Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) is still widely read today because of one reason. He wrote essays on the nature of human experience and drew conclusions of permanent value. He used numerous examples from ancient Greece and Rome, and those remain quite as fresh and fascinating for today’s readers.
What is Montaigne’s main conclusion after devoting twenty years of his life to writing essays? Did he endorse the doctrines of scepticism and relativism, or discovered universal behaviour patterns that lead to happiness?
Montaigne’s key philosophical lesson is that happiness takes lots of work, but that it is worth pursuing through daily, steady activity. He acknowledged human imperfections, mistakes, and inconsistencies, but on the other hand, he praised the ancient Greek and Roman heroes for their persistent idealism.
Reading Montaigne’s essays enables today’s readers to gain a crucial insight, namely, that it is worth it to pursue the good life despite setbacks, opposition and occasional defeats. This is a message that it is difficult to find elsewhere.
Montaigne’s focus on human experience
Montaigne focused his literary explorations on the analysis of different perspectives on human experience. He took stories from different cultures and scrutinised their underlying ideas with the goal of finding happiness.
His comments are sometimes wrong, but never trivial. His search for ancient Greek and Roman wisdom was indefatigable and exuberant. His retelling of historical anecdotes is not fully accurate in details, but always precise in the spirit.
Montaigne is the first essayist in history who had no qualms in confessing his confusion when assessing human experience. In half of his essays, he fails to draw clear conclusions, arguing that human experience is so “shapeless and diverse that each moment plays a unique role.”
He was also the first essayist in history to regard happiness as deeply subjective. After assessing hundreds of biographies, he concluded that happiness is not a cold summation of one’s wealth, health, pleasures and delights.
Montaigne pointed to the strong connection between one’s happiness and the “pattern of opinions and traditions received from the environment.” It is practically impossible, he argued, to attain happiness through immorality.
Why did he particularly despise aggressiveness, intolerance, and ignorance? Because those deficiencies harm other people without making the culprit any happier. They guarantee a loss for all persons involved.
Montaigne’s search of wisdom in human experience
Montaigne’s praise for occasional solitude or for solitude at regular intervals contains echos of ancient Greek and Roman thinkers such as Seneca (4-65 AD) and Marcus Aurelius (161-180 AD). Nonetheless, he came up with additional arguments in favour of taking a time-out to find one’s path in the world.
Like Aristotle (384-322 BC), Montaigne viewed friendship as crucial for happiness. However, in contrast to Aristotle, he emphasised the subjective elements in interpersonal relations. He noted that, in the choice of friends, personal circumstances, tastes and inclinations exert an influence as strong as objective virtues, common interests and background.
Montaigne described friendship as a “generative process,” which shapes one’s spirit and improves it as times go by. Such benefits can also be drawn from meditation, reading, and direct contact with nature.
Despite his vast efforts to analysing personal experience, Montaigne was a doer. He sought wisdom to improve his own life, not for wisdom’s sake. He studied ancient books, heroes, and their stories for a practical purpose.
For Montaigne, history and literature are tools of cognition. They are “sources of instruction to change the reader.” Their effects are theoretical and practical.
On the one hand, they change our ideas and help us acquire virtues such as prudence, steadiness and moderation. On the other hand, they prompt us to make better choices and behave more effectively.
Nevertheless, Montaigne viewed human experience as more instructive than abstract ideas. In his life, he spent more time with peasants than with intellectuals. Etienne de La Boetie was the only sophisticated mind that Montaigne regarded as a close friend, but he passed away young and proved irreplaceable.
Montaigne’s closest companions were solitude and silence, which he devoted to assiduous study. He avoided any kind of idleness as a matter of principle because “the human soul tends to get lost when it lacks purpose.”
Montaigne’s essay “How our spirit hinders itself”
In books, Montaigne primarily sought lessons about how to live, but when he compared those lessons with actual human experience, he was always confronted with inconsistencies.
To know what to do in life is the first step, but knowledge becomes valuable only when we put it into practice, day after day. “Every person has a desire for knowledge,” he noted, but it’s rare to find people who will put it consistently into practice.
Montaigne was so annoyed by his own inconsistencies that he devoted a whole essay to the self-defeating tendencies in human personality. The essay is titled “How our spirit defeats itself” or “How our spirit hinders itself,” depending on how the original French has been translated.
