Raymond Sebond
From Montaigne’s “Apology for Raymond Sebond”:
Now our human reasons and arguments are as it were the heavy and barren matter; the grace of God is their form; it is that which gives them shape and value. Just as the virtuous actions of Socrates and Cato remain vain and useless because they did not direct them toward the end of loving and obeying the true creator of all things and because they did not know God; so it is with our ideas and reasonings: they have a certain body, but it is a shapeless mass, without form or light, if faith and divine grace are not added to it. (Essays, Donald Frame’s translation, 326-7)
Montaigne’s “Apology for Raymond Sebond” is a prescient view into the future of nihilism in which “faith” is held accountable to “reason.” It is positively anti-Cartesian several decades before Descartes shows up on the scene. The first sentence in the passage I just cited contains the seeds of this anti-Cartesianism. Descartes would find the very basis of existence in human reason and the guarantee of our subjectivity standing over against a mechanical universe we must seek to bend to our will. Montaigne saw exactly the opposite: human reason by itself is “heavy and barren matter” and a “shapeless mass, without form or light.” Something else must give it life, and that something else comes from outside ourselves: “faith and divine grace.”
In this meditation, I want to come to terms with Montaigne’s criticism of Cartesianism before Cartesianism was even a thing. Montaigne saw Europe marching toward a new brand of nihilism as human reason started to assert itself as self-sufficient and based on an aspiration to control anything outside of itself, including its physical body. This is the force of his message in this essay. He sees it clearly and is warning posterity against it. At the same time, this future feels inevitable. Religious institutions are at war (322-4). Protestantism, or “the innovations of Luther” (320), is offering an alternative to Catholicism, but this alternative is fueled by the twin powers of doctrinal fragmentation and hostile intolerance : “There is no hostility that excels Christian hostility. Our zeal does wonders when it is seconding our leaning toward hatred, cruelty, ambition, avarice, detraction, rebellion” (324). In the realm of knowledge, theology is abandoning philosophy as it goes off to fight political and doctrinal battles: “See the horrible impudence with which we bandy divine reasons about, and how irreligiously we have both rejected them and taken them again, according as fortune has changed our place in these public storms” (323).
Descartes would accept this separation as given, and he says exactly this in the opening paragraph of his Letter of Dedication to the Meditations: “I have always thought that two issues — namely, God and the soul — are chief among those that ought to be demonstrated with the aid of philosophy rather than theology.” Montaigne, on the contrary, is trying to hold them together, hoping that the separation has not passed the point of no return. In this effort his warning is clear. If we go down this path, the innovations of Luther combined with the vanity of human reason would degenerate from an “incipient malady” into an “execrable atheism” (320). I want to be clear on what Montaigne saw. He is watching the intellectual leaders of his time actively pursue this separation by reducing all of knowledge to the drive for scientific certainty. By doing so, the world is becoming disenchanted, to use Charles Taylor’s characterization, and this will have grave consequences for humanity:
For the common herd, not having the faculty of judging things in themselves, let themselves be carried away by chance and by appearances, when once they have been given the temerity to despise and judge the opinions that they had held in extreme reverence, such as those in which their salvation is concerned. And when some articles of their religion have been set in doubt and upon the balance, they will soon after cast easily into like uncertainty all the other parts of their belief, which had no more authority or foundation in them than those that have been shaken; and they shake off as a tyrannical yoke all the impressions they had once received from the authority of the laws or the reverence of ancient usage —
For eagerly is trampled what once was too much feared.
LUCRETIUS
—determined from then on to accept nothing to which they have not applied their judgment and granted their personal consent. (320)
Can we have no more clear prediction of Descartes Meditations than this last sentence? The challenge Montaigne sends us in the “Apology” is this: if mankind disenchants the world and finds self-sufficiency in his reason and judgment, what is to stop him from all manner of violence against everything and anything in the name of his own convenience? We will find ourselves living a life that treats the entire universe as something that exists only for our convenience because we have cut ourselves off from any sense of moral and spiritual connectedness to it. This cutting off will not be a denigration of humanity. Rather, it will result in the rise of, and reliance on, our vanity:
Let us consider for the moment man alone, without outside assistance, armed solely with his own weapons, and deprived of divine grace and knowledge, which is his whole honor, his strength, and the foundation of his being…. Who has persuaded him that the admirable motion of the celestial vault, the eternal light of the torches rolling so proudly above his head, the fearful movements of that infinite sea, were established and have lasted so many centuries for his convenience and his service? Is it possible to imagine anything so ridiculous as that this miserable and puny creature, who is not even master of himself, exposed to the attacks of all things, should call himself master and emperor of the universe, the least part of which it is not in his power to know, much less command? … who has sealed him this privilege? Let him show us his letters patent for this great and splendid charge. (329, emphasis added)
These are rhetorical questions, and Montaigne loves his rhetorical questions. Indeed “who has sealed him this privilege” other than himself? One can imagine Descartes, some 50 years later, reading this passage and saying to himself, “I’ll give it a go.” Clearly the first sentence in his First Meditation does just this: “I had to raze everything to the ground and begin again from the original foundations, if I wanted to establish anything firm and lasting in the sciences.” From this razing to the ground, Descartes will use his “method” to rebuild himself, God, and the external world. Crucially, not everything will be razed to the ground: the “original foundations” will remain. What is this original foundation? Nothing other than Descartes’ “method for solving all sorts of problems in the sciences” (Letter of Dedication to the Meditations). This, to use Montaigne’s phrase from above, will be the mark of his aloneness, “without outside assistance, armed solely with his own weapons.”
