This meditation started from an exchange between my friend and me as she prepares for a seminar on Montaigne. Our exchange helped me better understand some crucial things about Montaigne’s concept of death as the absence of experience and duration and to better understand this passage about Montaigne’s Essays from Auerbach’s Mimesis:

No doubt such a creatural realism would be inconceivable without the preparatory Christian conception of man, especially in the form it took during the later Middle Ages. And Montaigne is aware of this too…. But it is also true that his creatural realism has broken through the Christian frame within which it arose. Life on earth is no longer the figure of the life beyond; he can no longer permit himself to scorn and neglect the here for the sake of a there. Life on earth is the only one he has…. To live here is his purpose and his art, and the way he wants this to be understood is very simple but in no sense trivial. It entails first of all emancipating oneself from everything that might waste or hinder the enjoyment of life, that might divert the living man’s attention from himself. (310)

The “emancipation” from the “Christian frame” happens concretely through Montaigne’s concept of death as a complete and total absence of duration and experience. Once he’s hollowed out eternity such that it has no meaning and no duration, God is officially irrelevant. To be clear, it’s not that God doesn’t exist — there is no requirement to disavow belief in the Christian God. Rather, when all that is left is the concrete experience of the living human being, God may exist, but He is irrelevant because He has no purchase on death and therefore no special claim on human life. We have no need to wait for Nietzsche’s declaration of God’s death 300 years later; Montaigne had already provided it.

Montaigne’s introspection is quite different from Augustine’s, which requires the external Truth of the Christian God revealed through a sacred text to make his introspection meaningful. Augustine’s Confessions are a template for others. Montaigne can be as relentlessly introspective as Augustine, but he has no need for an interpretive framework that looks outside and beyond his own experience for its meaning — “he can no longer neglect the here for the sake of a there.” The Essays are not and cannot be a template for others. They can merely serve as a demonstration of introspection, but they cannot be duplicated. Life, l’humane condition, is necessarily an “art of living” (to borrow a phrase from Alexander Nehamas) untethered from any need to conform to a pre-determined Truth.

L’humaine condition requires each of us individually to find our own way in the world using only experience and self-reflection as a guide. Introspective writing (essays, meditations) become material acts and practices of ascesis as self-formation. The self is a unity, but not because it finds itself in an ultimate and definable Truth as its anchor. There is no need to find one’s True Self. It is a unity because it is contained between a birth and a death that define its boundaries from the pure nothingness of eternity. Within these defining boundaries, outside of which is nothingness, there is constant change as the human individual seeks to find her way in the world. Death is a final answer to life, but not because it is a Truth full of meaning revealed to those who pass from this life to another. Death is a final answer that gives meaning to life because it is pure nothingness, a final and complete end to one’s ability to experience anything at all.

For Montaigne, this makes the work of philosophy into an active engagement with life itself as its fundamental fact and irreducible reality. “That to philosophize is to learn to die” puts philosophy into an active role that is not about finding a prior justification for what a good life is. Remember, God is irrelevant when life is conceived as bounded by birth and death that separates us from a hollowed out eternity. Rather, “to philosophize” is active and emerges from the work of living a life. “To philosophize” is to embrace ascesis as fundamental to living. Birth throws us into life without preparation. We are born into a world we did not make and we did not ask to be a part of. For all this, we must live until we die and thus return to that state of not experiencing anything. That pure nothingness on either side of life gives l’humaine condition its potential for meaning. As such, questions such as “why have I been born?” and “what is the meaning of life?” are Bergsonian false problems. They seek to refill eternity with meaning that spills over into life. There is nothing to spill over; eternity is not full of meaning. When death arrives, nothing (literally and spiritually) is revealed.

[Addition June 15, 2022] I don’t think Montaigne is an Existentialist. Existentialism, as I read it, wants to find a fundamental lack at the heart of the human condition that must be filled up as the work of finding meaning. It is a humanism founded on a fundamental problematic that we are fated (Camus) or condemned (deBeauvoir, Sartre) to overcome. All of our experiences are thus reducible to this lack of meaning and the human drive to overcome it. Whenever I think about life in these terms, I find it depressing and frustrating. All of my experiences become somehow answerable to, and reflections of, this fundamental problematic of “absurdity” (Camus) and “ambiguity” (deBeauvoir). I want to be clear on my frustration. I’m not frustrated by a lack of meaning or the inability to find meaning. I’m frustrated by the Existentialist demand that I see my human condition as reducible to this motivation, and that all my thoughts, feelings, experiences, and actions somehow get their significance only because they are attempted answers to this eternally returning problematic. The richness of life’s experiences are cut off because they are absorbed back into this black hole of a problematic.

[June 15 addition continued] To be sure, Existentialism thinks that it is optimistic and freedom-loving. Camus’ Sisyphus ultimately embraces his fated task; “freedom” is a “condemnation” that we can’t avoid for deBeauvoir and Sartre. In the emptiness at the heart of the Existentialist human condition, they saw the glass as half full. But I find this optimism hollow. To require us to see human life as caught within, and defined by, this Catch-22 is exhausting and an impossibly high bar to clear. Understood this way, Existentialism is just another form of Christianity insofar as each life is defined against a backdrop of an eternal human struggle. Our journey in the struggle will take idiosyncratic forms for each of us, but the vision of a human condition that is defined by an underlying universal problematic is exactly the same.

