Montaigne and Dissonance
Montaigne begins to critique laws, but he is actually critiquing a particular kind of thinking.
This is Part 3 of an extended commentary on Montaigne’s “Of Experience,” an essay that helped to establish the genre of the personal essay. The audience is writers of nonfiction, especially those who work in the personal essay and memoir or normal human beings who want to learn about Montaigne. If you want to read the series in sequence, consult the Table of Contents below:
“Of Experience”: Part 3
Revised August 12, 2025. Version 1.1.
Montaigne:
Yet, I am not pleased with the opinion of that man that supposed by the multitude of laws to curb the authority of judges, cutting them into pieces. He didn’t see that there is as much liberty and extension in the interpretation of laws as in their fabrication. And those but mock themselves who think to diminish our debates and end them by quoting the sacred Bible. Because our spirit does not find the field less spacious, to control and check the sense of others, than to represent his own: And as if there were as little courage and sharpness to glossing as to inventing.
[For a comparison, see Frame’s translation, p. 993; Atkinson and Sices’ translation, pp. 288-89.]
Commentary:
The ”man,” according to Atkinson and Sices, is probably King Charle VII of France. Montaigne criticizes him for trying to make laws more specific in order to reduce the need to interpret them as they are applied.
It is interesting that Montaigne, here, defends the need for laws that are interpreted with flexibility (he doesn’t like King Charles VII intervening) because he will soon begin a critique of laws as a way of thinking—we could say as a kind of Reason.
In the previous section (see Part II), Montaigne discussed similarity and difference as modes of perception. In his translation, Florio begins this paragraph with “yet.” Frame begins it with “therefore.” Atkinson and Sices do not include a transitional. I don’t have access to the original Middle French (if I did, it would do me little good), but I suspect that there is some sort of transitional here (“yet” or “therefore” or something like that) that Atkinson and Sices didn’t think made much sense. Maybe they are right. Maybe it didn’t quite make sense, but maybe this was Montaigne being Montaigne. Maybe he used a transitional that would suggest logical or linear thinking as he was in the process of critiquing that kind of thinking.
In other words, if we accept that there was some sort of transitional at the beginning of the paragraph, the first sentence in this paragraph does not logically follow from the preceding paragraph.
It is a break in thought. Indeed, the first sentence of this paragraph is not even a conclusion; it is an expression of a feeling. After mentioning forms of Reason, Montaigne leaps to a new topic and a statement that doesn’t have anything to do with Reason. It is an expression of emotion about a relatively recent historical event, a vague reference, rather than logic. What is going on here? I think that Montaigne is preparing us to think beyond the logic/emotion binary and other forms of linear thought.
The structure of a Montaigne essay, as has frequently been noted, imitates the flow of his thoughts. He follows associations rather than topics arranged logically or hierarchically. Is the “yet” or “therefore” ironic? Does he want to question the limits of logic as he makes a statement of disapproval? Is he, after mentioning types of Reason, warning us that his thoughts will not build logical arguments?
As we read Montaigne, we need to be prepared for breaks and shifts in thought.
As Montaigne mentions the interpretation of laws and the Bible, he is raising another path to pursuing knowledge—the reading of established texts. As said earlier, the dominant epistemology in Montaigne’s time was Scholasticism, which was grounded in interpretations of the Bible and Aristotle.
Here, Montaigne states the need for interpretation. Soon, he will critique the interpretation of interpretations of interpretations.
As a magistrate, this was how Montaigne spent much of his adult life. In How to Live (2010), Sarah Bakewell writes:
Montaigne’s daily life involved the law more than politics. . . . He would study the details [of court cases], summarize them, and hand his written interpretation to the councillors. It was not up to him to pass judgment, only to sum things up intelligently and lucidly, and capture each party’s point of view. Perhaps this is where he first developed his feeling for the multiplicity of perspectives on every human situation, a feeling that runs like an artery through the Essays. (p. 77)
As Montaigne begins to critique laws, we will see him shifting perspectives. For him, multiple interpretations are always better than one rigidly and devotedly followed.
Short aside about Bakewell’s book: I was discussing How to Live with my son, Jay. He has also read it. Jay commented on how, intriguingly, she was able to write a biography of a sixteenth century writer and turn it into a self-help book. That’s appropriate because Montaigne’s essays are about, to borrow the title of Bakewell’s book, how to live. I would like to say that Montaigne’s Essays is the first psycho-salvation self-help book in Western civilization, but it is not. One of the Stoics, maybe Seneca, probably gets that honor. The point of this aside: the Stoics and Montaigne, following their lead, were able to write about becoming a better person, living a fuller life, without lapsing into hippie-dippy dribble.
By acknowledging the importance and variability of interpretation, in an essay about the importance of learning from experience, Montaigne questioned the foundation of Scholasticism and we could even say early bureaucratic practice. As a magistrate, he was himself a minor bureaucrat.
He is also arguing against rhetorical acts that shut down thought and dialogue, like quoting an authoritative text. We could say that he is arguing against quoting texts without engaging with them and interpreting them—against using quotations out-of-context dogmatically.
Montaigne was a learned, well read man, who owned about a thousand books, and yet he often criticized books as a barrier to learning from experience and engaging with nature. The same apparent contradiction will appear later in both British and American Romantics, especially in the works of Emerson and Thoreau.
It is also important to remember that the first edition of Essais appeared in 1580. Martin Luther posted his 95 theses in 1517. Gutenberg invented moveable type and the printing press in 1540, just forty years earlier. Montaigne was writing his essays in an era of social upheaval, including the Protestant Reformation and religious wars that seemed to have no end.
We could say that the Protestant Reformation began as a matter of interpretation. Luther wanted to democratize interpretation, take it away from the priests, allow the lay people to read the Bible and find their own truth. This argument could not have been made until books, including the Bible, were more available.
Finally, Montaigne is introducing the idea that interpretation plays a role in learning from experience as much as interpretation plays a role is learning from texts. He sees both the value and danger of interpretations. He understands that interpretations raise issues of not just how we determine knowledge but also how power operates, as Foucault will argue in the later half of the twentieth century.