How to Live

by Sarah Bakewell

  La Boétie’s death certainly did leave Montaigne with some literary slavery of a more down-to-earth kind, in the form of his stack of unpublished manuscripts. These were not particularly unusual or original, with the exception of On Voluntary Servitude (assuming that this was indeed La Boétie’s work), but they deserved better than being left to crumble to dust. Whether because La Boétie had asked him to, or on his own initiative, Montaigne now became his friend’s posthumous editor—a demanding role, which gave a push to his own literary career.

  Rather surprisingly, considering his well-ordered character, La Boétie’s manuscripts seem to have been in a higgledy-piggledy state. In one of his dedications to the published work, Montaigne talks of having “assiduously collected everything complete that I found among his notebooks and papers scattered here and there.” It was a formidable task, but he found many things worth publishing, including La Boétie’s sonnets. There were also translations of classical texts, such as the letter of consolation from Plutarch to his wife on the death of their child, and the first ever French version of Xenophon’s Oeconomicus, a treatise on the art of good estate and land management—a subject of relevance to Montaigne, who was just about to resign from Bordeaux.

  Having sorted out the manuscripts, Montaigne saw a collected edition of them through the press. He traveled to Paris to liaise with publishers and to promote the result. For each of La Boétie’s pieces he courted a suitable patron, crafting graceful and sycophantic dedications to influential people including Michel de L’Hôpital and various Bordeaux notables—as well as to his own wife, in the case of the Plutarch letter. Conventional though the “dedicatory epistle” genre was, his letters are lively and personal. He also appended an even more personal piece of writing to the book: his account of La Boétie’s death. The whole undertaking confirms the sense that he was now in a literary partnership with La Boétie’s memory, and that the two of them could expect a great future together. It taught Montaigne a lot about the world of publishing and about what fashionable Parisians liked to read, information that would come in useful.

  The account of La Boétie’s death appeared in the form of a letter to Montaigne’s own father: a strange choice. Perhaps Pierre had urged him to write it. He had certainly done this once before. Around 1567, he had given his son a very challenging literary commission indeed, which had also done its part in turning him into a writer.

  This early request seems to have been Pierre’s attempt to shake his son out of a continuing tendency to idleness; it was another of those “tricks,” inflicted for its victim’s benefit. Even in his mid-thirties, Montaigne still had something of the sulky teenager about him. He was dissatisfied with his career as magistrate, disinclined to the life of a courtier, snooty about the law, and indifferent to building and property development. Moreover, despite his interest in literature, he showed no signs of writing much. Pierre may now have guessed that he himself did not have long to live, and he probably felt that Montaigne needed preparing for the responsibilities that would soon descend on him. He needed a challenge.

  Micheau wanted to write: very well, let him write! Pierre handed him a 500-page folio volume, written by a Catalan theologian over a century earlier, in stilted Latin, and said, “Translate this into French for me when you get a moment, will you, son?”

  This would have been a good way of putting Montaigne off literary endeavors for life; perhaps that was what Pierre was trying to do. As good luck would have it, however, the book was more than just long and boring. It also promoted a brand of theology that Montaigne found abhorrent. This woke him out of his slumbers. More than the work on La Boétie’s manuscripts, and perhaps more even than the crafting of the letter describing his friend’s dying moments, his father’s translation task lit the spark that one day blazed up into the Essays.

  The book was called Theologia naturalis, sive liber creaturarum (Natural Theology, or Book of Creatures). Its author, Raymond Sebond, had written it in 1436, though it was not published until 1484: still well before Montaigne’s time, and Pierre’s. It had been given to Pierre by one of the bookish friends he liked to cultivate, but the Latin was too difficult for him, so he put it away in a pile of papers. Years later, he looked through the pile. Something about the book, perhaps its dense, stubborn inscrutability, put him in mind of his errant son.

