Montaigne and the Art of the Essay

Josh Landy
Are essays a good way to do philosophy?

Lanier Anderson
What if they’re full of digressions or contradictions?

Josh Landy
Does that make them even more philosophical?

Lanier Anderson
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything except your intelligence.

Josh Landy
I’m Josh Landy.

Lanier Anderson
And I’m Lanier Anderson, sitting in for Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from our respective homes by the studios of KALW San Francisco,

Josh Landy
continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus where Lanier teaches philosophy, and where he and I co-direct the philosophy and literature initiative.

Lanier Anderson
Today, we’re thinking about Michel de Montaigne and the art of the essay. You know, Josh, Montaigne actually invented the essay back in the 1570s.

Josh Landy
Yeah, and those essays he wrote, they’re pretty amazing. They get you thinking about so many different things. But I mean, they don’t really do philosophy, are they?

Lanier Anderson
What do you mean, Josh? They make you think, and they make you think about interesting things. Isn’t that what this show is supposed to be about? And they’re about all kinds of philosophical themes, you know, knowledge, morality, the confrontation with death, what’s not philosophical about that?

Josh Landy
Or they’re, they’re a mess. I mean, the guy starts out talking about the limits of our knowledge. And then next thing you know, he’s telling you about his films.

Lanier Anderson
That’s all deliberate, my friend. As Michel says, it’s the inattentive reader who loses my subject, not me. So it’s all your fault, Josh.

Josh Landy
Oh, right. Yeah, blame the reader. It’s not my fault he can’t keep his story straight. Plus, he’s always contradicting himself. I mean, yeah, one page, he’ll say, philosophy is all about learning to face death. Yeah. And then a few pages later, he’ll say you can’t learn to face death.

Lanier Anderson
Come on, Josh. It was a few hundred pages later. But anyway, contradiction is the lifeblood of the essay.

Josh Landy
It’s the what?

Lanier Anderson
The word essay literally means “attempt” or try out.” Montaigne invented the form precisely so he could try things out, stuff he wasn’t sure about. He said it himself. If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays. I’d make decisions.

Josh Landy
Okay, that is a good line and trying things out, that’s great. But how is it doing philosophy?

Lanier Anderson
Man, you have such an impoverished conception of philosophy.

Josh Landy
Okay, smarty pants, enlighten me.

Lanier Anderson
Look, I’m with Montaigne. Philosophy isn’t just about coming up with true beliefs. It’s about living well. You can have all the best beliefs in the world. But if you’re living like a Buddha or a tyrant, then it’s totally pointless or even worse.

Josh Landy
Okay, yeah, I accept that. But look, here’s my question. How on earth is a massive digression and contradiction gonna help us live better? I mean, I mean, can’t we live good lives by reading things that are clear things that are consistent, things that stick to the point?

Lanier Anderson
No, because that’s not going to help you be a skeptic or a good skeptic like Montaigne was, he realized just how hard it is to know anything, and also how dangerous it can be when you think you know more than you actually know.

Josh Landy
Actually, yeah, that’s a good point. I mean, the folks around Montaigne in France in the 16th century, they were so certain, they had it exactly right about which version of Christianity was the right one they were running around slaughtering each other in the millions. I mean, that that does seem to be a case where being totally convinced you have the right beliefs is dangerous.

Lanier Anderson
Right. And that was just about which version of Christianity. I think he’s totally right, that we need at least a measure of skepticism to counter that kind of lethal overconfidence. That’s why the essay form made so much sense for Montaigne. He thought, let’s be humble about what we can know and cautious about upsetting the whole applecart of society based on our pet ideas. So instead, you should use your writing to remind yourself of just how confused you are, just how little you actually know.

Josh Landy
You know what Lanier, that’s actually pretty neat. And Montaigne really did turn questioning everything into an art form, a question that got him to some pretty impressive places for his time, like the equality of women, the stupidity of religious wars, the barbarity of imperialism.

Lanier Anderson
Finally, Josh, you’re getting it. Philosophy is all about the questions, not the answers, just like Socrates said all along.

Josh Landy
See maybe, I don’t have such an impoverished view of philosophy after all.

Lanier Anderson
Okay, I think I might have heard something from you before about that. So I guess you don’t, and neither does our guest Cécile Alduy, who’s an expert on the French Renaissance. Cécile has written about Montaigne, and she’s also an expert on political polarization today, so she’s the perfect person to talk to about Montaigne’s essaying, his philosophy, and his politics.

