- Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher
« Nouvelle figure: un philosophe impremedité et fortuite ! » [A new figure: an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher!]. Thus writes Montaigne in a paragraph all to itself, initially his own manuscript addition to his copy of the 1588 edition of the Essais and one [End Page 355] of the numerous changes that appeared to the text published in 1595, three years after his death. The phrase provides the axis for Ann Hartle's excellent and innovative study of Montaigne as a philosopher. Her central contention takes Montaigne at his word. He was not a writer dabbling in issues of philosophy (as we have often taken him to be); rather he was a philosopher who had discovered a new method. This method challenged established philosophical approaches, placed him in a new relationship to human experience, led him to a new metaphysic and helped him to articulate the educative value of his philosophic endeavor. Ann Hartle thus engages with all the central issues of Montaigne critical studies. It takes into account the mountainous output of the latter, sensitively aware of the main lines of the underlying debates and attentive to the views of its principal contributors. At the same time, Ann Hartle maintains her own independence in a text that gathers conviction by the internal coherence of its argument.
Montaigne's new method was based on an ambiguous relationship to the classical philosophical tradition. On the one hand, he respected the ancient philosophers for their public eminince: « C'est en eux que loge la hauteur extreme de l'humaine nature. Ils ont reglé le monde de polices et de loix : ils l'ont instruict par arts et sciences, et instruict encore par l'exemple de leurs meurs admirables » [Man in his highest estate resides in them. They have regulated the world with government and laws; they have instructed it with arts and sciences, and instructed it further by the example of their admirable conduct]. He contrasted this with the disdain for philosophy in his own day. On the other hand, he was sceptical of their higher truth claims and utilized his new method to destabilize the categories of traditional metaphysics and "lower" the absolute expectations of what philosophy is capable of. The method was a circular dialectic, delineated by Hartle as "accidental" (as opposed to the "deliberate" philosophy of his antecedents). It is deftly analysed in the fourth and central chapter of Hartle's exposition. The circularity lies not in a spiral from opinion to knowledge but a thoughtful and personal voyage through credulity and skepticism, by which we return in our thoughts to where we first began, but understand things differently. The novelty of Montaigne's philosophy is the discovery that "truth can only be found in the beginnings: we can only come to understand what we already somehow understand, and we can only see the truth that was already there" (91). The method is exemplified in the form of the Essais, a particular mode of reflection exemplified by Oakeshott as "the adventure of one who seeks to understand in other terms what he already understands [ . . . ] and in which the understanding sought [ . . . ] is a disclosure of the conditions of the understanding enjoyed and not a substitute for it" (63). That disclosure and those conditions are precisely the kind of truth that Montaigne's method aims for. In a particularly sensitive passage, Hartle analyses Montaigne's pattern of quotation. Explicit quotations are treated to the circular method, rendering Montaigne's relationship to the understanding they embody fluid and open. He reinforces that fluidity by further levels of citation that locate his learning within wider experience, indicated by Montaigne's frequent recourse to « on dit » [it is said]. This "common opinion" is the thought-experience that Montaigne wishes most to disclose, to embrace the contradictions of customary thought within his philosophic experience, not rationalize them out of existence. Herein lies Montaigne's latent metaphysics and the key to the (apparently) ambiguous attitude to belief he explores in the most controversial of the Essais, the Sebond apology.
The aspect...