How to Live

by Sarah Bakewell

  Descartes cannot truly exchange a glance with an animal. Montaigne can, and does. In one famous passage, he mused: “When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?” And he added in another version of the text: “We entertain each other with reciprocal monkey tricks. If I have my time to begin or to refuse, so has she hers.” He borrows his cat’s point of view in relation to him just as readily as he occupies his own in relation to her.

  Montaigne’s little interaction with his cat is one of the most charming moments in the Essays, and an important one too. It captures his belief that all beings share a common world, but that each creature has its own way of perceiving this world. “All of Montaigne lies in that casual sentence,” one critic has commented. Montaigne’s cat is so celebrated that she has inspired a full scholarly article, and an entry to herself in Philippe Desan’s Dictionnaire de Montaigne.

  All Montaigne’s skills at jumping between perspectives come to the fore when he writes about animals. We find it hard to understand them, he says, but they must find it just as hard to understand us. “This defect that hinders communication between them and us, why is it not just as much ours as theirs?”

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  We have some mediocre understanding of their meaning; so do they of ours, in about the same degree. They flatter us, threaten us, and implore us, and we them.

  Montaigne cannot look at his cat without seeing her looking back at him, and imagining himself as he looks to her. This is the kind of interaction between flawed, mutually aware individuals of different species that can never happen for Descartes, who was disturbed by it, as were others in his century.

  In Descartes’s case, the problem was that his whole philosophical structure required a point of absolute certainty, which he found in the notion of a clear, undiluted consciousness. There could be no room in this for Montaigne’s boundary-blurring ambiguities: his reflections on a deranged or rabid Socrates or on the superior senses of a dog. The complications which gave Montaigne pleasure alarmed Descartes. Yet, ironically, his desire for such a point of pure certainty had arisen largely in response to his understanding of Pyrrhonian doubt, as transmitted primarily by Montaigne—leading Pyrrhonian of the modern world.

  Descartes’s solution came to him in November 1619 when, after a period of traveling and observing the diversity of human customs, he shut himself up in a German room heated by a wood stove and devoted one whole uninterrupted day to thinking. He started with the Skeptical assumption that nothing was real, and that all his previous beliefs had been false. Then he advanced slowly, with careful steps, “like a man who walks alone, and in the dark,” replacing these false beliefs with logically justified ones. It was a purely mental progress; as he moved from step to step, his body remained by the fire, where one imagines him staring into the embers for hours. The image of Descartes in front of his stove, perhaps in the hunched position of Rodin’s Thinker, provides a neat contrast to the image of Montaigne pacing up and down, pulling books off the shelves, getting distracted, mentioning odd thoughts to his servants to help himself remember them, and arriving at his best ideas in heated dinner-party discussions with neighbors or while riding in the woods. Even in “retirement,” Montaigne did his thinking in a richly populated environment, full of objects, books, animals, and people. Descartes needed motionless withdrawal.

  By his stove, Descartes gradually wound out a chain of reasoning, each link of which he considered to be riveted firmly to the previous one. His first discovery was that he himself existed:

  I think, therefore I am.

  From this secure point he proceeded to establish, using nothing but deduction, that God must exist, that his own “clear and distinct” idea of God’s existence must have come from God himself, and thus that anything else he had a clear and distinct idea about must be true as well. He put this last point even more boldly in a work called the Meditations, where he wrote, “Everything I perceive clearly and distinctly cannot fail to be true”—surely one of the most astonishing statements in the whole of philosophy, and one as far removed from Montaigne’s way of doing things as can be imagined. Yet it all grew out of Montaigne’s favorite brand of Skepticism—the one that threw everything into doubt, even itself, and thus raised a huge question mark at the heart of European philosophy.

