How to Live (24 page)

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:

It makes for exciting reading, but after a few pages one craves a dose of Montaigne’s easygoing humanism. Pascal wants people to remain aware of ultimate things: the huge empty spaces, God, death. Yet few of us find it possible to maintain such thoughts for long. We get distracted; the mind drifts back to concrete and personal matters. Pascal found this infuriating: “What does the world think about? Never about that!
But about dancing, playing the lute, singing, writing verse, tilting at the ring …” Montaigne liked asking big questions too, but he preferred to explore life through his reading, the animals in his household, incidents he had witnessed on his travels, or a neighbor’s problems with his children. Pascal wrote: “Human sensitivity to
little things and insensitivity to the greatest things: sign of a strange disorder.” Montaigne would have put it exactly the other way around.

A century or so later, Voltaire, who thoroughly disliked Pascal, wrote: “I venture to champion humanity against this sublime misanthropist.”
He ran through fifty-seven quotations from the
Pensées
, dismantling each in turn. “As for me,” he remarked,

This led Voltaire to rush to the defense of Pascal’s “great adversary”:

Voltaire was much more at home with a credo like Montaigne’s, as it appears in the final chapter of the
Essays:

This comfortable acceptance of life as it is, and of one’s own self as
it
is, drove Pascal to a greater fury than Pyrrhonian Skepticism itself. The two go together. Montaigne places everything in doubt, but then he deliberately reaffirms everything that is familiar, uncertain, and ordinary—for that is all we have. His Skepticism makes him celebrate imperfection: the very thing
Pascal, as much as Descartes, wanted to escape but never could. To Montaigne, it would be obvious why such escape is impossible. No one can rise above humanity: however high we ascend, we take that humanity with us.
At the end of his final volume, in its final version, he wrote:

Like Pyrrhonism, the “rump” argument is impossible to argue against, yet it also seemed to Pascal to
require
refutation, because it represented a moral danger. Montaigne’s overriding principle of “convenience and calm,” as Pascal described it, was pernicious.
It worried Pascal and sent him into a helpless rage, as if Montaigne were enjoying some advantage that he could not have.

A similar level of anger is visible in the reaction of another reader of the same period, the philosopher Nicolas Malebranche.
He was a rationalist, closer to Descartes than to Pascal, but, like Pascal, he deplored Montaigne as much for his general attitude of nonchalance as for his acceptance of doubt.

Malebranche recognized that Montaigne’s book was a perennial best seller—but of course it would be, he writes bitterly. Montaigne tells good stories and appeals to the reader’s imagination: people enjoy that. “His ideas are false but beautiful; his expressions irregular or bold but agreeable.” But to read Montaigne for pleasure is especially dangerous. As you float in your bath of sensuous ease, Montaigne is lulling your reason to sleep and filling you with his poison. “The mind cannot be pleased by reading an author without adopting his opinions, or at least without receiving some coloring from them which, mixed with its own ideas, makes them confused and obscure.” That is, reading pleasure corrupts Descartes’s “clear and distinct ideas.” Montaigne neither argues nor persuades; he does not need to, for he
seduces
. Malebranche conjures up an
almost diabolical figure. Montaigne fools you, like Descartes’s demon; he lures you into doubt and spiritual laxity.

These sinister images would prove long-lived. In 1866, the literary scholar Guillaume Guizot was still calling Montaigne the great “seducer” among French writers.
T. S. Eliot saw him the same way. And the modern critic Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani describes the
Essays
as “a prodigious seduction machine.” Montaigne works his spell through his nonchalance, his meandering and casual tone, and his pretense of not caring about the reader—all tricks designed to draw you in and take possession.

Subjected to such a machine, modern readers are often happy to lie back like Barbarella and enjoy it. Seventeenth-century readers felt more threatened, for serious matters of reason and religion were at stake.

Even during this period, however, other readers loved Montaigne for the pleasure he gave them. Several came overtly to his defense. In his
Caractères
, the aphorist Jean de La Bruyère suggested that Malebranche had missed the point of Montaigne because he was too intellectual and could not “appreciate thoughts which come naturally.”
This easygoing naturalness, together with Skeptical doubt, would make Montaigne a hero to a new breed of thinker: the vague confederacy of wits and rebels known as the
libertins
.

In English, “libertine” brings to mind a disreputable Casanova-like figure, but there was more to them than that (as indeed there was to Casanova). Although some
libertins
did seek sexual freedom, they also wanted philosophical freedom: the right to think as they liked, politically, religiously, and in every other way. Skepticism was a natural route to this inner and outer liberty.

