A Lawless Man
Pierre Manent’s recently translated study, Montaigne: Life Without Law, makes a persuasive case that the careful study of Montaigne’s writings is essential for anyone who seeks to understand the modern world. Manent places Montaigne beside figures like Niccolò Machiavelli and John Calvin as great modern teachers. But whereas Calvin addresses those who wish to be deeply pious, and Machiavelli the politically ambitious, Montaigne offers a modernity for the rest of us.
Montaigne, as Manent describes him, attempts to instill a strong sense of the worth of normal life: “It is life itself in its ordinary tenor, in the variation of its humors and the irregularity of its accidents, that needs to be brought to light, and, if I can put it this way, installed in a light that causes its fullness to appear, while preserving its imperfection.” In Montaigne’s own words, the “most beautiful lives are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without eccentricity and without miracle,” and learning to enjoy such a life properly is “an absolute perfection and virtually divine.”
Montaigne’s own imperfections are one of the chief themes of his Essays. It takes a certain audacity to make yourself the theme of your writings, and a startling audacity if one has lived a life like Montaigne’s. Of course, he was not the first to write about himself. Xenophon and Julius Caesar describe their own great political achievements. St. Augustine, in his Confessions, speaks frankly of his flaws, but they are imbued with greater significance because they are obstacles to submitting his will to God’s—and it is clear from the beginning that God is his real theme. Montaigne, on the other hand, writes about his shortcomings with no evident sense of shame and without attempting to show that they serve any greater purpose, whether religious or political. He describes his gallstones at length, he alludes to his erectile disfunction, and the only military deed of his own of which he speaks is falling off a horse and being knocked unconscious during some minor skirmish.
Montaigne’s choice of subject reflects his basic intention: to replace older accounts of how human beings ought to live with a new one that depends on becoming aware of the particularities of one’s own nature, and embracing them, rather than aspiring to imitate great heroes or saints. The Essays imply that his inglorious, even comic, life is a model of perfection.
In his title, Manent describes this sort of existence as a “life without law.” By “law,” he does not mean an ordinance passed by the political community. Of course, no life without those is possible. It is rather “law” in a more comprehensive sense: rational criteria in light of which human actions and lives can be judged, the sense in which some have used the term “natural law.” Manent associates this notion with the Aristotelian claim that a human being is by nature a political animal: to see human nature as political is to recognize “the general aim of organizing common life, by appealing in a decisive way to the reason of the members of the association.” If we are political by nature, then we always already live in light of a certain kind of law. Moderns like Hobbes and Rousseau reject this notion. They treat human beings as originally individuated and, therefore, not by nature concerned with the common good.
In envisioning a “life without law,” Montaigne suggests a possible cure for the “specific human malady” of always insisting on seeing ourselves in light of some standard not drawn from ourselves. As Manent puts it, “humans as humans . . . cannot not imagine a ‘better form’ of their humanity.” These imagined standards of perfection can only lead us astray. It is better to strive to live by becoming more aware of and adhering to the peculiarities of our own nature—by living according to our “master form,” as Montaigne puts it. People in Montaigne’s understanding never really change who they are. He claims never to have seen an instance of genuine conversion. Everyone in the end reverts to his or her own “master form,” his or her particular character as a human being. To attempt to find some standard or criteria of goodness beyond ourselves, to hope to become something different, is a delusion. Montaigne may confess his sins like St. Augustine does, but he never purifies himself of them, nor does he show any desire to do so. He comes to see them as belonging to his nature, and not as sins at all.
In all of this, Manent suggests, Montaigne is charting new, and uniquely modern, territory. We embrace ourselves, as ourselves, and try to learn to be ourselves, rather than striving to become something other. Only in a world shaped by Montaigne could Polonius’s wisdom in Hamlet, “This above all: to thine own self be true,” appear without irony in the pages of so many high school yearbooks.
Now, there is a potential problem in situating Montaigne so comfortably among modern thinkers. He has one ancient predecessor who seems to serve as a model for him: Socrates, whom he celebrates as a pattern for “all sorts of perfection.” Like Socrates, what is interesting about Montaigne is not what he did, but what he said and thought. Among the most striking parts of Manent’s book is his attempt to show how the two are in fact decisively different. He claims that Montaigne presents a different human possibility, disguised as Socrates. Montaigne’s version of Socrates excludes what is most essential to him: he omits the “intense and even ardent search for the beautiful or the noble” which gave Socrates’s life its form. He abstracts from the purpose of Socrates’s life the dogged pursuit of wisdom through dialectical inquiry. Basic questions—including the question of whether God exists and could ever be concerned for human beings—are settled, not through inquiry that results in a demonstrated conclusion, but through training one’s own natural disposition to adopt certain beliefs. This means that, in contrast to Socrates, Montaigne recommends laxity and even easy-goingness when it comes to fundamental questions of human life. Thus, he counts as a kind of virtue this unassuming carelessness, calling it by the decidedly unphilosophic name "nonchalance." In effect, one answers fundamental questions of human life by cultivating a habitual indifference to them.
Though Manent reads Montaigne sympathetically and with a view to learning from him, his study also conveys certain reservations about him—and with them, doubts about the modern world as such. The comparison of Montaigne to Socrates is one such instance. But more, Manent clearly doubts whether human beings can possibly live without maintaining some notion of law, some standard drawn from beyond ourselves. Even Montaigne, or especially Montaigne, recognizes how human it is to believe that we are capable of becoming better than we are. For that reason, one of the defining marks of humanity is a capacity for disdaining ourselves: no creature without our imaginations would ever be capable of that. How can Montaigne consistently claim to embrace his own humanness while rejecting this essential part of it?
Of course, Montaigne is aware of this problem. He would presumably reply that, if this is malady is chronic, we should not give in to it and slip into self-loathing, but, as much as possible, we should treat its symptoms and live as best we can. Maybe that is right. But we, as readers of Montaigne, can wonder what makes him so sure, and whether what he dismisses as a “malady” might not be something serious and true, and an important key to how we ought to try to live.
Dr. Dempsey is the Assistant Director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas at the University of Texas at Austin, and a Lecturer in the Departments of Government and Classics. He specializes in ancient and medieval political thought, especially Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, as well as the origins and critics of liberalism.
Portrait of Michel de Montaigne attributed to Daniel Dumonstier c1578 in the Musée Condé