Pub: Edelman, Christopher. "Michel de Montaigne." INTERNET ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY April 28, 2011.

Michel de Montaigne is widely appreciated as one of the most important figures in the late French Renaissance, both for his literary innovations as well as for his contributions to philosophy. As a writer, he is credited with having developed a new form of literary expression, the essay, a brief and admittedly incomplete treatment of a topic germane to human life that blends philosophical insights with historical anecdotes and autobiographical details, all unapologetically presented from the author’s own personal perspective. As a philosopher, he is best known for his skepticism, which profoundly influenced major figures in the history of philosophy such as Descartes and Pascal.

All of his literary and philosophical work is contained in his Essays, which he began to write in 1572 and first published in 1580 in the form of two books. Over the next twelve years leading up to his death, he made additions to the first two books and completed a third, bringing the work to a length of about one thousand pages. While Montaigne made numerous additions to the book over the years, he never deleted or removed any material previously published, in an effort to represent accurately the changes that he underwent both as a thinker and as a person over the twenty years during which he wrote. These additions add to the unsystematic character of the book, which Montaigne himself claimed included many contradictions. It is no doubt due to the unsystematic nature of the Essays that Montaigne received relatively little attention from Anglo-American philosophers in the twentieth century. Nonetheless, in recent years he has been held out by many as an important figure in the history of philosophy not only for his skepticism, but also for his treatment of topics such as the self, moral relativism, politics, and the nature of philosophy. . . .

Visit: http://www.iep.utm.edu/montaign/.

Grayling, A. C. "A Man for All Seasons." PROSPECT MAGAZINE June 21, 2010.

Bakewell, Sarah. How to Live: a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. London: Chatto and Windus, 2009.

A reason for the enduring attraction of Montaigne’s Essays is that they do what all classics do: they illuminate the universal in the particular. In one way this should be a surprise, because Montaigne was a highly individual man and, by his own account, a rather unsuccessful one. He frankly confessed his inabilities and shortcomings, his dislike of business, his yearning for solitude, his regret at being forgetful and not very clever, his physical lacks (he was short and had, he tells us, a small penis). Yet his frankness is refreshing and full of human truth. He found a method of writing suited to the character of his mind—an aleatory, divagatory, exploratory method which meandered along with his thoughts, making his essays unsystematic and random, full of unexpected, entertaining detours.

Sarah Bakewell adopts Montaigne’s own method to give an account of him and his views. Because Montaigne’s great question was Socrates’s question—“how to live?”—she arranges her portrait of him around the answers he offered. The outcome is an instructive journey around Montaigne, exemplifying his charm and the universality of his appeal. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/06/a-man-for-all-seasons/.

Bakewell, Sarah. "Montaigne, Philosopher of Life, Part 7: What Can We Learn from Montaigne?" GUARDIAN June 21, 2010.

So, are we all Montaignes now? In many ways, yes.

Few of us write long books of essays, and even fewer of us immerse ourselves in classical and historical sources until they become indistinguishable from our very selves. But we are curious, well-informed, well-connected, introspective and hyper-communicative. We never tire of talking about the things that go through our heads. The diversity of cultural perspectives is a familiar idea to us, in a way it wasn't in the 16th century, and many take it for granted that truth is relative. We know about psychology: about unconscious drives, repressed memories, hormones, and moods. We don't expect ourselves to be rational all the time. We apparently forgive ourselves a lot of bad behaviour, on the excuse that it's the fault of our upbringing or genes. Do we really need Montaigne to tell us to relax, accept our mistakes, go with the flow, and gaze fascinated at ourselves all day?

Get the answer here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jun/21/montaigne-philosophy-essays.

Bakewell, Sarah. "Montaigne, Philosopher of Life, Part 6: The Moment is Everything." GUARDIAN June 14, 2010.

