The surrounding world is all lies and treachery. Dissimulation is among the most notable qualities of this century.. . .1 [Deceit] maintains and feeds most of men’s occupations.”’2 People massacre one another under cover of noble pretexts which, in reality, merely mask base interests.
By accumulating such scattered observations, Montaigne develops an ancient theme, older than Plato, who first cast it in mythical form. Exploited by Stoics and Skeptics; developed by Boethius; given wide currency by various medieval authors, most notably John of Salisbury, and repeatedly invoked by moralists and preachers, this is the theme of the world as theater, in which men do no more than play out their roles, speaking their lines and gesticulating like actors on a stage—until death decrees their final exit. This theme was at times employed to exalt the omnipotence of God, simultaneously author, director, and spectator of this vast production; on other occasions it was used to denounce the idle fictions in which gullible mer allow themselves to believe. Montaigne does not fail to cite the words at- tributed to Petronius, ‘Mundus universus exercet histrioniam,’’4 later echoed within the walls of the Globe Theatre by melancholy Jaques in Shakespeare’s As You Like It: ‘’All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.’’.
What Montaigne, in common with many of his contemporaries, uses this image to emphasize is the idea that the world, like a theater, creates illusions. It is a play of shadows that holds us in its grip. The grandeur of princes is pure theater: clever imitators are able to mimic majesty and win the respect of the populace. No less illusory are the wisdom extolled by the champions of prudence and the doctrines propounded by learned scholars. Everywhere there is trumpery, knavery, affectation, and artifice. ‘Yes, even the mask of greatness put on in our plays affects us and deludes us somewhat.’’ Everything is borrowed “for mask and show” in a cruel and futile display.” More from weakness than from malevolence, ordinary men are susceptible to this sort of deception. Prisoners of their imaginations, forgetful of themselves, they let themselves be gulled. They mistake the appearance for the essence. Both monarchs, for their bellicose purposes, and religious factions, through their propaganda, are perfectly capable of taking advantage of this human blindness. Both need credulous men, men easily swayed by opinion and ready to shed their own blood and the blood of others for the sake of the cause. “Any opinion is strong enough to make people espouse it at the price of life.’’8 Wherever one looks, triumphant impostors and satisfied dupes are to be found. “I have in my time seen wonders in the undiscerning and prodigious ease with which people let their belief and hope be led and manipulated in whatever way has pleased and served their leaders, passing over a hundred mistakes one on top of the other, passing over phantasms and dreams.’’?
In denouncing the viciousness of false appearance, Montaigne is at one with the spirit of his age. Flattering the prevailing taste, he exploits a commonplace idea, which he varies and amplifies and embellishes with abundant citations and conceits. Yet through this commonplace he is in fact aiming at an aspect of contemporary reality on which the traditional antithesis of being and appearance bears more directly than at any other time in history. The wars through which the princes of Europe are seeking to augment their power (with the formation of the major European states still in the offing); the religious conflicts that threaten to undermine the very principle of authority (with the elevation of man’s “inner conscience” to the position of supreme authority still looming on the horizon); and the ubiquitous violence, the constant danger that besets all men—all of these circumstances provide pressing reasons for dissimulation and deception; as a result, these have become generally accepted forms of behavior and are frequently taken as themes of literature. In this age of excess, the teachings associated with the ethical and religious tradition of contemptus mundi have been exaggerated: the temptations of this world are traps, the true goods lie elsewhere. Before long, the baroque theater would depict disillusionment (desengaño) as a moment of bitter grace, in which characters too long sunken in blindness would suddenly regain their sight.10
The world against which Montaigne levels a finger of accusation is a labyrinth in which the counterfeit passes for legal tender. Hypocrisy, far from being regarded as a mask that one must penetrate, is everywhere praised as “this new-fangled virtue of hypocrisy and dissimulation, which is so highly honored at present." !11 The juggling of offices and ranks is a scandal for all to behold. Anybody involved in public affairs is aware of what goes on and must, since everybody is doing it, take steps at once to protect himself and remain on his guard. “Our truth of nowadays is not what is, but what others can be convinced of.”’12 Duplicity and cunning are not discoveries that men make in time, but handles to the world available to anyone bold enough to grasp them. Men learn to dissimulate as they learn to talk, by listening to what is going on all around and mimicking what succeeds. Education is quickly acquired. Politics is defined, in principle, as ostentation, trickery, and ruse—wholly legitimate defenses against an enemy’s ambush and the hazards of fortune. “Innocence itself could neither negotiate among us without dissimulation nor bargain without lying.”13 So little trouble is taken to hide a lie that lying has become the universally accepted convention. Concealment and duplicity are the common “form,” the normal way of doing business—lying, at first tacitly tolerated, is now the general rule.
