Montaigne’s Skeptical Stroll

Montaigne spat on every dogma and system that strutted through the intellectual barnyard of his day. His motto: Que sais-je? (What do I know?) His answer, delivered with a smirk: Not a daggone thing.

“There is a plague on man: his opinion that he knows something.”

Montaigne

Logic? Pfft. He’d sooner trust a mule to cure his gout.

The Catholic Scholasticism that was still hanging around? All Latin and no soul.

The Protestant reformers yammering about their new-and-improved salvation? Just another gaggle of know-it-alls, peddling their own brand of hogwash.

Systems were to Montaigne what a parade of strip malls is to us: a soul-crushing march of sameness, each one uglier than the last. Modernity’s logocentric circus—its Enlightenment hubris, its technocratic wet dreams—would’ve sent him retching into the nearest ditch.

Yet, for all his sneering, Montaigne wasn’t a nihilist. He had a simple Catholic faith, unexamined, like a farmer’s trust in the seasons. He performed simple acts of devotion. He believed.

But he didn’t foist his beliefs on others and definitely hawk them like a Reformation pamphlet-peddler.

His skepticism was the quiet kind, the kind that doesn’t preach or plot or dream up utopian blueprints to fix a world that’s been broken since the (pre-)dawn of time and always will be, this side of the Second Coming.

He was Pyrrho of Elis reborn, plucked from the dusty agora of 4th-century BC Greece and dropped into the muddy lanes of 16th-century France. He wandered that world with a pilgrim’s curiosity but none of the fanatic’s fire. As Etienne Gilson put it,

[T]he only thing we can learn from him is the art of unlearning. It is very important, and nowhere is it better learned than in the Essays.

Such intellectual restraint was no small feat in the world of religious dogmatism that was Montaigne’s Reformation century, and it ain’t no small feat in the world of scientific dogmatism that is our era (though I maintain COVID was a blessing in this regard: the COVID experts accidentally shattered scentific dogmatism like a ball-peen hammer gaveled onto a glass figurine).

Okay, so his Essays don’t offer much else. Just a man, his doubts, and a pen, reminding us that the only thing we really know is how little we know.

But in our age of algorithms and experts, that’s a lesson we should choke down.

I’d even argue that Montaigne couldn’t have done much more than teach us to unlearn. If he’d started to do anything more constructive, he would’ve cut against everything he was (un-)teaching. In this, he may have been the modern age’s first superfluous man, beating Albert Jay Nock to the skeptic’s modest punch by 400 years.