The Ethics of the Impossible in “De la phisionomie” (III, 12)
In “De la phisionomie” (III, 12) (“Of Physiognomy”) Montaigne makes the topos of vision central to the understanding of the essay.1 From the outset the essayist engages in an epistemological critique that draws attention to our inability to see things as they are:
Nous n’apercevons les graces que pointues, bouffies et enflées d’artifice. Celles qui coulent soubs la nayfveté et la simplicité eschapent ayséement à une veue grossiere comme est la nostre: elles ont une beauté delicate et cachée; il faut la veue nette et bien purgée pour descouvrir cette secrette lumiere. (III, 12, 1037)
We perceive no charms that are not sharpened, puffed out, and inflated by artifice. Those which glide along naturally and simply easily escape a sight so gross as ours. They have a delicate and hidden beauty; we need a clear and well-purged sight to discover their secret light. (793)
For Montaigne the appearance of a thing always already constitutes its otherness since our perception constrains us and allows what is seen to be viewed equivocally. According to this logic, once we see something, the aporia between seeming and being is foregrounded to such an extent that we can no longer distinguish between reality and fiction.
Montaigne’s essay draws on the popular treatises of the day, according to which a person’s external facial features reflected his or her inner moral character. The text’s conceptual framework is organized around a debate concerning the relationship between inner and outer spheres and how one might inform the other: “Il n’est rien plus vraysemblable que la conformité et relation du corps à l’esprit” (III, 12, 1057) (“There is nothing more likely than the conformity and relation of the body to the spirit” [809]). Within this context, the essay’s focus on the physical act of seeing and the psychic process of visualization leads to an investigation of the validity of the science of physiognomy.
Etymologically physiognomy conjoins the concepts of nature ( physis ) and knowledge ( gnos ). From Barthélemy Coclès to Jean d’Indagine, it was thought that for the specialist of this science Being could be made to surface through the image of the face.2 This engagement with the world of phenomenal forms identified the face as the privileged locus for the unveiling of Being and the gateway to one’s character. The physiognomic unity upon which this science insists is one of analogy between the parts. Yet the outward face of things is far from transparent, and vision is often overdetermined, based as it is on the limitations of spatial perspective.
The most striking problem that physiognomy encounters, according to Montaigne, concerns the counterexample represented by the discrepancy between the grotesque features of Socrates’ face and the beauty of his soul: “Socrates, qui a esté un exemplaire parfaict en toutes grandes qualitez, j’ay despit qu’il eust rencontré un corps et un visage si vilain, comme ils disent, et disconvenable à la beauté de son ame, luy si amoureux et si affolé de la beauté (III, 12, 1057) (About Socrates, who was a perfect model in all great qualities, it vexes me that he hit on a body and face so ugly as they say he had, and so incongruous with the beauty of his soul, he who was so madly in love with beauty” [809]).
One glimpse of Socrates reveals him in all his ugliness. In this context, vision fails to account for the “beauté de son ame” (“beauty of his soul”). Nevertheless, initially the representation of Socrates draws on the Silenic image found in Plato’s Symposium. According to Alcibiades, this image underscores the necessity of looking beyond the philosopher’s grotesque image, his “si vile forme” (III, 12, 1037) (“so mean a form” [793]), in order to discover the beauty within. To be sure, the phenomenon of the Silenic Socrates puts into question physiognomy itself. However, this project can only be realized with a “veue nette et bien purgée” (III, 12, 1037) (“a clear and well-purged sight” [793]), which paradoxically replaces the phenomenon of sight with the imagination’s power of visualization. Montaigne assigns to the mind’s eye the ability to imagine a virtual reality that paradoxically enables us to see more accurately things as they are. Reality thus becomes that which is not grasped with the eyes but rather with the intellect.