On the other hand, it is not uncommon in this verbose age to find false appearances being denounced. There were accepted formulas for decrying the universality of lying and for protesting one’s own sincerity, one’s willingness to engage in flattery, one’s eagerness to tell the truth, however imprudent it might be. ‘“Parrhesia’” and protestations of sincerity or candor were devices commonly used by smooth talkers.14 The rhetorical contrast between being and appearance, the topos according to which this world is the world of fraud and deception, were among the common tricks of the duplicitous. Hypocrites could deliver admirable speeches condemning hypocrisy. Anyone who saw profit in so doing could rail against deception, buttressed by innumerable citations, yet remain a character wearing a false mask, an actor in the ultimate role of disillusioned sage. The rules of dissimulation would have been incomplete had they not included among their recommended strategems the refusal to dissimulate. The enemy of concealment is often just an other stage device: the play becomes (or appears to become) believable because it includes a character who ostensibly refuses to believe in the appearances he encounters. In the baroque era this ultimate illusion was expressed symbolically by the play within a play. The actor defending himself against illusion takes on the status of a real being, thanks to the interplay of relative oppositions. The spectator believes that the actor is not on the stage because he denounces yet another stage. (And so it goes today with ideology, one of whose most effective diversionary tactics is the denunciation of ideology.’ Montaigne is obviously making use of this kind of rhetoric.
Indeed, he goes it one better, drawing from the humanist tradition methapors of disloyalty and indictments of lying. But he does what he does with a new seriousness and irony.
He is to be believed when he insists on his veracity, when he declares that it “is painful for me to dissemble,’”16 or that "I have ordered myself to dare to say all that I dare to do,"17 or when he tells how his “face” and “frankness’’18 have on several occasions saved his life. The traditional precepts find in him a ready welcome: for him, to live with an open heart is no mere turn of phrase but an injunction that he has no difficulty putting into practice. By the same token, the gate of his castle remains open to all comers.
Montaigne casts the net of his skepticism quite widely. Looking at the history of mankind, he determines that the consequences of sincerity and deception are quite unpredictable. “By diverse means we arrive at the same end,” says the title of the very first essay in book. Unpredictability means that deception can never be certain of achieving its goals even in the world of facts; hence Montaigne decides in favor of that which the moral tradition has established, in law, as being of higher moral value: sincerity. Whatever the outcome of our actions (which outcome depends on God alone), Montaigne is in no doubt as to the correct moral choice: insistence on veracity remains his unvarying standard of judgment, his permanent criterion for criticizing morals and for governing his own behavior. This standard is, admittedly, a commonplace, but Montaigne’s desire for originality is not so great that he rejects it. Such is his concern for honesty that it is untouched even by his recognition of the mutability of all things.
Montaigne shaped his response to the world-theater by drawing on the humanist tradition. If it is true that “most of our occupations are low comedy," 19 should we laugh or cry? To the sorrowful compassion of Heraclitus Montaigne preferred its fabled opposite, the laughter of Democritus. This comparison heightens the contrast between the two positions and renders compromise less likely. Once again, we have every reason to believe that Montaigne wholeheartedly subscribes to the lesson that he draws from the traditional cultural stereotype:
(A) Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears. . . . I prefer the first humor, not because it is pleasanter to laugh than to weep, but because it is more disdainful, and condemns us more than the other; and it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve. . . . We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not so wretched as we are worthless.20
Here, Montaigne is temporarily adapting to his own purposes an attitude that dates from the beginnings of philosophy: Democritus laughs at the world’s folly, but it grieves him just the same, and in fact he exacerbates his melancholy by his relentless efforts to get at the causes of the folly he mocks.21 (Later, in 1621, Robert Burton would publish his Anatomy of Melancholy under the pseudonym Democritus Minor, invoking the name of Montaigne among his precursors.) Hamlet repeats a line remarkably similar to one in the passage of Montaigne cited above: ‘Use every man after his desert, and who should escape whipping?’’22 And Freud mentions this verse from Hamlet more than once, most notably in “Mourning and Melancholia,”” where it is adduced as evidence for the clear-sightedness of self-accusation on the part of the melancholic.23 By what special privilege do such judgments of melancholy, more than other words, pass down through the ages, linking the author who pronounces with the reader who reads and pronounces in his turn? Should we conclude that the propensity to quote (about which we shall have more to say later on) is a consequence of the self-denigration of the melancholic? Montaigne’s excuse for the borrowings that serve him as embellishment is that he prefers to speak through the stronger voice of a Seneca or a Plutarch. Citation, an avowal of weakness, shows a marked predilection for the discourse of melancholy.
