1. the philosopher
of 'natural judgment'
The kind of judgment in
question in the Essais is 'natural judgment'. This is a judgment
which is made on the basis of ignorance; that is, a judgment
that is only founded on its own strengths, without the aid
of doctrinal knowledge or the supernatural. At the beginning
of chapter I.26, “Of the education of children”,
Montaigne imagines himself to be asking questions to schoolboys.
He asks them questions on general topics which do not allow
them to rely on specialised knowledge: “And, if they
force me to, I am constrained, rather ineptly, to draw from
it some matter of universal scope, on which I test the boy’s
natural judgment : a lesson as strange to them as theirs is
to me”(1). Montaigne imagines himself in the act of
passing an exam, although he claims that any schoolboy in
his first year knows his way around Aristotle better than
he does. The superiority that he wishes to claim, as an examiner,
thus concerns the singular judgment. This situation reflects
the one which Montaigne finds himself in throughout his work.
The 'essais du jugement' represent an exam of natural judgment,
in the precise sense in which Montaigne takes this in the
chapter on the education of children. On the other hand, the
interest in natural judgment means a depreciation of knowledge.
"Doctrine" and "science" are the terms
with which Montaigne refers to any kind of knowledge acquired
by formal learning. When, for example, he considers the entry
exams for future parliamentary lawyers, he deems it of greater
value to have sound judgment than to have great learning concerning
the law. Of the two skills, he gives priority to the former
: “and even though both parts are necessary, and both
must be present, still in truth it is a fact that learning
is less valuable than judgment”(2). In other words,
sound judgment is a necessary condition for science to be
a skill, while the reverse is not true: it is possible to
have sound judgment without being learned. It is because of
this that training one's judgment is more important than anything.
Natural judgment may be exercised without learning or rule:
“This is purely the essay of my natural faculties, and
not at all of the acquired ones; and whoever shall catch me
in ignorance will do nothing against me”(3).
When in the chapter on pedantry he recalls the conversations
he had with the great professor Adrien Turnèbe (Adrianus
Turnebus), Montaigne prides himself on having put to the test
the strength of the man's natural judgment. He pressed his
interlocutor into discussing topics to which he wasn't accustomed,
and on which he could not use his learning (4). In this fashion
Montaigne verified that Turnebus's judgment, despite the immense
erudition which might have sapped its strength, has remained
in perfect health. He therefore praises his professor, distinguishing
him from "pédantesques" types, who “have
a full enough memory but an entirely hollow judgment, unless
their nature has of itself fashioned it otherwise" (5).
The principal intellectual merit is having a well-made head
rather than a well-stuffed one, as the now-famous expression
has it. Then it becomes possible to be a humanist without
being pedantic, “as I have seen in Adrianus Turnebus,
who, having had no other profession but letters (…)
had nevertheless nothing pedantic about him”(6). The
exam of natural judgment, that is, judgment without recourse
to any formal learning, in a sense constitutes the original
playing field of the Essais. The importance of this pedagogical
scheme is such that it largely explains why Montaigne, unlike
his fellow humanists, never elaborated an educational programme
(7). If one reads this negligence in light of the essay as
a means of putting natural judgment to the test, it reveals
itself as the expression of a complete philosophy. Montaigne
is the philosopher and pedagogue of natural judgment.
2. the need to educate
Montaigne's understanding of philosophy as the exercise of
natural judgment authorises him to recommend that it be practised
by children. To Montaigne, the child, like every man, is a
natural philosopher, in the sense that he is capable of spontaneously
exercising his judgment. Education should intervene as early
as possible, in order that people may learn to make the most
of this natural ability.
The philosophising child is first of all a fact of experience
that an attentive observer like Montaigne could not have failed
to notice. And this also means that the child, a particular
kind of person whose status differs from culture to culture,
has by the sixteenth century come to be seen as worthy of
attention. The first portraits of children appear. In the
Essais, edited between 1572 and 1592, the term "enfance"
appears sixty-five times, "enfant" fifty-nine times,
and "enfants" two hundred thirty-seven times. The
child is a figure well represented in the philosophical tradition.
