Montaigne, Humanism, and the French Renaissance

Transcription

1 Romain 1 Montaigne, Humanism, and the French Renaissance A brief reflection of his life and popular works, and what we can take away 5/15/2015 Meeting of Minds 2015 Abigail Romain, University of Michigan Dearborn

2 Romain 2 The Renaissance was a great time period which brought on countless changes in Europe. New ideas and ways of thinking began to appear, and consequently, Europe saw a cultural transformation. The Renaissance took place from roughly the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, and began in Italy. It was later introduced in France by kings Charles VIII after his invasion of Italy, and by Francis I, who was the first prominent figure at this time to seriously promote the arts in France. The country, along with the rest of Europe, began to see serious adjustments in areas of the arts, including painting, sculpture, literature, and music. Along with these changes came a new sense of selfawareness, and different ideas about religion. We began to see a shift from a focus on God alone to a focus on man; this change was known as Humanism. Humanism brought on a shift from relying on faith alone to a combination of faith and reason in order to understand the world. It began as an effort to uncover and more deeply understand the ancient Greek and Roman culture. The most significant aspect of humanism is the focus on the individual, on man. Whereas God was once the primary focus, we now experience a change: humanists affirming the power of man, of the human mind, and man s ability to think, wonder and understand. Thus, a quest for knowledge so as to better ourselves as human beings began. As this new way of thinking began to sweep the country, the traditional educational system started to change. Humanist education was based mainly

3 Romain 3 on five topics: poetry, grammar, history, moral philosophy, and rhetoric. Children were being taught in a new way. One of these children was to become an extremely important philosopher and writer of the French Renaissance: Michel de Montaigne. He was born in 1533 in the Aquitaine region of France, in a town called Gascony, on an estate his family owned at the Chateau de Montaigne. Throughout his life, Montaigne remained Catholic like his father and mother, while his younger brother and sister converted to Protestantism. His family was very religiously diverse, yet his parents religion stuck with him. Always wanting and often demanding the best for their son, Michel s parents went to lengths to ensure that he was well-educated, including hiring a live-in Latin tutor before sending him off to Bordeaux to study at the College de Guyenne. Professor James Miller, in his book Examined lives reflects briefly on twelve of history s greatest philosophers, and notes that Montaigne was taught by many Christian humanists, and was engrained early on with the idea of classical erudition and introspective spirit. After Bordeaux, Montaigne went on to study law at the University of Toulouse, before retiring at age 38 after a brief time working in the courts and involving himself in the political sphere. We know details of Montaigne s retirement because he himself actually inscribed a message in Latin on the wall of a study near his library, in which he declares his moving on to a simpler, more secluded life. Again, he was thirtyeight at the time; it was the year He seems very relieved to be retiring, as

4 Romain 4 he speaks of being long weary of the servitude of the court and public employments, and also emphasizing that he will be now [calm and free] from all cares and consecrate his next years to freedom, tranquility, and leisure. So for the rest of his life, he devoted his time to studying great philosophers on the past and writing. His most famous work is Les Essais, or in English, The Essays. Written from 1572 to 1579, and published in 1580, The Essays contain 3 books which consist of a total of 107 chapters. Miller describes The Essays as a sprawling record of [Montaigne s] readings and reflections. The main purpose of Les Essais is to examine himself and man, mainly by questioning and criticizing the validity of various beliefs and practices popular at the time. The main and most important element is Montaigne s portrayal of himself. In a lecture given on a brief overview of Montaigne s life and The Essays, Professor Ronald Herzman infers that the piece Apology for Raymond Sebond is a good example of the overall style and techniques Montaigne utilizes in his writing throughout all of Les Essais. This apology is Socratic in many ways. It is important to firstly understand that this apology is not saying sorry, as we would often think. In this case, as in that of Socrates, Montaigne is instead attacking charges made against Sebond. Here, Montaigne selects two main objections that have been raised against Sebond s writing Natural Theology, in which he had attempted to show the harmony between faith and reason. The two arguments were that Sebond s arguments and evidence were