But Montaigne does not merely take seriously the lessons of the masters of antiquity and try to live in accordance with precepts consecrated by tradition. He goes even further. When he casts his eyes about him, he thinks he sees the end of the world: ‘“Now let us turn our eyes in all directions: everything is crumbling about us... . It seems as if the very stars have ordained that we have lasted long enough beyond the ordinary term. And this also weighs me down, that the evil that most nearly threatens us is not an alteration in the entire and solid mass, but its dissipation and disintegration, the worst of our fears.’’24 When everything seems to be in collapse, is it not time time to remedy our dissatisfaction, to press our questioning with ever-greater urgency, to arm ourselves with higher standards, to shun every vanity (including even learned discourse on vanity), and to bring to our defense every available resource of sophistication and irony? Desire for independence becomes the main source of energy, though this need not interfere with listening to the past or reading the exemplary texts it provides.
Votive space
To have discerned so clearly the “banishment of truth,’’25 Montaigne must have formulated within himself a standard of candor and veracity which the world constantly disappointed. Would he have spoken so often of inconstancy and fraud had he not imagined a possibility of constancy and honesty, however vague his hope of living up to this standard may have been? To charge that the world is false presupposes belief in an opposite value: a truth situated elsewhere (whether in this world or out of it) which would authorize us to intervene in its name, to act as the prosecutors of falsehood. In denouncing the “prestige of appearance” Montaigne implicitly declares himself in favor of the unequivocal plenitude of true being.26 But he knows this plenitude only through the force of his refusal to accept falsehood and deceit. At the moment he declares his opposition to the world, Montaigne cannot claim to possess any truth: he merely proclaims his hatred of “sham.” The truth is the still-undiscovered positive implicit in the negation of proliferating evil; the truth has no fixed visage but is merely the unappeased energy that animates and arms the act of refusal.
The opposition between truth and falsehood initially has no way of manifesting itself other than through spatial figures. Skeptical refusal is expressed metaphorically in the act of standing aloof, abstaining.
Montaigne feels the need to create a private place for himself at a distance from the world—a place where he can make himself a spectator of human life and feel protected from all its pitfalls. If the world is a deceptive theater, one must not remain on the stage; instead, one must find a way to establish oneself elsewhere. To exile oneself from a world where truth has been banished is not really to go into exile.
(And Montaigne expresses his astonishment that Socrates, who saw the “horribly corrupt laws” of Athens for what they were, did not choose to accept a “sentence of exile.’’27) The secession from the world thus figures as an inaugural act. It determines the site where Montaigne withdraws from the trade in deception; it establishes a frontier, consecrates a boundary line. The site in question is no abstract height: in Montaigne everything has substance. His separate place will be his tower library—a belvedere in the family manor which offers a commanding view of the surrounding countryside. It is no secret that Montaigne did not make this his permanent residence: he continued to devote much of his time to public affairs, to conciliatory negotiations. He did not shirk what he saw as his duty to the common weal.
What mattered in his eyes was to have secured the possibility of occupying his own private territory, the possibility of withdrawing at any moment into absolute solitude, of quitting the game: the important thing was to establish a concrete as well as symbolic embodiment of the imagined distance between himself and the world, a place always ready to receive him whenever he felt the need; but he felt under no obligation to reside there permanently. Thus a hiatus was opened up between the gaze of the spectator and the agitation of mankind, a pure interval, which enabled Montaigne to perceive how the mass of men voluntarily choose bondage while he, each time he withdrew to his library, assured himself of a new liberty. He saw the shackles in which other men remained bound but felt his own fall away. For the first conquest is not knowledge but self-presence (présence à soi).