For present purposes it will suffice to recall the Meno, in
which Socrates questions a young slave and makes him discover
the mathematical truths which he naturally carries within
him. In a Platonic vein the great Czech pedagogue of the seventeenth
century, Comenius, asserts that “the knowledge of all
is so natural to man, that if one were asking properly questions
to a seven-year-old child, he would be able to answer on everything
with accuracy”(8). The figure of the child represents
the renewed possibility for each generation to acquire knowledge
of the universal. A French contemporary philosopher wrote:
"The child as such is never a sectarian. It lives in
the element of the universal: its receptivity knows no boundaries.
The child is therefore rational, more so than the adult, although
it has not yet mastered rationality. It carries with it the
lived experience of universal equality "(9). Montaigne
supports the idea that the child, yet untainted by prejudice,
is closer to the universal than the adult. Its intellectual
and moral disposition is such that it should at the same time
be preserved and developed by an appropriate education. In
the eyes of his contemporaries, Montaigne here follows the
lead of Erasmus when he advocates an early start of education.
The major pedagogic work of Erasmus is in fact called "De
pueris statim ac liberaliter educandis", that is "On
the necessity of giving boys a liberal education at once".
"Statim": it is important that children be educated
from the earliest age possible, that the age in which they
are still malleable and in which their character is given
decisive form does not slip away. Montaigne, who saw man more
as a creature of habit than one of reason, underlines the
importance of childhood in determining the later life of the
adult. To quote here the full passage from chapter I.23, “Of
custom, and not easily changing an accepted law” where
Montaigne establishes the necessity of moral education from
the earliest age on. “I think that our greatest vices
take shape from our tenderest childhood, and that our most
important training is in the hands of nurses. It is a pastime
for mothers to see a child wring the neck of a chicken or
amuse itself by hurting a dog or a cat; and there are fathers
stupid enough to take it as a good omen of a martial soul
when they see a son unjustly striking a peasant or a lackey
who is not defending himself, and as a charming prank when
they see him trick his playmate by a bit of malicious dishonesty
and deceit. Nevertheless these are the true seeds and roots
of cruelty, tyranny, and treason; they sprout there, and afterward
shoot up lustily and flourish mightily in the hands of habit”
(10). It is in the chapter on custom (I.23), and not in any
of the pedagogical chapters (I.25 and I.26) that one should
look for the necessity of an early education: the Essais are
set up as if the theme of custom naturally leads us to the
need for early education. Montaigne does not speak of the
virtuous or wicked nature of man - he affirms man is a creature
of habit. The child is yet very malleable. It is not a twisted
branch that one has to straighten out, but a tender soul with
the receptivity to acquire certain good traits forever, or
to be easily traumatised. “I condemn all violence in
the education of a tender soul which is being trained for
honor and liberty”(11). In that, too, Montaigne follows
the lead of Erasmus, who firmly banished violence from the
world of childhood. The long passage from I,23 which we have
cited is thus above all an accusation against the violence
or pedagogical ineptitude of parents. According to Montaigne,
the task of educating should be taken away from parents, who
are either violent towards their children, or incapable of
rooting out their growing vices. Here as well, one has to
look for the justification elsewhere than the pedagogical
chapters, in a passage of the second book inspired by Aristotle:
“Most of our states, as Aristotle says, leave to each
man, in the manner of the Cyclopes, the guidance of their
wives and children according to his own foolish and thoughtless
fancy; and the Lacedaemonian and Cretan are almost the only
ones which have committed the education of children to the
laws. Who does not see that in a state everything depends
on their education and nurture ? And yet, without any discernment,
they are left to the mercy of the parents, however foolish
and wicked these may be” (12). In the chapter on Pedantry,
Montaigne does not hide either his admiration for the state
education set up in Sparta (13). He takes from Aristotle and
the order instituted by Lycurgus in Sparta the idea that the
health of a state depends largely on its capacity to assure
the cooperation of docile citizens. Yet the reason he gives
in his own name is not that of care for the State, but a protest
against parental violence: “Among other things, how
many times have I had good mind, as I passed along our streets,
to set up some trick to avenge little boys that I saw being
flayed, knock down, and bruised by some father or mother in
a fury and frenzy of anger!" (14). Montaigne's interest
in childhood is largely motivated by a care for children as
such. Showing his sincere indignation at the violence perpetrated
against children, Montaigne sees the child more as a unified
individual person than as a future citizen or a fully-fledged
adult. He favours education by private instructor, principally
to shield the child from two sources of violence: parents
and schoolmasters. From the earliest age, the child is to
be taken in hand by a private instructor, who will abstain
from using violence. But what sort of positive education is
he to give?