  Pierre’s decision to put it away when he did, and retrieve it when he did, may have been connected to the fact that it went first out of favor with the Church, then back in again. Theologia naturalis was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1558, but taken off in 1564, because it promoted a distinctive style of “rational” theology about which the Church kept changing its mind. The debate centered on the claim that truths of religion could be proved through rational arguments, or by examination of evidence found in nature. Sebond thought they could be so proved: this put him at the opposite extreme both from Montaigne and, for a while, from the Church. Montaigne inclined more towards a position known as Fideism, which placed no reliance at all on human reason or endeavor, and denied that humans could attain knowledge of religious truths except through faith. Montaigne may not have felt a great desire for faith, but he did feel a strong aversion to all human pretension—and the result was the same.

  Thus Montaigne found himself with the job of translating 500 pages of theological argumentation designed to prove an assertion he deplored. “It was a very strange and a new occupation for me,” he wrote. In the Essays, he tried to make it sound as though he had approached it in a casual way. “Being by chance at leisure at the time,” he said, “and being unable to disobey any command of the best father there ever was, I got through it as best I could.” But it must have been a major project, taking a year or more to complete. He probably surprised himself by how much he got out of it. It stimulated him as grit stimulates an oyster. The whole time he was writing, he must have been thinking, “But … but …,” and even “No! No!” It forced him to analyze his own ideas. Even if he didn’t question the text deeply at the time, he certainly did when he was commissioned a few years later (probably by Marguerite de Valois, the king’s sister and wife of the Protestant Henri de Navarre) to write an essay defending the book; that is, to defend a work he considered indefensible.

  That would become his “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” the twelfth chapter of Book II of the Essays. It is far and away the longest piece in the book, almost absurdly out of proportion to the rest. In the 1580 edition, the other ninety-three chapters average nine and a half pages each, while the “Apology” occupies 248 pages. Stylistically, though, it fits perfectly. It charms the reader and weaves complex patterns of digression just like the others, and it gives the Essays its weight in more than one sense. Without it, the book would have had less influence in centuries to come. It would have been less hated, by some, but also less read.

  “Apology” means “defense”; and indeed the essay does begin as a defense of Sebond. It stays that way for about half a page. Then it swerves off into something very different: something much more like an attack. As the critic Louis Cons once put it, it supports Sebond “as the rope supports the hanged man.”

  How, then, can he call it an “apology”? Montaigne’s trick is simple. He purports to defend Sebond against those who have tried to bring him down using rational arguments. He does this by showing that rational arguments, in general, are fallible, because human reason itself cannot be relied on. Thus he defends a rationalist against other rationalists by arguing that anything based on reason is valueless. Montaigne’s defense undermines Sebond’s enemies, all right, but it undermines Sebond himself even more fatally. Of this, he was obviously well aware.

  Despite its length and complexity, the essay is never less than entertaining. This is because Montaigne borrows a technique from Plutarch: he constructs his argument by heaping up case studies. Stories and facts spill out in every paragraph like flowers from a cornucopia. Almost every story provides an example of how useless human reason is,
how feeble human powers are, and how silly and deluded almost everyone is—not excepting Montaigne himself, as he happily admits.

  Many of the examples themselves come from Plutarch as well. But the driving force behind this unapologetic “Apology” is not Plutarch’s—or not his alone. It comes from the third of the great Hellenistic philosophies, the strangest of them all: Pyrrhonian Skepticism.

  7. Q. How to live? A. Question everything

  ALL I KNOW IS THAT I KNOW NOTHING, AND I’M NOT EVEN SURE ABOUT THAT

  SET ALONGSIDE STOICISM and Epicureanism, Skepticism looks like the odd one out. The other two seem obvious paths to tranquillity and “human flourishing”: they teach you to prepare for life’s difficulties, to pay attention, to develop good habits of thought, and to practice therapeutic tricks on yourself. Skepticism seems a more limited matter. A skeptic is taken to be someone who always wants to see proof, and who doubts things that other people take at face value. It sounds as if it concerns only questions of knowledge, not the question of how to live. In the Renaissance, however, and in the classical world where Skepticism was born alongside the other pragmatic philosophies, it was seen differently.