The idea of cultivating full awareness of every instant owed much to the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers of antiquity. One of Montaigne's favourites, Seneca, wrote that life runs through our fingers like water. We cannot stem the flow, but we can drink deeply while it is there. Philosophy helps to remind us to do this. It works like the mynah birds in Aldous Huxley's novel Island, which are trained to fly around all day calling "Attention! Attention!" and "Here and now!" The pages of Montaigne's book were his mynah birds. So determined was he to squeeze out every drop of his life's experience that he had a long-suffering servant wake him repeatedly in the middle of the night, so he could catch a glimpse of his own sleep as it left him. No wonder the 20th-century philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty described Montaigne as someone who put "a consciousness astonished at itself at the core of human existence".

Montaigne liked to say that the Essays were a casual pursuit, thrown on paper in idle hours. But at times he confessed to the difficulties of this discipline of attention and astonishment. "It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds."

As he got older and realised that the life remaining to him could not be of great length, he exerted himself even more. "I try to increase it in weight," he wrote, "I try to arrest the speed of its flight by the speed with which I grasp it ... The shorter my possession of life, the deeper and fuller I must make it." At every moment, he brought himself back to himself. "When I walk alone in the beautiful orchard, if my thoughts have been dwelling on extraneous incidents for some part of the time, for some other part I bring them back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, and to me."

The result was an almost Zen-like presence of mind in the moment. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jun/14/montaigne-philosophy.

Bakewell, Sarah. "Montaigne, Philosopher of Life, Part 5: Humanity, Cruelty and Fellow-Feeling." GUARDIAN June 7, 2010.

Philosophical detachment went against Montaigne's grain because of his natural tendency to empathise with others, and to sympathise with them – in the full, original sense of this word, meaning "to feel with". Watching a human or animal in pain, Montaigne felt some of that pain himself. This made it impossible for him to collaborate in the cruel judicial procedures of the day. As a magistrate and mayor of Bordeaux, he was expected to order tortures and public killings, but refused to do so. "I am so squeamish about hurting that for the service of reason itself I cannot do it. And when occasions have summoned me to sentencing criminals, I have tended to fall short of justice". In any case, he knew torture to be useless as an investigative procedure: people will say anything at all to stop the pain. As for burning witches, "it is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have a man roasted alive because of them". Montaigne lived in an era when standards of evidence were being relaxed for witchcraft trials, because – as his contemporary Jean Bodin influentially argued – witches were uniquely strong at resisting interrogation, yet their planned crimes were uniquely dangerous and must be prevented at all costs. Medieval torture techniques had been revived after years of disuse, on the all-too-reasonable-sounding argument that the public good required it. Always sceptical of reasonable-sounding arguments, Montaigne remained unconvinced. In any case, he was too connected to other beings to be able to countenance their suffering, regardless of justifications. "I cruelly hate cruelty", he wrote, emphasising the paradox. It was an aversion of feeling as much as of reason. Not suprisingly, he disliked hunting, although his position as noble host occasionally obliged him to start a deer hunt in his woods for guests: he mentions doing this once for Henri of Navarre, the future Henri IV. Similarly, he was expected to supply meat to his cooks for his sociable table, and did so – yet he could not watch a chicken having its neck wrung in the yard. In his book, Montaigne presents all this as an accident of his own temperament. At the same time, he derives a powerful ethical code from it: an ethics founded in the body and in human nature. It is personal in origin, and he does not lay it out as a system. Yet it does, I believe, have the force of a moral law for him. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jun/07/montaigne-philosophy-essays.

Bakewell, Sarah. "Montaigne, Philosopher of Life, Part 4: Borrowing the Cat's Point of View." GUARDIAN May 31, 2010.