[June 15 addition continued] I find much more genuine optimism, beauty, and authenticity in Montaigne’s Essays. His l’humaine condition does not have a fundamental motivation or original lack at its heart. Experience stands on its own and is valuable in and of itself because it is not a reflection of some eternally returning motivation to find meaning where none can be found. The Essays are emphatically not Augustinian Confessions. By restoring to experience its own value, Montaigne gives us an “art of living” that is much more attainable because it is free of such foundational burdens.

Contemplating death as a complete lack of experience is to fill up life with concreteness and is therefore crucial to the art of living. If nothing exists on either side of life’s boundaries (birth and death), then the here and now can be understood and experienced in their concreteness, and that concreteness does not come with a prior meaning that must be deciphered. This is a profound reversal of our Neoplatonic and Christian inheritance. Neoplatonic Forms and the Christian God are not there to give us comfort that everything has a purpose and a definable Meaning that must be Revealed though the work of philosophy and science. For the stabilities of Meaning and Truth, we must substitute more dynamic concepts of time, duration, change and difference. Life fills up because on either side it is empty. Pierre Hadot found this same value in Epicureanism, of which Montaigne must be counted as one: “For the Epicurean, the thought of death is the same as the consciousness of the finite nature of existence, and it is this which gives an infinite value to each instant” (Philosophy as a Way of Life, 95).

For all his introspection, we are under no obligation to read Montaigne as an atomized self. Contemplating death is one way of plugging ourselves into the flow of nature and, as such, making our way in the world with others. Auerbach called this Montaigne’s “conception of the problem of self-orientation: that is, the task of making oneself at home in existence without fixed points of support” (311). By reading Montaigne, I get a better understanding of what the Stoics meant by living in accordance with nature. Death orients us to life as a part of nature. When we are cruel to others, we are not living in accordance with nature; we are out of sync. But there is no obligation to formulate a grand metaphysics or overarching Neoplatonic definition of “the good” to say that we should be kind and pleasant to others:

…still there is a certain respect, and a general duty of humanity, that attaches us not only to animals, who have life and feeling, but even to trees and plants. We owe justice to men, and mercy and kindness to other creatures that may be capable of receiving it. There is some relationship between them and us, and some mutual obligation. (Of cruelty, 310)

There is no need to pursue the “why” of “some relationship” and “some mutual obligation.” These need no further justification than an assertion that making life pleasant to live for oneself and others — including non-human lives — is a better way to live than embracing cruelty, which is not merely wrong, just unnecessary. We should just be kind because it’s a better experience for ourselves and others, including our pets: “I am not afraid to admit that my nature is so tender, so childish, that I cannot well refuse my dog the play he offers me or asks of me outside the proper time” (318). None of this requires the heroic and hard-won virtue of Cato or Socrates. All you need is a commitment to being a decent and kind person, which really shouldn’t be all that difficult.

I find all of this talk of death unfathomably comforting.

Page references below are to the Donald Frame translation.

—————

May 22, 2022 at 11:03am

Carol: Just read this [Of cruelty]. Many references to Stoicism and Epicureanism. I need your explication sometime.

—————

May 22, 2022 at 6:53pm

Me: I would love to chat about that essay. It’s a tough one. It took me a few times to sort out the first few pages, and I still don’t think I’ve got the second half figured out at all. 

The main distinction between Stoicism and Epicureanism that he’s making, I think, is in their different concepts of virtue. 

• Stoicism — virtue is the result of training and practice. It requires you to put yourself into difficult situations where you are tested and rise to the occasion. Seneca’s "On Providence” is probably the best explication of this. If you don’t practice it, virtue will atrophy. In On Providence, Seneca has a comparison with a wrestler who seeks out opponents who are better than him to train with. 

• Epicureanism — Virtue is found in seeking the simple pleasures of friends, conversation and moderation in all things. Where the Stoic goes looking for trouble to test him/herself, Epicurious [sic] famously built his school in the “Garden” that was isolated from the world of Athenian politics. The Greek word for what Epicurus sought as virtue is “ataraxia” — being free from troubles and worry. “Voluptas” (which Montaigne uses) is “pleasure.”  But for Epicurus, this isn’t what we would think of as hedonism, but as the removal or absence of pain. To appreciate true pleasure, one does have to endure some pain — the removal of pain can be its own form of pleasure. A good example of this is at the top of page 310 where Socrates feels a certain pleasure at having his painful chains removed from his legs. 

————-

May 23, 2022 at 11:53am

Carol: Thanks for this clear explanation.  As I re-read the essay, I don’t think that he makes such a clear distinction between Stoicism and Epicureanism.  At least, I don’t think it’s his main point.  I am trying to understand the connection between the first and second halves of the essay.  He starts by defining “virtue” as more than simply “goodness” — while goodness is “natural”, virtue struggles against less worthy impulses and prevails. The second half seems to be connected only in describing cruelty as the most serious vice.  Is there more than that? Since he says he has a natural inclination toward goodness, his abhorrence of cruelty seems less a virtue than a inborn or inbred goodness.  He has not needed to struggle against inclination toward cruelty.

