L'Ontologie de la contradiction sceptique. Pour L'etude de la metaphysique des Essais.

Jan Miernowski. L'Ontologie de la contradiction sceptique. Pour L'etude de la metaphysique des Essais.

(Etudes montaignistes, 32.) Paris: Honore Champion, 1998. 161 pp. FFr 180. ISBN: 2-85203-833-1.

David Quint. Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy. Ethical and Political Themes in the Essais.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. xv + 172 pp. $37.50. ISBN: 0-691-04836-3.

These two important and original books on the Essais approach Montaigne from very different points of view. Miernowski places him in the context of philosophical inquiry, relating his notion of being to his skepticism. Quint posits a Montaigne involved in his troubled times, encouraging the French nobility toward a new model of heroic virtue to calm the violence of the French civil wars.

For Miernowski, Montaigne's ontology shapes epistemology. Miernowski examines the role of opposition and contradiction in Ancient notions of virtue, as well as in the Essais. Virtue, as opposed to simple goodness, requires struggle with a contrary force. Resisting opposition is a recurring motif in Montaigne's description of the human condition and in the relationship he envisions with his own reader. His penchant for contradiction is consistent with skepticism, and both are incompatible with the law of non-contradiction, a basic axiom of Aristotle's metaphysics. Sixteenth-century skepticism shows affinities with the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite and Nicolas of Cusa. Miernowski outlines the polemics between negative theology and Aristotelian scholasticism in the fifteenth century and shows how appealing Cusa's arguments were to both evangelical reformers and skeptics in the early sixteenth century. Like the negative theologians, both the reformers and the skeptics found the law of non-c ontradiction incompatible with their epistemological views. Miernowski finds the influence of Cusa's negative theology fundamental to Montaigne's skepticism, particularly as it unfolds in the Apologie de Raimond Sebond. Chapter two traces in the Apologie negative theology's challenge not only of rationalism but also of docta ignorantia and pyrrhonism. For Miernowski, even those last two philosophical positions are too positive to describe Montaigne's ontology. He finds that nothing attenuates the profound and total negativity of the Apologie's view of human ontological emptiness. Montaigne's nihilistic portrait goes even beyond that of Marguerite de Navarre's evangelical mysticism, because there is no possibility of transcending human nothingness in a mystical union with God. Miernowski sees in Montaigne's choice of Plutarch and Seneca to conclude the Apologie a supreme irony: two writers who had no possibility of enjoying grace and faith show the impossibility of transcendence.

Some readers of Montaigne might argue that subsequent essays revise the radically negative view put forth in the Apologie. They might point, for example, to the conclusion of the final essay, "De l'experience," which speaks of knowing how to enjoy one's being as an "absolue perfection, et comme divine." Miernowski, however, rejects any notion that Montaigne allowed a safe middle ground where his etre could escape the ontological void that is humanity.

A recurring pattern in Montaigne's argumentation presents a sequence of three levels in such a way that the two apparently contradictory extremes coincide in marked dissimilarity from the middle level. Miernowski examines that triadic pattern and finds in it both a striking similarity with the metaphysics of Nicolas of Cusa and a challenge to the principle of noncontradiction. He points our that Montaigne uses that configuration in its pure form when he is discussing values beyond the reach of human knowledge and expression: death and perfect friendship, for example. The comparison of Socrates' and Cato's virtue exploits the pattern, as does Montaigne's description of his own enterprise in "Des vaines subtilitez." Elsewhere, Montaigne disturbs the clear, harmonious gradation from sublime to lowly in an ironic demonstration of human nothingness.

Such extremely negative ontology might seem incompatible with the Essais's proclaimed project of understanding and portraying the self of its author. How can an author who denies being pretend to self-knowledge? In chapter 4, Miernowski finds the best formulation of that problem in the essay "Du repentir." In the light of negative ontology, Montaigne's conclusion that human beings are incapable of authentic repentance is inevitable. Miernowski acknowledges the apparently contradictory statements about the self in "Du repentir" and argues that it is Montaigne's consistently negative ontology that makes his portrait of the self so original and engaging. This closely-focussed study raises new questions about the philosophical coherence of the Essais.

