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ABSTRACT
One of the most enduring puzzles of courage is its relation to technical or instrumental reason and the power such reason brings. For Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), the conquest of the New World showed that classical, aristocratic valour was a dying paradigm: if all struggles can be settled by a test of power and skill, courage appears to be obsolete. Thus, the very meaning of courage is to be found in its opposition to instrumentalism. For Montaigne, the purely instrumental concerns of power and skill have no meaning in themselves, but aspire to an omnipotence through which an understanding of the self and its world evaporates. A god can never possess self-knowledge because self-knowledge is forged through opposition and struggle and under conditions of finitude. The attempt to transcend or avoid this struggle (and the courage that this struggle requires of us) through the application of ontic method is both cowardly and futile. The self is an inescapably finite, horizonal being embedded in a world of flux and plurality. Courage, for Montaigne, therefore relates to an awareness, as opposed to a denial, of human limitations. This is, I argue, a valuable contribution to our understanding of the virtue of courage, but it is not the last word. Montaigne’s concern to embrace our status as finite creatures often manifested in a problematic praise of poverty, suffering, and death.
Acknowledgements
I am particularly indebted to Vicki A. Spencer, Noah Stengl, and Julia Brown for their comments on an earlier version of this article, as well as to the anonymous reviewer who provided extremely helpful suggestions.
Notes
1. Montaigne, Essays, 3.12.1187. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to the Essays are from M. A. Screech’s translation, and are hereafter cited in the text, with book and chapter numbers followed by page numbers. Donald Frame’s translation will be cited as Complete Works.
2. Desan, Montaigne: A Life, 6.
3. Supple, Arms Versus Letters, 5.
4. Desan, Montaigne: A Life, 268, 283–84.
5. Supple, Arms Versus Letters, 18.
6. Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, 120, 100–101.
7. Boutcher has identified a consistently anti-pragmatic stance in the Essays (see The School of Montaigne, vol. 1, 44). I argue that this anti-pragmatic stance is importantly motivated by Montaigne’s preoccupation with courage.
8. The paradox has been known as early as Plato: see Laches, esp. 193a–d.
9. See, for instance, Bauhn, The Value of Courage, 33–44; Dent, Moral Psychology of the Virtues, 13–14; Kawall, “Other-Regarding Epistemic Virtues,” 258; Rorty, “The Two Faces of Courage,” 151; Scarre, On Courage, 117; Shade, “The Ends of Courage,” 213; Taylor and Wolfram, “Self-Regarding and Other-Regarding Virtues,” 247; van Hooft, Understanding Virtue Ethics, 137–38. For early modern and modern forebears of this view, see La Rochefoucauld, Maxims and Moral Reflections, 119; Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, 4.393; and Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms, 134. The term “executive virtue,” as far as I am aware, originates from James Wallace (Virtues and Vices, 76–77), and was also adopted by Bernard Williams (Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 9).
10. Dent, “The Value of Courage,” 574–75.
11. Miller, The Mystery of Courage, 36–37, 175–78; Avramenko, Courage, 4–7, 132, 136–37.
12. Strauss, Natural Right and History, esp. 180–91; Solzhenitsyn, “A World Split Apart,” 837–38; Mansfield, Manliness. In a brief but powerfully suggestive article, Dent summed up both the liberal reluctance to talk about courage, and the reactionary agendas often implied by a nostalgia for courage: see “The Value of Courage,” 574–77.
13. For an in-depth treatment of Montaigne’s understanding of autonomy, see Green, Montaigne and the Life of Freedom. Green attributes to Montaigne a Skinnerian “neo-Roman” view of political freedom as non-domination, and cautions against reading into Montaigne an anachronistic, Kantian understanding of autonomy in terms of sovereignty. Instead, she calls attention to the language of mesnagerie or household management in the Essays: as she puts it, “[t]he aim is not to rule but to regulate oneself” (185–86; my emphasis).
14. Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 23.
15. Cf. Montaigne, Essays, 3.7.1040: “I dislike all domination, by me or over me.”
16. In using the term “self-affirmation” and stressing its centrality to courage, I am drawing on Tillich’s The Courage to Be. Tillich argues that the existentiale of courage is self-affirmation. At the risk of anachronism, I consider this a valuable starting point from which to gain purchase on the meaning of courage in the Essays. In what follows, however, I aim to show that Montaigne’s idea of courage encompassed not only self-affirmation but its opposite, self-overcoming, about which Tillich has relatively little to say (28–29).
17. Cf. Homer, Iliad, 5.297–351, 119–20.
18. Homer almost certainly did not mean to attribute andreia to Aphrodite in this passage: upon being wounded (by a mortal, Diomedes), Aphrodite flees the battle and runs back to her mother, Diones, on Mount Olympus, after which Zeus warns her to stay away from the fighting. Indeed, the passage is an encomium to the andreia not of Aphrodite but of Diomedes, whose wounding of a goddess is the denouement to his slaughter of the Trojans. However, it would be a mistake to simply dismiss Montaigne’s reading of the passage as tenuous or mistaken; the reading speaks to the extent of his co-option and inversion of the heroic warrior ethic, his willingness to think “with the Greeks, against the Greeks.”