One of Montaigne's favourite hobbies was imagining the world from different perspectives. To remind himself how strange human behaviour looked if one's vision was not dulled by familiarity, he collected stories from his reading: tales of countries where men urinated squatting and women standing, where people blackened their teeth or elongated their ears with rings, where hair was worn long in front and short behind, or where boys were expected to kill their fathers at a certain age. It was not just that these were marvels in themselves. Montaigne loved such stories because they lent him an altered point of view from which to look back on his own culture and see it afresh. Most human beings judged what was merely habitual to be what was natural. Montaigne tried to wake himself from this dream. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/may/31/montaigne-philosophy-perspectivism.

Bakewell, Sarah. "Montaigne, Philosopher of Life, Part 3: Believer and Doubter." GUARDIAN May 24, 2010.

Montaigne was a good Catholic. He was also a man who doubted almost everything: the most influential sceptic of his day. He devoted long sections of his Essays to exploring reasons why nothing could be certain and everything was up for question – yet he claimed to accept whatever the church decreed without reservation. Was this just doublethink? Did he really mean it? I think he did mean it. But we can only understand exactly what he meant by making a great leap from our world to his, and discovering a kind of scepticism different from the one we are familiar with. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/may/24/montaigne-philosophy-scepticism.

Bakewell, Sarah. "Montaigne, Philosopher of Life, Part 2: Learning Not to be Afraid." GUARDIAN May 17, 2010.

Montaigne, as a young man, had an excessive fear of death, and it made it almost impossible for him to enjoy living. This was partly the result of a fashion of the time, which stated – following some of the ancient philosophers – that the best way to be at ease about your own mortality was to think about it constantly. Dwell on your death every day, went the theory, and you will become so used to it as an idea that it cannot scare you when it arrives in reality. Not surprisingly, the results could be quite the opposite. Brooding on death could make the fear worse, not better. That was certainly what Montaigne found when he tried it. It did not help that, as he entered his 30s, he suffered a series of bereavements. His best friend Etienne de La Boétie died of the plague in 1563. Next, his father died of a kidney-stone attack; then a younger brother suffered a fatal haemorrhage after being hit on the head by a tennis ball. This last freak accident particularly horrified Montaigne. "With such frequent and ordinary examples passing before our eyes," he wrote, "how can we possibly rid ourselves of the thought of death and of the idea that at every moment it is gripping us by the throat?" Fortunately, at around the same time, he had a near-death experience of his own, and it was just what he needed to release him from his fear. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/may/17/montaigne-philosophy-death.

Bywater, Michael. "HOW TO LIVE, by Sarah Bakewell." THE INDEPENDENT January 29, 2010.

Bakewell, Sarah. How to Live: a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer. London: Chatto and Windus, 2009. Early on in this illuminating and humane book, Sarah Bakewell announces that it is not only about about Michel de Montaigne the man and the writer, but also "about Montaigne, the long party". The phrase is both apt and happy. The subject of this Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer was pleased with his Essays. "It is," he says, "the only book in the world of its kind", and I suppose it remains so even today. Rousseau made a similar claim for his Confessions but its very title placed him firmly centre-stage - he, not his book, was the unique object - while the Essays put Montaigne on a level with the reader. He doesn't instruct or boast but asks us to join him in looking at himself, wondering how one should live and hopefully becoming "reconciled to this colicky life". An essay is a gesture of imperfection, an essai - an "attempt" or a "trial". Montaigne's signature phrase is "but I don't know." He may be wrong. We may be right. It's all an ongoing conversation, across time. Hence the "long party". A common remark by Montaigne's readers has been that it felt as if you'd written it yourself. Our receptions of him change according to the times. His Enlightenment readers read in Montaigne justification for their own Enlightenment; Romantics saw their exalted super-sensibilities reflected; various bowdlerisations recast the Essays in a form suitable for the emerging brash timidity of the Victorian consciousness. Nietzsche read him with the same (and entirely different) delight as Shakespeare had. Semioticians, deconstructionists and literary psychoanalysts have all had a pop at Montaigne and found exactly what they expected. If there's one word that suits his style, it's that coinage of the 20th-century guru of deconstruction, Jacques Derrida: the punning différance, a slippery hybrid of differentiation and deferral. Montaigne was an expert at both, but deferral always won. . . . Read the whole review here: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/how-to-live-by-sarah-bakewell-1882249.html.

