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

A practical way out of the mess was found at last, not through Descartes’s extremist challenge, but through a pragmatic compromise that has far more in common with the Montaignean spirit. Instead of seeking total certainty, modern science allows for an element of doubt, in theory, while in practice everyone gets on with the business of learning about the world, comparing observations to hypotheses according to agreed codes of practice. We live as though there were no abyss. Like Montaigne accommodating himself to his own fallibility, we accept the world as it appears to be, with just a formal nod to the possibility that nothing is solid at all. The demon waits in the wings, yet life goes on.

Descartes’s horror story was what ensued when Montaigne’s Pyrrhonism reached a more anxious, self-divided mind than the sixteenth century could generate. Montaigne was not without his moments of existential anxiety: he could write lines such as, “We are, I know not how, double within ourselves,” and “We have no communication with being.” Still, Descartes’s feeling of drowning in doubt would have left him puzzled.

Today, many people might find Descartes’s terror easier to understand than the peculiar comfort that Montaigne and the original Pyrrhonians derived from their Skepticism. The idea that a void underlies everything we experience no longer seems an obvious source of consolation.

Our sense of this void has been inherited largely from Descartes’s very contrary reading of Montaigne. Some of it has also been passed down to us from Montaigne’s other great disciple and antagonist in the seventeenth century, a man who was even more unsettled by the implications of Pyrrhonism. This was Blaise Pascal: philosopher, mystic, and another great horror writer.

The work for which Pascal is best remembered, the Pensées (“Thoughts”), was never meant to terrify anyone except himself: it was a collection of disorderly notes for a more systematic theological treatise which he never managed to write. Had he completed this work, it would probably have become less interesting. Instead, he left us one of the most mysterious texts in literature, a passionate outpouring largely written to try to ward off what he saw as the dangerous power of Montaigne’s Essays .

Blaise Pascal was born in Clermont-Ferrand in 1623. As a boy he showed precocious talents for mathematics and invention, and even designed an early calculating machine. At the age of thirty-one, while staying at the abbey of Port-Royal-des-Champs, he had a visionary experience which he tried to describe on a piece of paper headed FIRE:

Certainty. Certainty. Feeling, Joy, Peace.

God of Jesus Christ.

Deum meum et Deum vostrum .

Oblivion of the world and of everything excepting God.

He is found solely by the ways taught in the Gospel.

Grandeur of the human soul.

Just Father, the world does not know You, but I know You.

Joy, Joy, Joy, tears of joy.

This epiphany changed his life. He sewed the piece of paper into his clothes so that he could carry it everywhere, and from then on devoted his time to theological writing and to the notes that became the Pensées . He did not have long for this work. At thirty-nine, he died from a brain hemorrhage.

Pascal had almost nothing in common with Descartes except for an obsession with Skepticism. Rapturously mystical, he disliked Descartes’s trust in reason, and deplored what he called the “spirit of geometry” taking over philosophy. If anything, his aversion from rationality should have led him towards Montaigne instead — and it did, for he read the Essays constantly. But he also found the Pyrrhonian tradition, as transmitted through Montaigne, so disturbing that he could hardly get through a page of the “Apology” without racing to his notebook to pour out violent thoughts about it. Pascal cast Montaigne as “the great adversary,” to borrow a phrase used by the poet T. S. Eliot to describe their relationship. Such language is normally reserved for Satan himself, but the allusion is apt, for Montaigne was Pascal’s tormentor, his seducer, and his tempter.

Pascal feared Pyrrhonian Skepticism because, unlike the readers of the sixteenth century, he felt sure it did threaten religious belief. By now, doubt was no longer thought a friend of the Church; it belonged to the Devil, and must be fought against. And here lay the problem, for, as everyone had always seen, Pyrrhonian Skepticism was almost impossible to fight. Any attempt to quarrel with it only strengthened its claim that everything was open to dispute, while if you remained neutral this confirmed the view that it was good to suspend judgment.

In a short piece usually included with the Pensées , recounting a conversation with Isaac Le Maître de Sacy, director of the Port-Royal abbey, Pascal sums up Montaigne’s Pyrrhonian argument, or lack of it:

He puts everything into a universal doubt, and this doubt is so widespread that it becomes carried away by its very self; that is to say, he doubts whether he doubts, and doubting even this last proposition, his uncertainty goes around in an endless and restless circle. He contradicts both those who maintain that all is uncertainty, and those who maintain it is not, because he does not want to maintain anything at all.

Montaigne is “so advantageously positioned in this universal doubt that he is equally strengthened both in success and defeat.” You can feel the frustration: how can anyone fight such an opponent? Yet one must. It is a moral duty, for otherwise doubt will carry everything away like a great flood: the world as we know it, human dignity, our sanity, and our sense of God. As T. S. Eliot also remarked:

Of all authors Montaigne is one of the least destructible. You could as well dissipate a fog by flinging hand-grenades into it. For Montaigne is a fog, a gas, a fluid, insidious element. He does not reason, he insinuates, charms, and influences, or if he reasons, you must be prepared for his having some other design upon you than to convince you by his argument.

Because Pascal could not fight against Montaigne, he could not stop reading him — or writing about him. He struggled against the Essays from such close quarters that he could get no angle for a blow. If La Boétie hovered over Montaigne’s page as his invisible friend, Montaigne hovered over Pascal’s writing as his ever-present enemy and coauthor. At the same time, Pascal knew that the real drama was taking place in his own soul. He admitted: “It is not in Montaigne but in myself that I find everything I see there.”

He could just as well have looked at his own notebook and said, “It is not from myself but from Montaigne that I have taken everything I see here”—for he was in the habit of transcribing quantities of material almost word for word.

Montaigne: How we cry and laugh for the same thing.

Pascal: Hence we cry and laugh at the same thing.

Montaigne: They want to get out of themselves and escape from the man. That is madness: instead of changing into angels, they change into beasts.

Pascal: Man is neither angel nor beast, and unhappily whoever wants to act the angel, acts the beast.

Montaigne: Put a philosopher in a cage of thin iron wire in large meshes, and hang it from the top of the towers of Notre Dame of Paris; he will see by evident reason that it is impossible for him to fall, and yet (unless he is used to the trade of the steeplejacks) he cannot keep the sight of this extreme height from terrifying and paralyzing him … Lay a beam between these two towers of such width as we need to walk on: there is no philosophical wisdom of such great firmness that it can give us courage to walk on it as we should if it were on the ground. Pascal: If you put the world’s greatest philosopher on a plank wider than he needs, but with a precipice beneath, however strongly his reason may convince him of his safety, his imagination will prevail.