Josh Landy
So who was this Montaigne fella? Anyway, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter Holly J. McDede to find out. She files this report.

Rob Zaretsky
Michel de Montaigne is just wow.

Holly McDede
Rob Zaretsky is a Professor of History at the University of Houston. To him Montaigne is someone he wishes he could have a beer with.

Rob Zaretsky
He talks about textiles, he talks about earth, he talks about food, he talks about, forgive me, about deprecating. He talks about sex, he just loves earthly things.

Holly McDede
Montaigne is known as the man who invented the essay. So of course, he had a lot to say, and people have a lot to say about him. But Zaretsky thinks we still don’t really know him.

Rob Zaretsky
And just as we really don’t know him, if we were to do what Montaigne did, and take a long, sustained look at ourselves, we don’t know who we are either.

Holly McDede
But if nothing else, we can at least begin with some basic biographical facts. Montaigne born in the Aquitaine region of France in 1533, and grew up on a wealthy estate speaking Latin. As an adult, he served in the Bordeaux Parliament, and became very good friends with the Humanist writer, Étienne de La Boétie.

Pierre Force
Montaigne really describes it as a perfect friendship.

Holly McDede
That’s Pierre Force, a professor of French and History at Columbia University,

Rob Zaretsky
There was mutual admiration, but there was love.

Holly McDede
Montaigne’s friend died in 1563, just a few years after they met. In 1570, Montana decided it was time to retire.

Rob Zaretsky
And he dedicated his life to reading and thinking and meditating. And that’s when he started writing the essays.

Holly McDede
In his younger years, Montaigne was obsessed with death. But when he fell off a horse and nearly died, his mindset changed.

Rob Zaretsky
He essentially saw himself dying, and then he saw himself coming back to life. And as a result, he was probably less stressed or afraid, or obsessed with the idea of death than he was in his early years.

Holly McDede
While surrounded with his own thoughts, he learned that the people of Bordeaux had elected him there.

Rob Zaretsky
He apparently did not lobby for that position or anything like that. They just elected him.

Holly McDede
And he did such a great job that he was elected again. Montaigne lived during an extremely turbulent time and the world threw a lot at him. At one point he had been asked to act as an official mediator during the vicious war between Catholics and Protestants. In the essays he talks about almost getting kidnapped and ransomed at his house. Still, he just wanted to meditate and write.

Rob Zaretsky
Looking into himself, taking care of his own mind his own heart.

Holly McDede
But staying in one place was not easy. In 1585 month, Montaigne learned the plague had arrived in Bordeaux. Rob Zaretsky from the University of Houston says Montaigne hit the road with his family, and in one of his essays he describes wishing he could run from himself.

Rob Zaretsky
The point to living is not to rehearse one’s dying for Montaigne. Now, in the wake of the play, the point to life is to live.

Holly McDede
So Montaigne lived and he wrote and wrote and wrote, he lived an unusual life in a frightening time and spent a lot of it trying to get to know himself better. After all, as he would say, even on the most exalted throne in the world, we’re only sitting on our own bottom. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede.

Josh Landy
Thanks for that fascinating and really informative report, Holly. I’m Josh Landy, with me as my Stanford colleague Lanier Anderson, and today we’re thinking about Montaigne and the art of the essay.

Lanier Anderson
We’re joined now by Cécile Alduy. She’s a professor of French literature and culture at Stanford and the author of “The Politics of Love: Poetics and Genesis of the “Amours” in Renaissance France,” Cécile, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

Cécile Alduy
Hello, glad to be here.

Josh Landy
Cécile, you work on all kinds of fascinating stuff from 16th century poetry all the way to 21st century political discourse. So, what first got you interested in Montaigne?

Cécile Alduy
Well, to be honest, when I was a student in France, I got, you know, to read Montaigne, and I was not really caught up with you know, being like, I didn’t think he was the best guy but many years later, and even after having taught Montaigne in courses at Stanford, I got a pretty bad case of carpal tunnel syndrome where my hands could not function for two years and this is where I discovered Montaigne wrote a small essay called “On Thumbs.” And I you know, thought you know, a guy who thinks that writing and thinking about your hands is important. That’s my guy.

Lanier Anderson
Your guy, your guy, that’s excellent. So Cécile, this literary form that Montaigne invented, what is it? What makes something an essay in the Montaigne sense?

