Abstract
This chapter and the next interrogate the highest ideal of both authors, denoted by the term “greatness.” Far from simply being an advocate of “easygoing humanism,” Montaigne is fascinated by greatness. Montaigne generally rejects what he calls “eminent greatness” in favor “greatness without a name.” Such greatness turns out to be a democratized ideal of greatness. Even though Montaigne rejects the “great man idea of greatness,” he does not dispense with the need for particular examples of greatness. Accordingly, this chapter reflects on the way in which Montaigne presents his reader with models as diverse as Cato, Socrates, and Epaminondas. Though such exempla are important, Montaigne ultimately holds that the highest greatness cannot consist in the imitation of others. On the contrary, it requires an extraordinary degree of truthfulness about oneself, along with a concerted effort to live in fidelity to what Montaigne calls one’s “master form.”
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Notes
- 1.
Letter of November 24, 1882 (KSB 6:282).
- 2.
See Cicero (1914, 153–154) (De finibus 2.20). In context, the battle between the two men appears as a contest between Epicureanism and Stoicism. Montaigne converts it into a comparison of two kinds of greatness .
- 3.
This appearance is due in part to the peculiar circumstances of his childhood. “The care of the dead is recommended to us. Now, I have been brought up from childhood with these dead. I was familiar with the affairs of Rome long before I was with those of my own house. I knew the Capitol and its location before I knew the Louvre, and the Tiber before the Seine. I have had the abilities of Lucullus, Metellus, and Scipio more in my head than those of any of our men” (III.9.996/927).
- 4.
But sometimes they do, Montaigne observes elsewhere, as when he praises Caesar and Alexander for “subordinating these violent occupations and laborious thoughts, by the vigor of their spirits, to the practice of ordinary life (l’usage de la vie ordinaire)” (III.13.1108/1036).
- 5.
Compare BGE 62: “The higher the type of man that a man represents, the greater the improbability that he will turn out well.”
- 6.
This assessment, to be sure, is difficult to reconcile with the cruelty attributed to Alexander at the C-stratum addition that concludes the first chapter of the Essais (I.1.10/6).
- 7.
Moreover, such “greatness ” is addicted to receiving the abject submission of others, as Montaigne observes when he comments on “[C] the great, toward whom lack of submission is the ultimate offense, and who are rough on any righteousness that is aware of itself and does not feel itself to be abject, humble, and suppliant” (III.12.1045/973).
- 8.
Though relatively uncommented on, this chapter of the Essais is crucial for understanding how Montaigne subverts the received idea of greatness. As Starobinski (1985, 130) remarks, the more celebrated chapter “Of three outstanding men” (II.36) is really a “pendant” to “Of three good women ” (II.35).
- 9.
See Starobinski (1985, 76): “death ‘deindividualizes’ me and refers me back to the common condition.”
- 10.
Though Montaigne thinks we should despise fortune, he does not think that we are entirely immune from it. “If she continues, she will send me hence well contented and satisfied. But beware the crash. There are thousands who are wrecked in port” (III.9.998/929). Vivarelli (1994, 93) finds in the 1876 notebooks a parallel to Montaigne’s frequent exhortations to live modestly, so as to lessen the impact of bad fortune: “An external goal is reached early—a small office, a fortune just nourished. So live in a way that an overthrow of all things cannot upset us very much” (KSA 8:16[49].295).
- 11.
Ann Hartle well grasps Montaigne’s high valuation of Epaminondas , while perhaps overstating it (Hartle 2003, 82 and 202). Her handling of Epaminondas is a useful corrective to the widespread tendency to assume that for Montaigne, Socrates is equal or superior to Epaminondas ; see e.g., Cave (2007, 44); Schneewind (2005, 217). (This reading can legitimately appeal to II.11.423/373, where Montaigne praises Epaminondas, but a few paragraphs later mentions “the soul of Socrates, which is the most perfect that has come to my knowledge.”) But Hartle does not appear to see the tension between Montaigne’s praising of Epaminondas and the claim that Montaigne “relocates” greatness from the public to the private realm.
- 12.
A theme ably emphasized in Quint (1998) .
- 13.
As Vivarelli shows, there are any number of strong connections between “Of Solitude” and Nietzsche. To mention only one of the most striking, Vivarelli (1994, 92) links Montaigne’s exhortation “Let us cut loose from all the ties that bind us to others” (I.39.240/214) to an 1876 notebook entry: “How does the free spirit ultimately stand toward the active life? Lightly bound—no slave to his actions ” (KSA 8:16[47].294).
- 14.
Nehamas (1998, 117) appropriately captures this side of Montaigne: “There is no such thing as a direct confrontation with oneself: that way only emptiness lies.”
- 15.
See Aristotle , Nicomachean Ethics 4.3 (1123b8, 1125a28).
- 16.
