Montaigne fini, pas fini

LISTEN. Time to close Sarah Bakewell's fine Montaigne bio. Our time with him for now is ended, but not finished. I think he's now in a dead heat with David Hume as one of my favorite skeptics. But I do have reservations.

For instance, if amor fati means "cheerful acceptance of whatever happens" I cannot join him in being firmly wedded to such a complacent-sounding stance. Loving one's fate, as I understand the concept, does not mean loving everything about everyone's fate and cheerfully renouncing the meliorist's mission to work for better futures all around. The tenor of Bakewell's discussion, in terms of Christian salvation, suggests a narrower focus--on one's personal fate--than pragmatic meliorists prefer. 

But if amor fati is more about renouncing impotent, debilitating, self-destructive regret for one's own past errors and fallibilities ("18. Reflect on everything; regret nothing") while still learning from them and cultivating conscientious, humane regard for others and a "willingness to leap between different people's points of view," that elicits my cheer.

The three great Hellenistic traditions of Stoicism, Skepticism, and Epicureanism are bound to Montaigne and bind him to so many of us, Bakewell observes, by their and our shared pursuit of eudaimonia and ataraxia. We're all just trying, just essaying, to flourish and get us some peace. 

Virginia Woolf pops up a couple of times, in Bakewell's later pages, to appreciate Montaigne's "beautiful vision of generations interlinked" and to endorse his vision of life as an aim and purpose "unto itself." It's not at all surprising that the author of A Room of One's Own should so admire the modest sage of the tower. The minds of several centuries now have been "threaded together" in an open-ended conversation with the humbly great Essayist, in a way that presages Richard Rorty's vision of philosophy as a perpetual conversation across time and place. 

And the affirmation of life as its own end echoes another Rorty theme, the repudiation of anything non-human as eligible or worthy to resolve our inescapably human problems and conflicts. There's never been a less "authoritarian" mind than Montaigne's. Hence my wish to enlist him as a pioneering humanist and primordial pragmatist.

There's one other reservation I cannot resist mentioning. 

Bakewell concludes with an image of Montaigne engaging with his cat. "They looked at each other, and, just for a moment, he leaped across the gap in order to see himself through her eyes." And in that glance, we're to believe, he found the seed of "his whole philosophy."

In the glance of an aloof, indifferent feline. Really?

For most of us, I think, that's the wrong answer. 

But never mind. Que sais je?

n oor wot