  Like the others, Skepticism amounted to a form of therapy. This, at least, was true of Pyrrhonian Skepticism, the type originated by the Greek philosopher Pyrrho, who died about 275 BC, and later developed more rigorously by Sextus Empiricus in the second century AD. (“Dogmatic” or “Academic” Skepticism, the other kind, was less far-reaching.) Some idea of the bizarre effect Pyrrhonism had on people is apparent from the story of how Henri Estienne, Montaigne’s near-contemporary and first French translator of Sextus Empiricus, reacted to his encounter with Sextus’s Hypotyposes. Working in his library one day, but feeling too ill and tired to do his usual work, he found a copy while browsing through an old box of manuscripts. As soon as he started reading, he found himself laughing so heartily that his weariness left him and his intellectual energy returned. Another scholar of the period, Gentian Hervet, had a similar experience. He too came across Sextus by chance in his employer’s library, and felt that a world of lightness and pleasure had opened up before him. The work did not so much instruct or convince its readers as give them the giggles.

  A modern reader perusing the Hypotyposes might wonder what was so funny. It does contain some sprightly examples, as philosophy books often do, but it does not seem wildly comic. It is not obvious why it cured both Estienne and Hervet of their ennui—or why it had such an impact on Montaigne, who would find in it the perfect antidote to Raymond Sebond and his solemn, inflated ideas of human importance.

  The key to the trick is the revelation that nothing in life need be taken seriously. Pyrrhonism does not even take itself seriously. Ordinary dogmatic Skepticism asserts the impossibility of knowledge: it is summed up in Socrates’s remark: “All I know is that I know nothing.” Pyrrhonian Skepticism starts from this point, but then adds, in effect, “and I’m not even sure about that.” Having stated its one philosophical principle, it turns in a circle and gobbles itself up, leaving only a puff of absurdity.

  Pyrrhonians accordingly deal with all the problems life can throw at them by means of a single word which acts as shorthand for this maneuver: in Greek, epokhe. It means “I suspend judgment.” Or, in a different rendition given in French by Montaigne himself, je soutiens: “I hold back.” This phrase conquers all enemies; it undoes them, so that they disintegrate into atoms before your eyes.

  This sounds about as uplifting as the Stoic or Epicurean notion of “indifference.” But, like the other Hellenistic ideas, it works, and that is all that matters. Epokhe functions almost like one of those puzzling koans in Zen Buddhism: brief, enigmatic notions or unanswerable questions such as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” At first, these utterances cause nothing but perplexity. Later, they open a path to all-encompassing wisdom. This family resemblance between Pyrrhonism and Zen may be no accident: Pyrrho traveled to Persia and India with Alexander the Great, and dabbled in Eastern philosophy—not Zen Buddhism, which did not yet exist, but some of its precursors.

  The epokhe trick makes you laugh and feel better because it frees you from the need to find a definite answer to anything. To borrow an example from Alan Bailey, a historian of Skepticism, if someone declares that the number of grains of sand in the Sahara is an even number and demands to know your opinion, your natural response might be, “I don’t have one,” or “How should I know?” Or, if you want to sound more philosophical, “I suspend judgment”—epokhe. If a second person says, “What rubbish! There is obviously an odd number of grains of sand in the Sahara,” you would still say epokhe, in the same unflappable tone. In effect, you respond with the deadpan statement Sextus himself cited as a definition of epokhe:

  I cannot say which of the things proposed I should find convincing and which I should not find convincing.

  Or:

  I now feel in such a way as neither to posit dogmatically nor to reject any of the things falling under this investigation.

  Or:

  To every account I have scrutinized which purports to establish something in dogmatic fashion, there appears to me to be opposed another account, purporting to establish something in dogmatic fashion, equal to it in convincingness or lack of convincingness.

  This last formulation in particular might be memorized as a useful way of shutting up anyone making outlandish claims about the Sahara or anything else. In reciting it, one feels a kind of mental calm descending. One cannot know the answer and feels it doesn’t matter, so one’s nonengagement causes no distress.

