.
OF MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE
As I get older, I
see myself as a member of a shrinking remnant that was so enveloped
in the modern milieu that we thought it was all there was. We
lacked the distance to see ourselves within it until we reached
mature years. That is why the youth revolution of the 1960s seemed
so central to me. By throwing modern values back in the faces of
their parents, Baby Boomers unintentionally gave people my
age--midway between their parents and themselves--a new way of
seeing how we had grown up and what we had become. I did not
clearly see myself as a malleable form fashioned in the cultural
climate of modernity until I could look at modernity from the
critical viewpoint of postmodernism.
Indeed,
the more I sought to understand what the postmodern turn meant, the
more I wanted to understand what modernity—my milieu--meant. The
definition and exploration of postmodern culture peaked in the
1980s. As the major first-generation thinkers on postmodernism age
and die, younger scholars appear to be going over the now-familiar
ground without adding fundamentally to our understanding of the
modern-postmodern divide. My foray into postmodernism, in
retrospect, now seems valuable to me mainly because it opened the
door to a consideration of modernity itself.
I am
continuing to think about modernity by going back to foundations. I
have looked at Adam
Smith’s “other” idea—that beneficent sympathy underlies
human moral sentiments--as a prelude to studying his main work,
The Wealth of Nations. Smith’s monument of modernity taught
Western nations the virtues of free competition and anchored the
policies that have led to the several phases of enterprise leading
up to present developments in globalization. The tension between
Smith’s idea of moral sentiments and his idea of the free
circulation of capital has intrigued me; but I have yet to address
that tension with the discipline necessary either to resolve it or
to find incoherence at the core of Smith’s systems.
When (if)
I get to it, I have a hunch that I will learn something helpful
about an inherent instability in modernism. How can we reconcile
the desire for a just society (based on moral sentiments) and the
desire to convert the resources of nations into actual wealth
through rampant competitiveness (based on laissez-faire
capitalism)? The continuing conflicts in the political history of
the West, the US in particular, suggest how far we are from
reconciling these poles of Smith’s thought.
Meanwhile,
literary critic Harold Bloom, graying in his eminence, set out to
look for wisdom in the literary canon he has done so much to keep in
place for half a century. His resulting book (Where Shall Wisdom
Be Found?) persuaded me to turn to another foundation stone of
modernity of even greater age than Smith’s writings—the essays of
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). Just as Adam Smith affirmed the
individual entrepreneur as an essential agent in modern life, so
Montaigne, Bloom led me to believe, would show us how a modern
person could have the right and the pleasure to identify and
celebrate his individual interests and tastes in secular terms, all
the while being uncritically accepting of a concept of divine
hegemony.
By wisdom
Bloom meant insight—differing from beauty (“aesthetic splendor”) and
from truth (“intellectual power”) (1). He searched in the Hebrews
and Greeks, in Cervantes and Shakespeare, in Montaigne and Francis
Bacon, in Samuel Johnson and Goethe, in Emerson and Nietzsche, in
Freud and Proust; he searched in Thomas’s gospel and Saint
Augustine.
He found
that the solace offered to his assorted traumas of aging was simply
this: “Wisdom literature teaches us to accept natural limits.” (4)
Bloom
raised Montaigne to the highest place among his wisdom writers
precisely because the first essayist taught us how to accept our
natural limits, indeed, to celebrate them, to make of them the
essence of sensible living. Montaigne’s wisdom is “cheerful and
sociable” (139); he anticipates for Bloom the earth-bound and
magnificent figures of Cervantes’s Sancho Panza and Shakespeare’s
Falstaff, both of whom gave serio-comic voice to what we now
identify as the modern spirit.
Bloom
purports to celebrate the wisdom of the greatest Western writers;
but in the process he celebrates wisdom as he, the perfect product
of modernity, would like it be. The complete modernist Bloom has the
eyes to see clearly in Montaigne the very ideas and sentiments that
defined modernity as it coalesced in the 1500s. This is not to say,
however, that Bloom's reflexive celebration misrepresents what lies
in Montaigne's essays. Bloom values what he knows, and he finds
what he knows in that source of his values.
Bookish
Bloom follows Montaigne when the latter chooses "the common life"
over mere intellectual prowess. Bloom lines up behind Emerson, who
(in Representative Men, 1850) saw in Montaigne someone who
"likes to feel solid ground, and the stones underneath." (124)
Bloom, like Emerson, affirms Montaigne because he concerned himself
with "the conduct of life" itself, not just with the manner of
expressing himself about it.
Bloom
credits Montaigne above all with the turn to the individual self
for wisdom about human life in general. “What do I know?” “Think of
yourself.” Nothing sounds a more modern note than that. Bloom
assures us that Montaigne was "serene" in searching himself for
wisdom. (132) He did not fear the dangers of solipsism. The
Catholic God was in his heaven for Montaigne; but this God was
remote from the day-to-day life of a French gentleman. Montaigne
could examine his life as his super-hero Socrates taught without
feeling that he would unsettle or violate a divine order that was
beyond his merely human speculation.
Even in
its late phase, modernity of the mid-twentieth century still
demonstrated such an order. Abstract Expressionists such as
Barnett Newman
could strip their images of all reference and still feel
confident of their existence in an implied metaphysical dimension
that could go unexamined and unspecified.
From the
start, with Montaigne, an infinitely various concreteness played
itself out in the centuries of modernity against an absolute reality
outside of space and time, whether or not identified or
acknowledged. Bloom helps us to trace that latter-day modernist
arrangement back to the beginnings in Montaigne.
Montaigne,
in turn, grounded his “tests” of common life in his particular
reading of Socrates. Bloom advises us that, where others saw
Socrates serving transcendental good or teaching broad virtues,
Montaigne saw him doing something else: “Montaigne’s Socrates
rescues human wisdom from heavenly exile, and returns her to share
our [merely human] labors.” (135)
Inspired
by Socrates, Montaigne had the simple self-confidence to look
directly for wisdom “in the way the common people live and die.”
(136) Bloom applauds him for remembering that the mighty of the
world “are still sitting only on their own rump” and that “the most
beautiful lives…are those that conform to the common human pattern,
with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity.” (139)
Montaigne
tests topics without a grand theoretical apparatus and with a
healthy curiosity about the varieties of human experience. He tries
to avoid foregone conclusions. He has the appetite to look at and
comment on just about anything the human being can countenance,
whether at home or in the wilds of the New World. Here, then,
thanks to Bloom, I have the beginnings of the modern way of
seeing the world and oneself in it. My task is to read the essays
through from beginning to end, as Bloom recommends. It will change
you permanently, he says. Whether or not it can do that to someone
my age, the exercise should allow me to isolate and understand more
clearly the attitudes and interests of one of the earliest and most
influential shapers of modern sensibility.
Montaigne in some
ways anticipated
Rousseau, who came two centuries later.
9 May 2005 Richard P.
Richter