5 Romain 5 unconvincing, and secondly, that Christians should base their knowledge and beliefs on faith alone, without any reliance on reason or concrete scientific evidence. Now, much like Socrates, Montaigne s writing is often open to interpretation; Miller describes it as radically open and asserts that it could be read in multiple ways. What s funny is that even though Montaigne claims he is defending Sebond and his beliefs, he actually leaves us questioning as to what he really believes in. Because of his approach and radically open style of writing, he leaves the reader asking if he s actually defending the Catholic faith, or pretending to defend something he is extremely skeptical and doubtful of. This is because Montaigne s approach is somewhat perverse as Miller describes it. He actually begins by pointing out the weaknesses of Sebond s arguments and then inversely defends them pretty much by saying: well no one else has any better arguments. In the end, he focuses on the idea of human vanity over outlined reason. Rather than attacking reason itself, Montaigne states that while we have access to reason and the ability to use it for greater understanding, it is impossible to trust it one-hundred percent of the time because we often manipulate it and/or use it for selfish reasons. It is very interesting how he does this, and Herzman in his lecture states the very important point that Montaigne is criticizing the role of

6 Romain 6 reason in relationship to faith, while he is brilliantly utilizing his own reason to express his logic. Following are a few selected quotes from a passage in the Apology for Raymond Sebond that truly capture Montaigne s wave of thought and his perspective on the human mind. He states that the mind is an erratic, dangerous, and heedless tool and it is hard to impose order and moderation on it. Montaigne then goes on to say that he thinks people are right to give the tightest possible barriers to the human mind. He elaborates on these barriers, stating that the mind is constantly [bridled] by different factors like religions, laws, customs, science, precepts, mortal and immortal punishments and rewards, yet in the end. We see that by its whirling and its incohesiveness it escapes all these bonds. He uses adjectives like varying and formless to describe the mind, and states that it is an empty body, with nothing by which it can be seized or directed. Linking back to humanism, Montaigne like many Renaissance writers of his time, desired to return to ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. In these two following quotes, there is a definitive parallelism between Socratic teaching and Montaigne s assertion: The only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing Socrates there are few souls so orderly that they can be trusted with their own guidance Montaigne

7 Romain 7 Here, both philosophers are reminding their audiences that there is so much we don t know, and that we must always stay searching, living out what we believe to be the most important purpose in life, the quest for personal knowledge and understanding of our identities and the world we live in. In his retirement alone, we see a definite link to Montaigne s personal values and that of humanism. He gave up what could have been an even more successful political career to focus and reflect on his life and the study of man and his discoveries. As mentioned before, the main subject of the text is Montaigne himself. He analyzes his own life and comes to many conclusions that he feels necessary to pass on to us, the reader. One of these claims: The value of life lies not in its length, but in the use we make of it. This quote of Montaigne s also speaks to a clear parallelism between his ideas and humanistic values, as it appears to be answering the question of Why are we here? or What is our purpose? two questions at the very core of humanism. Now: what can we take away from Montaigne? His most famous quote is Que sais-je, which literally translated, means, What do I know? It is important to analyze this quote more deeply than just the surface, because there is so much we can learn about Montaigne, ourselves, and the overall nature of man when we dissect it. We have seen through some small samples of his writing that Montaigne s style is approachable and very open, in other words, we are able

8 Romain 8 to understand his thought process and his mindset concerning different topics and arguments. Furthermore, this quote is exemplary of Montaigne as a skeptic. He is questioning what he knows, what he can be sure of and what he s learned and now he s questioning what he needs to accept as truth. Herzman states it interestingly in his lecture, saying that many scholars have agreed, Montaigne and skepticism go hand in hand. It is helpful to look a bit more closely at where exactly we put the emphasis in this question, because it is very important to the meaning: What do I know? It is almost instinctive to first place the emphasis on the word know what do I know? What have I learned from concrete facts, from school, from others, and what I have discovered myself? What conclusions have I come to through the experiences in my own life? What do I acknowledge as TRUTH? As we ve discovered in Montaigne s Essays, he primarily writes about himself, so it is important that we switch the emphasis to the I What do I know? Here we see, again, this very vital theme that s been emphasized by many philosophers, including Socrates, which we spoke about earlier, the quest for personal knowledge. It is evident that in the end, Montaigne would want us to take away that one question: What do I know? As he put aside a career and social status in order to examine his life and the meaning of our time on earth, so he wishes that we too will stop to think, to question, to reflect. And like so many humanists of his

9 Romain 9 time, to constantly strive for more understanding as we journey on in the quest for personal knowledge. Works Cited Herzman, Ronald B. "Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition: Part 4 of 7, Literature of the Renaissance." Lecture. Miller, Jim. Examined Lives: From Socrates to Nietzsche. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Print. Rabb, Theodore K. Renaissance Lives: Portraits of an Age. New York: Pantheon, Print. Thompson, Stephen P. Renaissance Literature. San Diego, CA: Greenhaven, Print.