  Descartes’s supposedly infallible chain of reasoning can seem absurd, but it makes more sense in the context of the previous century’s ideas—ideas he wanted to escape. These were, above all, the two great traditions transmitted to his generation by Montaigne: Skepticism, which took everything apart, and Fideism, which put it all together again on the basis of faith. Descartes did not want to end up at this point. He was anything but a Fideist. But in a way, that is just what happened; it was a hard tradition to get away from.

  Descartes’s real innovation was the strength of his desire for certainty. Also new was his general spirit of extremism. Trying to get away from Skepticism, he stretched it to a hitherto unimaginable length, as one might pull a strand of gum stuck to one’s shoe. There could be no question of floating in doubt indefinitely, as on a “sea of speculation.” Uncertainty was not a way of life, as it was for Montaigne and the original Pyrrhonians. For Descartes, it was a crisis stage. One can feel his disorientation when he writes, in the Meditations:

  The Meditation of yesterday has filled my mind with so many doubts that it is no longer in my power to forget them … I can neither put my feet firmly down on the bottom nor swim to keep myself on the surface.

  This was where the seventeenth century really separated itself from Montaigne’s world: in its discovery of the nightmare side of Skepticism. In that “Meditation of yesterday,” Descartes—always good at using vivid metaphors to make his points—had even personified his uncertainties in a figure of real horror:

  I shall suppose, therefore, that there is, not a true God, who is the sovereign source of truth, but some evil demon, no less cunning and deceiving than powerful, who has used all his artifice to deceive me. I will suppose that the heavens, the air, the earth, color, shapes, sounds, and all external things that we see are only illusions and deceptions which he uses to take me in. I will consider myself as having no hands, eyes, flesh, blood, or senses, but as believing wrongly that I have all these things.

  Demons still seemed real and frightening in Descartes’s day, just as they had in Montaigne’s. Some thought they filled the world in clouds, like microorganisms in pollution; they and their master, Satan, could weave illusions out of air, or tie up rays of light or the very threads of your brain in order to make you see beasts and monsters. The thought that such a spirit might be systematically fooling us as to the nature of the entire physical world—and of ourselves—was enough to send anyone mad. The only thing worse was the possibility that God Himself might be such a deceiver, something Descartes hinted at fleetingly, then withdrew from.

  Perhaps strangely for someone who advocated pure reason and swore enmity to tricks of the imagination, Descartes used every novelistic device in his power to play on the reader’s emotions. But, like most horror writers, his impulse was essentially conservative. The demon threatens the order of things, but he is then defeated and normality is restored on a more secure foundation—except that it isn’t. In horror fiction, the monster often threatens a comeback in a coda at the end: not truly defeated at all but only waiting for the sequel. Descartes did not want sequels. He thought he had covered up the abyss forever, but he had not; his reassuring ending fell to pieces almost at once.

  A practical way out of the mess was found at last, not through Descartes’s extremist challenge, but through a pragmatic compromise that has far more in common with the Montaignean spirit. Instead of seeking total certainty, modern science allows for an element of doubt, in theory, while in practice everyone gets on with the business of learning about the world, comparing observations to hypotheses according to agreed codes of practice. We live as though there were no abyss
. Like Montaigne accommodating himself to his own fallibility, we accept the world as it appears to be, with just a formal nod to the possibility that nothing is solid at all. The demon waits in the wings, yet life goes on.

  Descartes’s horror story was what ensued when Montaigne’s Pyrrhonism reached a more anxious, self-divided mind than the sixteenth century could generate. Montaigne was not without his moments of existential anxiety: he could write lines such as, “We are, I know not how, double within ourselves,” and “We have no communication with being.” Still, Descartes’s feeling of drowning in doubt would have left him puzzled.

  Today, many people might find Descartes’s terror easier to understand than the peculiar comfort that Montaigne and the original Pyrrhonians derived from their Skepticism. The idea that a void underlies everything we experience no longer seems an obvious source of consolation.