3. not in school
The central role in education which Montaigne gives to philosophy
is equally tied to the fact that the child does not go to
school. Chapter I.26 replaces the school with a more traditional
form of instruction, that of dealings with and imitation of
adults. Montaigne further expands this type of education to
"dealings with the world" or "fréquentation
du monde" at large (15), which stops us from understanding
it simply as a return to "archaic" education. In
the years that Montaigne was born and raised, the education
of the nobility underwent a complete change. Such was the
success of the humanist colleges in the 1530s that fathers
of noble families begun to send their children there. Montaigne's
father thus had succumbed to educational fashion. The son
unflatteringly compares his father's behaviour with that of
cranes: “that good man, being extremely afraid of failing
in a thing so close to his heart, at last let himself be carried
away by the common opinion, which always follows the leader
like a flock of cranes, and fell in line with custom (…).
And he sent me, as I was about six, to the Collège
de Guyenne, which was the very flourishing and the best in
France” (16). Pierre Eyquem, seigneur de Montaigne,
abandoned in favour of the college the more traditional way
of education, in which a young nobleman was sent to another
noble household to serve as page. For the future son of Diane
de Foix, to whom he dedicated his reflections on education
in chapter I.26, Montaigne sought to rehabilitate this sort
of education. The child will familiarise himself with his
future tasks through observation, participation and discussion.
When sent to school, the child ceases to mix with adults and
to learn their way of life directly from contact with them;
he learns it through the mediation of abstract knowledge,
which puts undue emphasis on memorisation. Today we would
say that the child is cut off from society, “put in
a sort of quarantine” as wrote French historian Philippe
Ariès (17). Montaigne writes in a period in which the
school is newly called into question. He finds that the school
has missed its goal, enslaving the mind rather than leading
it to independent judgment and virtue. Historians such as
Roger Trinquet and Georges Huppert have sketched the disenchantment
of the last humanists concerning the school as institution:
the humanist colleges did not fulfil the promise of a regeneration
of man through education (18). Montaigne rediscovers the merits
of a pedagogy not based on the school, and ostensibly opposes
the humanist enthusiasm for the school as institution.
Education as Montaigne envisages it is the opposite of the
school as institution. In practice, it is the idea of education
appropriate to the social circles of a young nobleman, with
his future tasks of directing management (mesnage) or the
household (la maison), which gets our author to revise Erasmian
pedagogy. "The child distances itself from its parents
rapidly; throughout the ages, education has been assured through
apprenticeship in the coexistence of the child with adults.
He learns the things he needs to know in helping the adults
do it"(19). Education is to take place under the supervision
of a private instructor in the environment of a bourgeois
house, far from parental authority (20). The whole is to take
place gently: “For the rest, this education is to be
carried on with severe gentleness, not as is customary. Instead
of being invited to letters, children are shown in truth nothing
but horror and cruelty”(21). But Montaigne appropriates
the Erasmian idea of a gentle education to justify, unlike
Erasmus, abandoning the school as framework altogether. If
philosophy takes a central role in this new project, it is
precisely because it is not tied to a scholarly mode of education,
but on the contrary possesses “this privilege of being
everywhere at home”(22). The intention to make education
come out of the schools plays the role of a Leitmotiv in Montaigne's
pedagogy: “For our boy, a closet, a garden, the table
and the bed, solitude, company, morning and evening, all hours
will be the same, all places will be his study”(23).
It is thus thanks to its capacity to concern itself with anything
in life that philosophy acquires its central pedagogical role
in Montaigne.
Montaigne makes education come out of the schools, but not
to return to an archaic mode of education. Education, to the
extent that it is philosophy, remains education in light of
the universal.
4. education as philosophy and the ideal of Socratic naïveté
The earliest stages of education have also to be taken in
hand by philosophy. In accordance with the classical ideal,
philosophy appears in the Essais as magister vitae for the
whole of human life.
