Michel de Montaigne was born in the castle of Montaigne, in Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, in the Bordeaux region of France. All of his family members spoke to him only in Latin. As a result, the boy did not learn French until the age of six, when he was admitted to the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux. It is not clear where or whether Montaigne studied law. The only thing that is known for sure is that his father bought him an office at the Court of Périgueux.
Historical context
Living in the second half of the 16th century, Montaigne witnessed the decline of intellectual optimism that marked the Renaissance. The Calvinist Reformation, closely followed by religious persecution and the Wars of Religion (1562-1598) shook the immense human possibilities arising from the discoveries of New World travelers, the rediscovery of classical antiquity and the opening of academic horizons through the works of the humanists. These conflicts were in fact political and civil wars, as well as religious ones, marked by great excesses of fanaticism and cruelty.
Michel de Montaigne's ideas
Under the influence of his friend La Boétie, the philosopher adopts the stoic pretension of reaching the absolute truth. However, his spirit coexists more with doubt, and the stoic experience certainly marked, forever, Montaigne's rupture with any idea of absolute truth. Stoicism was a school and philosophical doctrine that emerged in Ancient Greece, which valued fidelity to knowledge and focus on everything that can be controlled only by the person himself, despising all kinds of external feelings, such as passion and extreme desires.
Montaigne was seduced by the philosophers of skepticism, a doctrine according to which the human spirit cannot reach any certainty about the truth, which results in an intellectual procedure of permanent doubt and in the abdication of a metaphysical, religious or absolute understanding of the real. According to these philosophers, if man knows nothing about himself, how can he know so much about the world and about God and his will? Doubt is for Montaigne a weapon against religious fanaticism.
Education aimed at understanding and awareness
Montaigne considered that education should create human beings focused on investigation and conclusions, at the same time that they exercise the mind for a critical positioning of the individual. In the philosopher's words: we only take care of filling our memory, and we leave understanding and conscience empty. Teaching should be linked to empiricism, a doctrine according to which all knowledge comes solely from experience, limiting itself to what can be captured from the external world, through the senses, or from the subjective world, through introspection, that is, through practical experiences.
The memorization scheme and the use of books, based on the bookish culture of the Renaissance, would alienate students from knowledge. In book culture, students would not learn quickly and still would not have the practice to solve several very important issues, linked to human and moral development.
In the field of education, the personality of the child must be respected in order to form an honest man capable of reflecting for himself. This man should seek dialogue with others, having a sense of relativity about all things. Thus, he will be able to adapt to the society where he will have to live in harmony with other men and with the world. He will be a free spirit and free from beliefs and superstitions.
Skepticism combined with the desire for truth
Bearing in mind the age of dissimulation, corruption, violence and hypocrisy in which he lived, the Essays' starting point lies in negativity, the negativity of Montaigne's recognition of the rule of appearances and the loss of connection with the truth of being.
Montaigne's skepticism is reflected in the French title of his work, Essais, or Attempts, which implies not a transmission of proven knowledge or confident opinion, but a project of trial and error. A reference to neither an established genre nor an indication of a necessary internal unity and structure within the work. The title indicates an intellectual attitude of questioning and continuous evaluation.
His skepticism does not exclude belief in the existence of truth, but it constitutes a defense against the danger of locating it in false, unexamined and externally imposed notions. This leads to the rejection of commonly accepted ideas and a deep distrust of generalizations and abstractions; it also shows the way to an exploration of the only realm that promises certainty: that of concrete phenomena and, above all, the basic phenomenon of your own self body and mind.
This self, with all its imperfections, is the only possible place where the search for truth can begin. That is why Montaigne does not fail to affirm that I am myself the subject of my book. He discovers that “master form” cannot be defined in simple terms of a constant and stable self, as it is something changeable and fragmented. Valuing and accepting these traits is the only guarantee of authenticity and integrity, the only way to remain true to the truth of your being and nature and not to extraneous appearances.
