3 days ago (castalianstream.medium.com)
Sometimes it seems like all of Montaigne’s Essays are digressions. But often the more surprising moments, the digressions amongst the digressions, are the best bits.
This is especially so in the long central ‘Apology of Raymond Sebond’, which is as close as he gets to a more traditionally ordered, or systematic piece. It’s here that Montaigne seemingly ‘outs’ himself as a Pyrrhonian sceptic, and so, a recognised kind of albeit non-dogmatic philosopher. It’s this piece that has led commentators like Pierre Villey to propose that the French essayist experienced a ‘Pyrrhonian crisis’, having discovered the old writings of Sextus Empiricus in the 1570s.
Much of the essay does use recognisable Pyrrhonian modes of argumentation, to challenge the idea that even the wisest philosophers have made any progress in understanding God or the gods, the afterlife, the soul or its relation to the body, or even ourselves.
If man was supposed to be the measure of all things, Montaigne surmises, the joke is on us, who cannot even measure ourselves, let alone fathom anything else.
Anyway, towards the end of this long ‘Apology’, Montaigne has got to musing on the way things reciprocally affect each other, which makes the clear and distinct understanding of particular things or processes tricky. Then, without further ado, he launches into a kind of proto-postmodern musing on a great theme of our times: hermeneutic indeterminacy.
Here is the opening of what he says:
This opinion put me in mind of the experience we have that there is no sense or aspect of anything, whether bitter or sweet, straight or crooked, that the human mind does not find out in the writings it undertakes to tumble over. Into the cleanest, purest, and most perfect words that can possibly be, how many lies and falsities have we suggested [i.e. the Bible, is what M. means — CS]! What heresy has not there found ground and testimony sufficient to make itself embraced and defended!
Montaigne is writing in the context of the ongoing civil wars in France. These were occasioned by the advent of Protestantism, which had challenged the authority of Popes or Councils to interpret the Bible. But if Christians were to return to the Bible, sola scriptura, how was the Bible then to be read? And how could any particular reader be certain their interpretation of the divine word?
Different readings multiplied or ‘disseminated’, in ways a Jacques Derrida used to love. Montaigne continues, that he even knew a man who supported his search for the fabled philosophers’ stone, by finding passages in Holy Writ:
A person of dignity, who would approve to me, by authority, the search of the philosopher’s stone, wherein he was head over ears engaged, lately alleged to me at least five or six passages of the Bible upon which, he said, he first founded his attempt, for the discharge of his conscience (for he is a divine); and, in truth, the idea was not only pleasant, but, moreover, very well accommodated to the defence of this fine science.
What is Montaigne’s point, beyond indulging his omnivorous curiosity and love of a good yarn?
On the one hand, there are clearly writers and speakers out there who know how to lead people on, with promises of insights and belonging, or great things just around the corner. Montaigne mentions the old pagan oracles, fortune-tellers, and the Sibyls: we will all meet a tall dark stranger, some time soon …
On the other hand, Montaigne seems to want to suggest, as the dreaded postmodernist underminers of all things civilizational were to do in Paris, nearly exactly 400 years later, that every text is like this. That is, every text just is subject to that ‘infinite interpretation’ in whose shimmering light and apparently open horizon, generations of students were taught to see a promise of freedom from all things old, staid, or stable:
There are so many ways of interpretation that it will be hard but that, either obliquely or in a direct line, an ingenious wit will find out, in every subject, some air that will serve for his purpose; therefore we find a cloudy and ambiguous style in so frequent and ancient use.
Indefence of the postmodernists, why isn’t this indeterminacy not tantamount to a promise of liberation itself? If we are unbound by any single authority, in interpreting anything, isn’t this a kind of freedom?
To speak against the same postmodernists, we would need to be sure that license was not being mistaken for liberty, and that a liberation from interpretive boundaries does not open out onto endless indeterminacy, or a hermeneutic twilight in which all cows are either grey or contain all colors at once.
We would also need to be sure that, in plying our delirious freedom to provide ever-more-unheard-of readings of established authorities, that we did not paradoxically rest this interpretive freedom … well, on the unquestioned authority of such figures as, for instance, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, and c, who were supposed to have opened up this hermeneutic way.
What for instance, if critics suggested that these thinkers wanted their own ideas to be taken as more true or valid, than other authors’? Should we oppose them, since we read these authors as promoting only openness? Or should we agree with them, since these authors are indeed the ones who saw the light?
Both-and-neither-nor.
The other problem — to get back to our authority here, Montaigne — is that unquestioning love of texts and textual authorities can also provide its own motives for interpretive creativity, and this is what the French essayist also seems to have glimpsed.
That is, our freedom here would rest on prior pressing obligations. We all might for instance feel the impulse to want to square the ideas of older books and authors we love, or that we’ve been taught as authoritative, with our present values and interests. For we want the things we love, to love each other.