Cécile Alduy
Well, what it is not is what you’re learning to do at school in America today, which is the five paragraph essay, an essay in Montaigne’s sense, is really a writing process that seeks to, as you said, try out ideas, including contradictory ideas, honestly, sincerely, without necessarily having a preconception of an answer to the original question. So it’s a roundabout way to circulate, from idea to idea, topic to topic, to come to a sense of what the subject and it’s a really important thing, the invention of subjectivity through writing, what the subject can know about this, looking at books, looking at examples, looking at his or her own life, and rounding it up in a forum that is open to further questioning.

Lanier Anderson
So let me pick up two themes that you highlighted and get you to dilate a little bit on why they’re important. So one theme you highlighted is that you should go round and round and that the essay should digress. Why is that important? And the other thing is, why is there an honesty rule? Why do you have to say what you really think?

Cécile Alduy
So the digression is a consequence of honesty. Because the writing of the essay in Montaigne’s sense and practice is the thinking process itself. It’s not a stream of consciousness, there is some drafting and rewriting going on. But it has to be transparent about its own shortcomings. And so instead of being a philosophical system, where you present like likeness, arguments, and through deduction arrive at a system of the world, or metaphysics, or what have you, not, Montaigne is interested in how we know what we know if we know anything, and how we think and how we think is, coming to your second answer, being from a specific perspective, from a point of view, in a body at a certain time, in some situation, and within a cultural system. And so he is one of the first authors to pinpoint the conditions of thinking as intrinsic to how much we can understand and how modest we have to be about what we can know.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about the 16th century essayist Michel de Montaigne with Cécile Alduy from Stanford University.

Lanier Anderson
What makes the essay such a great vehicle for doing philosophy? How can writing essays help us recognize our limits, embrace other cultures and become who we are?

Josh Landy
Skepticism, style, and the self, along with your comments and questions when Philosophy Talk continues.

If the book you read was full of digressions and contradictions would you sing about it? I’m Josh Landy, this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything

Lanier Anderson
except your intelligence. I’m Lanier Anderson sitting in for Ray Briggs and we’re thinking about Montaigne and the art of the essay with Cécile Alduy from Stanford University, author of “Montaigne and the 29 Sonnets of Étienne de La Boétie: From Composing Poetry to Composing Essays.”

Josh Landy
No essay needed about COVID. Unfortunately, we’re still pre recording episodes from the safety of our respective homes. So we can’t take your phone calls today, but you can always email us at comments@philosophytalk.org Or you can come on our website, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Lanier Anderson
So Cécile, Josh, and I were arguing earlier about whether Montaigne’s essays really count as philosophy. I of course, was right. Is there a philosophical value to writing the way he did in your opinion?

Cécile Alduy
Well, I think you know, the same question would apply to Socrates who is one of the models for Montaigne. So the constant questioning of how much and how little we can know, is the philosophizing that’s going on in the essays. I think that, you know, it is, for me, it’s a literary form as much as philosophy. And I always think he’s a writer, more than a philosopher. If you take a philosopher as someone who builds a system of understanding everything, Montaigne thinks in metaphors, he thinks through his body, he thinks through his age, he thinks the way we all think, which is not as abstract minds, but as embodied persons. And from a very specific, situated position. And this is philosophical in and of itself. I think Montaigne is one of the first to have invented modern subjectivity, as we know it, the sense that we are not just rational minds, but people with histories who change in time, whose eye is not the same 20 years ago, and 20 years after. So I think that this embodied knowledge, through thinking and through writing, is very much philosophical. It’s also a lot of wondering and curiosity about the world in all its facets from, you know, very foreign lands to watermelons.

Lanier Anderson
Yeah. So he, he says that this way of writing this form, actually reveals who he really is, how, how does it do that?

Cécile Alduy
Yeah, so he has a famous line where he says that I did not make my book as much as my book made me because the book is co-substantial to its author. And the way to understand that is the process of writing, because of this fundamental principle of honesty and saying as much as is legal of the other time, this principle of authenticity and honesty with oneself, and going deep into oneself, means that it’s the writing act that reveals what’s inside, it also reveals that one changes with time, not only because in the moment, one thing back at who we were in the past and who we are now, but also because Montaigne comes back to his writings again and again. And he reads himself again, and adds a paragraph or three words and compares who he was or what he was thinking to who he is today, and what time has brought him in terms of maybe not wisdom that but maybe more doubts, actually. So this process, which is in a time, rather than a fixed abstract, atemporal system of things, is much more, as much truer to reality, or to the human experience, at least.

