Episode 25 - Michel de Montaigne & Samuel Beckett

In this extended episode, I explore some of the ideas and values that inform and animate the work of the sixteenth-century French thinker, Michel de Montaigne, and the twentieth-century writer and playwright, Samuel Beckett. I suggest that in the work of both of these figures we find echoes of the ideas and values of earlier sceptics – particularly Pyrrho of Elis and Sextus Empiricus. If you haven’t already done so, it may be as well to listen to Episode 17 of this podcast before you embark on this episode – as I explore some of the key ideas of this branch of scepticism in Episode 17. 

Transcript

Michel de Montaigne was born in 1533 and died in 1592. He lived for most of his life in the Chateau de Montaigne, which is about halfway between Bordeaux and Bergerac in southwest France. He is noted for his essays which present his thoughts on everything from his bowel movements to big questions like, ‘how should I live?’ He is considered to be one of the key thinkers of the late Renaissance and an exponent of a form of sceptical enquiry founded by the Greek philosopher, Pyrrho of Elis (c.360-270 BCE ) and the Roman writer, Sextus Empiricus (2nd or 3rd century CE ). 

Montaigne is particularly interested in his own experiences – in the flow of consciousness with all its quirks, twists and turns. In his writing we find him questioning his own beliefs and attitudes, peeling away the prejudices and assumptions that he found in his own thinking and in that of others. He has a restless curiosity about why we act as we do and is continually disturbing and overturning his own certainties. He recognises that he himself is full of contradictions and paradoxes, and he accepts that life is full of surprises and challenges that need to be confronted with courage, clarity of thought and attention - and good humour. Montaigne says in one of his essays that one of the most difficult arts to learn is the art of living with yourself. It is this art he cultivated through his thinking and writing. 

Underlying Montaigne’s inquisitiveness were the questions: ‘How can we achieve peace of mind and how can we live a good life?’ In this he follows in a long line of philosophers who have asked the same questions. For Montaigne part of the answer is to accept his own many-sidedness and to acknowledge and celebrate the diversity of human opinions and beliefs rather than to search for, let alone impose on others, one set of beliefs. He is always uncovering and challenging any form of dogmatic certainty. In this he echoes the process-orientated thinking of philosophers like the Greek thinkers, Heraclitus, Socrates and Plutarch, and the Roman writer, Seneca. 

Montaigne was a keen observer of the flow of his own experiences – trying to document his feelings and thoughts in as honest a way as possible. Sarah Bakewell points out that Montaigne acted on Seneca’s advice on what to do if ‘you become depressed or bored in your retirement […] just look around you and interest yourself in the variety and sublimity of things. Salvation lies in paying full attention to nature.’ (Bakewell 2010: 31) For Montaigne, ‘nature’ meant the everchanging landscape of his own experiences – his thoughts, sensations and feelings. And for Montaigne, there is no great divide between body and mind – certainly there is none of the antipathy for the body and its functions that was a feature of Christian doctrine in his day – the body as an impediment to spiritual insight and growth. In many ways, Montaigne celebrates his body as the vehicle of his life – recording his aches and pains with as much care as his thoughts and feelings. In a sense, Montaigne thinks through his body.

In his longest essay, An Apology for Raymond Sebond, Montaigne, not only explains and defends the natural theology espoused by the Castilian writer, Raymond Sebond, he also articulates his understanding of, and support for, Pyrrhonist scepticism. Indeed his essay, published in 1580, is one of the first to take full account of the thinking of Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus since the publication in France in 1562 of the first modern edition of Sextus’, Outlines of Pyrrhonism. 

