Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–1592) is one of those rare thinkers whose influence is measured not by the construction of a philosophical system but by the invention of a form. By creating the essay — a word he coined himself, from the French essai, meaning attempt or trial — he inaugurated a way of thinking that refuses any claim to final truth and makes the thinking subject both the object and the instrument of inquiry. His Essais, published between 1580 and 1595, remain among the most widely read texts in Western literature, and their philosophical significance has only grown with time.
This article examines Montaigne’s life, work, and legacy, from his humanist education to the enduring resonance of the Essays in contemporary thought.
1. Life and Humanist Education
Michel de Montaigne was born on February 28, 1533, at Château de Montaigne in the Dordogne (Périgord), southwestern France. His father, Pierre Eyquem, was a minor nobleman of mercantile origins who had returned from the Italian wars fascinated by Italian humanism. His mother, Antoinette de Louppes, descended from a family of Iberian merchants, possibly of converso Jewish background.
Pierre Eyquem undertook a remarkable pedagogical experiment: he entrusted his newborn son to a peasant family so the child would spend his earliest years among the simplest people, then hired a German tutor who spoke nothing but Latin to the boy. Montaigne states in the Essays that Latin was his true mother tongue — before French, before the Périgordine dialect. By age six, when he entered the Collège de Guyenne in Bordeaux, he already commanded Latin with the fluency of a Roman. His formal schooling, however, with its system of rote repetition and punishments, disappointed him profoundly — an experience reflected in his fierce criticism of bookish instruction and scholastic pedantry.
He studied law (probably at Toulouse) and held positions in the magistracy, first at the Tribunal of Périgueux, then at the Parlement of Bordeaux, between 1557 and 1570. It was in this juridical and political milieu that he met Étienne de La Boétie, a friendship that would mark his entire life.
2. The Invention of the Essay
The word essai in sixteenth-century French meant attempt, trial, test. Montaigne made this word both the title and the programme of his work. To essay is to attempt — to test one’s own judgement, to put one’s opinions on trial, to explore a subject without any obligation to reach a definitive conclusion. The essay is not the philosophical treatise, which proceeds from premises to consequences; not the Platonic dialogue, which stages positions in confrontation; not the sermon, which exhorts; not the scholastic commentary, which glosses an authority. It is something new: thought in motion, observing itself as it thinks.
The form of the Essays reflects this intention: chapters range from a few pages to hundreds, jump from topic to topic, and interweave anecdotes, Latin and Greek quotations, personal reflections, and observations on customs. Montaigne compares himself to a painter who, having filled the main picture, fills the empty spaces with whimsical arabesques. This apparent disorder is, in fact, the method: thought advances through digression, association, and return, mimicking the actual movement of the human mind.
Montaigne declares that every human being carries within himself the entire form of the human condition. By painting himself, therefore, he paints humanity. This declaration founds a principle that would be taken up centuries later by Rousseau, Nietzsche, and the modern autobiographical tradition: the extreme particularity of the individual is the most honest path to the universal.
3. “Que sais-je?” and Pyrrhonian Skepticism
The motto Que sais-je? (“What do I know?”) encapsulates Montaigne’s intellectual stance. It is not a destructive skepticism that denies all possibility of knowledge, but an attitude of suspended judgement inherited from ancient Pyrrhonism — the philosophical tradition founded by Pyrrho of Elis (c. 360–270 BC) and systematised in the writings of Sextus Empiricus.
The Renaissance rediscovery of Sextus Empiricus — particularly Henri Estienne’s 1562 Latin edition of the Outlines of Pyrrhonism — had a decisive impact on Montaigne. The longest chapter of the Essays, the celebrated Apology for Raymond Sebond (Book II, chapter 12), is largely a systematic demonstration of the fragility of human knowledge, directly inspired by the Pyrrhonian tropes. Montaigne catalogues there the reasons why the senses deceive us, reason contradicts itself, and the opinions of philosophers diverge on everything — concluding that the wisest posture is suspension of judgement (epoché).
There is, however, a crucial difference between Montaigne and ancient Pyrrhonism. For Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus, suspension of judgement aims to achieve ataraxia — tranquillity of the soul. For Montaigne, doubt is not a destination but a point of departure: it frees the mind from dogmatic pretensions and opens space for honest self-examination. Montaigne’s skepticism is thus deeply bound to his project of self-knowledge — doubting everything one knows is the first step toward knowing what one is.
Montaigne also deploys skepticism in a fideist key: if human reason is incapable of reaching absolute certainties, then faith is not diminished by rational critique — on the contrary, it occupies a plane that reason cannot touch. This position, later taken up by Pascal, allowed the Essays a relatively peaceful coexistence with Catholic orthodoxy.
