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WorkMichel de Montaigne

The Complete Essays

A former magistrate withdraws to his tower and makes himself the subject of a book, testing on one life how much anyone can know.

by Michel de Montaigne2,286 passages held

  • French, the original language
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Original title
Essais
First published
(aged 47)
Original language
French

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Overview

In 1570 Michel de Montaigne sold his seat as a magistrate in the Parlement of Bordeaux. On his thirty-eighth birthday, 28 February 1571, he withdrew to a library in a tower on his family estate, where an inscription dedicated the room to his freedom, tranquillity and leisure. The book he wrote there, the Essays (Essais), takes one ordinary man — himself — as its subject, and uses him to test how far anyone can know anything for certain, about custom, death, friendship, cruelty or God. The title is his own verb, essayer, to try or to test, and each chapter is a trial of his judgement rather than a treatise. The longest, "Apology for Raymond Sebond", began as a son's duty. At his father's request Montaigne had translated the Natural Theology of Sebond, a Catalan theologian who set out to prove the Christian faith by reason, and published it in 1569. The "Apology" defends Sebond by taking apart the confidence of reason itself, and it is where Montaigne's scepticism is argued most fully. Simon Millanges, a Bordeaux printer, issued the first two books in 1580. On the journey to Rome that followed, papal censors examined the book, objected to its talk of fortune and its kind words for Julian the Apostate, the emperor who abandoned Christianity, and left Montaigne to revise as he saw fit. A third book came with the Paris edition of 1588, and Marie de Gournay, his adoptive daughter, published the final text in 1595, three years after his death. Francis Bacon borrowed the title for his own Essayes in 1597, and scholars find John Florio's English version of 1603 behind passages of Shakespeare. Descartes drew heavily on the Essays without naming their author. In 1676 the Catholic Church placed the book on the Index of Prohibited Books.

Key concepts

Why did Montaigne call his chapters essays?

An essay is a trial. The title is Montaigne's own verb, essayer, to try or to test, and each chapter sets his judgement to work on a subject to see what it can make of it. The result is a record of the attempt, not a treatise that settles the question, which is why a chapter may wander, turn back on itself or end without a conclusion.

What does the Apology for Raymond Sebond argue about reason?

It argues that human reason cannot bear the confidence placed in it. Montaigne set out to defend Sebond, a Catalan theologian who tried to prove the Christian faith by reason, and he defends him by showing that no human reasoning, however learned, stands on secure foundations. Sebond's arguments are no weaker than anyone else's. The chapter becomes the book's fullest case for scepticism.

What does Montaigne mean by judgement, and why prefer it to learning?

Judgement is the capacity to weigh things, and in the Essays it matters more than learning. Memory can hold other people's opinions intact without understanding them; judgement has to take a matter in hand and decide what it is worth. Montaigne exercises his on everything, large and small, because a judgement that is only used on grand subjects never gets trained. The book is a record of that exercise.

How does custom pass itself off as nature?

Custom works by repetition until its rules stop feeling like rules. What a people has always done comes to look like the order of nature, and whatever differs looks unnatural or barbarous. In the Essays this is how custom blinds the judgement: it forms our sense of right and wrong before reason can examine it, so that reason usually arrives only to justify what habit has already settled.

What kind of self do the Essays portray?

A self in motion. Montaigne finds himself varied, inconsistent and changing from one day to the next, and he does not tidy the portrait into a single character. Because he added to the book for twenty years rather than correcting it, later views stand beside earlier ones. The contradictions are left in as accurate reports of a mind that does not stay the same.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

One ordinary life as the whole subject

Can a man who studies no one but himself learn anything that holds for others? Everything turns on whether an unremarkable life, with its body, appetites and moods, is a fair sample of being human or only a private curiosity.

Montaigne refuses the exemplary subject. Instead of taking heroes or sages as the measure of a life, he sets down his own habits, ailments, appetites and lapses, wagering that an unremarkable man shows what being human is as fully as a great one. The body and its desires are not distractions from the self but part of what is examined, and moderation is learned from them rather than imposed on them. Because the book grew for twenty years without erasures, it records a self that changes, and inconsistency becomes evidence rather than error.