Bakewell, Sarah. "Montaigne, Philosopher of Life, Part 1: How to Live." GUARDIAN May 10, 2010.

This series is about Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a 16th-century philosopher who proposed no theories, put no trust in reason, and showed no desire to convince readers of anything. In his vast book Essays, he contradicted himself, preferred specifics to generalities, embraced uncertainty, and followed his thoughts wherever they led. Was he a philosopher at all? In his own view, he was, but only of an "unpremeditated and accidental" kind. He wrote about so many things, he said, that his essays were bound to coincide with the wisdom of the ancients from time to time. Others have seen him not just as a philosopher but as the world's truly modern thinker, because of his intense awareness that he was complex and self-divided, always double in himself, as he put it. In my opinion, he was the first and greatest philosopher of life as it is actually lived, and perhaps the one who has the most to offer our troubled 21st century. . . . what he truly liked doing had nothing to do with either work or family. He would go walking or riding in the local forests, thinking inquisitive thoughts about himself and the world; at home, he would read, and write, and talk to people. He converted a chubby tower at one corner of his property to be his library. (You can still visit it today.) There, he started writing down the hundred or so lively, rambling pieces which he called his Essays – a word he coined from essayer: "to try". That is just what they were: trials, or attempts upon himself. What is it to be a human being, he wondered? Why do other people behave as they do? Why do I behave as I do? He watched his neighbours, his colleagues, even his cat and dog, and looked deeply into himself as well. He tried to record what it felt like to be angry, or exhilarated, or vain, or bad-tempered, or embarrassed, or lustful. Or to drift in and out of consciousness, in a half-dream. Or to feel bored with your responsibilities. Or to love someone. Or to have a brilliant idea while out riding, but forget it before you can get back to write it down – and then feel the lost memory recede further and further the more you hunt for it, only to pop into your head as soon as you give up and think about something else. He was, in short, a brilliant psychologist, but also a moral philosopher in the fullest sense of the word. He did not tell us what we should do, but explored what we actually do. He published the results for the first time in 1580, and saw his Essays become an instant Renaissance bestseller. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/may/10/montaigne-philosophy.

Raphael, Frederic. "Man for All Seasons." LITERARY REVIEW (December 2009).

Bakewell, Sarah. How to Live: a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.  London: Chatto and Windus, 2009.

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne was born in 1533 and died (following an attack of kidney stones, like his father) in 1592. His mother was of Marrano descent; her family had been Sephardic Jews, forced into Catholicism. Montaigne himself was always formally obedient to the Church. 'Otherwise', he wrote, 'I could not keep myself from rolling about incessantly. Thus I have kept myself intact, without agitation or disturbance of conscience.' In this respect, he was somewhat the precursor of Evelyn Waugh, who said that, had he not been a Catholic, he would scarcely have been human. Montaigne, however, was a genial man of no officious piety; a dutiful mayor of Bordeaux, unaggressive lord of his modest Périgordin manor, and a courtier without grand ambition.

His essays advocated good-humoured acceptance of the vagaries of human life. For all his formal orthodoxy, he was a manifest sceptic: 'There is', he observed, 'no hostility that exceeds Christian hostility.' In practice, he preferred the Stoic amor fati to religious absolutism and abominated the righteous cruelty of those with undoubting convictions: 'It is putting a very high price on one's conjectures to have someone roasted alive on their account.' Sarah Bakewell takes this to be an allusion to the spate of witch-hunting which accompanied the religious wars, but it is no great stretch to see in it a reference to the ongoing series of autos-da-fé on the other side of the Pyrenees. For those who choose to read him so, Montaigne was a bit of a crypto-Jew. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.literaryreview.co.uk/raphael_12_09.html.