Josh Landy
Yeah, and I love what you’re saying there and also love the way that Montaigne’s thinking about the role of writing, because you could imagine, why don’t you just sit in your room and think of all these thoughts to yourself, right? Why not just, you know, talk to a friend or something like that. But he’s really thinking really hard, what’s the additional value of putting it down on paper, you know, in a book that, as you say, keeps coming back to me never cuts anything. And, and he says, um, you know, that’s because I don’t want to cheat, right? This public declaration obliges me to keep on my path. So he, you know, he writes it down, he circulates it in the public. And so he can never pretend that he always thought the way he’s thinking now or something like that. I love this way of thinking about the value of the actual written word. How do you see this?

Cécile Alduy
Well, there’s another thing that’s very philosophical about it is whether we’re thinking outside of language or not. And we’re, whether we’re thinking outside of language, intended for some kind of audience or not, the process of the essay pretends that he’s reading just for his family so that they can know him after his death of the same time, he’s going to publish like three volume, edited and republished, like many, many times, so he had this intention of reaching a wider audience. So I think that, I mean, this is why I love him because it’s for me, it’s literature as much as philosophy meaning that he thinks in the language, you cannot dissociate an abstract system of thinking that will be just in your head as if you had this pure reason working itself alone and engaging with others, the readers he will have but also him reading authors and you know, you mentioned you could talk to someone to think through your things, but this is what he does in the essays. He’s constantly talking to dead authors to companions like let me see whose memory he’s you know, eliciting again and again. So the essence are conversations with oneself with other writers with the fragments of quotations that he embeds in his writing. It’s certainly not a lonely process.

Lanier Anderson
Yeah. So you’ve been pushing on this idea that it’s really philosophical because he uses it to form himself and fashion himself and create a work that as you put it as consubstantial, or he put it as consubstantial with its author. And you might think that if the whole thing is about self exploration through conversation that way, you were just suggesting that he would be talking about himself all the time. But as you also pointed out, that’s that’s not what he does. You know, he doesn’t talk about himself, he talks about thumbs or smells, or whether you should go out to parley with the, the besieging army outside your city or cannibals or whatever. Right?. Yeah, that’s what does, how does he get it himself by talking about all those other things?

Cécile Alduy
Yeah, there. I mean, the preface is to trap to the reader like talk to myself, and then you open the book, and all about his own, you know, subjectively for a long time, because actually, thinking about the world, thinking about others, is still thinking from one’s mind. So the thinking thing brings the self into contact with the outside, if you wish. So even when you’re doing an essay about, you know, doctors and medicine, or fathers and sons, the subjectivity of the writer, because there’s this honesty embedded in the reading contract comes in or shines through or leaks through in the writing itself. And conversely, what he was also implying is that the subject is not interesting, because he’s wonderful. He’s just a great guy. But just because he is as everybody else, he is just a human being. And so he has this other quote, which is every single person holds the entirety of the human condition within him or her. And I think that’s what’s valuable about his book. It’s not about the ego, it’s about the self as self.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about Montaigne and the essay with Cécile Alduy from Stanford University. And we have an email from Dana in Lake St. Louis, Missouri. And Dana says, could you discuss how philosophers might benefit from returning to Montaigne’s stylish essay form? We have grown dry as dust, and he is so engaging and lively. What do you think Cécile?

Cécile Alduy
I could not agree more. This is what I’m not a philosophy person; I’m a literature preson. I think that we think in images, we talk in images, we understand the world, in images as well. And this is what Montaigne says and writes. I do agree that philosophers would gain a lot in trying to translate the abstract reasoning into concrete applications, and have this constant back and forth between the experience and the abstraction that Montaigne is doing, because it’s not like he’s just like, you know, chit chatting about things. Actually, he’s taking examples and trying to see so what can we deduct from this, maybe nothing, because it’s contradicting with something totally different on the other side, but he’s trying out the mind with different examples, or writings or statements and seeing how we can make sense of them either together or opposing them, one from another. And this is thinking, and what I love about it is that if you want to follow his writing, you have to think yourself, you cannot just like take a statement, take it out from the book, and oh, I know Montaigne, I know what he means. You cannot extract from the writing itself as quintessential, you know, philosophy, you have to read and think the book through.