Montaigne’s essays, including the Apology, present us with a lucid record of continuous enquiry, a testimony of apparently endless curiosity and questioning. Over and over again Montaigne defers making up his mind about particular ideas and issues. He is always investigating and rarely definite in his conclusions. Indeed, the idea of a conclusion seems anathema to his dialectical method and to his inquisitive mentality. He reminds us that he has taken for his own emblem an image of a balance with the words, ‘what do I know,’ inscribed on it. (Montaigne 1993: 100) And it is the interweaving of doubting curiosity, balanced opinions and open-mindedness that animates Montaigne’s thinking. His curiosity and endless investigating is a typical sceptical trait and one of the derivations of the word scepticism is the Greek term, skeptesthai, which means ‘enquiry.’

Montaigne seems to approve of the Pyrrhonist strategy of not taking sides, of maintaining neutrality in relation to the different sides of an argument. He acknowledges that dogmatic certainty in relation to any opinion, positive or negative, so often leads to trouble, to argument and conflict. He notes how ‘the senses deceive our intellect; it deceives them in their turn.’ (1993: 179) He goes on, ‘Quarrels are constantly arising because one person hears, sees or tastes something differently from another. As much as anything, we quarrel over the diversity of the images conveyed to us by our senses.’ (ibid: 183) Recognising that the diversity of images is inevitable, just as a diversity of opinions, beliefs and values will always arise in relation to any aspect of human affairs, he agrees with Sextus that it is folly to attach oneself to any one image, taste, belief or opinion, if by that we mean that we consider our choice to be the right or true one and others to be wrong or untrue.

To read Montaigne’s essay, is to engage with the equivocations of a mind that interrogates religious belief in order to see more clearly what a belief in God might mean to a rational, intelligent person. Montaigne sifts through the grains of Catholicism as it presents itself to him, finding that much of it is chaff, though some of it may be nourishing wheat. Throughout the Apology he presents us with countless beliefs, habits of thought and moral codes, only to show how they are insubstantial, fallacious or contradictory. He scrutinises assumptions and dogmas in such a way that we can see the inconsistencies in them. He does this in a spirit of open-ended enquiry, laced with a humane wonder at the comic folly of human belief and gullibility. Montaigne’s forensic analysis of his own personality reveals a ragged patchwork of thoughts, emotions, sensations and attachments that are anything but consistent. His scepticism finds little room for certainty and no room for any absolutes other than God, an entity that remains enigmatic and ineffable, and towards which Montaigne seems equivocal. It is as if God is that which remains when all the trappings of belief, ritual, dogma and convention have been removed from the religious institutions that made up the Catholic church of his time. God is a remainder, a possibility leftover from the exercise of doubt and critical enquiry.

In a way that is perhaps surprising, Montaigne argues for the efficacy of Pyrrhonist scepticism, as a preparation for religious practice. He makes a leap, which many of his sceptic forebears might have considered a leap too far, from sceptical enquiry and doubt to religious belief of a very particular kind. He maintains that the sceptical method can lead us to become open to divine grace. He writes: ‘Man, stripped of all human learning [is] all the more able to lodge the divine within him.’ He then uses the arresting phrase, ‘annihilating his intellect to make room for faith.’ (ibid: 74) Montaigne is a sceptical believer in some kind of God or godliness. He seems to see nothing illogical in arguing that the dialectical tools developed by Pyrrho and Sextus can be used to strip away false certainties, beliefs and dogmas in order to open the human mind and heart to something other, a potential for another kind of knowledge or experience. Once we are free of attachment to one side or the other in the conflict of dogmatic assertions, we may become, as he says, ‘a blank writing-tablet, made ready for the finger of God to carve such letters on [us] as he pleases.’ (ibid) This may seem a strange step for Montaigne to take in his seemingly remorseless exercise of sceptical logic, but it is important to give due consideration to his argument. 

Montaigne’s notion of God as a non-judgmental open presence is far removed from the authoritarian narrow judgmental view of God as espoused by many of his contemporaries. Montaigne experienced the conflict and bitterness caused by this narrow view as the battles between French Catholics and Huguenots raged around him. This conflict between two sects of the same religion, catholic and protestant, citizens of the same country, France, lasted from 1562 to 1598 and Montaigne witnessed first-hand how dogmatic beliefs drove a stake into the heart of tolerance and kindness – even setting family members against each other. These wars were rooted in divergent speculations about the nature of God – speculations which Montaigne considered to be unverifiable and therefore very provisional – maybe a basis for friendly discussion and open-ended argument, but not for violence and war. 