The language of credit and borrowing is a central motif in “De la phisionomie.” The opening line of this essay substantiates this fact: “Quasi toutes les opinions que nous avons sont prinses par authorité et à credit” (III, 12, 1037) (“Almost all the opinions we have are taken on authority and on credit” [792]). However, this emphasis on “otherness” is quickly put into question by a reference to the figure of Socrates, who in his individuality acquires exemplarity: “ Vrayment il est bien plus aisé de parler comme Aristote et vivre comme Caesar, qu’il n’est aisé de parler et vivre comme Socrates. Là loge l’extreme degré de perfection: l’art n’y peut joindre” (III, 12, 1055) (“Truly it is much easier to talk like Aristotle and live like Caesar than it is to talk and live like Socrates. There lies the extreme degree of perfection and difficulty; art cannot reach it.” [808]). In many ways Socrates embodies the Montaignian ideals of learned ignorance and authenticity as manifested in his engagement with academic skepticism. As a paragon of human virtue in following nature’s example, Socrates exemplifies the model of proper living in his understanding of the infelicitous consequences of not knowing limits:. “Il a faict grand faveur à l’humaine nature de montrer combien elle peut d’elle mesme. Nous sommes chacun plus riche que nous ne pensons; mais on nous dresse à l’emprunt et à la queste: on nous duict à nous servir plus de l’autruy que du nostre” (III, 12, 1038) (“He did a great favor to human nature by showing how much it can do by itself. We are each richer than we think, but we are trained to borrow and beg; we are taught to use the resources of others more than our own” [794]). Philosophical dogma, that malady produced by those engaged in “ex-cez fievreux” (III, 12, 1039) (“feverish excesses” [794]), is little more than vanity, “cette complaisance voluptueuse qui nous chatouille par l’opinion de science” (III, 12, 1039) (“that voluptuous complacency which tickles us with the notion of being learned” [794]). The value of Socrates’ teaching suggests that by borrowing or buying on credit one risks occluding the authenticity of the self. In criticizing the phenomenon of borrowing, Montaigne appears to suggest that our very own nature can be a source of true wealth. Socratic humility is therefore praised for its ability to discover wisdom in the activities of everyday life: “C’est luy qui ramena du ciel, où elle perdoit son temps, la sagesse humaine” (III, 12, 1038) (“It is he who brought human wisdom back down from heaven, where she was wasting her time” [793]).
How does Montaigne get us to know Socrates, and how can the essayist represent this most natural of men? The figure of Socrates, a man of unpretentious verbal expression, is transmitted through texts that mediate his very being and allow us to visualize who he is. Interestingly, as the text unfolds it introduces the question of “phisionomie,” which acts as a trope for the hermeneutic practices of reading and writing that permit us to visualize instead of simply to see:
Sans peine et sans suffisance, ayant mille volumes de livres au-tour de moy en ce lieu où j’escris, j’emprunteray presentement s’il me plaist d’une douzaine de tels ravaudeurs, gens que je ne feuillette guiere, de quoy esmailler le traicté de la phisionomie. Il ne faut que l’espitre liminaire d’un alemand pour me farcir d’allegations. (III, 12, 1056)
Without trouble and without competence, having a library of a thousand volumes around me in this place where I write, I will presently borrow, if I please, from a dozen such patch-makers, people whom I do not often leaf through, enough to bedeck this treatise on physiognomy. I need only the preliminary epistle of some German to stuff me with quotations. (808)
The figure of Socrates permeates Montaigne’s essay. He is revealed through references to the writings of various figures of antiquity, such as Cicero, whom the essayist criticized for his rigidity and the artificiality of his rhetorical praxis: “Fussé je mort moins allegrement avant qu’avoir veu les Tusculanes? J’estime que non” (III, 12, 1039) (“Should I have died less cheerfully before having read the Tusculans? I think not” [794]). The philosopher in the text becomes a copy of the “déjà lu,” for the authenticity of his image is conceived as a simulation predicated on the authority of borrowing on credit. “ Il est bien advenu que le plus digne homme d’estre cogneu et d’estre presenté au monde pour exemple, ce soit celuy duquel nous ayons plus certaine cognoissance. Il a esté esclairé par les plus clair voyans hommes qui furent onques: les tesmoins que nous avons de luy sont admirables en fidelité et en suffisance” (III, 12, 1038) (“It happened fortunately that the man most worthy to be known and to be presented to the world as an example should be the one of whom we have most certain knowledge. We have light on him from the most clear-sighted men who ever lived; the witnesses we have of him are wonderful in fidelity and competence” [793]). In spite of this praise, the philosopher who rejected bookish knowledge for lived experience can only be transcribed in that which is otherwise than Being: “En toutes choses les hommes se jettent aux appuis estrangers pour espargner les propres, seuls certains et seuls puissans, qui sçait s’en armer. (III, 12, 1045) (“In all things men cast themselves on the resources of others to spare their own, which alone are sure and alone powerful, if we know how to arm ourselves with them” [799]). If nature is to become visible it can only be seen from the paradoxical effects of the art of reading.
