Montaigne and the Comic: Exposing Private Life (original) (raw)
Related papers
Montaigne's Education, Oxford Handbook of Montaigne. Ed. Philippe Desan (2016)
In spite of Montaigne’s dismissal of his schooling as a “failure,” significant features of his thought can be traced to his humanist education. Not only did he acquire literacy in French at school, he picked up a comic outlook from the plays of Terence in which he acted. Further, George Buchanan exposed the young Montaigne to reformation ideas. Later, Marc-Antoine Muret’s Julius Caesar would school Montaigne in displaying confidence in face of fortune’s vicissitudes, an attitude that he would incorporate into the “heroic” skepticism of the Essays. More generally, he adopted images, language, and postures from the stage as a way of understanding the life as a comédie humaine. Montaigne, however, preferred to award a determining influence for his adult character to the infancy he spent in a rural village.
Montaigne and the Virtue of Moderation
The Review of Politics, 2023
I begin by congratulating the Storeys on their splendid achievement. They have managed to write an eminently readable account of a "conversation" among four complex French thinkers. As a reader learns from the footnotes, their presentation of the unfolding argument is based on an enormous amount of scholarly research, but they never let the scholarship interfere with the smooth flow of their prose. The great strength of the Storeys' book lies in the coherence of the line of thought they trace from Montaigne to Tocqueville concerning the way in which human beings ought to seek happiness. They begin by emphasizing how attractive the notion Montaigne developed of what they call "immanent contentment" is to explain how it became not merely influential, but dominant in the centuries which followed. However, because they are interested in showing how later thinkers received, criticized, and responded to Montaigne's novel conception, the Storeys tend to read and present Montaigne's thought through the eyes of later thinkers and readers. As a result, they do not present a completely accurate account of Montaigne's thought as he understood and presented it. "Although he is remembered as a skeptical individualist who debunks the idea of a universal human good so as better to appreciate humanity's manifold variety," they write, "the practical consequence of his skepticism is this new . . . ideal of happiness." It consists in "moderation through variation: an arrangement of our dispositions, pursuits, and pleasures calculated to keep us interested, 'at home,' and present in the moment but also dispassionate, at ease, and in balance" (3, emphasis original). I can accept that as a general statement of Montaigne's chief recommendation to his readers. However, they go on to identify a "social dimension" of this ideal, which I am less able to accept as correct. "By presenting to others the variegated and balanced self," they claim, Montaigne leads his readers to hope they will receive the "complete, personal, unmediated approbation" he had received from his friend Étienne de La Boétie (3, emphasis original). Montaigne celebrates the extraordinary friendship in which he claims that he and La Boétie shared "everything . . . wills, thoughts, judgments, goods, The Review of Politics 85 (2023), 378-381.
Article The Confessions of Montaigne
2012
Montaigne rarely repented and he viewed confession-both juridical and ecclesiastical-with skepticism. Confession, Montaigne believed, forced a mode of self-representation onto the speaker that was inevitably distorting. Repentance, moreover, made claims about self-transformation that Montaigne found improbable. This article traces these themes in the context of Montaigne's Essays, with particular attention to-On Some Verses of Virgil‖ and argues that, for Montaigne, a primary concern was finding a means of describing a self that he refused to reduce, as had Augustine and many other writers before and after him, to the homo interior.
Montaigne rarely repented and he viewed confession-both juridical and ecclesiastical-with skepticism. Confession, Montaigne believed, forced a mode of self-representation onto the speaker that was inevitably distorting. Repentance, moreover, made claims about self-transformation that Montaigne found improbable. This article traces these themes in the context of Montaigne's Essays, with particular attention to "On Some Verses of Virgil" and argues that, for Montaigne, a primary concern was finding a means of describing a self that he refused to reduce, as had Augustine and many other writers before and after him, to the homo interior.
MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE AND THE POWER OF LANGUAGE
Verbum, 2014
This essay argues that the main instrument Montaigne, 16th-century French thinker and writer, used for creating a "new ontology, " as Nicola Panichi calls it (2004, 278), was language and a special style of writing. He, first of all, created-or revived from the Antiquity-a new genre most suitable for a new discourse, and christened it essai. Then he applied a method known in humanist schools of the Renaissance as ultraquem partem to relativise all previous thought. Finally, he employed a thorough, frank examination of his own behaviour, habits and preferences, adorned with Latin sentences, to promote self-analysis as a path to personal contentment. This article applies the theory of Bakhtin, a 20th-century Russian philosopher and sociolinguist, especially his essay "Discourse in the Novel" ("Слово в романе"), in the analysis of the peculiarity of Montaigne's composition and its purposefulness in expressing at that time dangerous, but already prevalent worldview. Since battling medieval Christian thought was the paramount assignment of his endeavour, the quotes are mostly taken from Montaigne's only essay-and by far the longest in the three-volume collection-entirely dedicated to religion, "Apologie de Raimond Sebond. "