Apparently, Montaigne was very fond of a story about a king who meets a philosopher. The philosopher asks the king what his plans are. The king replies, ‘I am going to conquer Spain.’ The philosopher says, ‘um, interesting…. And then what will you do?’ The king says, ‘then I will conquer Turkey.’ ‘And then,’ asks the philosopher. ‘Well, then I will conquer India.’ ‘I see,’ says the philosopher, ‘and what next.’ This continues for a while and the king grows weary. The philosopher then asks again, ‘and what will you do when you have conquered all these countries?’ The tired king replies, ‘well, I will probably put my feet up and have a glass of wine.’ There is a long quiet pause and then the philosopher says, ‘if that is your destination wouldn’t it be better to put your feet up now and open that bottle of wine and avoid all that bloodshed?’

Montaigne accepts, indeed he seems to celebrate, the bounded and provisional qualities of human understanding. We may seek transcendence, but we cannot avoid our limitations. At the end of the Apology, he quotes Seneca: ‘Oh, what a vile and abject thing is man if he does not rise above humanity.’ (ibid: 189) But he immediately comments on Seneca’s remark:

'A pithy saying; a most useful aspiration, but absurd withal. For to make a fistful bigger than the fist, an armful larger than the arm, or to try and make your stride wider than your legs can stretch, are things monstrous and impossible. Nor may a man mount above himself or above humanity: for he can only see with his own eyes, grip with his own grasp. '(ibid)

This is typical of Montaigne’s analytical mind and his questioning of ideas and beliefs. No person, be he a king, or a philosopher, can be all-seeing or all-knowing. We are all limited in what we can see and know – thus, we should acknowledge our limitations, celebrate our differences and enjoy each other’s company – not claim to know the one-and-only truth and to wage war against those who see things differently. In contrast to the divisiveness of dogma and unfounded certainty, Montaigne believes that humans have a capacity to transform narrowness and bigotry into expansive acceptance and kindness - and he sees this as essential to his notion of a religious life of tolerance and curiosity. Towards the end of the Apology, he writes that humanity ‘will rise by abandoning and disavowing his own means, letting himself be raised and pulled up by purely heavenly ones.’ (ibid: 190) It is only by letting-go of attachment to dogma and false certainty that human beings can aspire to a ‘holy and miraculous metamorphosis.’ It is with these words that Montaigne ends the Apology. 

How these words echo those of many mystics who would also argue that only through abandoning dogmatic belief, attachment and intention, and the certainty that accompanies them, can we open ourselves to the possibility of achieving a full realisation of the mystery of simply being here.

Samuel Beckett

Though it may seem surprising, the Irish/French writer, Samuel Beckett, can be considered as a successor to Montaigne – for Beckett is a deeply sceptical writer who strips away the cant, hypocrisy, false religiosity and unchallenged beliefs of formal Christianity and yet somehow keeps open a place for what we might call ‘sacredness,’ or rather a place for wonder at the sheer fact of being here. There is a poignancy to Beckett’s forensic interrogation of Christian ideas and practices, carried to such an extreme that there seems to be little left upon which he can depend, or in which he can believe. But, against all the odds, he seems open to the idea that human beings exist in an improbable state of grace – given a life which, against all the odds, can be blessed with moments of joy or resigned equanimity.

