Sarah Bakewell - How to Live - A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

That would become his “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” the twelfth chapter of Book II of the Essays . It is far and away the longest piece in the book, almost absurdly out of proportion to the rest. In the 1580 edition, the other ninety-three chapters average nine and a half pages each, while the “Apology” occupies 248 pages. Stylistically, though, it fits perfectly. It charms the reader and weaves complex patterns of digression just like the others, and it gives the Essays its weight in more than one sense. Without it, the book would have had less influence in centuries to come. It would have been less hated, by some, but also less read.

“Apology” means “defense”; and indeed the essay does begin as a defense of Sebond. It stays that way for about half a page. Then it swerves off into something very different: something much more like an attack. As the critic Louis Cons once put it, it supports Sebond “as the rope supports the hanged man.”

How, then, can he call it an “apology”? Montaigne’s trick is simple. He purports to defend Sebond against those who have tried to bring him down using rational arguments. He does this by showing that rational arguments, in general , are fallible, because human reason itself cannot be relied on. Thus he defends a rationalist against other rationalists by arguing that anything based on reason is valueless. Montaigne’s defense undermines Sebond’s enemies, all right, but it undermines Sebond himself even more fatally. Of this, he was obviously well aware.

Despite its length and complexity, the essay is never less than entertaining. This is because Montaigne borrows a technique from Plutarch: he constructs his argument by heaping up case studies. Stories and facts spill out in every paragraph like flowers from a cornucopia. Almost every story provides an example of how useless human reason is, how feeble human powers are, and how silly and deluded almost everyone is — not excepting Montaigne himself, as he happily admits.

Many of the examples themselves come from Plutarch as well. But the driving force behind this unapologetic “Apology” is not Plutarch’s — or not his alone. It comes from the third of the great Hellenistic philosophies, the strangest of them all: Pyrrhonian Skepticism.

SET ALONGSIDE STOICISM and Epicureanism, Skepticism looks like the odd one out. The other two seem obvious paths to tranquillity and “human flourishing”: they teach you to prepare for life’s difficulties, to pay attention, to develop good habits of thought, and to practice therapeutic tricks on yourself. Skepticism seems a more limited matter. A skeptic is taken to be someone who always wants to see proof, and who doubts things that other people take at face value. It sounds as if it concerns only questions of knowledge, not the question of how to live. In the Renaissance, however, and in the classical world where Skepticism was born alongside the other pragmatic philosophies, it was seen differently.

Like the others, Skepticism amounted to a form of therapy. This, at least, was true of Pyrrhonian Skepticism, the type originated by the Greek philosopher Pyrrho, who died about 275 BC, and later developed more rigorously by Sextus Empiricus in the second century AD. (“Dogmatic” or “Academic” Skepticism, the other kind, was less far-reaching.) Some idea of the bizarre effect Pyrrhonism had on people is apparent from the story of how Henri Estienne, Montaigne’s near-contemporary and first French translator of Sextus Empiricus, reacted to his encounter with Sextus’s Hypotyposes . Working in his library one day, but feeling too ill and tired to do his usual work, he found a copy while browsing through an old box of manuscripts. As soon as he started reading, he found himself laughing so heartily that his weariness left him and his intellectual energy returned. Another scholar of the period, Gentian Hervet, had a similar experience. He too came across Sextus by chance in his employer’s library, and felt that a world of lightness and pleasure had opened up before him. The work did not so much instruct or convince its readers as give them the giggles.

A modern reader perusing the Hypotyposes might wonder what was so funny. It does contain some sprightly examples, as philosophy books often do, but it does not seem wildly comic. It is not obvious why it cured both Estienne and Hervet of their ennui — or why it had such an impact on Montaigne, who would find in it the perfect antidote to Raymond Sebond and his solemn, inflated ideas of human importance.

The key to the trick is the revelation that nothing in life need be taken seriously. Pyrrhonism does not even take itself seriously. Ordinary dogmatic Skepticism asserts the impossibility of knowledge: it is summed up in Socrates’s remark: “All I know is that I know nothing.” Pyrrhonian Skepticism starts from this point, but then adds, in effect, “and I’m not even sure about that.” Having stated its one philosophical principle, it turns in a circle and gobbles itself up, leaving only a puff of absurdity.

Pyrrhonians accordingly deal with all the problems life can throw at them by means of a single word which acts as shorthand for this maneuver: in Greek, epokhe . It means “I suspend judgment.” Or, in a different rendition given in French by Montaigne himself, je soutiens: “I hold back.” This phrase conquers all enemies; it undoes them, so that they disintegrate into atoms before your eyes.

This sounds about as uplifting as the Stoic or Epicurean notion of “indifference.” But, like the other Hellenistic ideas, it works, and that is all that matters. Epokhe functions almost like one of those puzzling koans in Zen Buddhism: brief, enigmatic notions or unanswerable questions such as “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” At first, these utterances cause nothing but perplexity. Later, they open a path to all-encompassing wisdom. This family resemblance between Pyrrhonism and Zen may be no accident: Pyrrho traveled to Persia and India with Alexander the Great, and dabbled in Eastern philosophy — not Zen Buddhism, which did not yet exist, but some of its precursors.

The epokhe trick makes you laugh and feel better because it frees you from the need to find a definite answer to anything. To borrow an example from Alan Bailey, a historian of Skepticism, if someone declares that the number of grains of sand in the Sahara is an even number and demands to know your opinion, your natural response might be, “I don’t have one,” or “How should I know?” Or, if you want to sound more philosophical, “I suspend judgment”— epokhe . If a second person says, “What rubbish! There is obviously an odd number of grains of sand in the Sahara,” you would still say epokhe , in the same unflappable tone. In effect, you respond with the deadpan statement Sextus himself cited as a definition of epokhe:

I cannot say which of the things proposed I should find convincing and which I should not find convincing.

Or:

I now feel in such a way as neither to posit dogmatically nor to reject any of the things falling under this investigation.

Or:

To every account I have scrutinized which purports to establish something in dogmatic fashion, there appears to me to be opposed another account, purporting to establish something in dogmatic fashion, equal to it in convincingness or lack of convincingness.

This last formulation in particular might be memorized as a useful way of shutting up anyone making outlandish claims about the Sahara or anything else. In reciting it, one feels a kind of mental calm descending. One cannot know the answer and feels it doesn’t matter, so one’s nonengagement causes no distress.