Montaigne on Language and Authenticity

The path to authenticity begins with examining our language.

Montaigne and language

This is Part 6 of an extended commentary on Montaigne’s “Of Experience,” an essay that helped to establish the genre of the personal essay. Montaigne and the personal essay show us how to study the self and find ways to lead a full and meaningful life. Each post can be read separately. If, however, you want to read the series in sequence, consult the Table of Contents below, under the portrait of Punk Rock Montaigne:

Part 6: Montaigne, Language, and Authenticity

Posted August 15, 2025. Version 1.0.

Montaigne:

Why is it that our common language, so easy to be understood in all other matters, becomes so obscure so harsh and so hard to be understood in law, cases, bills, contracts, indentures, citations, wills and testaments? And that he who so plainly expresses himself, whenever he speaks or writes on other subjects, is unable to declare himself or his meaning in law without some doubt or contradiction? Unless it be, that the princes of this art are applying themselves with a particular attention to invent and choose strange and solemn words, and frame artificially cunning clauses, have so plodded and poised every syllable, canvased and sifted so exquisitely every clause, that they are now so entangled and so confounded in endless figures and minute partitions, that they cannot communicate with the sense of any order, or prescription, or certain understanding.

Confusum est quidquid usque in puluerem sectum est.

[Whatsoever is sliced into very powder is confused.]

{For a comparison, see Frame’s translation, p. 994.; Atkinson and Sices’ translation, p. 230.]

Commentary:

In “Montagine and the Event,” I wrote about the usefulness of the postmodern perspective. Part of that perspective, which is far from unified, is the idea that the self is a fiction, which raises questions about the possibility of authenticity.

The idea of the “self” being a fiction is often repeated in Annaka Harris’ Lights On, a podcast about consciousness, which I am listening to on Audible. It is an excellent series.

In this post, I am going to try to reshape this line of thought a bit.

To say that the self is a “fiction” implies that it is not real. I agree that the self is largely constructed, but that does not mean it is unreal or that it is unimportant.

So, my first tweak of the postmodern approach to the self is this: The self can be largely constructed and real. We need an integrated self to move through life. But how can a self be both constructed and real?

We are born into bodies. Heidegger is famous for saying that, at our birth, we are also thrust into language. That language already exists. So, as individuals, right off the bat, we are dealing with both bodies and language.

Your body is not exactly the same as mine, which means that part of the task of constructing a self involves understanding what it means to live in my body—not your body.

This might seem like I am trying to resuscitate the Romantic self—that is, the idea that we are born with an identity that we need to discover. In a way, I am. I can sense some postmoderns reading this and cringing. Here’s a nuance: It can be useful for our individual development to proceed as if the Romantic self were a thing—even if it is not a thing.

As I begin to discover what it is like to live in my body, I am discovering at least some aspects of how I am different from others. This is not anything like a fully formed identity or self. This is what Antonio Damasio, the Portuguese neuroscientist, calls the core self or the proto-self, but most of our development as individuals takes place within language, which means coming to terms with cultural baggage that our language brings with it.

We need to understand who we are within language, but we also need to understand who we are outside of language. Yes, this statement raises all kinds of intellectual squabbles about language, such as, is it possible to think outside of language? Are we all trapped with the prison house of language? Etc.

I am sure we will get into all of these pissing contests later. For now, let me repeat what I have already stated in this commentary: The human body is the foundation of ethics. If I am being physically or emotionally abused by another human being, I will feel the trauma in my body. Part of my task at developing my self is acknowledging this trauma and processing it. Healing it. I don’t think it gets more real than this. Foucault, who is as postmodern as you can get, often writes about the care of self. We don’t have to get lost in binaries. We can think beyond them.

We’re going to do the musical interlude early. It’s probably needed about here. Hang in there. The worst is over. It’s all downhill from here. So, take a quick break and then we’ll get back to it:

This brings us to the above Montaigne passage.