Montaigne is able to see Socrates through the act of reading classical texts inherited from antiquity: “cette image des discours de Socrates que ses amys nous ont laissée” (III, 12, 1037) (“the version of the sayings of Socrates that his friends have left us” [792]). Through the process of contemplation, the mind’s eye is able to visualize what it has read and transform it into a series of differentiations. The singularity of Socrates thus becomes multiple and consequently renders his image subject to change. With this in mind, Raymond La Charité has noticed that the essayist’s textual borrowings act as “a kind of facial binding for the book, and it is in this way … that writing and book [function] as faces to be read.”3 Writing, however, can never be transparent since the image in the text represents an untranslatable reality articulated in improper terms. This mediation renders visible the image of Socrates in the only form in which he can possibly emerge, namely, the realm of appearances.
The ghost of Socrates acts as a powerful figure in this essay, and this phenomenon permits the future to have an existence in Montaigne’s text:
Socrates faict mouvoir son ame d’un mouvement naturel et com-mun. Ainsi dict un paysan, ainsi dict une femme. Il n’a jamais en la bouche que cochers, menuisiers, savetiers et maçons. Ce sont inductions et similitudes tirées des plus vulgaires et cogneues actions des hommes!; chacun l’entend. Soubs une si vile forme nous n’eussions jamais choisi la noblesse et splendeur de ses conceptions admirables, nous, qui estimons plates et basses toutes celles que la doctrine ne releve, qui n’apercevons la richesse qu’en montre et en pompe. Nostre monde n’est formé qu’à l’ostentation: les hommes ne s’enflent que de vent, et se manient à bonds, comme les balons. Cettuy-cy ne se propose point des vaines fantasies: sa fin fut nous fournir de choses et de preceptes qui reelement et plus jointement servent à la vie, servare mo-dum, finemque tenere, naturamque sequi. Il fut aussi tousjours un? et pareil, et se monta, non par saillies mais par complexion, au dernier poinct de vigueur. Ou, pour mieux dire, il ne monta rien, mais ravala plustost et ramena à son point originel et naturel, et lui soubmit la vigueur, les aspretez et les difficultez. Car, en Caton, on void bien à clair que c’est une alleure tendue bien loing au dessus des communes: aux braves exploits de sa vie, et en sa mort, on le sent tousjours monté sur ses grands chevaux. Cettuy-cy ralle à terre, et d’un pas mol et ordinaire traicte les plus utiles discours; et se conduict et à la mort et aux plus espineuses traverses qui se puissent presenter au trein de la vie humaine. Il est bien advenu que le plus digne homme d’estre cogneu et d’estre presenté au monde pour exemple, ce soit celuy duquel nous ayons plus certaine cognoissance. Il a esté esclairé par les plus clair voyans hommes qui furent onques: les tesmoins que nous avons de luy sont admirables en fidelité et en suffi-sance. C’est grand cas d’avoir peu donner tel ordre aux pures imaginations d’un enfant, que, sans les alterer ou estirer, il en ait produict les plus beaux effects de nostre ame. Il ne la represente ny eslevée ny riche; il ne la represente que saine, mais certes d’une bien allegre et nette santé. Par ces vulguaires ressorts et naturels, par ces fantasies ordinaires et communes, sans s’esmouvoir et sans se piquer, il dressa non seulement les plus reglées, mais les plus hautes et vigoreuses creances, actions et meurs qui furent onques. C’est luy qui ramena du ciel, où elle perdoit son temps, la sagesse humaine, pour la rendre à l’homme, où est sa plus juste et plus laborieuse besoigne, et plus utile. Voyez le plaider devant ses juges, voyez par qu-elles raisons il esveille son courage aux hazards de la guerre, quels arguments fortifient sa patience contre la calomnie, la tyrannie, la mort et con-tre la teste de sa femme: il n’y a rien d’emprunté de l’art et des sciences; les plus simples y recognoissent leurs moyens et leur force; il n’est possible d’aller plus arriere et plus bas. Il a faict grand faveur à l’humaine nature de montrer combien elle peut d’elle mesme. Nous sommes chacun plus riche que nous ne pen-sons; mais on nous dresse à l’emprunt et à la queste: on nous duict à nous servir plus de l’autruy que du nostre. (III, 12, 1037–38)
Socrates makes his soul move with a natural and common motion. So says a peasant, so says a woman. His mouth is full of nothing but carters, joiners, cobblers, and masons. His are inductions and similes drawn from the commonest and best-known actions of men; everyone understands him. Under so mean a form we should never have picked out the nobility and splendor of his admirable ideas, we who consider flat and low all ideas that are not raised up by learning, and who perceive richness only in pomp and show. Our world is formed only for ostentation; men inflate themselves only with wind, and go bouncing around like balls. This man did not propose to himself any idle fancies: his aim was to furnish us with things and precepts that serve life really and more closely:
To keep the mean, to hold our aim in view,
And follow nature.