4. The Tower-Library as Philosophical Laboratory
In 1571, at the age of 38, Montaigne withdrew from public life and retired to his château in the Dordogne. On the third floor of a circular tower, he installed his library — some one thousand volumes — and had 57 maxims in Greek and Latin inscribed on the ceiling beams, drawn from Sextus Empiricus, Lucretius, Pliny, Ecclesiastes, and others. There, among books and inscriptions, he began writing the Essays.
The tower was not a place of monastic seclusion. Montaigne received visitors, continued to manage his estates, travelled extensively through Italy, Switzerland, and Germany between 1580 and 1581, and served as mayor (maire) of Bordeaux for two terms (1581–1585), during the most violent phase of the French Wars of Religion. But the tower remained the gravitational centre of his intellectual life: it was there that he always returned, there that he revised and expanded the Essays in successive editions, covering the margins with additions that compose the so-called “Bordeaux copy” — the personal copy annotated until shortly before his death.
The tower is thus more than a biographical detail: it is the symbol of a method. Montaigne philosophises from a concrete place, with a concrete body, among concrete books. He does not claim to speak sub specie aeternitatis, but from the particular contingency of a man who grows old, suffers from kidney stones, and watches, from his window, a France tearing itself apart in civil war.
5. The Friendship with La Boétie
In 1558, at the Parlement of Bordeaux, Montaigne met Étienne de La Boétie (1530–1563), a young magistrate and humanist who had already composed, probably before the age of twenty, the Discourse on Voluntary Servitude — a brief, incandescent text that asks why people obey tyrants, since they would only need to stop obeying for tyranny to dissolve.
The friendship between Montaigne and La Boétie is one of the most celebrated in intellectual history. Montaigne describes it in the essay On Friendship (Book I, chapter 28) as something that transcends the usual categories: it was not friendship based on utility, pleasure, or habit — it was so complete a fusion of souls that the reasons for it became indistinguishable from the very existence of the two men. The most famous phrase — “Because it was he, because it was I” — captures this impossibility of rationally explaining a bond that precedes all reason.
La Boétie died in 1563, aged 32. Montaigne never fully recovered from this loss. Some scholars argue that the Essays were, in part, an attempt to replace the lost interlocutor: writing became a way to continue a conversation that death had interrupted. The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, which Montaigne had initially planned to include in the Essays, was published by others in a partisan political context, leading Montaigne to substitute La Boétie’s sonnets instead — a gesture of protection toward his friend’s memory.
6. Of Cannibals: Cultural Relativism Avant la Lettre
The essay Of Cannibals (Book I, chapter 31) is probably the most studied text of the Essays in the contemporary human sciences. Montaigne draws on the account of a servant who had lived ten or twelve years in Brazil, in France Antarctique, and on his own interview with Tupinambá people brought to Rouen and presented to the young King Charles IX around 1562.
Montaigne describes the customs of the Tupinambá — including ritual cannibalism — without the automatic horror of European chroniclers. His argumentative strategy is inversion: he compares the ceremonial anthropophagy of the indigenous people, who devour an enemy already dead in combat, with the judicial torture practised in Europe, which makes the living suffer for hours and days. And he asks: who is, in fact, the more barbarous? The implicit conclusion is devastating: we call “barbarous” everything that does not conform to our own customs, without realising that the criterion of judgement is custom itself — not universal reason.
This intellectual gesture anticipates by centuries what modern anthropology would call cultural relativism. Lévi-Strauss explicitly acknowledged the debt in Tristes Tropiques (1955), calling Montaigne a precursor of modern ethnology. This is not an absolute moral relativism — Montaigne does not say that everything is equivalent — but a demand for critical examination of one’s own presuppositions before judging others.
7. The Body, Death, Custom — To Philosophise Is to Learn to Die
One of the most celebrated essays bears the title That to Philosophise Is to Learn to Die (Book I, chapter 20), a formula borrowed from Cicero, who attributes it to Socrates. Montaigne argues there that constant meditation on death is the path to inner freedom: whoever has learned to die has unlearned servitude.
Yet as the Essays progress — from Book I to Book III, across nearly twenty years of writing — Montaigne’s relationship with death changes. The severe Stoicism of the early essays gives way to a more serene, more Epicurean acceptance: instead of meditating on death, it is better to live well. In the essay Of Experience (Book III, chapter 13), the last and one of the longest, Montaigne celebrates the body, simple pleasures, food, sleep, movement. Wisdom lies not in transcending the bodily condition but in inhabiting it with intelligence and enjoyment.