In the Ciceronian phrase taken up by the humanists, philosophy
is the "teacher of life" in the sense that it is
indispensable for the good life. Montaigne wishes philosophy
to concern itself with the child "au partir de la nourrice":
“Take the simple teachings of philosophy, know how to
choose them and treat them at the right time; they are easier
to understand than a tale of Boccacio. A child is capable
of that when he leaves his nurse (…)”(24). Philosophy
is suitable to childhood in two ways: not only is the child
capable of philosophy, but the philosophical tradition also
reserved part of its treasures for it. Montaigne takes from
the Epicureans and Stoics the idea that it is never to early,
nor too late, for philosophising. This is a singular understanding
of the matter in the context of the Renaissance, in which
the vulgar conception of man's lifetime was dominated by the
ages of life. Montaigne himself declares that "tout choses
ont leur saison"(25). “Our child is in much more
of a hurry; he owes to education only the first fifteen or
sixteen years of his life; the rest he owes to action. Let
us use so short a time for the necessary teachings”(26).
Nevertheless, Montaigne remains convinced that there is no
particular season for philosophising fruitfully. If philosophy
is to profit from the time of childhood, one has to prune
its useless branches and its “vain subtelties"(27).
This last point gives Montaigne the occasion to propose a
reform of philosophy, which interferes less with its contents
than with the way in which it is taught. The goal of this
reform is to allow philosophy to escape the bad reputation
she has fallen victim to. “It is a strange fact that
things should be in such a pass in our century that philosophy,
even with people of understanding, should be an empty and
fantastical name, a thing of no use and no value”(28).
The change means reconciling philosophy with life and with
praxis. With regards to education in his day and age, the
main line of Montaigne's educational project is to scrap “science”
and to foster “judgement” and “virtue”(29).
Putting philosophy in the middle of the stage, as the «
molder of judgment and conduct »(30) is the expression
of this project.
Montaigne's interest in education also corresponds to a reflection
on the fundamental nature of philosophy. In chapters I.25
and I.26, education is essentially taken to be the forming
of judgment and of morals. Education essentially consists
in moral philosophy, “according to the opinion of Plato,
who says that steadfastness, faith, and sincerity are the
real philosophy, and the other sciences which aim at other
things only powder and rouge”(31). Montaigne teaches
the child philosophy by on the one hand making it discover
examples of human virtue in the work of great writers, and
on the other hand in teaching it “the most profitable
lessons of philosophy, by which human actions must be measured
as their rule”(32), lessons which concern for example
the difference between knowledge and ignorance, the goal of
studying, or the nature of justice. Philosophy must therefore
be capable of addressing itself to the child, and above all
present an attractive face: [insert quote]. Thus Montaigne's
writing takes on a well-nigh lyrical tone when he takes on
the ancient genre of “protreptic” or the praise
of philosophy. As the child is capable of profiting by the
lessons of philosophy, one must pay attention to its appearance
and form. Montaigne intimately connects philosophy and pedagogy;
"vraye philosophie" is understood on the basis of
a pedagogical ideal of forming judgment and morals. On intimate
terms with the Greek and Latin authors, Montaigne is familiar
with the classical ideal of education as "culture of
the soul", and as a humanist perpetuates it. Thus Montaigne
reactivates an understanding of education as being essentially
philosophical, and an understanding of philosophy as essentially
education and cultivation of one's self. One might consider
the Montaignean gentleman, unacquainted with any special knowledge,
as the inheritor of the human ideal which was born with the
paideia of the Greeks. Montaigne makes Socrates into the emblem
of this ideal.
More than any other philosopher, Socrates retained a child-like
nature. Montaigne contrasts Cato’s "alleure tenduë"
with Socrates's natural conduct, the principle of which is
"naïveté" (33). Socrates
used only his natural judgment; he philosophised “by
these vulgar and natural motives by these ordinary and common
ideas”(34). This is the way Montaigne understands the
famous saying on Socrates reported by Cicero, “It is
he who brought human wisdom back down from heaven, where she
was wasting her time, and restored her to man (…)”(35).
Also, Socrates' soul remained unspoiled because of his refusal
to allow custom, knowledge, or ambition to tamper with it.
This child-like model of the philosopher is in sharp contrast
to the artificiality of scholastic science, the procedures
of which he debunks in the Apologie de Raimond Sebond (36).