19. Cf. Merleau-Ponty, “Reading Montaigne,” 208.
20. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 20. Montaigne could even be read as making the proto-Hegelian point that a healthy self-consciousness requires the presence of a limiting other, who can negate the delusion of omnipotence. See Honneth, The I in We, 11–13.
21. Starobinksi, Montaigne in Motion, 120, 307.
22. Montaigne discussed glory at various points in the Essays but his most complete remarks are found in 2.16.
23. Cf. Montaigne, Essays, 2.11.475.
24. Merleau-Ponty, “Reading Montaigne,” 204 (my emphasis).
25. Ibid., 198. Nehamas makes the case that Montaigne’s emphasis on finitude shows the influence of Xenophon’s depiction of Socrates: see Nehamas, Art of Living, 106; Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.3.3, 4.2.24–29.
26. Montaigne, Essays, 3.9.1118: “What is the use of those high philosophical peaks on which no human being can settle and those rules which exceed our practice and our power?” See also Schneewind, “Montaigne on Moral Philosophy,” 216–17.
27. Schneewind, “Montaigne on Moral Philosophy,” 217–19.
28. Quoted in ibid., 219.
29. Schneewind, “Montaigne on Moral Philosophy,” 218.
30. Cf. Montaigne, Essays, 3.13.1217: “I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics.”
31. Goyet, “Montaigne and the Notion of Prudence,” 130. As Boutcher notes, Montaigne saw letters as themselves a form of action (The School of Montaigne, 27).
32. Cf. Wolf, “Moral Saints,” 419–39.
33. Nehamas, Art of Living, 124.
34. Aristophanes, Clouds, lines 215–225.
35. See also Xenophon, Memorabilia, 1.2.4.
36. Plato, Laches, 181b; Plato, Symposium, 220d–21c.
37. Plato, Phaedrus, 229d–230a. Socrates rejects metaphysical speculation as irrelevant—or at least, not yet clearly relevant—to the essential philosophical mission of self-knowledge, which was his primary and ongoing concern. See also Plato, First Alcibiades, 128d–29a; Montaigne, Essays, 3.9.1132n; Nehamas, Art of Living, 106.
38. For further discussion of Montaigne’s Socrates, see Nehamas, Art of Living, 101–27.
39. Montaigne’s source for the Delphic directive is Plutarch’s The E at Delphi, which he also transcribed at length toward the end of the “Apology for Raymond Sebond” (2.12.680–83). Plutarch concludes his essay by calling attention to the “antithesis” between “Thou art,” the traditional greeting of worshippers to the god, and “Know thyself,” the god’s command to humanity: “for the one is an utterance addressed in awe and reverence to the god as existent through all eternity, the other is a reminder to mortal man of his own nature and the weaknesses that beset him” (The E at Delphi, 394c; cf. 392a, 393b).
40. Cf. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.37.419–20.
41. Montaigne, Essays, 3.13, quoted in Taylor, Sources of the Self, 183.
42. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 349–51.
43. Jeanneret, Perpetual Motion, 161.
44. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 182.
45. Paige, Being Interior, 29.
46. Green, Montaigne and the Life of Freedom, 64–65.
47. Launay, Savages, Romans, and Despots, 50–51; Montaigne, Essays, 3.6.1029.
48. Montesquieu, Spirit of the Laws, 22–26, 338.
49. Green, Montaigne and the Life of Freedom, esp. 8, 99.
50. Ibid., 97, 185–88.
51. Montaigne, Essays, 3.10, “De mesnager sa volonté.” Screech translates “mesnager” as “restraining,” Green as “managing,” and Frame as “husbanding.”
52. O’Brien, “Montaigne and Antiquity,” 64–65.
53. Cf. Goyet, “Montaigne and the Notion of Prudence,” 132–33.
54. Montaigne, Complete Works, 3.9.932 (my emphasis). Montaigne puts this statement in the mouth of Apollo, the god of the Delphic temple.
55. Ibid., 3.6.844. Montaigne was one of the first European writers to reflect critically on the conduct of the Conquista.
56. Conley, “The Essays and the New World,” 75.
57. Green, Montaigne and the Life of Freedom, 186.
58. Cf. Starobinski, who reads these remarks as implying a realist politics: Montaigne in Motion, 92–93, 264–65.
59. Goyet, “Montaigne and the Notion of Prudence,” 121; Green, Montaigne and the Life of Freedom, 8.
60. Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 10–12.
61. Plato, Apology, 36b–38b; Plato, Crito.
62. See, for instance, Montaigne’s remarks on the plague victims at his estates, discussed earlier (3.12.1187–88; and Desan, Montaigne: A Life, 6).
63. This remark from Montaigne’s earlier period was tempered in some of his later writing: see Essays, 2.37.860–61.
64. See, for instance, ibid., 2.3.392–407; 2.35.843–48.
65. Montaigne refers to them only as “cannibals,” but Lestringant has identified the three in question as Tupi (Cannibals, 41–42).
66. Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 19–20.
67. There are clear parallels here to the Sermon on the Mount (esp. Matthew 5:3–12).
68. Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 17–18, 16, 17.
69. Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity, 97.
70. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morality, 228–34, 235–40.
71. Dent, “The Value of Courage,” 576.
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Sam McChesney
Sam McChesney is a graduate student in the Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA. His research interests include ancient Greek political thought, intellectual history, and hermeneutics.