Saul Frampton on Michel de Montaigne
In When I Am Playing With My Cat, How Do I Know She Is Not Playing With Me? Saul Frampton celebrates perhaps the most joyful yet profound of all Renaissance writers.
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In the year 1570, at the age of thirty-seven, Michel de Montaigne gave up his job as a magistrate and retired to his château, situated a few miles north of the Dordogne in south western France, to brood on his own private grief – the deaths of his best friend, his father, his brother, and most recently his first-born child. On the ceiling of his library he inscribed a phrase from Lucretius: There is no new pleasure to be gained by living longer.
But finding his mind agitated rather than settled by this idleness, Montaigne began to write, giving birth to the Essays – short prose explorations of an amazing variety of topics. And gradually, over the course of his writing, Montaigne began to turn his back upon his stoical pessimism. He erased the inscription from Lucretius and engaged in a new philosophy of life, in which living is to be embraced in all its sensory, exuberant vitality. At the heart of Montaigne’s enquiry is his own experience of himself: the smell of his doublet, the pleasures of friendship, the intelligence of his cat and the flavour of his wine.
A Q&A with Saul Frampton
1. Why did you decide to write about Montaigne?
Montaigne struck me as one of the funniest, most enjoyable, but also most profound and interesting philosophers I had ever read, and I wanted to help others to appreciate him. But I also wanted quite simply to enjoy writing about him, which I did very much, and I hope that comes through to the reader. He is endlessly illuminating and quotable: ‘There is nothing useless in nature, not even uselessness itself.’
2. What do you feel his role is within Western literature?
Montaigne is of course very modern, very tolerant and very sceptical, and many have seen his main message as being a sceptical one, and therefore view him as a forerunner of Descartes. But I think that he also represents a link to a long-lost organicism: a very unrational sense that we are part and parcel of our bodies, and that through our bodies we are tied to society at large, and with this the rest of the nature. And Montaigne finds this out not through abstract reasoning, but through his own experience – as a seigneur and as a winemaker, as a cat-owner, a traveller and a man. In this sense Montaigne is more a precursor of Darwin than Descartes – someone who seeks integration more than definition and division.
3. What do you feel is the most important point to take away from the Essays? Why?
There is probably no one point, and Montaigne did not conceive it as a systematic work. But for me the most important thing is that Montaigne reminds us that we are blessed with an irrepressible sensitivity to not simply the beliefs, but the movements, gestures, and voices of other people. What Montaigne intuits is the existence of mirror neurons (the actual discovery of which in 1995 has been called the most important unpublicized scientific discovery of the last twenty years). And for Montaigne it is the fact that we are necessarily ‘tuned in’ to the feelings of others – that we in a sense experience them as our own – that should serve as the basis of our moral conduct.
4. Why do you think Montaigne’s reputation has endured for almost 500 years?
Montaigne is perhaps one of the most approachable writers there is. He writes about subjects that every age, and every sex can relate to – sleep, sadness and children; sex, drunkenness and death. In this everyone seems to find themselves in his essays, in that he reminds us, quite simply, of what life is like – as Pascal famously said: ‘It is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that I see in him.’
5. Do you feel that his work can be read easily today? Can it be applied to modern day life?
Yes, Montaigne is still very approachable, still very vivid and alive. As a guide to life I think he is still unsurpassable, in not simply trying to offer a sense of what life is ‘about’ or its ‘meaning’ – as if life is an allegory for something else – but in reminding us that this may be the only chance we get, and that our experience of life is something we should seek to intensify. For Montaigne the winemaker we should therefore seek to ‘taste’ or savour experience (another meaning of ‘Essais’ was simply ‘tastes’). But for Montaigne resensitizing ourselves in this way also opens us up to the experience of others; it is therefore an ethical as well as a psychological discovery.
6. Do you feel that Montaigne’s life and work are inextricably linked, or can one be understood without the other?
As Montaigne presented a copy of his essays to Henry III he told him: ‘My book and I are one’. And as he adds to and re-edits his essays there is a sense that he is rewinding and replaying life as he lives it. The history of his time and his life tell us something about the particular urgency with which he wrote – the wars of religion that surrounded him; the death of his friend La Boétie. But Montaigne very swiftly became his own man, rejecting his Christian, Stoic intellectual inheritance and developing his own philosophy of life. In this sense his Essays always tell us more about him than any facts or background details can ever do. For Montaigne, to know someone is to stand close to them, to observe them close at hand, and this is exactly what he intended his essays to be: a means to ‘retrieve some traits of my conditions and humours’ and to ‘nourish’ our sense of him ‘entirely and vividly’. As he says to the reader at the outset: ‘I am myself the matter of my book.’