Beckett was born in Dublin in 1906 and by 1928 he was in Paris teaching at the Ecole Normale Superieure for two years. By 1937 he had moved to Paris, more or less for good. He is reported to have said later, that he preferred ‘France at war to Ireland at peace.’ His Irish citizenship meant that he could live in France as a neutral citizen throughout the Second World War. He was active in the French resistance movement until around 1942, when other members of his group were arrested by the Gestapo – at which point he and his lover, and later wife, Suzanne, fled to the unoccupied zone in the south, until the end of the war. Later Beckett was awarded the Croix de Guerre for bravery during his time in the French resistance. After the war he settled in Paris and within about five years, he had written the plays, Waiting for Godot and Endgame, the novels Malloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, as well as many short stories and a book of criticism. Many of these texts were written, and often first published, in French. In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Beckett died in 1989, and he and Suzanne, who had died only a few months previously, are buried beside each other in the cemetery of Montparnasse in Paris.

In Beckett’s 1958 play, Krapp’s Last Tape, the protagonist sits in his cluttered room listening to old tapes of diary entries. He grumbles and curses, seemingly full of disgust at his pitiful observations and his fruitless attempts to make sense of his existence. Yet amidst this dismal catalogue of seeming failure, he comes across a thirty-year-old recording of his description of a moment of bliss, lying in a punt on a river with his then lover: ‘We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side. (Pause) Past midnight. Never knew such silence. The earth might be uninhabited.’ (McPherson 2006) Krapp tries to subject this brief recording to the same ridicule and invective he has heaped on everything else he has listened to, but there is something about it he can’t dismiss, and he returns to it. The play ends with him listening, transfixed, snared by a blissful episode he is unable either to understand or to deny. 

Beckett is often described and discussed as a misanthropic nihilist who seems to think the only redeeming feature of humanity is our occasional gallows humour muttered in the face of pain and misery. Despite this reading of his work - moments of quiet, peace and bliss crop up in surprising places throughout his plays and other writings – recounted with a warmth and almost-reverence that belies his miserabilist reputation. Often the darkness is punctuated and relieved by a welcome light: ‘Bright at last close of a dark day the sun shines out at last and goes down.’ (Beckett 1995: 240)

There is a redemptive quality to Beckett’s writing, a sense that by interrogating human existence, exposing the folly of becoming reliant upon idle assumptions, misguided beliefs and formulaic responses to the constant indeterminate twists and turns of lived experience –as if by facing up to and documenting such deluded thoughts and actions we can slough off the carapace of hubris and false optimism, finding instead a more humble sense of who we are and how we can live. Beckett seems to suggest a way of dealing with the contingency of life that involves first accepting that life is inevitably full of uncertainty, full of partings and uncontrollable events, and then accepting that it is only by acknowledging our inability to bring certainty to our lives through knowledge and control that we can learn to let go gracefully. The combination of courageous acceptance that all things pass, even those things we most wish to persist, and clarity of awareness of the folly of believing otherwise, can lead us to a state of equanimity – a state in which we suspend judgment and belief, and are less likely to be disturbed by attachment to false ideals and fantasies.

James Knowlson, in his biography, Damned to Fame, suggests that Beckett’s distinctive approach to writing can be traced to his relationship with James Joyce and his discovery of a way to extricate himself from Joyce’s influence. Beckett tells Knowlson: ‘I realized that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [and being] in control of one’s material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realized that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding.’ (see Anon 2024) Beckett develops a way of writing that demonstrates in its methods a way of living, a way of attending to the flux and contingency of existence. By stripping away unnecessary ornament, narrative artifice and discursive formulae, his writings can be seen as embodying a realisation that a clear awareness of life’s uncertainty, pain and evanescence can lead to moments of tranquillity, and to a tolerance and sympathy for those around us. Beckett sums up his realisation with characteristic brevity when he writes: ‘A story is not compulsory, just a life, that's the mistake I made, one of the mistakes, to have wanted a story for myself, whereas life alone is enough.’ (Melnyczuk 1996)