They were a varied group, ranging from the major philosopher Pierre Gassendi to more lightweight scholars like François La Mothe le Vayer and imaginative writers like Cyrano de Bergerac, then best known for his science-fiction novel about a voyage to the moon. (His role in a more famous story based on his protuberant nose came later.) Montaigne’s first editor, Marie de Gournay, may have been a secret
libertine
, along with many of her friends. Another was Jean de La Fontaine, author of Plutarch-style fables about animals’ cleverness and stupidity. He got away with these by keeping them gentle in tone, yet they still constituted a challenge to human dignity. Their
premise was the same as Montaigne’s: that animals and humans are made of the same material.

Libertinism remained a minority pursuit, but a disproportionately influential one, because out of the
libertins
would evolve the Enlightenment philosophers of the following century. They gave Montaigne a dangerous yet positive new image, which would stick. They also spawned a less radical breed of salon socialites: aphorists such as La Bruyère, and La Rochefoucauld
whose
Maximes
gathered together brief, Montaignean observations on human nature:

And, as it happens, one La Rochefoucauld maxim provided a neat comment on Montaigne’s own seventeenth-century predicament:

As with Montaigne himself, much of what the
libertins
and aphorists said revolved around the question of how to live well.
Libertins
prized qualities such as
bel esprit
, which might be translated as “good spirits,” but was better defined by one writer of the time as being “gay, lively, full of fire like that displayed in the
Essays
of Montaigne.”
They also aspired to
honnêteté
, “honesty,” which meant a life of good morals, but also of “good conversation” and “good company,” according to the French Académie’s dictionary of 1694.

Someone like Pascal did not even want to live like this; it would entail being distracted by the affairs of this world rather than keeping his eyes fixed on ultimate things. One imagines Pascal staring upwards into the open spaces of the universe, in mystical terror and bliss, just as Descartes stared with equal intensity into the blazing stove. In both cases, there is
silence, and there is a fixed gaze: eyes rounded with awe, deep cogitation, alarm, or horror.

Libertins
, and all those of the company of the
bel esprit
, did not stare. My dears! They would not dream of fixing anything, high or low in the universe, with gawping owl-eyes. Instead, they watched human beings slyly, from under half-closed lids, seeing them as they were—beginning with themselves. Those sleepy eyes perceived more about life than Descartes with his “clear and distinct ideas,” or Pascal with his spiritual ecstasies. As Friedrich Nietzsche would remark centuries later, most of the genuinely valuable observations about human behavior and psychology—and thus also about philosophy—“were first detected and stated in those social circles which would make every sort of sacrifice not for scientific knowledge, but for a witty coquetry.”

Nietzsche relished the irony of this because he abhorred professional philosophers as a class. For him, abstract systems were of no use; what counted was critical self-awareness: the ability to pry into one’s own motivations and yet to accept oneself as one was. This is why he loved the aphorists La Rochefoucauld and La Bruyère, as well as their forefather Montaigne. He called Montaigne “this freest and mightiest of souls,” and added: “That such a man wrote has truly augmented the joy of living on this earth.”
Montaigne apparently managed the trick of living as Nietzsche longed to do: without petty resentments or regrets, embracing everything that happened without the desire to change it. The essayist’s casual remark, “If I had to live over again, I would live as I have lived,” embodied everything Nietzsche spent his life trying to attain. Not only did Montaigne achieve it, but he even wrote about it in a throwaway tone, as if it were nothing special.

Like Montaigne, Nietzsche simultaneously questioned everything and tried to accept everything. The very things that most repelled Pascal about Montaigne—his bottomless doubt, his “skeptical ease,” his poise, his readiness to accept imperfection—were the things that would always appeal to this other, very different tradition, running from the
libertins
through to Nietzsche and beyond, to many of his biggest fans today.

Unfortunately, in the seventeenth century, the resenters of Montaigne proved stronger than the devotees, especially once the former organized themselves and launched a direct campaign for suppression. In 1662, the year
after Pascal’s death, his former colleagues Pierre Nicole and Antoine Arnauld unleashed an assault on Montaigne in their best-selling book
Logique du Port-Royal
. Their second edition, in 1666, openly called for the
Essays
to be put on the Catholic Church’s
Index of Prohibited Books
, as an irreligious and dangerous text.
The call was heeded ten years later: the
Essays
appeared on the
Index
on January 28, 1676. Montaigne stood condemned, as much by association as anything else—for by now he was the favorite reading of a disreputable crew of fops, wits, atheists, skeptics, and rakes.