Michel Eyquem de Montaigne - Biography

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born February 28, 1533 in Château de Montaigne near Bordeaux, France where he also died on September 13, 1592. He was one of the most important French Renaissance writers and philosophers. He is most well known for his Essais.

Born into a wealthy and noble family, Montaigne’s father Pierre Eyquem had served as a soldier in Italy and subsequently intended to import Italian humanist culture to France. As a result, Montaigne was solely brought up in Latin and did not learn French before the age of six when he was sent to the highly prestigious Collége de Guyenne in Bordeaux. At thirteen he left the school in order to study law, presumably in Toulouse. After working in the courts of Périgueux, Montaigne became a counselor of the parliament in Bordeaux in 1557. During this time he developed a close friendship with the humanist writer and scholar Etienne de La Boëtie. Later, from 1561 until 1563, Montaigne served as courtier at the court of Charles IX.

Shortly before his death in 1568, Montaigne’s father, Pierre Eyquem, had asked his son to translate Theologia naturalis (Book of Creatures or Natural Theology), a book by the Spanish theologian and monk Raymond Sebond. From this experience Montaigne’s produced one of his longest essays, “The Apology for Raymond Sebond," based on the Spaniard’s work. Three years after his father´s death Montaigne decided to leave public life and retired to work in a castle that he had inherited. There he began to work on his main (and only) philosophical work, Essais. This great text was produced in volumes, the first two books, which alone contained 57 and 37 chapters respectively, were published in 1580; the third volume appeared in eight years later.

During this early writing period Montaigne traveled as well, primarily to to find a cure for his kidney stones. Over the course of 15 months between 1580 and 1581, his journey took him to other parts of France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, and Italy. He kept a journal during his travels and though he never intended to publish it, it was published in 1774 under the simple name, Journal de Voyage. While away his influence was clearly missed as he was informed that he had been elected Mayor of Bordeaux while residing in Lucca in 1581. Montaigne accepted the post and held it for two terms through 1585. It was during this time that there were several conflicts between Catholics and Protestants and he tried to appease and mediate fairly between the two. As well, Montaigne continued to expand and edit the Essais completing the third volume in 1588. In that same year, Montaigne was arrested en route to Paris because of his open, and thus partially contentious, support for Henry III who was killed a year later in 1589.

The Essais, enormously successful during Montaigne’s own lifetime, represent one of the most important and influential works of the Renaissance and established the “essay" as a new literary genre. In compliance with the meaning of the French essai, these essays contain a large number of very personal and subjective reflections, and cover such different topics as religion, education, friendship, love, and freedom. The aim here is less to promote truths or beliefs, but they instead describe Montaigne’s individual search for and engagement with knowledge, the possibility of knowledge, as such. What is perhaps most interesting and eccentric about the Essais is that they elude any analysis or summary whatsoever, and it may be due to this elusiveness as well as to Montaigne’s unconventional style of writing and thinking that he is considered more a writer rather than a “true" philosopher.

The Essais are first and foremost to be seen as both an exploration and description of human nature; that is, they are nothing but Montaigne’s attempt to learn about himself. As he asserts throughout the Essais, “I am myself the subject of my book," and following, “I have never seen a greater monster or miracle in the world than myself." This is in part because Montaigne is convinced that truth cannot be found through reason. Rather it is only by means of a thorough knowledge of the self that truth can be obtained. As well, it must be understood that this self is always ever-changing: “I take the first subject Fortune offers: all are equally good for me. I never plan to expound them in full for I do not see the whole of anything [….] Everything has a hundred parts and a hundred faces: I take one of them and sometimes just touch it […] I can surrender to doubt and uncertainty and to my master-form, which is ignorance."

Therefore, Montaigne does not believe in science per se; there can only be belief in it and one can only believe in personal experience. He is thus very critical against generalizations and argues in favor of the concrete (experience) over abstraction, which one can see reflected in his infamous statement: “Not being able to govern events, I govern myself." This being said, Montaigne does not by any means disregard intellectual knowledge but rather argues for the necessary need to have a balance between personal experience and the intellect.

Categorically denying all certainties, Montaigne is generally seen as one of the re-founders (or for others, even one of the inventors) of skepticism, of which his mantra “What do I know?" underscores his underlying principle. Perhaps the single most important theme throughout Montaigne’s work is his critique of dogmatic thinking. Montaigne argues in favor of a philosophy no longer governed by doctrines in place of universal rules and truths. As indicated above, Montaigne does indeed believe in the existence of truth, yet, this truth cannot just come “from outside."

I enter into discussion and argument with great freedom and ease, inasmuch as opinion finds me in a bad soil to penetrate and take deep root in. No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers to my own. There is no fancy so frivolous and so extravagant that it does not seem to me quite suitable to the production of the human mind.

Montaigne was truly a humanist and of the opinion that we are not able to control neither our thoughts nor our senses, he did not consider humans to be superior to other species, or, as it was the commonly held belief, to “Barbarians". Rather, Montaigne was convinced that different cultures and values should be equally respected. It was not least this very conviction that led many analysts to regard him as being relativistic, as well quite radical and way ahead of his time.

He was radically opposed to violence and the insidious clashes between Protestants and Catholics. While Montaigne was a Catholic himself, he outspokenly condemned religious fanaticism: “I accept other people's choice and stay in the position where God put me. Otherwise I could not keep myself from rolling about incessantly. Thus I have, by the grace of God, kept myself intact, without agitation or disturbance of conscience, in the ancients beliefs of our religion, in the midst of so many sects and divisions that our century has produced." In accordance with his overall philosophy, belief itself, for Montaigne, always had to demonstrate its relevance and applicability to daily-life and experience.

In 1592 Montaigne died in Château where he had spent the last years of his life expanding and revising the Essais. While he was himself influenced by Plutarch and Sextus Empiricus, Montaigne’s Essais had a tremendous impact on successive generations of thinkers, such as Voltaire, Flaubert, Pascal, and, above all, Jean Jacques Rousseau.