LUCAN
He was also always one and the same, and raised himself, not by sallies but by disposition, to the utmost point of vigor. Or, to speak more exactly, he raised nothing, but rather 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; in the brave exploits of his life and in his death we feel that he is always mounted on his high horse. The other walks close to the ground, and at a gentle and ordinary pace treats the most useful subjects; and behaves, both in the face of death and in the thorniest trials that can confront us, in the ordinary way of human life.
It happened fortunately that the man most worthy to be known and to be presented to the world as an example should be the one of whom we have most certain knowledge. We have light on him from the most clear-sighted men who ever lived; the witnesses we have of him are wonderful in fidelity and competence.
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 from them the most beautiful achievements of our soul. He shows it as neither elevated nor rich; he shows it only as healthy, but assuredly with a very blithe and clear health. By these vulgar and natural motives, by these ordinary and common ideas, without excitement or fuss, he constructed not only the best regulated but the loftiest and most vigorous beliefs, actions, and morals that ever were. It is he who brought human wisdom back down from heaven, where she was wasting her time, and restored her to man, with whom lies her most proper and laborious and useful business. See him plead before his judges, see by what reasonings he rouses his courage in the hazards of war, what arguments fortify his patience against calumny, tyranny, death, and his wife’s bad temper. There is nothing borrowed from art and the sciences; even the simplest can recognize in him their means and their strength; it is impossible to go back further and lower. He did a great favor to human nature by showing how much it can do by itself. (743– 44)
Ironically Socrates incarnates a figure that is both real and unreal, which is to say that for Montaigne he is real in his mind’s eye despite the fact that he no longer exists to be seen. To be sure, the spectrality of Socrates in this essay forces us to question what it means to exist and what may be perceived as natural.
Near the end of the essay Montaigne becomes his own double, juxtaposing the narrator’s perspective in relation to the character in the narrative. Moreover, he relates the question of physiognomy to his own experience, recounting how the openness of his face saved him from highwaymen, who tried to rob him. In the process, he is able to distinguish himself from Socrates: “J’ay un port favorable et en forme et en interpretation … et qui faict une contraire montre à celuy de Socrates” (III, 12, 1059–60) (“I have a favorable bearing, both in itself and in others’interpretation … one very unlike that of Socrates” [811]). In the two tales that follow Montaigne engages in storytelling in such a way that his experience is transformed into a drama that becomes a metacommentary on the limits of knowledge. Here the text examines the capabilities of the look and how we bring things to light by looking. Montaigne wishes to explore the conditions of phenomenalism by exploring its limits.
The first tale involves a deceptive neighbor who attempted to profit from Montaigne’s apparent naïveté in order to gain entry into his house and occupy it. This aggressive neighbor, who also happens to be a marital relation, invents a tale of attack and escape, a narrative that prefigures the story that he and his troops are in the process of staging. As the intruder enters, he is accompanied by several soldiers who wish to seize Montaigne’s property. They are succeeded by a band of twenty-five or thirty men whom Montaigne admits by seemingly following his natural inclinations: “Je me laissay aller au party le plus naturel et le plus simple” (III, 12, 1060) (“I abandoned myself to the most natural and simple course” [812]). In reacting to this intrusion, Montaigne engages in what David Quint has called “conscious simplicity.”4 Despite appearances, however, Montaigne realizes the evil intentions of his neighbors and profits from their perception, which functions as the threshold to a calculated strategy for survival in the worst of times (the treacherous religious wars): “Je n’ignorois pas en quel siecle je vivois” (III, 12, 1060) (“I was not unaware in what sort of an age I was living” [812]). He therefore hides his true awareness of the situation and greets his guests as a proper host in an utterly improper situation:
Tant y a que, trouvant qu’il n’y avoit point d’acquest d’avoir commencé à faire plaisir si je n’achevois, et ne pouvant me desfaire sans tout rompre, je me laissay aller au party le plus naturel et le plus simple, comme je faicts tousjours, commendant qu’ils entrassent. (III, 12, 1060)
However, feeling that there was nothing to be gained by having begun to be pleasant if I did not go through with it, and being unable to get rid of them without ruining everything, I abandoned myself to the most natural and simple course, as I always do, and gave orders for them to come in. (812)
