Montaigne and the Origins of Modern Philosophy Montaigne and the Origins of Modern Philosophy Ann Hartle northwestern university press evanston, illinois Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2013 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2013. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hartle, Ann. Montaigne and the origins of modern philosophy / Ann Hartle. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8101-2965-8 (cloth) — ISBN 978-0-8101-2932-0 (pbk.) 1. Montaigne, Michel de, 1533–1592. Essais. 2. Montaigne, Michel de, 1533– 1592—Philosophy. 3. Montaigne, Michel de, 1533–1592—Political and social views. 4. Philosophy in literature. I. Title. PQ1643.H295 2013 844.3—dc23 2013025328 Except where otherwise noted, this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. 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To Francis Slade Teacher, Friend, True Philosopher Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi Note on the Texts xxi Part One: The Transformation of Philosophy Chapter One Reversing Aristotle 5 Chapter Two Sticking to the Old Ways: Montaigne and Sacred Tradition 29 Chapter Three The Philosophical Act (I): Judgment 51 Chapter Four The Philosophical Act (II): Ending in Experience 77 Part Two: The Invention of Society Chapter Five Overcoming Natural Mastery 99 Chapter Six The Primacy of the Private and the Origins of a Free Society 135 Chapter Seven The Character of the Free Individual 155 Conclusion The Invisibility of Philosophy and the Light of the Good 181 Notes 185 Works Cited 207 Index 213 Acknowledgments This book is dedicated, in gratitude and admiration, to Francis Slade, my teacher, friend, and exemplar of the integrity of the life of philosophy and the life of faith. His work on the origins of modern philosophy, especially the political philosophy of Machiavelli, has influenced my understanding of Montaigne at the most fundamental level. My thanks are due to John Kekes, Donald Livingston, and Donald Phillip Verene who read earlier versions of the manuscript and gave me their very helpful comments and suggestions. Erika Ahern’s sharp editorial eye was most useful in making my expression clearer. I am grateful for her care and skill. The Emory University Research Committee funded a semester during which much of the research was done. Additional support from the Emory Philosophy Department and Emory College of Arts and Sciences for the completion of this work is gratefully acknowledged. A year spent at the Fox Cen- ter for Humanistic Inquiry of Emory University was invaluable to me in the earliest stages of this project. I am grateful to Martine Brownley, Keith Anthony, and their staff for their gracious support. The Seminar on “Montaigne and the Origins of Modern Philosophy” (sponsored by the Institute for the History of Philosophy of the Emory Philosophy Department through the generosity of the Marcus Foundation), which I conducted in June 2010, was an occasion for the development of these ideas in the company of learned and insightful colleagues. I thank the participants for their generosity and friendship. Finally, my debt to my husband, Robert, goes well beyond what I can express here. Chapter 2, “Sticking to the Old Ways: Montaigne and Sacred Tradition,” appeared in Anamnesis: A Journal for the Study of Tradition, Place, and ‘Things Divine,’ vol. 1, no. 1 (2011). ix Introduction What is modernity? What is modern philosophy? What is modern society? And what, if anything, does philosophy have to do with the possibility of a free society? The purpose of this book is to show that Montaigne transforms phi- losophy itself, bringing it down from the heavens and into the streets, markets, and taverns of ordinary men and ordinary life. Thus, he “invents” or discovers society as a distinctly modern form of association and radi- cally changes the nature of political power. The essay is philosophy made sociable. My approach to the Essays, then, is philosophical rather than literary. True, the essays do not look anything like traditional philosophy, and Montaigne himself calls them “bizarre.” Nevertheless, he does describe himself as a philosopher, “a new figure: an unpremeditated and acciden- tal philosopher.” My discussion of the language, style, and order of the essays is intended to show the ways in which these features of the essay form reveal Montaigne’s radically new philosophical project. The essay is not simply a literary innovation: it is the expression of an unprecedented philosophical intention. In Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher (2003), I argued that Montaigne should be regarded as an original philosopher, not simply as the inventor of the essay. I was also especially concerned to show that Montaigne is not a skeptic as most of his scholarly readers take him to be. The emphasis in that book, then, is on drawing a contrast between Montaigne and the “deliberate” philosophers of antiquity. In this book, I return to many of the same themes that emerged in Accidental Philoso- pher in order to explore them in greater depth. However, my emphasis here is on Montaigne’s relationship to modern philosophy, and I believe that this relationship brings out his originality in a more radical way. Thus, I approach Montaigne as a philosopher within the context of modernity rather than Renaissance humanism, although there is much in common between these contexts. Two major works on humanism and the Renaissance are especially compatible with my view of the Essays. Montaigne holds a central place in Tzvetan Todorov’s account of the humanist tradition, a tradition that he traces into the eighteenth century. xi xii Introduction In his Imperfect Garden: The Legacy of Humanism, Todorov argues that humanism offers the antidote to our deepest and most pressing moral and political problems: the dissolution of society, the disappearance of morality and the self, and the conflict between liberty and community. The humanists do not fall into the extreme either of the autonomy of the individual or the disappearance of individuality. The “humanist core” that he sees in the tradition of liberal democracy can combat the drift of democracy toward collapse into illiberal and inhuman forms of auton- omy and isolation. Montaigne also figures prominently in William J. Bouwsma’s The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550–1640. The Renaissance saw three lib- erations: the liberation of the self in the affirmation of the uniqueness of every human being, the liberation of the cosmos from the constraints of the classical-medieval hierarchy of being, and the liberation of politics in the emergence of the concept of sovereignty. Montaigne’s moral attitude, according to Bouwsma, displays “the re-ordered self” in the absence of natural hierarchy. These conclusions are, in some ways, similar to my own. However, by approaching Montaigne as a modern philosopher, rather than as a Renaissance thinker, I believe it is possible to bring to light certain epis- temological and political aspects of his thought that might otherwise remain unnoticed. Although I do not focus primarily on Montaigne’s relationships to other modern philosophers, I do discuss them at certain points in order to elucidate Montaigne’s thought. In addition to the influence of Machiavelli, we find in the Essays inti- mations of such widely diverse philosophers as Descartes, Pascal, Bacon, Hobbes, Hume, and Rousseau. Montaigne appears as the incomparably rich source from which both rationalists and empiricists, liberals and con- servatives, draw. Yet Montaigne himself is neither a rationalist nor an empiricist, neither a liberal nor a conservative. His “unpremeditated and accidental” philosophy transcends these distinctions. Indeed, both mod- ern epistemology and modern political philosophy take on a somewhat different color when seen through the lens of Montaigne’s philosophical project. Montaigne’s re-formation of philosophy is his radical break with the classical-medieval Aristotelian tradition. This rejection of Aristotelian philosophy is a fundamental principle of early modern philosophy. Mon- taigne undermines the foundations of Aristotle’s metaphysics, politics, and ethics, so that the traditional hierarchy of being collapses. In his rejection of Aristotelian metaphysics, Montaigne combats especially the Introduction xiii conceit that the philosopher is most fully human and therefore divine through his participation in the divine activity of contemplation. Modern philosophy understands itself as a human, not a divine, activity and there- fore abandons contemplation as the philosophical act. Montaigne sees the philosophical pretense to divinity as dangerous because it makes the philosopher inhuman, destroys his natural sympa-