Josh Landy
I love that. Yeah. And you know, maybe it connects to something that Lanier was talking about a little earlier on today about the different kinds of philosophy that are out there, right? There’s one is one kind of philosophy that’s all about, you know, having the right beliefs thinking correctly and other kinds it’s all about acting correctly. And if you if you want the second time, maybe a book that isn’t a treatise is better for me. Montaigne himself said something about books, you know, use books more for exercise than for instruction. And he you know, sometimes he likes to read books, just for the style, not so much the subject matter. I, you know, what do you think? Do you think this is true of us too, and we can go to Montaigne, not so much to learn what thumbs are or why thumbs are useful, vut you know, to meet Montaigne and and to sort of intuit him through his fascinating style and, and maybe to exercise ourselves like you were saying to seal, you know, we have to work we have to do something and is that work itself philosophically important? Are we doing something that helps us live a better life?

Cécile Alduy
I think that thinking and doubting is always important. And what I love about Montaigne, and there are other other authors like that is that you have yourself to engage into this cognitive process that suspends certainties that suspense dogmas, and forces you to really think, honestly, outside of the bounds of what you’re used to do. And so for me, really, it’s really, you know, reading Montaigne, like writing the essays for Montaigne is a cognitive process, almost like a meditation in thinking, where you’re practicing new neural connections, you’re expanding your brain by putting together things that you’re not used to put together and confronting ideas that were not trained to align in the same paragraph, for instance. So it’s this, you know, he has the phrase, he says that he likes a poetic allure, as soon as they go back where you’re jumping around, and so this jumping around, which is so not conventional, is immensely productive way to get outside of our cognitive bubbles, and our habits of thinking.

Lanier Anderson
Yeah, and you know, one of the main cases where he forced his contemporaries to think outside the box in that kind of way, is the famous essay on cannibals. And I always thought, you know, in a way, the whole thing grew out of the joke at the end. You know, he spends all this time praising the bravery and the resilience and the virtue of the Native Americans. And then, at the end, he says, well, but what can- what can we do? They don’t wear pants, so you know, there’s nothing to be done with them. And, you know, by opening the whole essay out of that closing joke, he sort of tried to force his contemporaries to re-see the Native Americans as genuine humans with virtues to admire and things to teach us. And that really shaped them. Yeah, better people than them and really shake them out of their complacency as Europeans.

Cécile Alduy
Yeah. And what’s really remarkable about the essay is that it’s, it’s exactly what I was describing. It forces you to think even the meaning of words differently. So he, he takes this word barbarian, and kind of travels with it along different lines of thinking. So first, you know, okay, the cannibals. Oh, they’re barbarian. Yeah, but only in the sense of barbarian are the ones that are just not like us, like, you know, the Romans were barbarians for the Greek. Oh, yeah. And they’re barbarian because, you know, they live close to nature. So they’re, they’re, you know, really close to nature, but is that bad? And so then he have a few paragraphs about how being close to nature is probably better than being in our artificial societies where brothers are killing each other. And then, you know, and not only they’re really close to nature, but okay, they do have this habit of cannibalism, but what did we do just like, you know, yesterday? We killed each other. There were rumors that in Paris during the civil wars, people would go and unearth cat lovers to eat them, because they were this famine. So he’s constantly forcing us to rethink even the meaning of the word barbarian. Which is, you know, the other basically, you know, for us today, and, and put images that are new to this word, including our own faces on that word, we are the barbarians. So you know, if you travel with him reading through the cannibals, you’ve changed entirely, in your mind, the meaning of the word barbarian?

Josh Landy
Yeah. So Cécile, we’ve got an email from Jeff in Williamstown, Massachusetts. And Jeff says, is Montaigne’s way of making thoughtful judgments without obsessing over a certainty, a good model for the 21st century, given our current crises of knowledge?

Cécile Alduy
I probably yes, I think it is. If you think of how much troubles come from people holding really firm on ideologies that they think are truth and how it prevents any civil dialogue or deliberation, how it can have very serious consequence on even how we might be able to live on this planet, you know, going forward, having the sense of constant doubt, obliges one, to be open to not only contradiction, but to learning from others. And to, you know, learning from science also, it’s not doubting every everything, but mostly doubting yourself and your, your ability to have a secure truth. That’s not tainted by just very relative cultural position.

Josh Landy
And that’s great and maybe add some doubt in whatever conspiracy comes across your Facebook.You’re listening to Philosophy Talk, today we’re thinking about Montaigne and the essay with Cécile Alduy from Stanford.

Lanier Anderson
Who do you think is writing the most interesting essays today? What do you look for in an essay? Do your favorite essays help you live better, a more authentic, a more tolerant life?

