Montaigne demonstrates his characteristic mental mobility in this passage as he builds a case for Stoicism out of his own ‘everyday experiences’ and thus translates reality back into philosophy. The riding accident demonstrated to him the disparity between the fearful expectations he had supposed absolute and the sudden upsetting reality of experience. His previous state of health meant that he was both physically and emotionally distanced from illness, leaving space for his imagination to create something much worse than reality. While previously, fear, dread and ‘the power of my imagination’ even in health had warped his perceptions and magnified certain unknowns, making the thought of sickness seem ‘bigger by half’. Montaigne learns through experience to measure the world more accurately. The ability to rescale experiences in order to give them their correct weight and significance is an important part of the attitude that Montaigne cultivated. A vital element of this system of weights and measures is Montaigne’s humour; the lightness of his tone and wry, carefree approach to the world helps to lighten and to shrink potentially large, heavy problems. Wry humour, born of accidents, serves as an alternative to and a defence against tragic fear and dread.
In the ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’, Montaigne directs his mocking humour towards – among others – Seneca and the Stoics themselves. This is the longest essay that Montaigne ever wrote and marks a distinct break with Stoic philosophy. It can be read as Montaigne’s manifesto for scepticism or as Donald Frame describes it, ‘a declaration of intellectual independence’.13 In 1569, Montaigne had translated Raymond Sebond’s fourteenth-century text Theologica Naturalis from Latin into French at the request of his father. Sebond had written the book with the aim of proving the existence of God, but his attempt to reconcile philosophy and theology had proven controversial and in 1595 its prologue was placed on the Pope’s list of banned books. In his ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’ Montaigne does not take long to deviate from the task of defending the text and its author, and the essay instead quickly becomes ‘a devastating critique of all dogmatic philosophy’14 which therefore included criticism of Sebond himself.
In the final passage of ‘The Apology for Raymond Sebond’, Montaigne takes one particular quotation from Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones and – as he has done so often in the Essays – puts it to the test:
To that very religious conclusion of a pagan I would merely add one more word from a witness of the same condition, in order to bring to a close this long and tedious discourse which could furnish me with matter for ever. ‘Oh what a vile and abject thing is Man,’ he said, ‘if he does not rise above humanity.’
A pithy saying; a most useful aspiration, but absurd withal. For to make a fistful bigger than the fist, an armful larger than the arm, or to try and make your stride wider than your legs can stretch, are things monstrous and impossible. Nor may a man mount above himself or above humanity: for he can see only with his own eyes, grip only with his own grasp. He will rise if God proffers him – extraordinarily – His hand; he will rise by abandoning and disavowing his own means, letting himself be raised and pulled up by purely heavenly ones.
It is for our Christian faith, not that Stoic virtue of his, to aspire to that holy and miraculous metamorphosis.15
Montaigne dismantles Seneca’s argument with three concise clauses which mimic the Roman philosopher’s own succinct style: ‘A pithy saying; a most useful aspiration, but absurd withal.’ The first three editions of the Essays were published with the gentler alternative of ‘There is in all his Stoic school no saying truer than that one: but to make a fistful bigger than a fist.’ But after 1588, this initially hesitant critique of Seneca was substituted by Montaigne’s final crisp verdict. The confidence of the three new clauses correspond with Montaigne’s growing scepticism. Rather than using Seneca for support, here the voices of the two men are distinctly separate. Montaigne deconstructs Seneca’s theory by separating the Stoic’s theoretical man into his physical parts; by giving him a ‘fist’, an ‘arm’, a ‘stride’ and a ‘grasp’ he demonstrates what it would mean in practice for a man ‘to rise above humanity’. For Montaigne, not only would it be impossible for an individual to single-handedly exceed the physical capacities of his species, it would be ‘monstrous’ or inhuman to reject our natural boundaries and try to become something beyond our own natural limits. This is the kind of philosophy that would lead to a state of constant disappointment and repentance, for every attempt to stretch beyond the physical and biological parameters of the human species is doomed to fail.
Rather than setting himself up for failure or regretting his insufficiencies, Montaigne is interested in a philosophy that will make his life more able to be lived. To read Montaigne’s Essays is to meet somebody who has achieved ease with his own self, who can nonchalantly dismiss a precept with a shrug and relax within his own skin. This is not however a thoughtless version of nonchalance, much here depends on tone, for it is as though tone is the almost unconscious physical accompaniment to what is thought.
In his essay ‘On Vanity’ – also in Book III – Montaigne deviates from his central theme to discuss his travels around France. His physical freedom of movement corresponds with his mental mobility and provides in this passage a model or template of a particularly sane kind of non-linear progress that is itself explicitly against preset templates. Montaigne’s Essays offer a model of healthy thinking, even while existing as they do in defiant opposition to the possibility of universally applicable templates for living:
I, who most often travel for my own pleasure, am not all that bad a guide. If it looks nasty to the left I turn off to the right; if I find myself unfit to mount the saddle, I stop where I am. By acting thus I really do see nothing which is not as pleasant and agreeable to me as my home. It is true that I always do find superfluity superfluous and that I am embarrassed by delicacy, even, and by profusion. Have I overlooked anything which I ought to have seen back there? Then I go back to it: it is still on my road. I follow no predetermined route, neither straight nor crooked.16
Montaigne is not constrained by straight lines or preset routes; if there is danger ahead, he simply turns off in a different direction. There is no obligation to follow a certain path, he is guided by an internal compass which serves him. There is no need to endure and maintain a damaging straight route. The flexibility required to change direction is something to be nurtured.
Montaigne has no difficulty in looping back to repeat or remake his path, hence his revisions of the Essays. He goes back again and again to build up layers of experience just as in the Essays he loops back into earlier attempts at writing to consider again something he may have overlooked at first or not explored to its full depth. But importantly, he also gives himself the time to move away from certain places – often for many years – before returning again to add new layers of thought. As he declared in the essay ‘On Vanity’, ‘I make additions not corrections.’17 Montaigne’s natural changeability contains within it something subtly constant and is all the more constant for not being under fixed mental control.
The additions made to the essay ‘On Friendship’ – Montaigne’s ode to Etienne de La Boétie in Book I – show this process in action. In the Bordeaux copy of the Essays, which Montaigne was working on up until his death, he returned to one passage in the twenty-eighth essay of Book I and added the following words in italics to the original