Quint's study also begins by highlighting opposition and its consequences in the Essais. Here the opposition is military, the confrontation between victor and vanquished, and ethical, the victor's choice between clemency and revenge. The examples from past history evoke the immediate world for which Montaigne wrote, a world where self-interest and violence determine the course of political life. Montaigne's intended audience, Quint argues, is his own class, the warring French nobility; whose ethical standards had disintegrated into a culture of egotism, revenge, and cruelty. The essays portraying military encounters are part of a larger rhetorical strategy urging those nobles toward new habits of empathy, accommodation, and clemency. Against the Stoic model of unflinching and unfeeling valor, Montaigne constructs a new ideal of virtue where sparing the defeated defines nobility. Quint proceeds through careful, detailed reading of selected essays, noting how Montaigne develops and complicates his lessons on h uman behavior across the twenty years and three printed stages of the Essais's composition. The first chapter studies in Montaigne's opening essay the gallery of military victors whose various reactions to the defeated allow no easy generalization. Quint examines in particular the paradoxical figure of Alexander. His cruelty toward Betis puzzles Montaigne because it seems to run counter to Alexander's characteristic valor. Quint proposes that Montaigne framed the Essais with Alexander, gradually delineating a negative example of noble virtue that culminates in the last essay "De l'experience" (111:13). The positive example who counters Alexander is Epaminondas, the Theban general who showed clemency to his enemies and whose compassionate nature Montaigne describes in terms similar to those he uses to describe himself.

In his second chapter, Quint examines two essays on cruelty, showing how Montaigne makes cruelty incompatible with noble valor. The crisis of the civil wars had made violence and revenge the norm in addressing conflict. Montaigne exposes the noble pastime of the hunt as an activity that conditions men to accept and later practice a similar brutality toward other men in battle. The new ideal of virtue that Montaigne urges on his fellow noblemen is neither rigid Stoicism nor Christian charity. Socrates and Cato emerge here again to illustrate through the contrast of their suicides the ethos that Montaigne supports. Socrates humbler and apparently more effortless virtue mirrors an affable nature that Montaigne claims as his own. In "De la crusute" Montaigne explains by that nature his inherent disposition against physical cruelty, whether toward animals in the hunt or other human beings by torture. He attacks the sadism practiced toward captives in the civil wars as bestial rather than heroic and relates those extreme practices to the Stoic ideal of strenuous virtue and disdain for the body. Through the careful orchestration of his essay, Montaigne suggests that the Stoic emphasis on self-mastery has made its followers incapable of forgiveness, both of themselves and of others. Throughout his discussion, Quint pays careful attention to the works of Antiquity with which Montaigne dialogues and to the changes that his position undergoes as he expands the Essais. He respects the complexity and paradox of the Essais. Quint situates Montaigne's efforts to re-define noble virtue against the backdrop of his family's own recent accession to the noblesse de robe, a group disdained by the older warrior class, the noblesse d'epee.

In that context, Quint offers a new reading of "Des cannibales" in which the Brazilian Indians are not noble savages portrayed with admiration, but rather the extreme embodiment of barbaric horror, of a "culture that cannot pardon" (75). Quint emphasizes the continuity between that essay and the many other depictions of a victor's encounter with his captive adversary. He shows how Montaigne stresses the similarities among the warring cannibalistic societies, even rewriting the cannibal's song to show that their ritual enactment of violence is really a self-destruction. The spectacle of similar societies practicing reciprocal vengeance indicts a culture that is devouring itself. The cannibals provide a grim mirror for the nobles perpetuating the civil wars. In a cluster of essays echoing or foreshadowing "Des cannibales," Montaigne criticizes the obstinacy of the martyrs, both Huguenot and Catholic, as well as the cruelty of their self-righteous killers.

To replace the ethos of unbending valor and cruelty to the vanquished, Montaigne advocates an ethics of yielding. In his final chapter, Quint examines Montaigne's opposition to political revolt and revisits the question of his conservatism. He situates him between the pull toward a strong central monarchy, on the one hand, and the resistance of those nostalgic for the feudal past, on the other. Here the exemplary essay is "De l'art de conferer," where an agonistic model of conversation teaches the warring nobles how to resolve their differences verbally rather than violently. Montaigne's anecdote in "De la phisionomie" about his own successful experience of yielding reinforces that lesson. Quint closes his book by analyzing a letter Montaigne wrote to Henry IV urging the king to practice leniency and clemency a fitting end to a work that argues eloquently for the political and ethical mission of the Essais.