Josh Landy
The slow art of the essay in an impatient world, plus commentary from Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Surely today’s essayists publish more than unreconstructed rubbish? Could we call upon the authors to explain? I’m Josh Landy and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything

Lanier Anderson
except your intelligence. I’m Lanier Anderson sitting in for Ray Briggs. Our guest is Cécile Alduy from Stanford, and we’re thinking about Montaigne and the art of the essay.

Josh Landy
So Cécile, we’ve got an email from Tim in Portland, Oregon. Tim asks whether Montaigne has any equals today. What are his essays most similar to, something in the Atlantic or New Yorker? Or maybe Reddit, Twitter or even Wikipedia? Who was the Montaige of today?

Cécile Alduy
That’s a great question. There’s only a few writers in the New Yorker who qualify as you know, new Montaignes. I really like Adam Gopnik. But I’m thinking of other authors that made a similar influence on me because of the same qualities that Montaigne has, and, in particular, Susan Sontag, in her book, Metaphors of Illness, because you have the same combination of their subjective point of view, where the essay is rooted in lived experience, but to question how this experience has been put into words, or denied, or how language can even help us make sense of it, or if there is the possibility to make sense of illness in general. And that’s very similar to essays trying out words and trying outs, ways of thinking things that maybe are outside of the realm of what we can comprehend. And, you know, put into a little box. So that’s, that’s another.

Josh Landy
Yeah, that makes sense. If somebody comes to mind for me, it’s Roxane Gay. I mean, this is kind of combination of the personal intellectual, but I think for I don’t know, for me, the biggest thing that comes to mind on the biggest but the closest comparisons, what I meant was David Foster Wallace, because, right, he has footnotes to his footnotes. Right. So there’s a personal intellectual, the digressions, there’s the retractions as the kind of skeptical acknowledgement of ignorance. You see there, and you see a kind of kinship there.

Cécile Alduy
Yes, absolutely. I think that the digression feature of Montaigne’s essays is harder to find, nowadays, just because editors have much more power than in the past. And so publishers are reluctant to allow something like looks like a draft be published. But yeah, David Foster Wallace would count. I think that blogs, probably because you can go back in time and write something entirely different in the same topic, you know, a few years later, would probably be a form that Montaigne would have embraced.

Lanier Anderson
Yeah, that’s what Andrew Sullivan actually claimed that part of his pioneering work and political blogging was inspired by the way he read Montaigne. I think that’s a great observation. But I’d like to actually go back for a second and invite you to expand a little bit on Josh’s call out of Roxane Gay and another person who seems similar in concern with the body and ecstatic states is Jia Tolentino. And there really has been an explosion of great writing in the feminist first person essay in the last few years. And Montaigne himself was a little bit of a proto feminist. And I wonder if you have a perspective on that, Cecile?

Cécile Alduy
Yeah, I would qualify a little bit his proto feminism. I mean, I don’t remember now how he put it but,

Josh Landy
He says males and females are case the same mold.

Cécile Alduy
Yes, that’s true but he his chapter on three commerces, he, you know, he’s very fast about the commerce of woman saying yeah, well I spent some time on that and didn’t bring me as much satisfaction as conversation and books. So he can be pretty blunt about and in his own life, I mean, he spends a lot of time talking about his friends, his father, a little bit his son, he was zero. And so I think he was proto feminist in the sense that he looked at the education of girls and women and the restrictions on their condition and, you know, called the bluff and said, you know, why are they not able to read about sex when, just, you know, actually, the taboo on sex elicits more curiosity on their part than being able to be open about it. And they know more than we do anyway. So I mean, of course, like, whatever thing was missing, you have to replace it in his context. But I think that creating a form where the subject as an embodied person was, you know, all the frailties, and particularities of being in one body that opens a space of literature for anyone to inhabit and take for themselves. So it will not be surprising that the essay as a form that so free, you know, would be a great vehicle for the feminists of today.

Lanier Anderson
Yeah, so regardless of whether Montaigne himself got all the way there, right, these other people can pick it up. Um, I’d love to hear your further thoughts on Gopnik, too. So I had this reaction to one of Gopnik’s pieces. You know, I don’t know if you saw his review of Philippe de Saul’s huge magisterial biography of of Montaigne. But you know, that biography makes Montaigne out to be, you know, writing because he’s kind of compensating for a failed political career or something like that. And I really felt like Gopnik wrote a very harsh review of that biography. And it felt kind of defensive to me, like Gopnik was insisting something like, you can’t say that about my friend.

Josh Landy
And he does feel like our friend, doesn’t he?

Lanier Anderson
How does Montaigne create that effect that he makes us think that he’s our friend?