Montaigne thinks it appropriate to introduce a reference to
the child in the portrait of the true philosopher: “It
is a great thing to have been able to impart such order to
the pure and simple notions of a child that, without altering
or stretching them, he produced the most beautiful achievements
of the soul ”(37). There is an unbroken continuity between
the child and Socrates the philosopher in the sense that both
they both exercise their judgment without artificiality. The
child is viewed by Montaigne as the most universal human standard.
It does not mean that the child would be a hint that the original
nature of man is good. On the contrary, Montaigne has explicit
doubts on the idea, having experienced how children can delight
when inflicting cruel pains other children or animals (38).
The child forces also the philosopher to bring his idea of
man back down from heaven to reality.
It is therefore not only out of any modesty that Montaigne
plays the child, but out of the ambition to be a new Socrates,
that is an accomplished man. “I set forth notions that
are human and my own, simply as human notions considered in
themselves, not as determined and decreed by heavenly ordinance,
(…) as children set forth theirs essays to be instructed,
not to instruct”(39). It is this original naïveté
and integrity of judgment, which he attributes to Socrates,
that Montaigne set up as the fundament of his work. Montaigne
saw the child not merely as a prototype of the philosopher,
but as his model. The essays which he makes of his own judgment
require the “pure and simple notions of a child”
( “les imaginations d'un enfant"), that is a spontaneity
equal to that which Socrates showed (40). In frequently referring
to Socrates and to childhood, Montaigne thus strengthens the
philosophical meaning of the Essais.
--------
I,26,159a. The translations in English are
taken from Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, translated
by Donald M.Frame, London:Everyman Library, 2003 (D.Frame,
Stanford University, 1943-1948).
I,25,124a
II,10,359a
I,25,124a : “I have often deliberatly launched him on
topics remote from his practice; he saw into them so clearly,
with so quick an apprehension, that it seemed he had never
practised any other profession than war and affairs of state.”
I,25,124a
ibid.
Compare with Rabelais, Gargantua, chap. XXIII.
Jan Amos Komensky (Comenius), Didactica Magna.
Marcel Conche, an interview in Le Monde de l’éducation,
April 1985; reprinted by Anita Hocquard, in Eduquer, à
quoi bon ? ce qu’en disent philosophes, anthropologues
et pédagogues, Paris, PUF, 1996. p.66
I,23,94a
II,8,341b
II,31,655c
I,25,126-127a : “It is a thing worthy of very great
consideration in that excellent form of government of Lycurgus,
one in truth prodigious in the perfection, that despite the
emphasis on the education of childrend as the state’s
principal responsability, and that in the very seat of the
Muses, there is so little mention made of learning”.
II,31, ibidem
I,26,140a : “Wonderful brilliance may be gained for
human judgment by getting to know men.”
I,26,157-158a
Philippe Ariès, L’enfant et la vie familiale
sous l’Ancien Régime, Paris (1960), reprint Le
Seuil, 1973, préface.
Roger Trinquet, La jeunesse de Montaigne, Nizet, Paris, 1972,
p.466-477; Georges Huppert, Public Schools in Renaissance
France, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago,
1934 ; G.Huppert, « Ruined Schools : The End of the
Renaissance System of Education in France », in Humanism
in Crisis : The Decline of the French Renaissance, Ph. Desan
ed., Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1991, pp.55-67.
Philippe Ariès, ibid.
I,26,136-137a : “Likewise, it is an opinion accepted
by all, that it is not right to brung up a child on the lap
of his parents. (…) And besides, the auhority of the
tutor, which should be sovereign over the pupil, is interrupted
and hampered by the presence of the parents.”
I,26,149a
I,26,148a
I,26,ibidem
I,26,146-147a
II,28, “All things have their season”, title of
the chapter.
I,26,146c
I,54, title of the chapter.
I,26,143a
See I,25
I,26,148a
I,26,136c
I,26,142a
III,12,965b : “<Socrates> brought vigor, hardships,
and difficulties down and back to his own natural and original
level, and subjected them to it. For in Cato we see very clearly
that his is a pace strained far above the ordinary (…).”
III,12,966b
ibidem.
See II,12,489-490a
III,12,966b
III,13,726b : “For in the midst of compassion we feel
within us I know not what bittersweet pricking of malicious
pleasure in seeing others suffer; even children feel it (…).”
I,56,284b
III,12,966b
Marc Foglia,
Université de Paris I - Sorbonne
translated with M.E.J. Buijs |
