Montaigne and the Habit of Doubt

Michel de Montaigne retired to his tower in 1571 at the age of thirty-eight. He had served as a magistrate, fought a war, lost his closest friend, lost a child, and decided that the next phase of his life would be the examination of his own mind. He had a Latin motto carved into the beams of his study: Que sais-je? — What do I know?

The question is the seed of the modern essai, the genre Montaigne effectively invented. Essai meant trial or attempt — not a finished argument but a working-out. The form was new because Montaigne was doing something new. He was using writing as a method of self-discovery, on the assumption that what he found out about himself, sincerely investigated, would be useful to other people because people are largely similar.

This is a deceptively radical method. Most writing before Montaigne — and a great deal of writing since — is performative. The author has reached a conclusion and is now presenting it to a reader, polished and confident. Montaigne refused this posture. He included the doubts, the contradictions, the changes of mind. He revised successive editions of his essays not to correct his earlier views but to add to them — sometimes preserving the old view and the new view side by side, marked, so that the reader could see him changing.

What he believed, deeply, is that certainty is usually a mistake. Not because nothing is true — Montaigne was not a nihilist — but because most of the things we think we know we know by inheritance, habit, social pressure, or self-flattery. He pointed out, gently and at length, that the customs of the French are obvious common sense to the French and ridiculous to the Brazilians, and vice versa, and there is no court of appeal. He pointed out that the most confident statements people make about their own motives are often the most wrong, because the mind that is being examined is the same mind that is doing the examining.

His skepticism, though, is not corrosive. He does not conclude that nothing can be acted on. He concludes that one should act with a kind of cheerful provisional commitment — do what seems right, knowing you may be mistaken, willing to find out. The opposite of skepticism is not commitment; it is dogmatism, and dogmatism is the more dangerous error because it forecloses learning.

There is a discipline implicit in this method. You have to be willing to write down what you actually think, including the parts that contradict each other, including the parts that make you look foolish. Montaigne is full of these. He admits to laziness, to vanity, to inconsistency, to changing his mind about important things multiple times. He does this not as a confession — confession implies guilt — but as data. Here is a person, examined honestly. What can be learned from him?

The cultural moment that most resembles Montaigne's was probably his own — France in the second half of the sixteenth century, in the middle of the religious wars, when every certainty had become a reason for killing one's neighbor. Montaigne is what skepticism looks like as a response to too much certainty. Not less commitment to truth, but less attachment to one's current account of the truth. Holding one's beliefs loosely enough to update them, tightly enough to act on them.

It is a difficult posture and most people, then and now, find it easier to be confident than to be honest. Montaigne is what it looks like to choose honesty without becoming paralyzed.