The result will be a profoundly different understanding of how God, man, and the world interconnect. Montaigne predicts these new relationships in this very passage: mankind will command the world and bend it to his convenience and his service. True to this prediction, Descartes will valorize “free will” aligned with “the intellect” as a new agency that shapes the world to its own ends. By the time we get to the Fourth Meditation, God and man have collapsed into one another:
It is only the will or free choice that I experience to be so great in me that I cannot grasp the idea of a greater faculty. This is so much the case that the will is the chief basis for my understanding that I bear a certain image and likeness of God. For although the faculty of willing is incomparably greater in God than it is in me, both by virtue of the knowledge and power that are joined to it and that render it more resolute and efficacious and by virtue of its object inasmuch as the divine will stretches over a greater number of things, nevertheless, when viewed in itself formally and precisely, God’s faculty of willing does not appear to be any greater. (Fourth Meditation, 57, emphasis added)
The equivocations of “although” and “nevertheless” in this citation set up the pronouncement that “God’s faculty of willing does not appear to be any greater” than man’s. Descartes’ point, revealed by although and nevertheless, is to make his case for the power of mankind’s free will, not the omnipotence of God’s. God no longer provides authority as the external author of a moral code of conduct. Rather, God has provided to man an equivalent will that is the shared “image” between them. Perfection and the idea of infinity from the Third and Fourth Meditations hollow out the content of God’s moral law and leave us with nothing but an open-ended cultivation of the will as our moral imperative. In other words, God has provided man with a power and not a code, and it is up to man to properly put this power to use. Gone is any Platonic or Stoic notion of morality that seeks harmony with a cosmos that we are woven into — organized by the good and harmonious beauty of the Platonist, or by the providential forces of nature for the Stoic. In fact, Descartes famously isn’t even sure that there is a nature outside of the thinking mind. “For as I observed earlier, even though these things that I sense or imagine may be nothing at all outside me, nevertheless, I am certain that these modes of thinking, which are cases of what I call sensing and imagining, insofar as they are merely modes of thinking, do exist within me” (Third Meditation, 34).
But what guides the use of this power of the will? For Descartes, the solution will be procedural rationality (“the method”) that can be universally applied to human understanding. Error will be the new form of sin and can only be avoided by subjecting all of our beliefs to rigorous doubt until confirmed by the method. “But if I withhold from making a judgment when I do not perceive what is true with sufficient clarity and distinctness, it is clear that I am acting properly and am not committing an error. But if instead I were to make an assertion or denial, then I am not using my freedom properly” (Fourth Meditation 59-60). If this is a solution to the divorce of theology from philosophy, it feels like more of a takeover and complete subordination of the former to the latter. This is Montaigne’s fear of the nihilism that his age is unleashing. Montaigne sees “vanity,” “presumption” and a “puny creature” nihilistically and dangerously overstepping its bounds. The 50 year distance between him and Descartes is the distance of a world turned upside down.
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A few thoughts on skepticism are in order here. Within the history of philosophy, Montaigne fits within the tradition of French skepticism. But not all skeptics are created equal. His is not the skepticism of a Ciceronian Academic who would be certain about one and only one thing — that we can’t know anything. Such a skepticism tends to direct its energy outward as an attack against other people’s certainty. This is how certain strands of twenty-first century atheism work, especially that of a Sam Harris or the late Christopher Hitchens. It stands on firm ground — I am certain of the truth of the universe and the human condition, which is meaninglessness. Upon this lack of meaning is built a new religion — atheism — founded on the new faith that the world is an indifferent moral void that can only be known scientifically. If you don’t accept this Truth, you are delusional, stuck in the past, barbaric. What’s worse, if you try to fill it with presumptuously pre-existing meaning, you are potentially dangerous.
