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  • Montaigne and Ethics:The Case of Animals
  • Hassan Melehy

Certain of Montaigne's statements on the relationship between human beings and animals are quite familiar. Particularly well known is the following, from the "Apologie de Raimond Sebond" and elsewhere, to which Descartes strenuously objected: "Il se trouve plus de difference de tel homme à tel homme que de tel animal à tel homme."1 The usual gloss on this phrase stems from Montaigne's own on its variation in "De l'inequalité qui est entre nous" (I, 42), struck from the 1595 and subsequent editions: "[C]'est-à-dire que le plus excellent animal, est plus approchant de l'homme, de la plus basse marche, que n'est cet homme, d'un autre homme grand et excellent" (258 n. 3). It is notable here that both human beings and animals are capable of excellence, ostensibly the same quality. Montaigne hence appears to be placing human beings and animals on a single scale: the difference between them, from the perspective of their capacity for excellence, becomes one of degree rather than kind, and the differences that exist among human beings place them in the great variety of animal creatures that nature has yielded.

That he is more interested in the differences among human beings than in their commonality with animals, he indicates in the next few sentences in "De l'inequalité," from the C-layer of the Essais: "hem vir viro quid praestat [oh, what distinguishes man from man]; Et qu'il y a autant de degrez d'esprits qu'il y a d'icy au ciel de brasses, et autant innumerables" (258-59). The distinction between man and man is stated before the observation on innumerable "degrez d'esprits," and hence the latter seem to refer to human esprits. But the context of the first quotation above, in the "Apologie," is the series of examples, drawn from both reading and experiential anecdote, suggesting that animals do indeed have reason. If there are as many "degrez d'esprits" as there are "d'icy au ciel de brasses," then this "innumerable" number of degrees is in effect unfathomable—and without discernible border. So the limit that marks human reason from animal reason—and Montaigne doesn't deny that there is one, as these domains of reason seem to be largely incommunicable to each other—is not strictly speaking apprehensible from the perspective of human reason. The innumerable "degrez d'esprits," then, should be read as implying a scale that includes the esprits of animals. [End Page 96]

The seriousness of Montaigne's paradox

Montaigne's statements on the speech, reason, and intelligence of animals in the "Apologie" have been much discussed since the seventeenth century and Descartes's dismissal of them; much less discussed have been the implications of these statements for an ethics with regard to animals. The evident point of departure for such a consideration is the essay that immediately precedes the "Apologie," "De la cruauté," which Philip P. Hallie has called "one of the most powerful essays on ethics ever written."2 Here, Montaigne's first example of his response to cruelty involves his reaction to seeing a chicken's throat cut (II, 11, 429). Hallie doesn't treat the essay as elaborating an ethics specific to animals but rather as entailing "fellow living, sentient beings" (167). He does, however, point out that the vast importance of the essay involves its shift from reason as the locus of moral judgment to affective responses: Montaigne writes that he finds "plus de reigle en mes meurs qu'en mon opinion, et ma concupiscence moins desbauchée que ma raison" (428). In complete contrast to the entire Western tradition of ethical writings up to that point, according to Hallie, "the victim of a vicious deed [rather than the 'Moral Agent'] is the focus of attention."3

It is important to note that most of Montaigne's examples involve the suffering of animals, and also that they are mixed together with, as though bearing the same force as, accounts of human beings in agony. Now, one might easily say that Montaigne extensively anthropomorphizes animals in order to make his point, as for example in the following...

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