…the house I live in…

I am infused with a baby-boomer’s, mid-western ethic to produce. I am not alone in this. It is our culture. As a capitalistic society if we don’t produce and consume, everything will come to a halt, or so we are told. My work ethic has served me well and I enjoy the benefits of my years of effort.¹ Sometimes, however, I wonder what a culture would be like that did not place such emphasis on production, and I mean specifically production that can be measured economically? Sometimes I wonder if a production-consumption mindset has blinded me to other, more subtle life opportunities.

* * *

Carole was recently out all day running errands. When she returned she asked about my day. I was out of sorts and told her that I’d wasted it, that I got nothing done. That led us into a conversation about production, leisure, and simply being. 

“We are great fools. ‘He has spent his life in idleness,’ we say. ‘I have done nothing today.; What, have you not lived? That is not only the fundamental but the most illustrious of your occupations. ‘If I had been placed in a position to manage great affairs, I would have shown what I could do.’ Have you been able to think out and manage your own life? You have the greatest task of all.”

(III.13)

Montaigne was disappointed in his career in Parliament.² The Protestant Reformation was sweeping Europe and the southwest corner of France, where he lived, was no different. Parliament was growing polarized—Catholic vs Protestant—and Montaigne, ever the neutral party, was increasingly pressured to take a side. The sentence above–‘If I had been placed in a position to manage great affairs, I would have shown you what I could do.”–reads as a poignant reflection of lost opportunity. Meanwhile, his daily travels from his estate to town and back was growing dangerous, as the stage was being set for the decade’s long Religious Wars to soon follow.³ He resigned himself to the situation and retired to his tower where, after knocking about on the family estate for a while, he began to write. 

“And though nobody should read me, have I wasted time in entertaining myself so many idle hours in so pleasing and useful thoughts?”

(II.18)

Montaigne’s revealing self-doubt is among his most human attributes. 

“In giving myself so continual and so exact an account of myself, have I lost my time?” 

I am a nihilist in the sense that I do not think life holds intrinsic meaning. It simply is. The oak in front of me simply is. As I sit here writing this, I simply am, raw existence. Nihilism can become troublesome if taken to the logical conclusion–why bother, nothing matters. The offset to such a worrisome position is to adopt the attitude of the Existentialists, or in this case, of Montaigne.⁴ Find, develop, and give yourself to meaningful projects, thereby infusing your life with purpose.

“Man is nothing else but what he purposes, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself, he is therefore nothing else but the sum of his actions, nothing else but what his life is.” ~ Sartre

And the greatest of purposes? “There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate…no knowledge so hard to acquire as the knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally.” (III.13) 

Acquiring the knowledge of how to live well is the ultimate project. To bear this in mind is to ask, Have I not lived? 

In the end and at the very least, Montaigne’s project, the Essais, proved a distraction and remedy against boredom and melancholy–“How often has this work delivered me from troublesome thoughts?” (II.18). Our life-defining projects will, at minimum, turn the mind to affirmation.

We may recall from the first post in this series that Montaigne’s retirement did not ensure him peace of mind and tranquility. “Whatever the mind is all wrapped up in, it is all wrapped up in.” Indeed, it was the project of the Essais that gave his life structure, thereby simultaneously quelling his mind while filling him with purpose.

* * *

I read Montaigne as a student takes instruction. What is your purpose, your meaning? the teacher asks. The exciting position of the existentialist is the freedom in choosing an authentic answer to this question. “Become who you are,” said Nietzsche. The life lesson, one among many, from reading Montaigne is to embrace the path to becoming, to exercise the freedom by which we choose to infuse existence with meaningful purpose–to live!–thereby becoming who we are. 

1. To consider the connection between the Protestant ethic and capitalism, I suggest Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [1905]. Trans. Talcott Parsons. New York: Scribner’s 1958.
2. “On the professional level, his career in Bordeaux might even be considered a failure.” Philippe Desan, Montaigne, A Life, pg. 199. 
3. “He had no difficulty in covering in a single day the forty-three kilometers that separated his château from the City Hall. It took approximately four hours on horseback.” Ibid, pg. 423.
4. We come to a text with all that precedes it: our previous readings, life experiences, formed judgements and attitudes. I cannot help but read Montaigne with my personal baggage front and center. That I connect him to the Existentialists reflects my personal perspective only. The closest I can come to tracing his influence on the Existentialists of the early 20th century is his impact on Nietzsche; Nietzsche being a major touchstone for the Existential thinkers that followed.