Michel de Montaigne against the ‘infinite interpretation’ of the postmoderns
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…