  Our sense of this void has been inherited largely from Descartes’s very contrary reading of Montaigne. Some of it has also been passed down to us from Montaigne’s other great disciple and antagonist in the seventeenth century, a man who was even more unsettled by the implications of Pyrrhonism. This was Blaise Pascal: philosopher, mystic, and another great horror writer.

  A PRODIGIOUS SEDUCTION MACHINE

  The work for which Pascal is best remembered, the Pensées (“Thoughts”), was never meant to terrify anyone except himself: it was a collection of disorderly notes for a more systematic theological treatise which he never managed to write. Had he completed this work, it would probably have become less interesting. Instead, he left us one of the most mysterious texts in literature, a passionate outpouring largely written to try to ward off what he saw as the dangerous power of Montaigne’s Essays.

  Blaise Pascal was born in Clermont-Ferrand in 1623. As a boy he showed precocious talents for mathematics and invention, and even designed an early calculating machine. At the age of thirty-one, while staying at the abbey of Port-Royal-des-Champs, he had a visionary experience which he tried to describe on a piece of paper headed FIRE:

  Certainty. Certainty. Feeling, Joy, Peace.

  God of Jesus Christ.

  Deum meum et Deum vostrum.

  Oblivion of the world and of everything excepting God.

  He is found solely by the ways taught in the Gospel.

  Grandeur of the human soul.

  Just Father, the world does not know You, but I know You.

  Joy, Joy, Joy, tears of joy.

  This epiphany changed his life. He sewed the piece of paper into his clothes so that he could carry it everywhere, and from then on devoted his time to theological writing and to the notes that became the Pensées. He did not have long for this work. At thirty-nine, he died from a brain hemorrhage.

  Pascal had almost nothing in common with Descartes except for an obsession with Skepticism. Rapturously mystical, he disliked Descartes’s trust in reason, and deplored what he called the “spirit of geometry” taking over philosophy. If anything, his aversion from rationality should have led him towards Montaigne instead—and it did, for he read the Essays constantly. But he also found the Pyrrhonian tradition, as transmitted through Montaigne, so disturbing that he could hardly get through a page of the “Apology” without racing to his notebook to pour out violent thoughts about it. Pascal cast Montaigne as “the great adversary,” to borrow a phrase used by the poet T. S. Eliot to describe their relationship. Such language is normally reserved for Satan himself, but the allusion is apt, for Montaigne was Pascal’s tormentor, his seducer, and his tempter.

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  Pascal feared Pyrrhonian Skepticism because, unlike the readers of the sixteenth century, he felt sure it did threaten religious belief. By now, doubt was no longer thought a friend of the Church; it belonged to the Devil, and must be fought against. And here lay the problem, for, as everyone had always seen, Pyrrhonian Skepticism was almost impossible to fight. Any attempt to quarrel with it only strengthened its claim that everything was open to dispute, while if you remained neutral this confirmed the view that it was good to suspend judgment.

  In a short piece usually included with the Pensées, recounting a conversation with Isaac Le Maître de Sacy, director of the Port-Royal abbey, Pascal sums up Montaigne’s Pyrrhonian argument, or lack of it:

  He puts everything into a universal doubt, and this doubt is so widespread that it becomes carried away by its very self; that is to say, he doubts whether he doubts, and doubting even this last proposition, his uncertainty goes around in an endless and restless circle. He contradicts both those who maintain that all is uncertainty, and those who maintain it is not, because he does not want to maintain anything at all.

  Montaigne is “so advantageously positioned in this universal doubt that he is equally strengthened both in success and defeat.” You can feel the frustration: how can anyone fight such an opponent? Yet one must. It is a moral duty, for otherwise doubt will carry everything away like a great flood: the world as we know it, human dignity, our sanity, and our sense of God. As T. S. Eliot also remarked:

  Of all authors Montaigne is one of the least destructible. You could as well dissipate a fog by flinging hand-grenades into it. For Montaigne is a fog, a gas, a fluid, insidious element. He does not reason, he insinuates, charms, and influences, or if he reasons, you must be prepared for his having some other design upon you than to convince you by his argument.