Is there more than that?  His classification of cruelty as the worst vice is interesting because the church of the day would not have done so; cruelty is not one of the seven deadly sins.  I almost wish he had just made the essay about “cruelty” instead of starting with discussion of virtue.  Is this just part of letting his mind ramble where it will?

Enough of this rambling.

———-

May 23, 2022 at 1:16pm

Me: I think he’s trying to make three distinctions on the problem of virtue: 1) goodness isn’t virtue because you’re not actively struggling against vice — you just don’t have the temptations in you; 2) Stoic virtue is actively seeking challenges so that you can become virtuous, 3) the examples of Socrates and Cato where they've done so much of #2 that they no longer feel the difficulty of the challenge — they are “habituated” to be virtuous. So #3 is like #1, but you’ve earned it, so it qualifies as virtue. I think he thinks #3 is more like Epicurean virtue where you’re not seeking challenges, you’re more in a state of ataraxia even when it comes to your own death. 

For me, the discussion of the beauty of Cato’s death was the most moving part of the essay. I was particularly struck by the section where he says, “One’s death should correspond with the life” or something like that. 

I actually marked the spot in the essay where he moves onto cruelty (about half way through). I feel the same way as you about the Stoic/Epicurean preamble — it felt unnecessary and a bit forced. I’m going to dig into the second half of the essay tomorrow. I find it rewarding to have to slow down and read these essays slowly. I like the challenge.

Does that make  me virtuous? 

————-

May 23, 2022 at 2:39pm

Carol: Absolutely...unless, of course, it comes naturally.

————

May 26, 2022 at 10:57am

Me: I started reading "That to Philosophize Is to Learn to Die." I realized that Montaigne’s strongest connection to Stoicism and Epicureanism is the need to meditate on death in order to demystify it and thus to make one’s life more valuable and meaningful. For both schools, death = a complete nothingness. Montaigne directly picks up this vision of death when he says, “As our birth brought us the birth of all things, so will our death bring us the death of all things” (64). You will feel in death exactly what you felt before you were born — completely nothing. By continually contemplating that nothingness, your life and all of its moments take on infinite value. “Premeditation of death is premeditation of freedom” (60). 

So that’s another influence on Montaigne from Stoicism and Epicureanism.

—————

May 26, 2022 at 11:31am

Carol: Excellent.  Yes, I read that essay too.  I have a great personal connection to that thought:  The several times in my life when I’ve been struck by terrible anxiety, it was in large part because I haven’t come to terms with the inevitability of death.  Buddhism has helped me somewhat in facing what “is” and the impermanence of all things, including ourselves.

I have just started “On Some Verses by Virgil”, the longest essay so far, almost 50 pages (The horror). I find it tough going and I’m hoping he eventually gets to Virgil since I recently read and enjoyed The Aeneid.  Right now he is talking about the pains and discomforts of old age.  This was very real to him because he suffered terribly from kidney stones much of his life.  I’m not supposed to mention non-textual material at St. John’s, but it helps me understand him.  This essay is the only text for Thursday’s two-hour discussion.  So I need to keep plodding.  As with all the essays, persistence is rewarded.

Thanks for sending along your comments.  They really help me engage with the text.

—————-

May 26, 2022 at 1:11pm

Me: Yes, 50 pages of Montaigne can only be described as a grind. I do not relish eventually diving into the Raymond Seybond essay, but I’m sure that I must and I will. 

I have found great comfort in the Stoic/Epicurean view of death in much the same way you’ve described, but Montaigne’s view is even more thoroughly optimistic to me. I’ve always been horribly afraid, not of death, but of eternity (whether Heaven or Hell didn’t matter). But I realized that my fear was based on thinking about eternity as a never-ending experience. What is powerful and therapeutic for me from Montaigne is that he removes the experience of “duration" from his concept of eternity. Time does not exist for you when you’re dead; you have no more experiences at all. “What stupidity to torment ourselves about passing into exemption from all torment.” (64)

Chiron refused immortality when informed of its conditions by the very god of time and duration, his father Saturn. Imagine honestly how much less bearable and more painful to man would be an everlasting life than the life I have given him. If you did not have death, you would curse me incessantly for having deprived you of it. (67)

By embracing death as the absence of duration and experience, there is a tranquility and fullness that is restored to thinking about life: “Now among the principal benefits of virtue is disdain for death, a means that furnishes our life with a soft tranquility and gives us a pure and pleasant enjoyment of it, without which all other pleasures are extinguished.” (57). Pure Epicurus right there. 

It’s interesting also that he thinks that this meditation on death is what defines “philosophy” — not the theoretical invention of a massive, complete and systematic world view (like Hegel or Marx or Kant). 

Of course, none of this alleviates my fear that I have a brain tumor.