“What Is the Self?”

“The self is hateful. You, Mitton, keep it under cover, but you don’t remove it. Thus you are still hateful” (494.) Pascal is addressing Damien Mitton, his libertine friend, a theoretician of the honnête homme. Honnêteté dissimulates the self, self-love, but does not annihilate it. Pascal attacks his friend: you are hateful, despite your altruism (494). The honnête homme is a hypocrite: thanks to his human civility, his self is not the “center of everything,” but only Christian piety can convert self-love into charity.

But the self is not always identified with self-love in the Pensées:I sense that I might never have been, for my self consists in my thought. Thus the I who thinks would never have existed, had my mother been killed before I had been brought to life. So I am not a necessary being. (167)

The use of the word moi, translated here as “self,” as a substantive in French, is recent. We find it in Descartes, and this fragment from the Pensées recalls Descartes’s second “Meditation”: “For it could be that were I totally to cease from thinking, I should totally cease to exist” (Meditations, p. 37). Pascal, for his part, insists on the contingency of the self. The self lacks necessity, lacks substance, and natural philosophy is incapable of justifying its existence.

Another paradoxical fragment from the Pensées actually has “What Is the Self?” as its title:

Given a man standing at a window to see the passers-by: if I pass by, can I say that he was standing there in order to see me? No, for he is not thinking about me in particular. But consider the man who loves someone because of her beauty: does he love her? No, for smallpox, which will kill beauty without killing the person, will make him no longer love her. (567)

It has been noted that Pascal’s highly beloved sister Jacqueline had facial scars after contracting smallpox at the age of thirteen. But readers of Pascal have most often been reminded of a page in Descartes’s Meditations about men who are passing by in the street. How can we know, Descartes asks, whether the form that is passing under a hat is a man or an automaton? Pascal uses the scene differently. He does not ask whether, for the observer, the passersby are really men but whether the man at his window is expecting him, himself.The self here is not self-love but what distinguishes an individual, what makes someone a person. In the framework of natural philosophy, the self is an undeniable reality whose immediate presence we can sense, but this reality is incomprehensible. Every individual is a person, but that person is indefinable.

We must be careful not to get this wrong. Pascal does not maintain that there is no self but that it is impossible to determine the essence of any self. The self is neither a substance nor an accident. The love one has for someone is inseparable from that person’s beauty, and if the beauty disappears, Pascal asserts, the love is destroyed. What does it mean to love if one loves for beauty and if beauty is an accident? It means that the object of that love was not the being, the self, of the other. The self—that mysterious unity of the soul of which we nevertheless have immediate certainty—is inaccessible.

This question besets Pascal:

And if someone loves me for my judgment, for my memory, does he love me myself? No, for I can lose those qualities without losing myself. Where is this self, then, if it is neither in the body nor in the soul? And can one love the body or the soul apart from its qualities, which are not at all what makes the self, since they are perishable? For would one love the substance of a person’s soul abstractly, and no matter what qualities it might have? That cannot be, and it would be unjust. So we never love anyone, but only love qualities. (567)

It is no longer a question of the beauty of the body but of the faculties, judgment, and memory, intellectual realities emanating from the soul:

I can readily conceive of a man without hands, feet or head, since it is only experience that teaches us that the head is more necessary than the feet. But I cannot conceive of a man without thought. It would be a stone, or a beast. (143)

Judgment and memory are attributes of thought. But the self does not disappear in the person who loses them, in an insane person or someone with amnesia. We run up against an aporia, and the self remains a mystery: “Not knowing by ourselves who we are, we can only learn this from God” (182).

One never encounters only qualities. Why then should we not pay our respects to persons of high status? “For the self to be constituted as an authentic being,” as Jean Mesnard put it, “grace must link it with the only necessary being, which is God” (Les Pensées de Pascal, p. 305).

A Summer With Pascal

Antoine Compagnon

A feeling of deep happiness suffuses the moments of studious leisure ...

 13 

THE LIBRARY

Montaigne’s tower is one of the most affecting visits to a writer’s home you can make in France; it is at Saint-Michel-de-Montaigne, in Dordogne, near Bergerac. The large round tower dating from the 16th century is all that remains of the chateau built by his father, Pierre Montaigne, which burned down at the end of the 19th century. Montaigne spent as much of his time in this tower as he could, retreating there to read, think, and write; the library was his refuge from domestic and civil life, from worldly strife and the century’s violence. 

