Literary and Philosophical Essays: French, German and Italian

by Michel de Montaigne

The 13 works of 7 continental authors span 3 centuries of philosophy from Montaigne to Schiller and literary criticism from Sainte-Beuve and Mazzini.

Genres: Philosophy, Essays, Classics, Nonfiction

Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1532-1592) was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance. Montaigne is known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. He became famous for his effortless ability to merge serious intellectual speculation with casual anecdotes and autobiography—and his massive volume Essais (translated literally as "Attempts") contains, to this day, some of the most widely influential essays ever written. Montaigne had a direct influence on writers the world over, from William Shakespeare to René Descartes, from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Stephan Zweig, from Friedrich Nietzsche to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He was a conservative and earnest Catholic but, as a result of his anti-dogmatic cast of mind, he is considered the father, alongside his contemporary and intimate friend Étienne de La Boétie, of the "anti-conformist" tradition in French literature.

In his own time, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman then as an author. The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style rather than as an innovation, and his declaration that, "I am myself the matter of my book", was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne would be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt which began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, "Que sais-je?" ("What do I know?").

Remarkably modern even to readers today, Montaigne's attempt to examine the world through the lens of the only thing he can depend on implicitly—his own judgment—makes him more accessible to modern readers than any other author of the Renaissance. Much of modern literary nonfiction has found inspiration in Montaigne, and writers of all kinds continue to read him for his masterful balance of intellectual knowledge and personal storytelling.

Reviews

[Will Spohn]

I found this book at a random used bookstore in Estes Park, CO, and I was lucky enough to be able to buy the singular volume out of the entire set, and only for around $4! I mainly bought it because I was interested in Montaigne, and I am happy to say that the other essays in the volume are just as good. The selections from Renan and Sainte-Beuve were probably the least interesting because they were more literary criticism than philosophy, but they were still somewhat engaging. I skipped over the selection from Schiller because I had already read it for another class, and I didn't think a second reading was necessary. The section from Kant was daunting at first, but once I got into it, it was not actually that hard. It was mainly a matter of remembering terminology he used. The last section, from Mazzini, sat between philosophy and literary criticism, but was lacking in neither. Mazzini made me want to read Byron, and so I probably will in the near future.

[Tom]

This volume contains the following essays:

By Michel de Montaigne:

The Author to the Reader

That We Should Not Judge of Our Happiness Until after Our Death

That to Philosophise Is to Learne How to Die

Of the Institution and Education of Children
"It is pittie men of understanding should so much love brevitie; without doubt their reputation is thereby better, but we the worse. Plutarke had rather we should commend him for his judgement than for his knowledge, he loveth better to leave a kind of longing-desire in us of him, than a satietie. He knew verie well that even in good things too much may be said."

Of Friendship

Of Bookes
"I am not greatly affected to new books, because ancient Authors are, in my judgement, more full and pithy:"


By Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve:
Montaigne

"And far from being discouraged and cursing fate for causing him to be born in so stormy an age, he suddenly congratulated himself: 'Let us thank fortune that has not made us live in an effeminate, idle and languishing age.'"


What is a Classic?
"A classic, according to the usual definition, is an old author canonised by admiration, and an authority in his particular style. The word classic was first used in this sense by the Romans."

"At first the only true classics for the moderns were the ancients. The Greeks, by peculiar good fortune and natural enlightenment of mind, had no classics but themselves. They were at first the only classical authors for the Romans, who strove and contrived to imitate them. After the great periods of Roman literature, after Cicero and Virgil, the Romans in their turn had their classics, who became almost exclusively the classical authors of the centuries which followed."

Read Voltaire's Age of Louis XIV.,
Montesquieu's Greatness and Fall of the Romans,
Buffon's Epochs of Nature,
Racine in Athalie
Buffon's Discourse on Style
Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws,
Bossuet's Discourse on Universal History,

"A true classic, as I should like to hear it defined, is an author who has enriched the human mind, increased its treasure, and caused it to advance a step; who has discovered some moral and not equivocal truth, or revealed some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and discovered; who has expressed his thought, observation, or invention, in no matter what form, only provided it be broad and great, refined and sensible, sane and beautiful in itself; who has spoken to all in his own peculiar style, a style which is found to be also that of the whole world, a style new without neologism, new and old, easily contemporary with all time."

Quoting Marie-Joseph Chénier: "It is good sense, reason which does all,—virtue, genius, soul, talent, and taste.—What is virtue? reason put in practice;—talent? reason expressed with brilliance;—soul? reason delicately put forth;—and genius is sublime reason."

Quoting Goethe: ""I call the classical healthy, and the romantic sickly."

"Ancient works are classical not because they are old, but because they are powerful, fresh, and healthy."

"Once when Lord Bolingbroke was writing to Swift, Pope added a postscript, in which he said—'I think some advantage would result to our age, if we three spent three years together.'"

"There comes a time in life when, all our journeys over, our experiences ended, there is no enjoyment more delightful than to study and thoroughly examine the things we know, to take pleasure in what we feel, and in seeing and seeing again the people we love: the pure joys of our maturity. Then it is that the word classic takes its true meaning, and is defined for every man of taste by an irresistible choice. Then taste is formed, it is shaped and definite; then good sense, if we are to possess it at all, is perfected in us. We have neither more time for experiments, nor a desire to go forth in search of pastures new. We cling to our friends, to those proved by long intercourse. Old wine, old books, old friends."


