'Montaigne and the Art of Free-Thinking'

This new book aims to alert a wider audience to the work of the 16th century writer, Michel de Montaigne, as well as to offer an original thesis about his place in the wider history of 'free-thinking' in early modern Europe. Books on Montaigne intended for experts alone are in plentiful supply, and there is a new wave of popular writing on the author, but very little writing on Montaigne attempts to bridge the gap between the experts and the general reader. Dr Scholar's book aims to fill that void and has caught a new tide of interest in Montaigne.

Books asked Dr Scholar about his work.

What is so intriguing about the work of Michel de Montaigne?

RS: I think it is the feeling his work gives you of being in the company of a great and unusual thinker who is grappling with the big questions - and who offers you access to the thinking process as it unfolds in the pages of his book.

That unfolding process is the really intriguing thing. We know a great deal of what Montaigne thinks. We know, because he tells us, on page after page of the Essais (1580-95). It might seem surprising, with this wealth of evidence at hand, that Montaigne could prove so elusive in his thinking. Yet elusive he proves. The problem for us lies not so much in knowing what he thinks as in understanding how he can think all the things he says he thinks. It arises, above all, because he appears to be as volatile in his opinions as he is voluble about them. There is something profoundly intriguing about a figure that can reserve the right to disagree with himself, as much as with everyone else, in the course of his thinking. Intriguing, yes, but also disconcerting. What, we are left wondering, does all that thinking amount to?

He was a near-contemporary of Shakespeare and has been described as a fellow literary mastermind. Yet his name may be unfamiliar to many people now. Does he deserve that label?

I certainly think so. The wit and thoughtfulness - and the sheer beauty of the writing - put Montaigne on a par with his European near-contemporaries Shakespeare and Cervantes. Yet Montaigne is less read and understood than Shakespeare and Cervantes, our taste for plays and fictions being keener than our taste for the thought-experiments Montaigne called 'essays', so the comparison with those two near-contemporaries of his often ends up being to the detriment of Montaigne.

In his last book, 'Shakespeare the Thinker', my former tutor Tony Nuttall said of his subject that 'the fiery track of his thinking' can never be followed to a settled terminus because Shakespeare was 'simply too intelligent to be able to persuade himself that the problems were completely solved'. I would say the same of Montaigne; in fact I would go a step further, arguing that Montaigne chanced upon, in the Essais, a new way of writing in which to pursue - without ever quenching - that fiery track of thought.

Much of his most famous work, Essais, might be described as self-indulgent. Is that fair?

It's the oldest criticism in the book! Pascal, who loved and loathed Montaigne in equal measure, is particularly responsible for propagating it in the century following Montaigne's death. To answer the charge would take much longer than we've got. The gist of my reply would be that his degree of introspection is extraordinary, but that to describe it as 'self-indulgent' is not entirely fair, given all that Montaigne “does” with his introspection. I see the first person at the heart of the Essais, not so much as the object of authorial self-indulgence but rather as a picaresque character that the author invents in his questing search for the truth. 

What did Essais contribute to literature?

How long have you got? No one before Montaigne had ever written a book quite like the Essais, and it remains one of a kind, despite its many admirers and imitators. The text, for all its uniqueness, has played a part in all kinds of developments - philosophical as well as literary - whose effects are still with us. It helped to bring the arguments of the ancient philosophical schools to the attention of a wider readership, for example, and to make modern secular forms of autobiographical writing possible. It created the conditions for a further, and major, shift in literature and philosophy alike: the invention of the essay. It has haunted generations of readers, including famous ones from Shakespeare to Orson Welles and beyond, and it continues to do so today.

What have you tried to achieve in your study of Montaigne?

I had three aims in mind when writing the book: first, to offer an alternative - and a corrective - to the still widespread tendency to reduce Montaigne’s thought to the expression of some ‘ism’ or other; second, to show that thinking and writing are intimately related in Montaigne, that he thinks as he does because of the way he writes and vice versa, so that understanding his thought means reading his text as he presents it to us; and, third, to ask how it is that a text so rooted in the time and place of its composition can also - indeed does - continue to speak to the present, to haunt its readers, to ask them the questions that matter.

My underlying hope is that readers will come to feel that the book encourages them to explore the Essais for themselves and that it offers them a way in and around the text, not, of course, the only way that could have been taken, but one that leads to the heart of its preoccupations and procedures.

Montaigne and the Art of Free-Thinking is published by Peter Lang