, but for reasons related to the need for “agitation” and “fresh stimulus” quoted above:

Moreover it is a very useful knowledge, this knowledge of social dexterity. Like grace and beauty, it acts as a moderator at the first approaches of sociability and familiarity, and consequently opens the door for us to learning by the examples of others, and to bringing forth and displaying our own example, if it has anything instructive and communicable about it. (Montaigne 33)

We are farther than Montaigne from an era in which armies announce their plans for battle in advance, out of respect to their opponents. Yet Montaigne shows how such parley itself is a form of “social dexterity.” Insofar as we do have power to “arrange” at least our “opinions,” let us hope and seek after, with Montaigne,  the kind of “stimulation,” “agitation,” and “social dexterity” that favors “letters,” as opposed to arms.

Works Cited

Bizzell, Patricia and Bruce Herzberg, ed. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. 2^nd Ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001.

Montaigne, Michel de. The Complete Works of Montaigne: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters. Trans. Donald M. Frame. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1948.