Cécile Alduy
Well, you know, one thing is that different personalities can take different things from Montaigne. So for instance, you know, I see him as a poetic writer, and maybe you see him more as a philosopher. But the work is so rich, and his, his presence is both very humble, and at every corner, so you get to really know a mind thinking through his own failings, you know, narrating how his body is so heavy and giving him all sorts of sorrows. So there’s this intimacy that emerges. And I just wanted to just pinpoint that it’s fairly new for the time at the time, literature is about imitation of great authors. So you’re supposed to if you’re a poet, you’re supposed to be like Petrarch, or you know Ovid, but you’re not supposed to write about yourself, actually, even if you say I, so the fact that Montaigne is about to create this intimacy, and talks so wonderfully, about friendship, of course, maybe accounts for how close the reader feels, to the offer.

Josh Landy
So this brings me to a question I have for you, Cecile, because, you know, we’ve talked about how he contradicts himself, we talked about change. But, you know, at times, he will also talk about how, you know, he’s managed to kind of construct himself, he’s made himself into something, he talks about everyone having a ruling pattern inside them some kind of, you know, essence or something like a deep character. And then you’ll quotes, you know, people like Seneca saying, you know, wisdom is always to will the same things, and always to oppose the same things. And there’s something really important about achieving a kind of stability. So where does he end up? Does he end up just kind of a mess? You know, where he started and, and that’s good, he’s conflicted. He changes across time, or is there a way in which he’s kind of produced something kind of stable, related with our friend, our friend Montaigne?

Cécile Alduy
Well, he creates this work which is stable because it’s finished at this point, but also he creates a complex image of the self and and I think this is what’s so rich about it is that instead of having, you know, even in a novel, you would have a portrait of the characters at the beginning and introduction. And you get the the physical, the moral portraits, and it’s couched in words that pre exists the character, and that are supposed to make sense, you know, in a very definite way of the complexity of the being that’s in question. But Montaigne does not put adjectives to himself, he shows himself in the writing. And he says, he’s not going to say, you know, I’m, I am this I am that. But across time, I’ve been this way and that way and these kind of occasions, and rather inclined to do this. And I can also be this but so you have the, the entire palette of being in action in the world, that’s, that’s evoked, which is a very different thing than just contradicting yourself in terms of, I had this idea. Now I have this other idea. So there is a Montaigne that exists through the essays, who is really like a person, you know, that you get to know, who rumbles about certain things and are obsessed about specific kinds of errors, nothing really trivial. And has this kind of irony, and but it does not preclude acknowledging doubt, and, and consistencies at the same time.

Lanier Anderson
Yeah. So there’s this passage in one of the chapters that I just love, where he compares himself in a way to a harmony in which we don’t hear just the flute or the spinit, or the, the instruments separately, but they all come together into a harmony. And we get that sense from him individually too that, you know, he might be changing all the time. But somehow those things all come together into a harmonious personality. You know, he focuses on change in himself. But he wasn’t so enamored of change in the society. So another thing that he’s famous for is, you know, advocating for sticking to the old customs. And I thought you would have quite illuminating important things to teach us about that part of Montaigne.

Cécile Alduy
Yeah, that’s the kind of paradoxical thing. And people were surprised when I say that he was very conservative, if you take it, if you take the meaning of conservative in at face value, he wanted to conserve the rules of laws, as they were, and he was very much against revolutions, for sure. But even before formation, not only as you know, a new theological system, but as a social enterprise of changing the law, the country you live in. And this is, of course, dictated, in part by his experience of the wars of religions, which were so so violent and deadly. And so, at the same time, actually, it’s very logical, the way he thinks about it, as you know, since we were unsure, I mean, our human minds, cannot know what is the best system of governments, they cannot know, you know, God’s will. So having any claim on that, and launching an entire religious reformation, when we’re doing it from our very limited human mind, can amount only to disorder, with no gain in terms of truth value, since it’s still coming from human reasoning. So it’s better to stick to what we have, because we know all you know, political systems are relative or cultural systems are relative, but no one is better than the other. But you know, and he’s in his chapter on customs, he adds, in the very last minutes, something that’s very kind of subversive, actually. But a little deviously waits to introduce, you know, so we should actually not change the laws. But the people who make the law should be able to govern the laws themselves, and and reform the laws. So there’s this weird, you know, dialectic, where he’s telling us don’t try to change the laws live by the laws of your country. And at the same time, the governing authorities should be able to see when the laws themselves are not just any longer, and these authorities should have the authority to govern the laws themselves.

