Montaigne

The Skeptical Essayist

‘What do I know’?

• "Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out."

The Skeptic

• "I have never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself."

• It was necessary, Montaigne argued, that man constantly subject himself to the most searching intellectual self-examination in order to impress upon ourselves how little we really know. Such an attitude flew in the face of the medieval scholastic, smug in his intellectual arrogance, who believed that, armed with the Scriptures and the masters of theology, he possessed the sum total of necessary knowledge (salvation).

• Montaigne took full safety in contemplating the human scene. If philosophy is to teach us how to live rather than how to die, we must gather the largest possible amount of information as to the ways in which men live and then analyze this mass of material in calm and judicious fashion. When we allow emotion and prejudice to enter the process of assimilating such knowledge, we will fail to derive wisdom form the exercise. If nature reveals diversity to be the rule, then the theological effort to teach and enforce uniformity in thought and action must be incorrect and dangerous.

• He perceived that man has devised a great variety of ways of meeting the chief problems of existence. Therefore, he could not subscribe in any sense to the Christian view that the only defensible solution of moral problems consisted of the narrow standards of conduct specified by orthodox Christianity. For Montaigne, God and nature seemed to approve of diversity rather than orthodoxy.

• “We seek for other conditions because we understand not the use of our own and we go outside of ourselves because we know not what is happening there. Thus it is in vain that we mount upon stilts, for, be we upon them, yet we must go with our own legs; and sit we upon the highest throne in the world, yet we do but sit upon our own behind.”