Montaigne’s Swerve: The Geometry of Parallels in the Essays and Other Writings

Abstract

When Michel de Montaigne criticizes different forms of knowledge in his Essays, geometry gets a decidedly bad rap. Geometrical assertions rely on abstract thought, and the essayist would rather we concentrate on concrete measurements of the world around us. While we have until now made much of the philosophical consequences these criticisms engendered, namely that Montaigne was heavily persuaded by skepticism, we have not looked at the extent to which Montaigne was fascinated by the language of geometry and even, in his writing, obsessed with a particular geometrical debate that dates back to the very first commentaries on Euclid: the necessary, infinite separation between parallel lines and between asymptotes and their hyperbola. Montaigne’s writing produces counter proofs to non-incident lines by forming parallels and asymptotes into demonstrable, everyday actions, expressing them in a more colloquial, French equivalent, and proposing the essay as a parallel figure that challenges theorems of infinite separation. The following will read these moments in Montaigne’s writing as conscious and unconscious instances of his geometrical language and, in Lucretian terms, his swerve [clinamen]. Montaigne’s explicit opposition to lines that never cross, specifically his aversion to the asymptote proposed to him by Jacques Peletier and the parallel lines asserted in Epicurus’ atomist discourse, constitutes a geometrical language in which crossing and contact are moral imperatives that promote social togetherness and exchange.