“When at home, I a little more frequent my library, whence I overlook at once all the concerns of my family. ‘Tis situated at the entrance into my house, and I thence see under me my garden, court, and base-court, and almost all parts of the building. There I turn over now one book, and then another, on various subjects, without method or design. One while I meditate, another I record and dictate, as I walk to and fro, such whimsies as these I present to you here. ‘Tis in the third storey of a tower, of which the ground-room is my chapel, the second storey a chamber with a withdrawing-room and closet, where I often lie, to be more retired; and above is a great wardrobe. This formerly was the most useless part of the house. I there pass away both most of the days of my life and most of the hours of those days. In the night I am never there.” (III, 3)

From this corner tower Montaigne could survey his property, overseeing from afar the activities of his household—but above all he went there to find himself, to “be more retired,” as he phrases it, in the “comfort” of his books. The library is famous for the many Greek and Latin phrases he had inscribed on its beams after his retirement in 1571; these bear witness to the extent of his readings, both religious and secular, and to his disillusionment. A phrase on one joist, from Ecclesiastes, Per omnia vanitas, “All is vanity,” combining the Biblical lesson with the wisdom of Greek philosophy as it does, perhaps best summarizes his view of life. 

Even more touching is his manner of presenting his activities as if they counted for nothing: leafing through a book rather than reading; dictating his daydreams rather than writing; none of it with any real aim or cohesion among the ideas. We are told, these days, that linear, prolonged, continuous reading—the kind we first learned to do—is disappearing with the advent of the digital world, but Montaigne, even then, was already—or still—championing versatile, fragmented, distracted reading, capricious and impulsive, jumping haphazardly from one book to another, taking the nuggets of wisdom wherever he found them, without worrying too much about the specific sources from which he gleaned the material for his own book. This, Montaigne insists, was the product of reverie rather than calculation.

A feeling of deep happiness suffuses the moments of studious leisure Montaigne spent in his library. Only one thing could have made it more perfect: a terrace where he could have walked while he thought—but he recoiled at the expense of building one.

“[ . . . ] and were I not more afraid of the trouble than the expense—the trouble that frights me from all business—I could very easily adjoin on either side, and on the same floor, a gallery of a hundred paces long and twelve broad, having found walls already raised for some other design to the requisite height. Every place of retirement requires a walk: my thoughts sleep if I sit still: my fancy does not go by itself, as when my legs move it: and all those who study without a book are in the same condition.” 

Here again, Montaigne returns to the idea that we do our best thinking when in motion.

14 

TO HIS FEMALE READERS

Montaigne chose to write the Essays in French, a decision that was anything but straightforward in the 1570s. It was only later, in 1588, that he provided an explanation for this, in the chapter “Of vanity”:

“I write my book for few men and for few years. Had it been a matter of duration, I should have put it into firmer language. According to the continual variation that ours has been subject to, up to this day, who can expect that its present form should be in use fifty years hence? It slips every day through our fingers, and since I was born, it is altered above one-half. We say that it is now perfect; and every age says the same of its own.” (III, 9)

Montaigne rejected Latin, the language of scholars, of philosophy and theology, in favor of the vernacular, the language of everyday life. However, renouncing the monumental language of Antiquity meant publishing his reflections in a tongue that was unstable, changeable, and perishable—and that might soon become unreadable.

This act does not seem to be rooted in false modesty; I have no pretensions, Montaigne is saying. I am not writing for the centuries to come, but for the people around me now. The excuse is not a conventional one, for Montaigne has watched his own language change during the course of his own lifetime; he has experienced its mutability himself. He warns us that the words he has used to express himself may soon become unrecognizable. Stendhal, who bet in 1830 that his work would still be read in 1880 and 1930, a half-century and even a full century after publication, placed his hopes for posterity on the permanence of the French language. Montaigne does no such thing in the Essays; he is speaking seriously when he concludes that the extent to which French has changed during his own life suggests the improbability of its being read much longer. Happily, he was wrong on that point.

Yet, it would have been all the easier for him to write in Latin, since he had learned that language from earliest childhood, and it was, for all intents and purposes, his mother tongue. His father had wanted him to speak Latin with perfect fluency: 

“[ . . . ] the expedient my father found out for this was, that in my infancy, and before I began to speak, he committed me to the care of a German, who since died a famous physician in France, totally ignorant of our language, and very fluent and a great critic in Latin. [ . . . ] As to the rest of his household, it was an inviolable rule, that neither himself, nor my mother, nor valet, nor chambermaid, should speak anything in my company, but such Latin words as each one had learned to gabble with me.” (I, 25)

If Montaigne, who spoke Latin before he spoke French, writes in French here, it is because that is the language of the readers he desires to reach. The language in which he writes is the language of the reader for whom he is writing.

In “Upon Some Verses of Virgil,” addressing the daring subject of his waning sex drive, Montaigne evokes his readers—more specifically, the female ones, who will read him in secret:

“I am vexed that my Essays only serve the ladies for a common piece of furniture, and a piece for the hall; this chapter will make me part of the water-closet. I love to traffic with them a little in private; public conversation is without favour and without savour.” (III, 5)

If Montaigne has decided to write in French, it is because his desired readers are women, who are less familiar with ancient languages than men.

You might argue that he scatters his book plentifully with quotes from the Latin poets, especially in “Upon Some Verses of Virgil,” when conveying the most private information about himself, and this is true. Montaigne is no stranger to contradiction.

Antoine Compagnon

A SUMMER WITH MONTAIGNE