However, Montaigne asks:
Is it possible that Homer could design to say all that we make him say, and that he designed so many and so various figures, as that the divines, law-givers, captains, philosophers, and all sorts of men who treat of sciences, how variously and opposite soever, should indifferently quote him, and support their arguments by his authority, as the sovereign lord and master of all offices, works, and artisans, and counsellor-general of all enterprises? Whoever has had occasion for oracles and predictions has there found sufficient to serve his turn. ’Tis a wonder how many and how admirable concurrences an intelligent person, and a particular friend of mine, has there found out in favour of our religion; and cannot easily be put out of the conceit that it was Homer’s design; and yet he is as well acquainted with this author as any man whatever of his time. And what he has found in favour of our religion there, very many anciently have found in favour of theirs …
To interpret an author, smoothing away the rough edges, excising passages that could wound our sensibilities today, or bending others far enough that they are made to say something quite other than what they seem to— all of this can seem alot like a kind of gift of love. What do we mean?
The good son or daughter, after all, ought to have a tough time even conceiving that the parent they love and respect could have any faults, and should go out of their way towards defending them, before admitting the worst.
So, too, what of our textual mothers and fathers? Do we not owe them, also, a break?
What Montaigne says of Homer being read by everyone to lend authority to their perspectives, he then continues to say of Plato. In our times of cultural Nietzscheanism (difference, becoming, aestheticization of life, radical individuality …), someone could say the same about the ‘peaceful 19th century libertarian’, who has nevertheless not always been read as a peaceful libertarian.
This would be a paradoxical interpretive freedom, though, that saw itself hung from the strings of the reputations of canonised masters.
Who hasn’t tried to save their favored authors from themselves, if they realise that, alongside ideas that they have been moved and inspired by, there are also concerns and opinions which are foreign or even obnoxious?
Shouldn’t our first impulse be to turn the text into whatever shapes or aspects we can, to rebuff the critics? Isn’t that one of the bonds of love?
We certainly wouldn’t want to cast the first stone, as lovers of Montaigne, and duty-bound to uphold his name!) His point, exactly, remains:
what if, beneath the radical anarchical front of infinite postmodernist hermeneutic indeterminacy, which has indeed succeeded in creating murmors amongst the zealots, what the zealots have missed is something altogether more uncanny— a longing, if not for servitude to new masters (as Jacques Lacan ironically called it), then an almost pious or tender impulse towards certain, rough textual authorities?
Montaigne seems to have denounced the postmodernists, in advance, in such terms as these:
Let the author but make himself master of that, to busy posterity about his predictions, which not only his own parts, but the accidental favour of the matter itself, may do for him; and, as to the rest, express himself, whether after a foolish or a subtle manner, somewhat obscurely or contradictorily, ’tis no matter; — a number of wits, shaking and sifting him, will bring out a great many several forms, either according to his meaning, or collateral, or contrary, to it, which will all redound to his honour; he will see himself enriched by the means of his disciples, like the regents of colleges by their pupils’ yearly presents. This it is which has given reputation to many things of no worth at all; that has brought several writings in vogue, and given them the fame of containing all sorts of matter can be desired; one and the same thing receiving a thousand and a thousand images and various considerations; nay, as many as we please.
So, if Montaigne has identified something here — and let’s leave the ‘if’ — the trick would seem to be one of how to get students to identify when commentating on a text which has been presented and accepted by previous generations as authoritative passes over into being a kind of end in itself.
Wanting to interpret the world, we come to interpret texts about the world. This world of ‘the text’ then becomes a substitute for the wider world, like we’re in some Borges story. How else could the issue Montaigne seems to be butting against be put?
Rather than using the authority of the author only to grow our independent understanding, that authority comes to supplant or dominate our understanding:
It is very easy, upon approved foundations, to build whatever we please; for, according to the law and ordering of this beginning, the other parts of the structure are easily carried on without any failure. By this way we find our reason well-grounded, and discourse at a venture; for our masters prepossess and gain beforehand as much room in our belief as is necessary towards concluding afterwards what they please, as geometricians do by their granted demands, the consent and approbation we allow them giving them wherewith to draw us to the right and left, and to whirl us about at their pleasure. Whatever springs from these presuppositions is our master and our God; he will take the level of his foundations so ample and so easy that by them he may mount us up to the clouds, if he so please.
If he does so please, then criticism of the text upon which we have built our own positions on, becomes a criticism of our positions themselves. And where there is love, modern psychology tells us, there is identification. So this means, criticism of ‘our’ authority becomes criticism of we ourselves, which creates its own kinds of hermeneutic necessities, which would give the lie to rhetorics surrounding freedom to interpret.
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