Montaigne's "Of Friendship" and "Of Solitude": Passages for Textual Analysis

At our meeting on next Monday, we'll talk about the questions on pages 127 to 129 and the textual passages below.  I usually pick passages that either (a) leave me baffled on first reading, or (b) ring true and are artfully stated.

From "On Friendship"

pages 108 to 109, starting "And that other, licentious Greek love ..." and ending "Because it was he, because it was I."

pages 110 to 111, starting "When Laelius," and ending "more readily than to myself."

page 112, from "Eudaimidas of Corinth" to "holding their weddings on the same day"


From "Of Solitude"

pages 118 to 119, from "Now the aim of all solitude" to "he took himself along with him."

page 120, from "We should have wife, children, goods, and above all health," to "Virtue, says Antisthenes, is content with itself, without rules, without words, without deeds."

page 124, from "This occupation with books" to "I am one of those who think that their benefits cannot counterbalance this loss."

page 125, from "Seek no longer that the world should speak of you" until the end of the piece.

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

This month's selection, "Of Friendhip" and "Of Solitude" form a "boxed set."  The first is a eulogy to Montaigne's deceased friend, Etienne de la Boétie, the second a paean to the solitary, contemplative life. The translator of these essais, Donald Frame, has written of Montaigne, "His greatest attraction for most readers is that the book reveals a man and that the man becomes a friend and often another self."

A Montaigne Sampler

I was interested to hear from our discussants at our February 15th meeting if they thought Montaigne's "Of Experience" hung together as a philosophical work, or if it was more a collection of random musings by the great essayist. I'm not sure we resolved this question, but most people seemed to enjoy Montaigne's bon mots, and so here I offer a few of them (from the Donald M. Frame translation):
There is no end to our researches; our end is in the other world. It is a sign of contraction of the mind when it is content, or of weariness. A spirited mind never stops within itself; it is always aspiring and going beyond its strength; it has impulses beyond its powers of achievement. If it does not advance and press forward and stand at bay and clash, it is only half alive. Its pursuits are boundless and without form; its food is wonder, the chase ambiguity.

I often say that it is pure stupidity that makes us run after foreign and scholarly examples. There is as great an abundance of them in this age as in that of Homer and Plato. But is it not true that we seek rather the honor of quoting than the truth of the statement?*

On raising children: Let them be formed by fortune under the custom of the common people and of nature; leave it to custom to train them to frugality and austerity, so that they may have rather to come down from rigorousness than climb toward it.

I am more naturally inclined to follow the example of Flaminius, who lent himself to those who needed him more than to those who could benefit him, than that of Pyrrhus, who was prone to truckle to the great and be arrogant with the weak.

[W]e should not so much consider what we eat as with whom we eat. (quoting Epicurus)

Greatness of soul is not so much pressing upward and forward as knowing how to set oneself in order and circumscribe oneself.

There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play to man well and properly, no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being.

*Present company excepted, bien sûr.

Questions for "Of Experience," by Montaigne

Interpretive Questions

On p. 41, Montaigne writes, "There is nothing that should be recommended so much to youth as activity and vigilance." What does he mean by "vigilance?" Why would these things not be recommended to people of all ages?

P. 63: What does Montaigne mean by the line, "May her [Philosophy's] followers have no more right and sinews and sap in deflowering their wives than her lessons have"?

P. 63:"Nature is a gentle guide, but no more gentle than wise and just. We must penetrate into the nature of things and clearly see exactly what it demands [Cicero]. I seek her footprints everywhere. We have confused them with artificial tracks, and for that reason the sovereign god of the Academics and the Peripatetics, which is "to live according to nature," becomes hard to limit and express; also that of the Stoics, a neighbor to the other, which is "to consent to nature." What does Montaigne mean when he says he seeks nature's footprints "everywhere"?

p.64: What is the significance of the placement in this essay of the St. Augustine quote from City of God (our November reading!) : "He who praises the nature of the soul as the sovereign good and condemns the nature of the flesh as evil, truly both carnally desires the soul and carnally shuns the flesh; for his feeling is inspired by human vanity, not by divine truth."?

Is Montaigne, in his detailed accounts of his bodily functions, giving us "too much information (TMI)"?

Evaluative Questions

Comment on the following passage (p. 47) "I am more naturally inclined to follow the example of Flaminius, who lent himself to those who needed him more than to those who could benefit him, than that of Pyrrhus, who was prone to truckle to the great and be arrogant with the weak."

p. 65: "Between ourselves, these are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct." Have you ever made the same observation?

Is Montaigne's philosophy based on the importance of personal experience, as the title of this piece implies, and if so, why does he need to display his extensive conversancy with classical sources?

What are Montaigne's strategies for enduring hardships, and do you find them personally relevant?

For Textual Analysis

A. Pages 1 through 9, beginning, "There is no desire more natural than the desire for knowledge ... to "There is no remedy."

B. Pages 11-14, beginning, "In this universe of things" ... to "assertion and proof precede knowledge and perception" [Cicero].

C. Pages 16-19 beginning, "The scholars distinguish and mark off" ... to ... "affection and frankness, but of much courage as well."

D. Pages 54-55 beginning, "I, who operate only close to the ground" ... to ... but "attending to it, sitting at it, not lying down at it."

Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

Montaigne was a French gentleman of Bordeaux best known for his multi-volume Essais (Essays), and he is generally regarded as the inventor of the genre. According to noted Montaigne translator Donald Frame, you might interpret the term "essay" two ways:

• as a "test" or "trial" of the writer's judgement
• as a "probing" or "sampling" of the writer's self.

Of that self, the nineteeth-century literary historian Edward Dowden writes:

"He was of middle temperment ... between the jovial and the melancholic, a lover of solitude, yet the reverse of morose, choosing bright companions rather than sad; able to be silent, as the mood took him, or to gossip; loyal and frank; a hater of hypocrisy and falsehood; a despiser of empty ceremony; disposed to interpret all things to the best; cheerful among his children; careless of exercising authority; incapable of househould management; trustful and kind towards his neighbors; indulgent in his judgements; yet warm in his admiration of old heroic virtue."(a)

Our selection this month, "Of Experience," is the very last in the sequence of Montaigne's Essais.

It fascinates as a capsule of Montaigne's philosophy. For example, he writes:

I would rather be an authority on myself than on Cicero. In the experience I have of myself I find enough to make me wise, if I were a good scholar. He who calls back to mind the exess of his past anger, and how far this fever carried him away, sees the ugliness of this passion better than in Aristotle, and conceives a more justified hatred for it. (b)

If Montaigne is considered a "modern" because of his reliance on his own perceptions and judgement, however, why does he cite passages from classical authors throughout the piece?

(a) Dowden, Edward, A History of French Literature, LaVergne, TN: Bibliolife, 2009.
(b) Great Books Reading and Discussion Program, Fourth Series, v.3, p.12)