Montaigne: une anthropologie des passions by Emiliano Ferrari (review)

This is an important contribution to Montaigne studies, detailing what Emiliano Ferrari calls an anthropology of the passions in the Essais, and tracing the influence of Montaigne’s conception of the human into the seventeenth-century sceptical tradition of Descartes and Hobbes. Ferrari is keen to put Montaigne at the beginning of this tradition of thought rather than the aphoristic tradition of the moralistes because of the systematic features he discerns in Montaigne’s writing on the passions. The book is part of the critical interest in the history of the emotions in pre-modern literature and culture, and historicizes Montaigne’s thinking on passions and affections effectively. In the Essais, Ferrari argues, the passions are not exclusively anchored either in the mind or the body, but originate in the complicated interaction of the two: physiological humours on the one hand, and movements of the mind such as judgement, imagination, and memory on the other. Montaigne’s theory of the passions, then, is in this book anchored in his dualist philosophy of the interpenetration of mind and body; Ferrari joins the critical tradition in which Montaigne’s philosophy of the care of the self must take the body into account. The passions have a conservative function in this model: fear, hope, and desire are the three ‘primitive’ passions that orientate human beings towards the future and inspire action. They also fulfil the role of what Montaigne calls ‘diversion’, on the grounds that only another passion can effectively oppose and replace a passion. The end of Montaigne’s analysis is not a Stoic triumph over the passions but a recognition and assumption of composite human nature. From this bald summary of his book, it may already be clear that Ferrari is a philosopher, and this is very much a philosopher’s book where the characteristic literary style of the Essais is not the object of sustained focus. For example, the first chapter details Montaigne’s critique of understanding the body exclusively through the operations of the soul, in which physical, anatomical functions and sensations are understood through purely mental categories. Montaigne calls this imposition of psychic order on perceived bodily chaos in the ‘Apologie de Raimond Sebond’ a ‘chose publique imaginaire’ (p. 24). There is an excellent discussion of the corresponding phrase in Sebond, but no exploration of the rich and suggestive literary and cultural echoes the phrase evokes. Nevertheless, this book provides an authoritative guide to the conceptualization of the passions and their relation to human subjectivity, both in the Essais and in sixteenth-century culture more generally.