In this essay, Montaigne compares the vast potential of the human mind to the poor performance delivered by most people especially during hard times. When confronted with trouble, it often happens that people will relinquish their principles, and make mistake after mistake.
Like in his other essays, Montaigne is too willing to forgive human frailties, starting with his own. He bears witness of the difficulty of overcoming one’s passions, prejudices and blind conformity.
As a result, he observes, it often happens that people suffer from indecisiveness. Instead of trudging ahead determinedly, they engage in endless analysis. Instead of devoting their time and energy to getting things done, they are papalized by doubt.
For Montaigne, self-awareness and self-reliance constitute the best antidotes to indecision. If we want to move forward, it is necessary to stop hesitating. If we want to achieve our goals, we have to let go of self-doubts, increase our effectiveness, and seize the available opportunities.
Montaigne’s learning from human experience
Do not let external factors drive you to self-destruction, he warns us. Learn from other people’s opinions, but do not give them an exaggerated weight.
Making mistakes is part of the human experience. When we make mistakes in good faith, there is nothing to be ashamed of; and when we make them out of ignorance or inconsistency, we should learn the lesson, so that we do better next time.
Who is to blame for human inconsistency? Why do we find it so hard to stay on course? Montaigne blames the educational system. People cannot think straight, he argues, because they have received an education that is “too theoretical, impractical, stifling of creativity, and prone to conformism.”
The key to consistent high performance, says Montaigne, is to acquire good habits. He is referring to habits such as justice, fairness, initiative, and persistence. However, those should be practised with measure, so that they do not become counter-productive.
Montaigne regrets that humans often hinder themselves due to their inconsistencies, but regards the search for perfection as wasteful. Instead of seeking complete consistency, we should just keep going and correct our mistakes as we advance.
What to do when we feel overwhelmed by our deficiencies? Montaigne advises us to look at famous people in history, and see how they dealt with their own errors and inconsistencies.
Montaigne’s views on errors and inconsistencies
He is asking us to put in practice the advice from Socrates (470-399 BC), that is, acknowledge our frailties, look for the truth, and correct mistakes little by little.
Montaigne wisely remind us that so-called heroes such as Alexander the Great (356-323 BC) would sometimes behave atrociously. Despite his qualities as military leader, Alexander became sometimes enraged, lost his self-control, and harmed other people unnecessarily.
The same can be predicated of the Roman senator Cato the Younger (95-46 BC). He held ethical principles in high regard, but over time, he grew excessively rigid and uncompromising, and precipitated his own demise.
Montaigne also employs Julius Caesar (100-44 BC) as a double-edged example. Despite his vast military achievements, he later became blinded by ambition. His relentless search for power eventually turned him into an assassination target.
The astonishingly effective Carthaginian general Hannibal (247- 181 BC) also became a victim of his own inconsistencies and overextended himself. Montaigne concludes that Hannibal would have been better off by focusing on a more modest goal, instead of trying to conquer the whole Italian peninsula.
In ancient Greece, Themistocles (524-459 BC) made some wise decisions, but also incurred in inconsistencies. Despite his great victories, he could not avoid being deposed by people he had once trusted.
Montaigne’s call for simplicity and effectiveness
Life is difficult enough, concluded Montaigne, and there is no need to make it worse by our own folly. Let us grow aware of our own deficiencies, accept them without shame, and work diligently at remedying them.
Success will be faster, Montaigne predicted, if we keep our thoughts well-organised. Let us keep our agitation, arrogance, and prejudice under control. Let us hold a steady course and minimise our contradictions.
Montaigne acknowledged the impossibility of suppressing all turmoil and contradictions from the human spirit, but those shouldn’t prevent us from finding a safe path forward. His call for simplicity is a call for focus, effectiveness, and parsimony.
“Let us not complicate what should be simple,” Montaigne recommended. Let us not give the troubles in our imagination more weight than the opportunities in the real world.
Montaigne delineated for us a workable path to a better life. It requires us to let go of exaggerated anxiety, preoccupations and fear, and align our thoughts, objectives, and actions. Let us heed his advice and advance confidently to a higher level of effectiveness.
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