Michel de Montaigne

French Renaissance philosopher (1533–1592), author of the Essais. Merleau-Ponty reads Montaigne in *Signs*' "Reading Montaigne" (1947) as a proto-phenomenologist of incarnation — the first modern philosopher who takes "the 'mixture' of the soul and body" as his starting point, and whose skepticism is not neutrality but the discovery of truth through contradiction. The Montaignean ethos — "ironic and solemn, faithful and free" (Essays III, x) — is the explicit model for MP's own late posture of action-at-a-distance.

Key Points

  • The governing epigraphs of "Reading Montaigne": "I commit myself with difficulty" (Essays III, x) and "We must live among the living" (Essays III, viii). MP quotes these twice in the introduction to Signs and treats them as naming the antinomy whose resolution is Montaigne's whole achievement.
  • Skepticism as discovery, not neutrality: Montaigne's skepticism "has two sides. It means that nothing is true, but also that nothing is false. It rejects all opinions and all behavior as absurd, but it thereby deprives us of the means of rejecting any one as false" (Signs, p. 198). The outcome is not suspension of judgment but the discovery that "contradiction is truth." Montaigne "finds in this ambiguous self — which is offered to everything, and which he never finished exploring — the place of all obscurities, the mystery of all mysteries, and something like an ultimate truth."
  • Consciousness as paradox: MP reads Montaigne as the first philosopher of "the paradox of a conscious being" — a consciousness that "adheres to something, makes it our own, and yet withdraws from it and holds it at a distance, without which we would know nothing about it" (Signs, p. 199). Descartes will resolve this paradox by making consciousness pure mind; Montaigne keeps the paradox open.
  • The mixture of soul and body: "Montaigne's realm... is the 'mixture' of the soul and body; he is interested only in our factual condition, and his book endlessly describes this paradoxical fact that we are. That is to say that he thinks of death, the counter-proof of our incarnation" (Signs, p. 202). MP reads Montaigne as the first anti-Cartesian: not because Montaigne denies the distinction but because he refuses to think apart from its undoing.
  • Free passion: Montaigne's ethics rejects both Stoic withdrawal and unreflective commitment. His wisdom is "a movement of pride through which he decides to take his risky life in hand, since nothing has meaning if it is not in his life" (Signs, p. 209). This is the lived form of action-at-a-distance.
  • "Ironic and solemn, faithful and free": MP's formula (from Essays III, xxxiii, as he reads it) for Montaigne's achievement: the capacity to be at once committed and critical, passionate and detached, without collapsing either pole into the other. MP uses the same formula as a refrain in the Introduction to Signs to describe his own philosophical ethos.

Details

Montaigne as Proto-Phenomenologist

MP's reading of Montaigne is deliberately anachronistic in the best sense. He reads Montaigne for what comes toward us through him — his unthought-of element — and what comes toward us is recognizable as a phenomenology of embodied subjectivity avant la lettre. Montaigne's wonder at the paradox of consciousness ("It is always vanity for you, within and without," Essays III, ix, cited Signs p. 199) is already the posture from which Husserl's Crisis and MP's Phenomenology of Perception will later operate.

The Ethics of Montaigne

The most important passage of MP's reading is on the transition from Stoicism to free passion (Signs, pp. 207–210). Montaigne begins as a Stoic — withdraw from others, despise the world's comedy — but discovers through his friendship with La Boétie that "true skepticism is movement toward the truth, that the critique of passions is hatred of false passions, and finally, that in some circumstances Montaigne recognized outside himself men and things he never dreamed of refusing himself to" (Signs, p. 209). The late Montaigne is not a Stoic but a theorist of free passion — passion that has gone through the critique of passion and emerged as chosen commitment.

MP's own ethical stance in the Introduction is Montaignean in exactly this sense. He is critical of Sartrean engagement but not detached; committed to philosophical rigor but not intellectualist; passionate about politics but not partisan. "We can commit ourselves passionately to [a just] cause without abandoning the critical honesty which compels us to search out our own faults and our enemies' merits. In this way we can hope to be simultaneously 'ironic and solemn, faithful and free'" (Signs, Introduction, p. 22).

Connections

  • provides the ethical model for action-at-a-distance — the "ironic and solemn, faithful and free" formula
  • is read by MP as a proto-phenomenologist of incarnation
  • contrasts with Descartes — MP reads Montaigne and Descartes as opposed solutions to the same paradox of consciousness
  • influences Machiavelli in MP's reading — both are Renaissance figures who refuse the abstraction of moralist politics
  • is the background of MP's own 1960 ethical stance in the Introduction to Signs

Sources

  • merleau-ponty-1964-signs — "Reading Montaigne" (pp. 198–210); Introduction, pp. 22, 35 (Montaignean epigraphs).
  • Montaigne, Essais, Book III, cited throughout MP's essay — especially III, viii ("Of the Art of Discussion"), III, ix ("Of Vanity"), III, x ("Of Managing the Will"), III, xiii ("Of Experience").