  • self-knowledge
  • human nature
  • embodiment
  • desire
  • pleasure
  • sexuality
  • emotion
  • moderation

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Judgement on trial: how far anyone can know

Once reason's own credentials are examined, how much of what a person holds certain survives? The answer decides whether doubt leaves someone stranded, or makes them freer, humbler and harder to fool.

The title's verb is the method: each chapter puts Montaigne's judgement to the test on a question instead of delivering a verdict. The fullest argument comes in the "Apology for Raymond Sebond", which defends a theologian's rational proof of the Christian faith by taking apart the confidence of reason itself. Senses, learning and imagination all colour what a mind concludes, and none of them can certify its own findings. The doubt that results is not despair. Withholding the claim to certainty keeps judgement working, modest and open to correction, and it leaves faith resting on something other than proof.

  • skepticism
  • judgment
  • knowledge
  • reason
  • religion
  • imagination

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Death, fear and the turns of fortune

Is it possible to look at one's own death steadily enough that fear of it stops governing how they live? At stake is whether calm is won by rehearsal and argument, or by trusting a nature that knows how to die untaught.

Death is the subject Montaigne comes back to most, and his handling of it does not stand still. He takes up the ancient counsel that philosophy is a preparation for dying, then tests it against his own ageing, his illnesses and the accidents that no planning prevents. Fear, he finds, can do more damage than the thing feared. Fortune's share in every outcome keeps him from crediting courage or virtue with more than they achieve, and it was this talk of fortune that troubled the papal censors. What emerges is less a doctrine of death than a way of living within reach of it.

  • death
  • mortality
  • fear
  • aging
  • courage
  • fortune
  • suffering

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Custom, cruelty and the measure of others

How much of what a person calls right, natural or barbarous is only the habit they were raised in? If custom does the judging, then justice, honour and the condemnation of other peoples all have to be checked again, starting at home.

Custom, for Montaigne, is the strongest legislator in human life. It settles what feels natural long before reason is consulted, and it hides its own work by making the familiar look obvious. Set side by side, the practices of different peoples show almost nothing that one society has not honoured and another forbidden. The conclusion is not that anything goes. Cruelty remains for him among the worst of vices, and the confidence with which one people calls another barbarous is itself put on trial, along with the codes of honour and war that his own society took for justice.

  • custom
  • nature
  • justice
  • war
  • honor

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A formed judgement, and the friend who shares it

What should an education produce, if not a well-stocked memory, and what can one person give another when judgement is shared freely between them? Both questions ask how a mind becomes its own through others.

Education fails, in Montaigne's account, when it stocks the memory with borrowed authorities and leaves judgement untrained. A pupil should weigh what he is told, converse, travel and make what he learns his own, so that virtue becomes a practical prudence exercised in ordinary conduct rather than a lesson recited. Friendship is the adult form of the same freedom: a bond chosen between equals, in which one judgement is tested against another without flattery or command. Both describe a mind that grows sound through other people without becoming their echo.

  • education
  • friendship
  • virtue
  • prudence

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Within this work

passages held
2,286
distinct concepts
1,592
by passages held, corpus-wide
#21

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “courage” and “death”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 27 pairings. 87 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
couragedeath24
educationvirtue23
couragevirtue22
human naturevirtue17
judgmentself-knowledge17
human natureself-knowledge15
educationjudgment14
judgmentskepticism14
deathvirtue13
human natureskepticism13
self-knowledgeskepticism12
educationself-knowledge9
judgmentvirtue9
deathhuman nature7
educationskepticism6
self-knowledgevirtue6
deathjudgment4
human naturejudgment4
courageeducation3
couragehuman nature3
deatheducation3
deathself-knowledge3
educationhuman nature3
courageself-knowledge2
deathskepticism2
couragejudgment1
skepticismvirtue1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1580 The Complete Essays (Essais) you are here FR
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