Montaigne is beginning to address issues of language and authenticity. He is not only interested in legal language. Rather, he is interested in the way that a specialized language that develops within a specialized setting, such as the law, becomes less connected to typical human experience. He is using legal language as an example of how humans allow obscure language to create a barrier between themselves and their experience, between themselves and truth, and between them and other people.

He is also writing against habituated forms of thinking that we begin to regard as reality rather than as an arbitrary path of history. I am thinking here of the archeological histories of Nietzsche (On the Genealogy of Morals, 1887) and Foucault (Madness and Civilization, 1961; The Birth of the Clinic, 1966; Discipline and Punish, 1975). Both Nietzsche and Foucault would say that we have a tendency to ignore the history of our culture and institutions. Their genealogies unearth that lost history and show us that the construction of our “reality” is filled with historical accidents that happen within the specialized language of discursive regimes.

A discursive regime is Foucault’s term for the kind of specialized language within a discipline, like law, that emerges historically. Foucault uses the term “regime” to indicate that the language of the discipline incorporates power relations that determine how one builds knowledge and even what kinds of questions are allowed. The concept of a discursive regime helps us to understand what concerns Montaigne about legal language and other forms of language as well.

While Montaigne is using law as an example, we should not minimize the importance of the development of legal systems, especially Roman law, which not only created the idea of integrated individuals who would be legally responsible for their actions but also the power relationships among these individuals. Roman law established property rights. These rights extended beyond the ownership of land, dwellings, and material objects; it also covered rights regarding the ownership of slaves. In this sense, coming to terms with the legal system and its language is part of creating the ethical self.

Montaigne ends the paragraph with a quote from Seneca (Letter 89, Moral Letters to Lucilius). He might have also been thinking of Letter 75. We can find this same concern about how language might affect the ethical self in Seneca’s letters, written in the first century, long before Montaigne wrote his Essais.

As a quick aside, in The Ethics of Nonfiction, I argued that the intimacy of the personal essay owes much to the extended exchange of letters between friends, such as those between Seneca and Lucilius, a younger man whom Seneca mentored.

In Letter 75, which Foucault cites often in The Hermeneutics of the Self. Seneca is responding to Lucilius’ complaint that he needs to craft his letters more carefully:

You have been complaining that my letters to you are rather carelessly written. Now who talks carefully unless he also desires to talk affectedly? I prefer that my letters should be just what my conversation would be if you and I were sitting in one another’s company or taking walks together, spontaneous and easy; for my letters have nothing strained or artificial about them. If it were possible, I should prefer to show, rather than speak, my feelings. Even if I were arguing a point, I should not stamp my foot, or toss my arms about, or raise my voice; but I should leave that sort of thing to the orator, and should be content to have conveyed my feelings to you without having either embellished them or lowered their dignity. I should like to convince you entirely of this one fact,--that I feel whatever I say, that I not only feel it, but am wedded to it.

Later in this letter, Seneca wrote: “That man has fulfilled his purpose who is in the same person both when you see him and when you hear him.” Authenticity comes with consistency in all aspects of our lives and in a plain style.

Foucault argues that this kind of informal, spontaneous way of writing (parresia, speaking the truth) is speaking without rhetoric. We can see the same concern in Montaigne as he writes about the lawyer who is so focused on style that the writing becomes obscure and, ultimately, false.

Foucault is not entirely consistent on his view of rhetoric, but he generally has a limited post-Ramus view of rhetoric as embellishment and manipulation (see The Government of Self, 229, 236, 266, 304, 320, 334). Most current rhetoricians would argue that parresia and this style of letter writing have their own rhetoric.

Seneca, Montaigne, and Foucault nonetheless point to the importance of authenticity in the personal essay: the connection between self and knowledge about living. In The Government of Self and Others, Foucault also ties parresia to the maintenance of democracy (152-55).

I am not necessarily advocating for “plain speak,” which is often part of populist movements, some of which lead to authoritarianism. I am advocating for not becoming lost in our language.

How do we move toward a simple and authentic language? Is this a matter of stripping away layers of obscure language? Or, is it more about finding a language that is meaningful because it is closer to our unique experience?