“Of Experience” refers to “[C] Aristotle , to whom self-appreciation and self-depreciation often spring from the same sort of arrogance” (III.13.1069/997).
- 17.
I owe this insight to continued discussion with Margaret Watkins .
- 18.
Many other passages to this effect appear in the Essais, e.g., “it seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve” (I.50.303/268). As Regosin (1977, 53–54) observes, “although Montaigne purposely avoids ‘humility ’ for its religious connotations, the recognition of the boundaries of human capacity reoccurs as a motif throughout the Essais, for it is the absolute prerequisite to the return to the self.”.
- 19.
One can argue that Montaigne’s dominant thought is not that we are wretched, but that we are worthless: “We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless” (I.50.303/268). But if my argument is correct, a one-sided stress on worthlessness would be just as misleading as a one-sided stress on wretchedness.
- 20.
Compare Nietzsche: “But the worst enemy you can encounter will always be you, yourself; you lie in wait for yourself in caves and woods” (Z I “On the Way of the Creator”).
- 21.
I have literalized Frame’s translation of une forme maistresse—though not entirely, since as Scholar (2010, 73) observes, the term is literally “mistress form.” In “Of Democritus and Heraclitus ,” Montaigne identifies his forme maistresse (overtranslated by Frame as “ruling quality”) as “[C] ignorance”(I.50.302/266). Eva (2012, 79) takes quite seriously the implications of this passage, suggesting that Montaigne fails in his attempt to gain self-knowledge , at least if “knowledge” is construed in an Aristotelian manner (see 81).
- 22.
- 23.
Though his forme maitresse is ignorance, “Of Vanity ” identifies his “maistresses qualitez” (translated by Frame as “ruling qualities”) as “[C] freedom and idleness” (III.9.992/923); compare III.9.969/900 on his “[C] very favorite qualities, idleness and freedom”). Montaigne addresses his ignorance in this passage from “Of Physiognomy”: “I speak ignorance pompously and opulently, and speak knowledge meagerly and piteously, [C] the latter secondarily and accidentally, the former expressly and principally. And there is nothing I treat specifically except nothing, and no knowledge except that of the lack of knowledge” (III.12.1057/985-986).
- 24.
There is an additional problem of remembering one’s master form, along with its demands and implications. Perhaps this explains why Montaigne had a variety of sayings carved in the beams of his study—to remind him of what he always stood in danger of forgetting. For evidence that Montaigne always took himself to be tempted away from his ideal, see III.12.1045/973-974: “I have long been preaching to myself to stick to myself and break away from outside things; nevertheless I still keep turning my eyes to one side.”
- 25.
“One should not dodge one’s tests,” Nietzsche says, “though they may be the most dangerous game one could play and are tests that are taken in the end before no witness or judge but ourselves” (BGE 41).
- 26.
This does not, however, stop Montaigne in “Of Experience” from asserting, or coming close to asserting, that he occupies just such a privileged perspective. “The long attention that I devote to studying myself trains me also to judge passably of others, and there are few things of which I speak more felicitously and excusably. It often happens that I see and distinguish the characters (conditions) of my friends more exactly than they do themselves” (III.13.1076/1004).
- 27.
Compare II.16.576: “Strangers see only the results and outward appearances . Any man can put on a good face outside, while full of fever and fright within. They do not see my heart, they see only my countenance.”
- 28.
It also takes a long time. See II.12.546/496-497: “[C] What rule my life belonged to, I did not learn until after it was completed and spent. A new figure: an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher!”
- 29.
Compare Pascal (1995, 244): “We are not satisfied with the life we have in ourselves and our own being. We want to lead an imaginary life in the eyes of others, and so we try to make an impression. We strive constantly to embellish and preserve our imaginary being, and neglect the real one” (Pascal, Pensées §806; Lafuma numbering; §147, Brunschvicg numbering).
- 30.
As Eva (2012, 85) contends, the master form “can only be manifest in how we perceive our variations through experience (and does not commit Montaigne to any metaphysical thesis).”
- 31.
See Nehamas (1998, 123): “The power of each person are different from the powers of everyone else. Those who take that difference seriously and try to organize their power in new and unprecedented ways produces lives and selves that differ from all others. Montaigne was one of them.” On this point, see also Eva (2012, 79), who ably argues that Montaigne’s famous statement “Each man bears the entire form of man’s estate (l’humaine condition)” (III.2.805/740) should not be construed as a law-like statement from which one might move from Montaigne's particular portrait to a more general knowledge of what man is.
- 32.
There may be some tension between “living naturally,” as often understood, and the artifice or artfulness implied by the act of “composing” one’s character. Nehamas (1998, 117) asks: “What can ‘nature’ mean here if it describes such artful composition?”
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Miner, R. (2017). Montaigne on Greatness. In: Nietzsche and Montaigne. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66745-4_7
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