Now, this occupation of a place, this creation of a space inaccessible to the world’s falsehood, also marks a caesura in time. To see this we have only to pay attention to the wording of the inscriptions that Montaigne had painted in 1571. A precise date is attached to the break in his life. A new era had begun, and it was important to situate it precisely in relation to both the collective time of Christendom (Anno Christi 1571 . . . pridie cal. mart.28) and his own biographical time (aet. 38 . . . die suo natali). Mention of his birthdate reinforces the idea of a voluntary birth. Time takes on a new origin and at the same moment acquires a new meaning: it is the limited lifespan that remains (quantillum in tandem superabit decursi multa jam plus parte spatii), the few days that will be added to the life already elapsed.
A new law or rule comes into effect. Renewed attachments compensate for the detachment that is at once voluntary and involuntary. The new order is no longer that of servitium but that of libertas. Liberation goes hand in hand with constriction. A strict opposition emerges between the expressions of disgust and of desire to make a break (servitii aulici et munerum publicorum pertaesus) and the votive act which both consecrates and narrowly circumscribes the place of retreat (libertati suae, tranquillitatique, et otio consecravit). This place is metaphorically the “bosom of the learned Muses” (doctarum virginum sinus): the allusion, of course, is to the round shape of the library, to the walls that “in curving round”29 hold the collection of works of poetry, philosophy, and history with which Montaigne wishes to surround himself.
The images of withdrawal (recessit) and the hidden place (dulces latebras) coupled with the feminine figure of the Muses (Montaigne will later declare that he might well have preferred to have produced a child “by intercourse with the Muses [rather] than by intercourse with [his] wife’’30) evoke for the modern reader the psychoanalytic concept of “regression” and all the ideas associated with it. When Montaigne refers to tranquillity (quietus and later tranquillitas), security (securus), and repose (otium), it may seem that he is merely confirming the regressive nature of his desire. The house containing his library is, to be sure, the ancestral seat (avitas sedes) handed down through the male line, but this masculinity (associated with domanial property since 1477) is counterbalanced (so far as the psychoanalytic argument is concerned) by the feminine gender of the word sedes and by the predominance of feminine nouns in the list of terms consecrated by the inscription (libertas and tranquillitas; only otium is not feminine, but neuter!). But in all of this it is important to recognize, as Hugo Friedrich has shown, the traditional formulas of otium cum litteris, a “contemplative” variant of the humanist life, which was recommended after the more active path of civic humanism turned out to be impracticable or fraught with peril! (Montaigne, who diligently discharged his political duties, is proof that the two attitudes could alternate.) The inaugural inscription of 1571 should not be read primarily as a psychological document: it conforms to a cultural paradigm— impersonal and generalizable. One might, however, argue that in the present case the humanist tradition, by its exaltation of antiquity as a wellspring and source of nourishment and its justification of withdrawal into solitude (sibi vivere), placed at the disposal of Montaigne’s desire ready-made formulas in which to pour his dissatisfaction, nostalgia, sublimations, and need for security: a full “instinctual” use of a coded language can be guessed at...
The inscription with which Montaigne dedicated his “library” to his liberty and personal tranquillity stood alongside another inscription (which for some time has been harder to decipher) dedicating the premises also to the memory of Montaigne’s lost friend, Etienne de La Boétie.32 The dedication to his departed ‘brother’ is coupled with the dedication to himself: the library that Montaigne hoped to enjoy also held the books bequeathed to him by La Boétie. The tranquillity he hoped to relish in the second half of his life (that which links up with death) was to prolong and perpetuate his dialogue with his best friend. The time spent in the library is thus framed on either side by death: the death that awaits Montaigne himself, and the death that he survives. The role of identity is important in both perspectives. On behalf of La Boétie, Montaigne felt responsible for an image, a resemblance: he took care in editing his friend’s works (1570-71) and took it upon himself to preserve, to transmit, whole and intact, his admired companion’s likeness as he was in life.33 The rule of identity is this: to lose nothing, to alter nothing, to wrest from death and time images that would otherwise be lost in oblivion and obscurity. (We shall have to consider this point several more times in what follows.) On his own behalf, Montaigne hoped above all that by securing for himself repose, freedom, leisure, tranquillity, and security, he might escape the “mutation” and vain ceremony to which public life condemns those whom it subjugates: his purpose will be to live in dialogue with himself, faithful to his nature and to Nature in the larger sense, and thus to cease to go astray.
From Jean Starobinski
Montaigne in Motion
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