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Side Note: To be sure, Harris, Hitchens and Dawkins were all necessary correctives to a fundamentalist Christianity that had (has?) gotten out of control. This recent history is well understood. But this doesn’t change the fact that their anger and condescension arises from the same atheism that Nietzsche warned us of. We do well to recall that Nietzsche’s most famous formulation of the Death of God had the atheists as the villains in the story as they mocked the madman who cries out, “I seek God! I seek God!” The atheists respond: “As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated? — Thus they yelled and laughed.” (The Gay Science, Aphorism 125).
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Montaigne’s skepticism is more tolerant than theirs because it is directed inward. It doesn’t start from the certainty of a meaningless universe waiting for us to discover its passive mechanisms as we fill it with our own meaning — convenience, subordination, control. This is an essential but subtle point. There is a difference between starting from a purported discovery (that we can’t know anything for certain, or that God doesn’t exist) and starting from a willingness to look at one’s certainties as possibly mistaken. The first starts from a Truth claim — the universe lacks meaning and/or we can’t know anything — and demands that the rest of us conform to the Truth claim, otherwise we are mistaken. The direction of energy flows outward from a foundation of certainty. The second, exemplified by Montaigne, tends to be more introspective, curious, and tolerant because it doesn’t start from a Truth claim as its foundation. It starts from a skepticism directed at one’s own certainties.
If Montaigne is certain of anything, he is certain of man’s ability to bullshit himself into believing what he wants to believe: “A nice faith, that believes what it believes only through not having the courage to disbelieve it” (325). Montaigne’s skepticism embraces ignorance as both humility and curiosity, which directs their energy inward. It becomes the mental energy to suspend judgment and hold certainty at bay. One could argue defensibly that the Essays are a prolonged attempt to do just this. Thus Montaigne’s brand of skepticism starts as an ethical disposition to oneself and not as a new Truth claim wielded as a bludgeon against others who don’t share this same Truth. For Montaigne, we are best served by withholding judgment so as to get along with others in the world. By holding certainty at bay, we can entertain multiple points of view without falling into existential crisis: “When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?” (331). A healthy mind can do this thought experiment without fearing that it will lose its identity because it lost its Truth.
We need to be careful about ascribing a nihilistic relativism to Montaigne. To be sure, we could pull this out of him. The truth of who is playing with whom — Montaigne or his cat — sits unresolved as another of his rhetorical questions. But the accusation of relativism seems like a Cartesian accusation that can’t understand knowledge to be anything other than absolute certainty of a truth. This is a Cartesian accusation that imposes a later worldview onto Montaigne. He is not of that world. He is standing ahead of it, looking at it, and warning us against it.
What is his warning? How should we understand it? This is no easy task to untangle. Charles Taylor points in a fruitful direction in his contrast between Descartes and Montaigne: “The Cartesian calls for a radical disengagement from ordinary experience. Montaigne requires a deeper engagement with our particularity?” How can he claim that the Cartesian disengages from experience? Isn’t experience itself what Descartes finds in his Meditations? “I am a thing that thinks, that is to say, a thing that doubts, affirms, denies, understands a few things, is ignorant of many things, wills, refrains from willing, and also imagines and senses” (Third Meditation 34). No, he only found these things to have certainty of existence through methodical rationality, which is not Decartes’ own. It is universal and not at all idiosyncratic: “I was strongly urged to do this [write the Meditations] by some people who knew that I had developed a method for solving all sorts of problems in the sciences — not a new one, mind you, since nothing is more ancient than the truth…” (Letter of Dedication, 3).
To be certain of anything, requires the Cartesian self to annihilate itself in the ultimate expression of Nietzsche’s ascetic ideal. This annihilation is in the service of the sciences not in the service of creating oneself. I’m not reading into this: “I had to raze everything to the ground and begin again from the original foundations, if I wanted to establish anything firm in the sciences.” To attain certain knowledge requires this razing of oneself — one’s passions, one’s thoughts, one’s feelings — so that the purity of a universal method can be activated. All of this in the name of science, not himself. This is Nietzsche’s ascetic ideal writ large and why he thought it was so dangerous. This same razing of the self is evident in moral philosophies that rely on some version of universal rationality that requires this self-annihilation — Kant’s Categorical Imperatives that demand that we do what we could universally prescribe; Bentham’s Utilitarianism that reduces moral choice to calculations of quantifiable pleasure and pain. The individual is incidental to these Cartesian inspired methods to arrive at the certainty of choice because certainty is aligned with universality. They could easily be reduced to Artificial Intelligence calculations thus removing ourselves entirely from the process — an accusation that Hobbes himself made in his objection to Descartes’ Meditations.