This trajectory — from Stoicism to skepticism, from skepticism to a tempered Epicureanism — is one of the most widely accepted interpretive frameworks in Montaigne scholarship, though scholars such as Jean Starobinski and Hugo Friedrich caution against rigid schematism. What is certain is that Montaigne takes the body seriously in a way few philosophers before him did: he describes his kidney stones, his eating habits, his digestion, his sexuality — not out of exhibitionism, but because the body is an inseparable part of the subject who thinks.
Custom (coutume) occupies a central place in Montaigne’s thought. He observes that customs, however arbitrary, acquire the force of natural law through sheer repetition. We grow accustomed to everything — to cruelty, to injustice, to absurdity — and come to regard as “natural” what is merely habitual. This critique of custom as “the tyrant of opinions” underlies both his cultural relativism and his demand for permanent critical vigilance.
8. Influence: Descartes, Pascal, Nietzsche, Emerson, Woolf
Montaigne’s legacy is vast and crosses disciplinary boundaries.
Descartes is, in a certain sense, a response to Montaigne. Montaigne’s skepticism — his demonstration that the senses deceive and reason contradicts itself — is the very problem Descartes set out to solve with methodical doubt and the cogito. The difference is that where Montaigne accepts uncertainty and makes it a way of life, Descartes seeks an unshakeable foundation on which to rebuild the edifice of knowledge. Without Montaigne’s skepticism, it is difficult to imagine the urgency of the Cartesian project.
Pascal, in the Pensées, maintains a constant dialogue with Montaigne — now admiring his honesty, now denouncing his Pyrrhonism as dangerous to faith. Pascal sees in Montaigne the correct diagnosis of human wretchedness without God, but refuses the serenity with which Montaigne inhabits that wretchedness. For Pascal, Montaigne reveals the wound but does not offer the remedy — which can only be divine grace.
Francis Bacon read the Essais and explicitly adopted the title for his own Essays (1597), though the genre he practises is quite different: more sententious, more political, less personal. Through Bacon, the essay became a central literary form in the Anglophone tradition.
Nietzsche recognised in Montaigne a kindred spirit. In Schopenhauer as Educator, he praises him for having had the courage to be himself, declaring that knowing someone like this once lived increases the joy of living on earth. The radical honesty, the refusal of systems, the attention to body and instinct — all of this brings Montaigne close to the Nietzschean project.
Ralph Waldo Emerson devoted one of the chapters of Representative Men (1850) to Montaigne, treating him as the archetype of the skeptic — not the skeptic who denies, but the one who doubts in order to see more clearly. The American essay tradition, from Emerson to Thoreau and beyond, is unthinkable without the Montaignean model.
Virginia Woolf, in a 1924 essay titled Montaigne, celebrated him as the writer who discovered that the self is the most fertile and inexhaustible subject of literature. The practice of stream of consciousness in the modern novel owes something, among its many sources, to Montaigne’s lesson: writing as a record of thought in motion.
9. The Relevance of the Essays in the Age of Post-Truth
It is tempting to invoke Montaigne in times of epistemic crisis. We live in an era in which the very notion of truth is under assault — not by rigorous philosophical doubt, but by the deliberate manipulation of information, the proliferation of fabricated narratives, and the erosion of traditional epistemic authorities. Would Montaigne have something to say about this?
Yes — but not what one might expect from a skeptic. Montaigne’s lesson is not that “everything is relative” or that “there is no truth.” On the contrary: his skepticism is demanding. To doubt, for Montaigne, is an exercise in intellectual honesty — it means refusing to accept as true that which has not been examined. What he combats is not truth but pretension — the arrogance of those who affirm more than they can know, who kill and torture in the name of certainties they do not possess.
In this sense, Montaigne’s skepticism is an antidote both to dogmatism and to epistemic nihilism. Against dogmatism, because it teaches that every certainty must be subjected to examination. Against nihilism, because it shows that honest doubt does not eliminate commitment to truth — on the contrary, it is the highest form of that commitment.
The practice of the essay, as Montaigne invented it, also offers a response to the fragmentation of public discourse. In an era of tweets and 280-character posts, the essay demands slowness, nuance, attention to the other’s argument, willingness to change one’s mind. Montaigne revised the Essays over twenty years, adding, correcting, contradicting himself — and this contradiction is not a flaw but the faithful record of a mind that keeps on thinking.
Reading Montaigne today is, therefore, an exercise in intellectual resistance: against haste, against simplification, against easy certainty. He declares that he does not paint being but passage — and it is precisely this attention to what passes, to what changes, to what contradicts itself, that makes his Essays a perpetually contemporary book.
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