Josh Landy
Well, Cecile, you have not digressed and you haven’t contradicted yourself, but in spite of that, very philosophical, thank you so much for joining us today.

Cécile Alduy
Thank you so much.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Cecile Alduy, Professor of French Literature and Culture at Stanford, and author of “The Politics of Love: Poetics and Genesis of the “Amours” in Renaissance France.” And thank you Lanier so much for co hosting with me today.

Lanier Anderson
It has been my enormous pleasure.

Josh Landy
We’ll put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Lanier Anderson
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments@philosophytalk.org and we may feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Now twice the digressions in half the time, it’s Ian Shoales, the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales. As a proper child of the Enlightenment, Montaigne invented the essay way back in the 16th century, he had been the rich son of a herring merchant raised speaking only Latin and then taught Greek as well, think of it you learn Greek in Latin. How do you even do that? Montaigne became a courier and advisor, careers Machiavelli would have killed to have without controversy, precisely on his 38th birthday, he retreated into the Library Tower, and thereafter only emerged occasionally spending the rest of his life holed up writing essays. Essay, of course, means attempt, which shows the innovation Montaigne brought to writing. These weren’t sermons, manifestos, broadsides, or ponderous aerations, they were explorations of his own mind. And what that told us about being human, never passionate, always reasonable. I think he may also invented what we call the Gallic shrug, but all I know is this catchphrase, the guy who was an innovator, all the modern essay tropes are there writes about whatever you happen to be thinking about, as he sits down to write full of anecdotes and observations, things he’s read things a guy said to him one time, he also throws in chunks of Latin and Greek as well. So reading Montaigne was a reward for being part of a vast information loop. No need to make a point just swim around in the ocean of received information. And at that time, [unintelligible] could know pretty much everything there was to know and later others could read his essays skip over the Latin and Greek and still feel like they’re swimming. Culturally, this sudden permission to just write whatever pops into your head meant that the demands of persuasion and rhetoric do not apply. Just cluing him in no convincing required with a subject matter whatever you felt like writing became a mighty tool in emerging democratic thought. Were the leaders doings of royals and eggheads were not so interesting, let’s hear first chatterers like Darwin, Freud and Marx, leave morality to the bishops and preachers. We had magazines now full of advertising, that is persuasions to buy things wrapped around essays about this and that articles feature writing your Amazon’s your Thoreau’s, I’m up to Joan Didion, David Sedaris. Eventually, they got radio and television, the Internet for a while we had newspaper columns up the wazoo, and I would place comedians among the heirs to Montaigne, one lone person standing up in front of hundred people, a thousand trying to keep them interested in the trees and forests of your personal opinions on everything from traffic jams to hygiene to the precous, is that just me? The essay itself has seen better days, who has time to read them? People check the thickness of the article too long didn’t read. Eye the width of the book on the bookshelf window, check the index to see if their name is in it, then decide to binge watch the sixth episode True Crime thing on Netflix instead, even though they’d seen the same crime and friendship files two years ago. Now it’s just a half hour, it doesn’t make any sense. Now magazines are in trouble. People turn to websites, blogs, subscription sites like medium substack. We had radio commentary for a century or so in my little home. Now podcasts are eating everybody’s lunch because for some reason some people will even pay for those who knows how long anything will last from simple truth seems beyond our grasp. Take a minor example. Mitch McConnell upset that Coca Cola disapproved of George’s new voting laws, warned that, quote, corporations will invite serious consequences of the become a vehicle for far left mobs to hijack our country unquote. But then he immediately said he did not want corporate donations to stop. Essay writer Jonathan Chait pointed out that what McConnell seemed to be saying is that corporate money is free speech. But corporate speech isn’t. So we no longer even know what people are saying where it’s like normalized become normalized not to mention politicized or overturn for the metaphors of tomorrow. Besides metaphors are racist I think problematic is a word. So would Montaigne be on Twitter if he were around today, no, he’s more of an Instagram kind of guy and influencer, you feel me. As he once said, If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays I would make decisions put that on the manifesto on any church door. I dare you, I gotta go.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
Thanks also to Merle Kessler and Angela Johnston.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website philosophytalk.org, where you can subscribe to our library of more than 500 episodes. I’m Josh Landy

Ray Briggs
and I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening

Josh Landy
and thank you for thinking.

Unknown Speaker
Montaigne said obsession was the wellspring of genius and madness. This is my obsession.