The accusation of relativism emerges from this Cartesian mindset. Rather, with Taylor, I would like to find in Montaigne an alternative view of things: “[Montaigne’s] aspiration is not to find an intellectual order by which things in general can be surveyed, but rather to find the modes of expression which will allow the particular not to be overlooked” (Sources of the Self 182). I want to be careful to not reduce this difference between Descartes and Montaigne to a binary opposition: Descartes denigrates the particular in favor of the universal and Montaigne simply argues the opposite. Rather, Montaigne’s particularity is not playing within this binary. It is not an atomized particularity standing alone in the universe left to its own relativist devices. It is a particularity that constantly seeks its connection with others who may very well be seeking connection with him. Is he playing with his cat or vice versa? This particularity does not seek to discover its truth lurking deep inside — human nature or an irrefutable and eternal method of rationality. It seeks to make itself through its friendships, its connection with other creatures, its appreciation for traditions, and especially the act of writing about oneself. “If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial” (Of Repentance, II.2, 611).
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With this difference between Descartes and Montaigne established, I want to take a look at how Montaigne’s skepticism sought to disallow the key intellectual and ideological move that he explored in the Apology. The Cartesian move is at the heart of our Modernity: the reduction of all ways of knowing to what you can prove to be certain. This is the heart of the emerging nihilism that Montaigne warns against before Descartes and the same nihilism that Nietzsche fought against after him. This nihilism is at the heart of the “innovations of Luther” and the Christian intolerance Montaigne spends so much time pointing out in the the opening of the essay. But it is also the collapse of all knowledge into human reason that he focuses on as the “incipient malady” of his time. This is his argument against the atheists who refuse any basis of argument other than their own: “an atheist flatters himself by reducing all authors to atheism” (327). Their refusal is filled with intolerance and anger: “But these men insist on being whipped to their own cost and will not allow us to combat their reason except by [reason] itself” (328, emphasis added). Modernity’s game, in other words, will be to make everyone play by its rules of rationality. Once we admit these rules, the die is cast.
This, for Montaigne, is a problem of collapsing truth and knowledge into a vain search for certainty and demonstrable proofs as the basis for allowing anything to be considered true:
What does truth preach to us, when she exhorts us to flee worldly philosophy, when she so often inculcates in us that our wisdom is but folly before God; that of all vanities the vainest is man; that the man who is presumptuous of his knowledge does not yet know what knowledge is; and that man, who is nothing, if he thinks he is something, seduces and deceives himself? (328)
This is not the denial of a Ciceronian Academic whose skepticism stands on the firm and paradoxical certainty that we cannot know anything. We have, in Montaigne, something more subtle and important going on. Montaigne is not a skeptic in this passage. We miss his point if we treat him as such. He is saying that there are other ways of knowing the truth that are not reducible to the demonstrable proofs of science. To say “that the man who is presumptuous of his knowledge does not yet know what knowledge is” does not say that there is no valid knowledge. It is to say that this presumptuousness is blinding us to other ways of knowing. Specifically, he wants to keep all ways of human knowing from collapsing into one way of knowing — reason as rational argument and the search for certainty. This collapse is “the vanity of our presumption” (337). This appreciation for the validity of other ways of knowing is also the legacy of Plato, who, especially in the Republic, so insistently sought to keep techne separate from episteme and from gnosis all as different ways of knowing.
These other ways of knowing, for Montaigne, have to do with keeping our eye on the providential cosmos as that which surrounds us and envelops us. He is resisting the proto-Cartesian move of carving mankind out of this cosmos and setting himself and his rationality over against nature as “some inert, insensible stupidity” (330). This cosmos has “soul, and life, and reason” just as mankind does (330). His lengthy discussion that equates man with animals is part of this argument. The fox who listens for moving water below the ice so that he can take the measure of a safe crossing is just as rational as a human being (337). From our modern vantage point, we see this view of the world as full of myth. But that is to look backward with all of our Cartesian assumptions taken for granted.
Montaigne is looking at modernity’s emergence and warning us against it. The atheists of his time, as the impresarios of the self-sufficient vanity of human rationality, are making a choice, not discovering a Truth. The choice is to ascribe a value of nil on the cosmos and turn it into the “inert, insensible stupidity” that we moderns now call nature. If Descartes claims to have discovered this, Montaigne would argue that he made a choice. This choice need not be made. In fact, we make it at our peril.
