The Matter of My Book: Montaigne's "Essais" as the Book of the Self (review)

474 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Richard L. Regosln. The Matter of My Book: Montaigne's "Essals" as the Book of the Self. Berkely: University of California Press, 1977. Pp. ix + 275. $11.75. This is a difficult book to review because it seems to be two books in one place, wresthng with each other for control of the territory. I think the better book wins and so shall review It at greater length. Both contestants are concerned with what Montaigne meant by speaking of his book as a "livre consubstantiel ~ son autheur, d'une occupation propre, membre de ma vie" (II, 18). Although considerable work has been done by Strowskl, Villey, Frame, and Trinquet, among many, to explore the historical background and foreground of the Essais and Montaigne's development in and through them from 1572 until his death in 1592, Regosm argues that there is another dimension which we have yet fully to appreciate. Montaigne is not merely a great writer; he is the first modern prose writer and thinker to see writing as making. Moreover, that making is not only of the book, but of the self of the writer through making the book. The phrase "'Book of the Self" suggests Montaigne's innovation: he knew that tradition, and especially Raymond Sebonde (whom he translated for his father), spoke of Scripture as the archetypal Book and also as the Book of Nature, both of which were to be taken as "the book as instrument of return [eplstrophe].'" Rejecting both of these, Montaigne undertook the Essais; like the P161adepoets, he stresses intellect as making, but for him it is the self which is the poem being made, though still "rooted in the realm of literature .... The composition of the book, the essayist maintains, is the realization of himself, and the dialectic and invention the source of both text and self" (p. 88). "Ontologlcally, the act of writing, and the book itself, become the sources for the founding of Montaigne's sense of being" (p. 141). Montaigne's "chasse" to know himself, all the while a changing and inconstant self, but still unwilling to settle for the world's illusions or vanity as substitutes for a self, is inherently a paradoxical and Socratic "chasse"; "The recognition of Ignorance becomes wisdom as paradox abounds in the juxtaposition and interplay of two contrasting orders [society's accepted values and Montaigne's self-authenticated values]. Modesty and singularity come together at the heart of the book of the self" (p. 132). Like Peter Ramus before him, Montaigne stresses the reality of things as we think them (I would add that Montaigne seems to draw upon Ramus's notion of "invention"). Regosln explains that "in the final analysis, the attention given to form or manner seems to Include the quality of thought as well: the union seems indeed contained in the notion of mventton as we have understood it [in the sixteenth century], as the embodiment of [things] thought in words" (p. 138). To see the ambiguity and elusiveness of the self in this hunt, and that the hunt itself is all the while making the self as one goes, becomes delicately expressed by Montaigne in the figure of Essais as portraiture: "By introducing the portrait into literature, line into language, Montaigne expresses the paradoxical interplay of the reality of becoming and the necessity of being, of inevitable movement and essential rest, of fragmentation and a sense of wholeness" (p. 188). Although "art" and "artifical" had been used in strong counterdistinction from "'nature" and "natural" in sixteenth-century Europe, as if art were phony or unnatural, Montaigne realized that artistry of some kind must be found and perfected m order to make the natural self into a flexible and sane whole being. Otherwise it tends to distraction, and to unlimited wishings or intellectual flights disruptive of life. A crucial part of this needed art ~sthe taming and domesticating of wild reason, for its vanities soar farther from life than do those of the passions, and by their rationalizations, reason's vanities debase our actions even by comparison with the lowest of the beasts. The art of judgment becomes able to listen to one's life...