  For a Pyrrhonian, this remains true even when the questions get more difficult. Is it all right to lie to someone to make them feel better? Epokhe. Is my cat better-looking than your cat? Am I kinder than you? Does love make one happy? Is there such a thing as a just war? Epokhe. And it goes further. A real Pyrrhonian will suspend judgment even in response to questions that ordinary folk might think had an obvious answer. Do hens lay eggs? Do other people really exist? Am I looking at a cup of coffee at this moment? It is epokhe all the way.

  The Pyrrhonians did this, not to unsettle themselves profoundly and throw themselves into a paranoid vortex of doubt, but to attain a condition of relaxation about everything. It was their path to ataraxia—a goal they shared with the Stoics and Epicureans—and thus to joy and human flourishing. The most obvious advantage is that Pyrrhonians need never worry about getting anything wrong. If they win their arguments, they show that they are right. If they lose, that just proves that they were right to doubt their own knowledge. This makes them simultaneously very peaceful and very contrary. They are fond of arguing for unpopular points of view, for the fun of it. As Montaigne wrote:

  If you postulate that snow is black, they argue on the contrary that it is white. If you say that it is neither one nor the other, it is up to them to maintain that it is both. If you maintain with certain judgment that you know nothing about it, they will maintain that you do. Yes, and if by an affirmative axiom you assure them that you are in doubt about it, they will go and argue that you are not, or that you cannot judge and prove that you are in doubt.

  By this time they will probably have been silenced by a punch on the nose, but even that does not bother them, since they are undisturbed by the idea of someone being angry with them, and they are not unduly bothered by physical pain. Who is to say that pain is worse than pleasure? And if a shard of bone penetrates their brain and kills them, so what? Is it better to live than to die?

  “Hail, skeptic ease!” wrote the Irish poet Thomas Moore, long after Montaigne:

  When error’s waves are past

  How sweet to reach thy tranquil port at last,

  And gently rocked in undulating doubt,

  Smile at the sturdy winds which war without!

  So immense was this ease that it could separate Skeptics entirely from ordinary people—even though, unlike the Epicureans in their Garden, they preferred to remain immersed in the r
eal world. Some extraordinary stories were told about Pyrrho himself. He was supposed to be so aloof and so tranquil that he would not react to things at all. When walking somewhere, he would not change his course even for precipices or oncoming carts, so his friends had to keep intervening to save him. And, as Montaigne recorded, “If he had begun to say something, he never failed to finish it, even though the man he was speaking to had gone away”—because he did not want to be diverted from his inner reality by external changes.

  Meanwhile, other stories suggested that even Pyrrho could not maintain perfect indifference all the time. A friend caught him “quarreling very sharply” with his sister, and accused him of betraying his principles. “What, must this silly woman also serve as testimony to my rules?” replied Pyrrho. Another time, having been caught defending himself against a frenzied dog, he admitted, “It is very difficult entirely to strip off the man.”

  Montaigne loved both kinds of story: the ones that showed Pyrrho departing radically from normal behavior, as well as the ones that showed him to be merely human. And, like a true Skeptic, he tried to suspend judgment about them all. He felt it more likely, however, that Pyrrho was an ordinary man like himself, striving only to be clear-sighted and to take nothing for granted.

  He did not want to make himself a stump or a stone; he wanted to make himself a living, thinking, reasoning man, enjoying all natural pleasures and comforts, employing and using all his bodily and spiritual faculties.

  All Pyrrho renounced, according to Montaigne, was the pretension most people fall prey to: that of “regimenting, arranging, and fixing truth.” This was what really interested Montaigne in the Skeptical tradition: not so much the Skeptics’ extreme approach to warding off pains and sorrows (for that, he preferred the Stoics and Epicureans, who seemed more closely attuned to real life), but their desire to take everything provisionally and questioningly. This was just what he always tried to do himself. To keep this goal in the forefront of his mind, he had a series of medals struck in 1576, featuring Sextus’s magic word epokhe (here appearing as epekho), together with his own arms and an emblem of weighing scales. The scales are another Pyrrhonian symbol, designed to remind himself both to maintain balance, and to weigh things up rather than merely accepting them.