By Ernest Renan
The Poetry of the Celtic Races

"There is a widely-spread belief in that country, that blood speaks, and that two relatives, unknown one to the other, in any part of the world wheresoever it may be, recognise each other by the secret and mysterious emotion which they feel in each other's presence."


By Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
The Education of The Human Race

"Let us also acknowledge that it is a heroic obedience to obey the laws of God simply because they are God's laws, and not because He has promised to reward the obedience to them here and there; to obey them even though there be an entire despair of future recompense, and uncertainty respecting a temporal one."

Christ as "The first practical Teacher. For it is one thing to conjecture, to wish, and to believe the immortality of the soul, as a philosophic speculation: quite another thing to direct the inner and outer acts by it."


By J. C. Friedrich von Schiller
Letters upon the Æsthetic Education of Man

"Ignorant of his own human dignity, he is far removed from honouring it in others, and conscious of his own savage greed, he fears it in every creature that he sees like himself. He never sees others in himself, only himself in others, and human society, instead of enlarging him to the race, only shuts him up continually closer in his individuality."

"The beautiful reconciles the contrast of different natures in its simplest and purest expression. It also reconciles the eternal contrast of the two sexes, in the whole complex framework of society, or at all events it seeks to do so; and, taking as its model the free alliance it has knit between manly strength and womanly gentleness, it strives to place in harmony, in the moral world, all the elements of gentleness and of violence. Now, at length, weakness becomes sacred, and an unbridled strength disgraces; the injustice of nature is corrected by the generosity of chivalrous manners. The being whom no power can make tremble, is disarmed by the amiable blush of modesty, and tears extinguish a vengeance that blood could not have quenched. Hatred itself hears the delicate voice of honour, the conqueror's sword spares the disarmed enemy, and a hospitable hearth smokes for the stranger on the dreaded hill-side where murder alone awaited him before."


By Immanuel Kant
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals

Every proponent of homosexuality ought to read Kant.

"Inexperienced in the course of the world, incapable of being prepared for all its contingencies, I only ask myself: Canst thou also will that thy maxim should be a universal law? If not, then it must be rejected, and that not because of a disadvantage accruing from it to myself or even to others, but because it cannot enter as a principle into a possible universal legislation, and reason extorts from me immediate respect for such legislation."

"we do not need science and philosophy to know what we should do to be honest and good, yea, even wise and virtuous. Indeed we might well have conjectured beforehand that the knowledge of what every man is bound to do, and therefore also to know, would be within the reach of every man, even the commonest."

"Act according to a maxim which can at the same time make itself a universal law."

"Act on maxims which can at the same time have for their object themselves as universal laws of nature. Such then is the formula of an absolutely good will."

"Empirical principles are wholly incapable of serving as a foundation for moral laws. For the universality with which these should hold for all rational beings without distinction, the unconditional practical necessity which is thereby imposed on them, is lost when their foundation is taken from the particular constitution of human nature, or the accidental circumstances in which it is placed. The principle of private happiness, however, is the most objectionable, not merely because it is false, and experience contradicts the supposition that prosperity is always proportioned to good conduct, nor yet merely because it contributes nothing to the establishment of morality—since it is quite a different thing to make a prosperous man and a good man, or to make one prudent and sharp-sighted for his own interests, and to make him virtuous—but because the springs it provides for morality are such as rather undermine it and destroy its sublimity, since they put the motives to virtue and to vice in the same class, and only teach us to make a better calculation, the specific difference between virtue and vice being entirely extinguished."



by Giuseppe Mazzini
Byron and Goethe

"Poetry is the feeling of a former world and of a future."

"I know no more beautiful symbol of the future destiny and mission of art than the death of Byron in Greece. The holy alliance of poetry with the cause of the peoples; the union—still so rare—of thought and action—which alone completes the human Word, and is destined to emancipate the world; the grand solidarity of all nations in the conquest of the rights ordained by God for all his children, and in the accomplishment of that mission for which alone such rights exist—"

On proper criticism: "Certain travellers of the eleventh century relate that they saw at Teneriffe a prodigiously lofty tree, which, from its immense extent of foliage, collected all the vapors of the atmosphere; to discharge them, when its branches were shaken, in a shower of pure and refreshing water. Genius is like this tree, and the mission of criticism should be to shake the branches. At the present day it more resembles a savage striving to hew down the noble tree to the roots."

[Tom]

I read this as part of my Harvard Classics read-through.

Kant's "Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals," where he develops the idea of the categorical imperative, was one highlight of this volume for me. It's more readable than the title sounds, and it was interesting to go to the source and get the full thought process around such an influential idea.

Schiller's "Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man" were the other highlight. I'm sure that either me or Schiller is thinking through some of his arguments (especially when he links politics to aesthetics) in a rather muddled way. But at the same time, this section got heavy highlighting and nudged me towards a greater appreciation of the value and influence of great art. The conclusions and assertions are interesting even though the arguments meant to support them seem sketchy.

[David]

Ponderous and dated.

[Ixby Wuff]

The 13 works of 7 continental authors span 3 centuries of philosophy from Montaigne to Schiller and literary criticism from Sainte-Beuve and Mazzini.