La Parole incertaine: Montaigne en dialogue (review)

Philip Knee sets his sights high in La Parole incertaine: Montaigne en dialogue. He seeks to specify the ethical and political scope of Montaigne's Essais while at the same time respecting their paradoxical style, rejecting evolutionary or contextual justifications. Moreover, in his conclusion he places the ethics of the Essais at the heart of the contemporary debate surrounding the origins of democratic thought in Western society.

Knee's reading of the Essais is encyclopedic and rejects traditional topical boundaries such as friendship or death to focus on a more volatile target, Montaigne's exercise of judgment and the ethical consequence of this exercise. He follows this thread in its consistent practice rather than through its inconsistent conclusions, demonstrating over and over that the foundation of Montaigne's ethics lies not in any normative or dogmatic formula for interpreting a given situation, but in the act of judgment, in the active dialogue modeled by Montaigne and in which he invites his reader to partake as well. This conversation takes place between Montaigne and his reader, between Montaigne and the authors he so frequently reads and quotes, and finally (perhaps most importantly) between Montaigne and himself. The dialogue that takes place between Montaigne and himself is the act of the essai, the "trying," in which psychological experience, the search for knowledge and the relationship with the past provide the discursive terrain for what Knee calls the dédoublement at the heart of Montaigne's internal dialogue. This dédoublement is defined as the process through which Montaigne both judges the world and at the same time questions his perceptions of this same world, and therefore his foundation for judgment.

The first chapter examines the nature and definition of Montaigne's judgment from multiple angles—custom, philosophy, ignorance, friendship and cruelty, narration and history, nature and art. Subsequent chapters place Montaigne in dialogue with a series of authors and explore in greater depth how Montaigne "exercises" his judgment in four domains: politics (Machiavelli), religion (Pascal), fiction (Rousseau) and identity (Diderot). Knee's goal in these chapters is not a reception study, however, despite the traditional pairings of Montaigne vs. Pascal, or Montaigne vs. Rousseau. He addresses each author's influence on or impressions of the other only secondarily. Rather, Machiavelli, Pascal, and Rousseau serve as a foil to Montaigne's ethical dialogue to the degree that each ultimately rejects the condition of uncertainty for all in favor of a dogmatic and even aristocratic vision of their respective topics. Only in the theatrical works of Diderot do the Essais find a corresponding vision of the necessary and perennial nature of uncertainty.

Just as Montaigne's Essais have traditionally been read both as philosophy and as literature, so does Knee's book offer meat for both tables. His analysis of Montaigne's relationship to Socrates and to Machiavelli in particular offers keen insight, and his first chapter, "L'Exercice du jugement dans les Essais," can be read as a solid introduction to this fundamental theme in Montaigne's work.