Yet despite his insistence that the self guard its freedom from outside influences and the tyranny of imposed customs and opinions, Montaigne believes in the value of going beyond the self. In fact, throughout his writings, as he did in his private and public life, he manifests the need to maintain links with the world of other people and events.
For this necessary coming and going between the interiority of the self and the exteriority of the world, he uses the image of the living room and the back room: the human being has a room facing the street, where he meets and interacts, and a bedroom for funds. He must always retreat to the back room of the more private self, where he can reassert the freedom and strength of intimate identity and reflect on the vagaries of experience.
Essay as a new literary genre
In March 1580, Michel de Montaigne published the first edition of Essays, consisting of two books divided into 94 chapters. A second edition was published in 1582, and a third appeared in 1588. His book became one of the most important, influential works of the Renaissance, and had a profound influence on European moral thought in the 17th and 18th centuries.
The work established the essay as a new literary genre, where the writer makes personal and subjective reflections on various topics, including religion, education, friendship, love, freedom, war, etc.
Conceptually, the Essays reflect the classical values of Skeptical, Stoic, and Epicurean currents of Hellenistic philosophy. Epicureanism was the Philosophical School created by Epicurus of Samos in the mid-4th century BC, which states that, in order to reach a state of complete freedom, tranquility and freedom from fear, the individual must remain in search of moderate pleasures.
Michel de Montaigne gave it that name because the work was not science or Literature, just personal opinions. Gathered in three volumes, it was the only work published by him being considered a milestone for the birth of the personal essay genre. The articles that deserve to be highlighted are On Cannibals, On Vanity, On Friendship, On Books and Journal of Travel.
Western Europe more barbaric than the natives of the New World
Montaigne extends his curiosity about others to the inhabitants of the New World, whom he met through his keen interest in oral and written travel accounts and through his encounter in 1562 with three Brazilian indians whom the explorer Nicolas Durand de Villegagnon brought back to France.
Giving an example of relativism and cultural tolerance, he finds these people, in their fidelity to nature itself and in their cultural and personal dignity and sense of beauty, far superior to the inhabitants of Western Europe who, in the conquests of the New World and in their own internal wars, proved to be the true barbarians. The suffering and humiliation imposed on the natives of the New World by their conquerors provoked his indignation and compassion.
Completely original meditation on yourself
Although he was apparently a loyal, if not fervent, Roman Catholic, Montaigne was suspicious of all human pretensions to knowledge of a spiritual experience that is not linked to a concretely lived reality. He refused to speculate about a transcendence that is beyond human knowledge, believing in God but refusing to invoke him in necessarily presumptuous and reductive ways.
Despite knowing the classical philosophers, his ideas spring less from their teachings than from a completely original meditation on himself, which he extends to a description of the human being and an ethic of authenticity, self-acceptance and tolerance. The Essays are the record of his thoughts, presented not in artificially organized stages, but as they occurred and repeated themselves in different forms throughout his thinking and writing activity.
The Essays embody a deep skepticism towards human beings' dangerously inflated claims to knowledge and certainty, but they also assert that there is no greater achievement than the ability to accept one's self without contempt or illusion, in the full realization of one's limitations and of your wealth.
Montaigne Readers
Not all of her contemporaries expressed the enthusiasm of Marie de Gournay, who fainted with excitement at the first reading of the Essays. She recognized in the book the full force of an unusual mind revealing itself, but most intellectuals of the period preferred to find Montaigne a sure reincarnation of Stoicism.
Montaigne continues to be studied in all aspects of his text by a great number of scholars and to be read by people from all corners of the earth. In an age that can seem as violent and absurd as his, his refusal of bigotry and bigotry and his lucid awareness of the human potential for destruction, coupled with his belief in the human capacity for self-assessment, honesty and compassion, appeals as convincingly as ever for many who find in him a guide and a friend.