I have said all this [about the rationality of animals] to maintain this resemblance that exists to human things, and to bring us back and join us to the majority. We are neither above nor below the rest… Man must be constrained and forced into line inside the barriers of this order. The poor wretch is in no position really to step outside them; he is fettered and bound, he is subjected to the same obligation as the other creatures of his class, and in a very ordinary condition, without any real or essential prerogative or preeminence…. And if it is true that he alone of all the animals has this freedom of imagination and this unruliness in thought that represents to him what is, what is not, what he wants, the false and the true, it is an advantage that is sold to him very dear, and in which he has little cause to glory, for from it springs the principal source of the ills that oppress him: sin, disease, irresolution, confusion, despair. (336)
To be sure, there are huge problems with this worldview. It is easy to take it as the enforced conformity of ourselves to fit into a natural order. Undoubtedly this natural order is and will be defined and enforced institutionally and violently. It is the basis for a natural order expressed as immobility within a fixed hierarchy. One must always know one’s place and not rise above it nor sink below it. I don’t think that this is what Montaigne is arguing for here, and I don’t think that we need to write him off as a conservative aristocrat lamenting the birth of modernity and/or the rise of bourgeois capitalism. I’d rather take him seriously as a thinker who is pointing out the nihilistic problems that are on the European horizon.
While scientific rationality will create all manner of great things in the name of progress, it will untether us from a sense of meaning and purpose as participants in a beautifully ordered cosmos. The “presumption of our vanity” will likely prove to be ill-equipped for what it creates as it chooses to see nature as “some inert, and insensible stupidity” just sitting and waiting for us to bend it to our own convenience. Such a view is incapable of responding to climate change in any wholistic way. Such a view will produce a quaint Romanticism as a temporary escape and respite from Cartesian instrumental reason as the religion of Capitalism. But this Romanticism will fail to be a true corrective because it will never gain credibility as anything other than a subjective aesthetic experience that fails to live up to the standards of Cartesian methodical certainty. I could defensibly argue that anti-vaccination campaigns, alternative facts, and the rise of Donald Trump are responses from the Right against a Left that prides itself on the rational articulation of “policy” as its favorite mode of communication.
Such a world will also reduce ourselves to calculable and manipulatable entities as the objects of instrumental reason. How else are we to understand the use of “big data” to drive our purchasing habits? Marketers know with a great deal of certainty what will happen when they make algorithmic changes that show us new products or new social media content. Don’t the modern metrics of conversion rates, click-through rates, and cpm-based advertising indicate that we have become part of the calculable universe? This is only possible because we ourselves are envisioned as “some inert, insensible stupidity.” We have reduced ourselves to objects whose behaviors, en masse, are predictable and calculable. Instrumental reason no longer only stands alongside nature trying to know it and bend it. It has permeated it so that even we humans are reduced to its mechanical operations. We have inserted ourselves back into the cosmos, but this insertion has come at the price Montaigne predicted: “sin, disease, irresolution, confusion, despair.” In other words, a crisis of meaning.
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It is only now that I better understand Nietzsche’s tone and intent in his initial formulation of amor fati. It now makes sense to me why he wrote it as a reversal of Descartes and a resolution for the new year:
For the new year — I still live; I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought that ran across my heart this year — what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not want to even accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all on the whole: someday I wish to be a Yes-sayer. (The Gay Science, Aphorism 276)
Montaigne did not need to make a resolution to “learn to more and more see as beautiful what is necessary in things” as Nietzsche did 300 years later. Montaigne stands on one side of the Cartesian worldview warning posterity against it. Nietzsche stands on the other side looking back at its victory somewhat like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History who bears witness to the wreckage of modern progress piling up at her feet. For Montaigne, holding onto a faith in an enchanted, beautiful and providential cosmos is a live option. He is bearing witness to the rise of atheism as its potential undoing and trying to point out to his contemporaries the dangers it will bring. Is he Benjamin’s Angel looking forward, predicting the problems to come?
Contrary to Montaigne, Nietzsche’s amor fati arrives in The Gay Science as a resolution, as something that he needs to recover and relearn. It is a live option, but only barely. It is a live option by reversing Descartes’ cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”) as sum, ergo cogito (“I exist, therefore I think”). Is this reversal an attempt to rewind the clock to recapture and relearn something from the enchanted cosmos that Montaigne wanted mankind to hold onto? Is it an attempt to reach back to a time before Descartes’ method turned the beautiful cosmos into the convenient and useful universe under mankind’s command? Is it a cycle that refuses to put either existence or the cogito in the lead position? We shouldn’t read too much into it. At its most forceful, it is a resolution to not accept a value of nil on the world, but to reverse that Cartesian valuation and put back into it a genuine respect for its beauty.