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

Harold Bloom in The Western Canon calls the Pensées “a bad case of indigestion” in regard to Montaigne. But, in copying Montaigne, Pascal also changed him. Even where he used Montaigne’s words, he set them in a different light. Like Jorge Luis Borges’s twentieth-century character Pierre Menard, who writes a novel which happens to be identical to Don Quixote , Pascal wrote the same words in a different era and with a different temperament, and thus created something new.

It is the emotional difference that counts. Montaigne and Pascal had similar insights into the less flattering sides of human nature — into the realm of the “human, all too human,” where selfishness, laziness, pettiness, vanity, and countless other such failings lurk. But Montaigne gazed upon them with indulgence and humor; in Pascal, they inspired a horror greater even than anything Descartes managed to muster.

For Pascal, fallibility is unbearable in itself: “We have such a high idea of man’s soul that we cannot bear to think that this idea is wrong and therefore to be without this esteem for it. The whole of man’s happiness lies in this esteem.” For Montaigne, human failings are not merely bearable; they are almost a cause for celebration. Pascal thought limitations should not be accepted; Montaigne’s whole philosophy revolves around the opposite view. Even when Montaigne writes, “It seems to me that we can never be despised as much as we deserve”—the sort of thing Pascal says all the time — he writes it in a cheerful mood, and adds that mostly we are just silly rather than wicked.

Pascal must always be at one extreme or another. He is either sunk in despair or transported by euphoria. His writing can be as thrilling as a highspeed chase: he whizzes us through vast spaces and scales of disproportion. He contemplates the emptiness of the universe, or the insignificance of his own body, saying, “Whoever looks at himself in this way will be terrified by himself.” Just as Descartes lifted the Pyrrhonians’ mental comfort blanket — universal doubt — and found monsters beneath it, so Pascal does the same with one of the Stoics’ and Epicureans’ favorite tricks: the imaginary space voyage and the idea of human tininess. He follows this thought into a place of terror:

On contemplating our blindness and wretchedness, and on observing the whole of the silent universe, and humanity with no light abandoned to itself, lost in this nook of the universe not knowing who put us there, what we have come to achieve, what will become of us when we die, incapable of all knowledge, I become frightened, like someone taken in his sleep to a terrifying, deserted island who wakes up with no knowledge of what has happened, nor means of escape.

It makes for exciting reading, but after a few pages one craves a dose of Montaigne’s easygoing humanism. Pascal wants people to remain aware of ultimate things: the huge empty spaces, God, death. Yet few of us find it possible to maintain such thoughts for long. We get distracted; the mind drifts back to concrete and personal matters. Pascal found this infuriating: “What does the world think about? Never about that! But about dancing, playing the lute, singing, writing verse, tilting at the ring …” Montaigne liked asking big questions too, but he preferred to explore life through his reading, the animals in his household, incidents he had witnessed on his travels, or a neighbor’s problems with his children. Pascal wrote: “Human sensitivity to little things and insensitivity to the greatest things: sign of a strange disorder.” Montaigne would have put it exactly the other way around.

A century or so later, Voltaire, who thoroughly disliked Pascal, wrote: “I venture to champion humanity against this sublime misanthropist.” He ran through fifty-seven quotations from the Pensées , dismantling each in turn. “As for me,” he remarked,

when I look at Paris or London I see no reason for falling into this despair Pascal talks about. I see a city not looking in the least like a desert island, but populous, wealthy, policed, where men are as happy as human nature permits. What man of sense will be prepared to hang himself because he doesn’t know how one looks upon God face to face? … Why make us feel disgusted with our being? Our existence is not so wretched as we are led to believe. To look on the world as a prison cell and all men as criminals is the idea of a fanatic.

This led Voltaire to rush to the defense of Pascal’s “great adversary”:

What a delightful design Montaigne had to portray himself without artifice as he did! For he has portrayed human nature itself. And what a paltry project of … Pascal, to belittle Montaigne!

Voltaire was much more at home with a credo like Montaigne’s, as it appears in the final chapter of the Essays:

I accept with all my heart and with gratitude what nature has done for me, and I am pleased with myself and proud of myself that I do. We wrong that great and all-powerful Giver by refusing his gift, nullifying it, and disfiguring it.

This comfortable acceptance of life as it is, and of one’s own self as it is, drove Pascal to a greater fury than Pyrrhonian Skepticism itself. The two go together. Montaigne places everything in doubt, but then he deliberately reaffirms everything that is familiar, uncertain, and ordinary — for that is all we have. His Skepticism makes him celebrate imperfection: the very thing Pascal, as much as Descartes, wanted to escape but never could. To Montaigne, it would be obvious why such escape is impossible. No one can rise above humanity: however high we ascend, we take that humanity with us. At the end of his final volume, in its final version, he wrote:

It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own, and go outside of ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. Yet there is no use our mounting on stilts, for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world we are still sitting only on our own rump.

Like Pyrrhonism, the “rump” argument is impossible to argue against, yet it also seemed to Pascal to require refutation, because it represented a moral danger. Montaigne’s overriding principle of “convenience and calm,” as Pascal described it, was pernicious. It worried Pascal and sent him into a helpless rage, as if Montaigne were enjoying some advantage that he could not have.

A similar level of anger is visible in the reaction of another reader of the same period, the philosopher Nicolas Malebranche. He was a rationalist, closer to Descartes than to Pascal, but, like Pascal, he deplored Montaigne as much for his general attitude of nonchalance as for his acceptance of doubt.

Malebranche recognized that Montaigne’s book was a perennial best seller — but of course it would be, he writes bitterly. Montaigne tells good stories and appeals to the reader’s imagination: people enjoy that. “His ideas are false but beautiful; his expressions irregular or bold but agreeable.” But to read Montaigne for pleasure is especially dangerous. As you float in your bath of sensuous ease, Montaigne is lulling your reason to sleep and filling you with his poison. “The mind cannot be pleased by reading an author without adopting his opinions, or at least without receiving some coloring from them which, mixed with its own ideas, makes them confused and obscure.” That is, reading pleasure corrupts Descartes’s “clear and distinct ideas.” Montaigne neither argues nor persuades; he does not need to, for he seduces . Malebranche conjures up an almost diabolical figure. Montaigne fools you, like Descartes’s demon; he lures you into doubt and spiritual laxity.