  Because Pascal could not fight against Montaigne, he could not stop reading him—or writing about him. He struggled against the Essays from such close quarters that he could get no angle for a blow. If La Boétie hovered over Montaigne’s page as his invisible friend, Montaigne hovered over Pascal’s writing as his ever-present enemy and coauthor. At the same time, Pascal knew that the real drama was taking place in his own soul. He admitted: “It is not in Montaigne but in myself that I find everything I see there.”

  He could just as well have looked at his own notebook and said, “It is not from myself but from Montaigne that I have taken everything I see here”—for he was in the habit of transcribing quantities of material almost word for word.

  Montaigne: How we cry and laugh for the same thing.

  Pascal: Hence we cry and laugh at the same thing.

  Montaigne: They want to get out of themselves and escape from the man. That is madness: instead of changing into angels, they change into beasts.

  Pascal: Man is neither angel nor beast, and unhappily whoever wants to act the angel, acts the beast.

  Montaigne: Put a philosopher in a cage of thin iron wire in large meshes, and hang it from the top of the towers of Notre Dame of Paris; he will see by evident reason that it is impossible for him to fall, and yet (unless he is used to the trade of the steeplejacks) he cannot keep the sight of this extreme height from terrifying and paralyzing him … Lay a beam between these two towers of such width as we need to walk on: there is no philosophical wisdom of such great firmness that it can give us courage to walk on it as we should if it were on the ground. Pascal: If you put the world’s greatest philosopher on a plank wider than he needs, but with a precipice beneath, however strongly his reason may convince him of his safety, his imagination will prevail.

  Harold Bloom in The Western Canon calls the Pensées “a bad case of indigestion” in regard to Montaigne. But, in copying Montaigne, Pascal also changed him. Even where he used Montaigne’s words, he set them in a different light. Like Jorge Luis Borges’s twentieth-century character Pierre Menard, who writes a novel which happens to be identical to Don Quixote, Pascal wrote the same words in a different era and with a different temperament, and thus created something new.

  It is the emotional difference that counts. Montaigne and Pascal had similar insights into the less flattering sides of human nature—into the realm of the “human, all too human,” where selfishness, laziness, pettiness, vanity, and countless other such failings lurk. But Montaigne gazed upon them with indulgence and humor; in Pascal, they inspired a horror greater even
than anything Descartes managed to muster.

  For Pascal, fallibility is unbearable in itself: “We have such a high idea of man’s soul that we cannot bear to think that this idea is wrong and therefore to be without this esteem for it. The whole of man’s happiness lies in this esteem.” For Montaigne, human failings are not merely bearable; they are almost a cause for celebration. Pascal thought limitations should not be accepted; Montaigne’s whole philosophy revolves around the opposite view. Even when Montaigne writes, “It seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve”—the sort of thing Pascal says all the time—he writes it in a cheerful mood, and adds that mostly we are just silly rather than wicked.

  Pascal must always be at one extreme or another. He is either sunk in despair or transported by euphoria. His writing can be as thrilling as a highspeed chase: he whizzes us through vast spaces and scales of disproportion. He contemplates the emptiness of the universe, or the insignificance of his own body, saying, “Whoever looks at himself in this way will be terrified by himself.” Just as Descartes lifted the Pyrrhonians’ mental comfort blanket—universal doubt—and found monsters beneath it, so Pascal does the same with one of the Stoics’ and Epicureans’ favorite tricks: the imaginary space voyage and the idea of human tininess. He follows this thought into a place of terror:

  On contemplating our blindness and wretchedness, and on observing the whole of the silent universe, and humanity with no light abandoned to itself, lost in this nook of the universe not knowing who put us there, what we have come to achieve, what will become of us when we die, incapable of all knowledge, I become frightened, like someone taken in his sleep to a terrifying, deserted island who wakes up with no knowledge of what has happened, nor means of escape.