Returning to Montaigne – on being awake

I want to end this episode by returning Michel de Montaigne in order to suggest a few similarities between Montaigne’s attitudes to living and writing, and some of the Buddhist ideas and practices I have discussed in other episodes of Dharma Roads. In his writings, though typically not in any sustained or obviously schematic fashion, Montaigne has much to say about the importance of attending to what is happening from moment-to-moment. In the following remarks I am drawing upon Sarah Bakewell’s excellent and unusual biography of Montaigne, titled, How to Live. (Bakewell 2010) 

Montaigne recognises how life slips away from him even as he perceives with great clarity its qualities, both joyful and painful. He writes, ‘I do not portray being. I portray passing. Not the passing from one age to another [...] but from day to day, from minute to minute.’ (ibid: 36) This heightened sense of mutability, of the evanescent nature of phenomena, imbues Montaigne’s writings with poignancy and courage - the courage he demonstrates in facing the passing of each moment of life. Like the Buddha, Montaigne is a realist in his understanding of the nature of lived experience. He accepts the finite uniqueness of each passing moment, realising with a kind of benign indifference that all he can do is to try to experience each moment as intensely as possible without clinging or hanging on to what can never be slowed or stopped.

At times Montaigne’s observations are uncannily like the advice given by Zen teachers to their students. For instance, he writes about walking alone in a beautiful orchard, noticing that his mind has a tendency to wander off, to dwell on ‘extraneous incidents.’ When this happens, he tells us that he brings his mind ‘back to the walk, to the orchard, to the sweetness of this solitude, and to me.’ (ibid: 38) This technique of watching the mind, noticing how and where it wanders, and gently bringing the attention back to what is going on now in the field of awareness is used extensively in Buddhism, as it is in many Christian approaches to contemplative prayer. 

When Montaigne writes elsewhere, ‘when I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep,’ (ibid) he seems to be almost quoting from the literature of Zen in which we find the following pithy remark by the Chinese Tang dynasty teacher, Yun-men (or Ummon in Japanese): ‘In walking, just walk. In sitting, just sit. Above all, don’t wobble.’ (in Watts 1989: 135) Both authors suggest that we should try to avoid dividing our attention in such a way that we lose touch with what is going on at any particular moment, drifting in an inattentive way from object to object, thought to thought, feeling to feeling, without being aware of what we are doing. This is to be dreaming while only half awake, to sleepwalk through life. Montaigne, like the Buddha, suggests that life is too precious in its passing to be left unattended. As Seneca reminds us, ‘anyone who clears their vision and lives in full awareness of the world as it is [...] can never be bored with life.’ (Bakewell 2010: 111) Montaigne aspired to this state of awakening - a state, Buddhists believe, that was realised by the Buddha – whose name means ‘the awakened one – the enlightened one.’

There is much we can learn from Montaigne and Beckett as we make our own way in the world. They both advise us to be attentive, to be present rather than absent, to be kind in the face of life’s joys and heartaches, and to laugh, or at least chuckle, at the absurdities of human beliefs and actions. They remind us that all dharma roads are bumpy, twisty and full of potholes – so we need to look where we are going, take care of each other and to smile even as we weep.

Thank you for listening and bye for now.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anon. 2024. Wikipedia entry on Samuel Beckett. On line at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Beckett (consulted 20 May 2024).

Bakewell, Sarah. 2010. How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in one question and twenty attempts at an answer. London: Chatto & Windus.

Beckett, Samuel. 1995. The Complete Short Prose: 1929-1989. New York: Grove Press.

McPherson, Conor. 2006. Chronicles of the Human Heart, The Guardian, 1 March 2006. On line at http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2006/mar/01/theatre.beckettat100 (consulted 18.10.2010).

Melnyczuk, Askold. 1996. Beckett’s Brightness on Dark Days. On line at - http://www.samuel-beckett.net/boston/bright.html accessed 18/10/2010 - in 2024, no longer available.

Montaigne, Michel de, trans. & ed. Screech, M. A. 1993. An Apology for Raymond Sebond, London: Penguin.

Watts, Alan. 1989. The Way of Zen. New York: Vintage Books.