Ironically, it was the intruder’s misapprehension of the essayist’s parrhesia that foreclosed the possibility of subsequent aggression. Montaigne’s engagement in a form of theatricality results from his recognition of the facial qualities nature has made available to him: “Il m’est souvant advenu que, sur le simple credit de ma presence et de mon air, des personnes qui n’avoyent aucune cognoissance de moy s’y sont grandement fiées” (III, 12, 1066) (“It has often happened that on the mere credit of my presence and manner, persons who had no knowledge of me have placed great trust in me” [811–12]). The scene of judgment enacted here creates a spatial distance between the one who judges and the one who is being judged. Montaigne’s staging of what appears to be natural bears witness to the strategic function of dissimulation. What matters above all else is the way in which the gaze of the intruder falls on the object of aggression. The enemy’s reading of the face overdetermines his subsequent inaction. To complicate things ever further, Montaigne renders the moral of this story other than itself: “Je penche volontiers vers l’excuse et interpretation plus douce… . Et suis homme en outre qui me commets volontiers à la fortune et me laisse aller” (III, 12, 1060 –61) (“I am apt to lean toward the milder excuse and interpretation… . And besides, I am the sort of man who readily commits himself to Fortune and abandons himself bodily into her arms” [812]).
By engaging in this strategy of self-preservation—an activity foreign to the behavior of Socrates at his trial—Montaigne attributes to the other a kind a myopia that makes him the victim of the referential fallacy. Believing that the gaze of Montaigne could not possibly be denatured, the naïve enemy falls victim to the illusion that equates his look with Being itself. In this context surface appearance assumes its perceived function as signifier of the soul. Vision paradoxically produces misrecognition. Like Socrates, Montaigne demonstrates fearlessness when encountering the threat of death, except that here the essayist is able to survive by modulating his desire and submitting to power while maintaining the sense of honor that binds aristocrats together.
The first adventure suggests that the enemy’s perception of Montaigne’s face ultimately “saves his hide.” As in the case of the psychoanalytic encounter, Montaigne’s face constitutes a disturbance in the visual field of the other. Confronted with an image, the aggressor is positioned before a gaze that compels him to reverse previously conceived imperatives.
In the second story Montaigne is attacked and robbed by a band of armed masked men while journeying through a forest. His life having been threatened, the essayist’s fate depends on the presentation of a ransom payment. Instead of succumbing to the threat, he remains steadfast. This demonstration of courage, as it is perceived by the attacker, motivates the latter to abandon his aggression: “Je vis revenir à moy le chef avec parolles plus douces, se mettant en peine de recercher en la troupe mes hardes escartées, et m’en faisant rendre selon qu’il s’en pouvoit recouvrer, jusques à ma boyte” (III, 12, 1062) (“I saw the leader return to me with gentler words, taking pains to search for my belongings scattered among the troop, and having them returned to me as far as they could be recovered, even including my money box” [813]). Interestingly, the steadfast heroism of Montaigne, his “liberté indiscrete” (III, 12, 1062) (“indiscreet freedom” [814]), enabled him to preserve his honor when confronted with a dangerous situation.
The Montaignian self is represented here within the context of an address in which meaning is comprised of contingencies otherwise unavailable to desire. According to Adam Phillips, “accidents became in Freud’s vision ways of securing unconscious gratification.”5 However, what one discovers in Montaigne’s text are desires revealed by contingencies instructive to the self. Unlike Freud, for whom finding is the result of looking, Montaigne foregrounds what we find when we are not focused on looking, namely, the opportunity to appear courageous. Beyond that, Montaigne’s personal story brings the events of the past into the present. These events are placed within a new context so that they may be seen in a different light as they are narrated. Such a representation has been affected by the imagination—by the act of telling, as well as by the influence of what has been read as its affects the memory and the use of language in the self-portrait.
As in the first story, Montaigne here suggests that the cause of his freedom remains somewhat undetermined. The verbal text challenges the actual situation by mystifying the scopic relations in which we are held:
La vraye cause d’un changement si nouveau et de ce ravisement, sans aucune impulsion apparente, et d’un repentir si miraculeux, en tel temps, en une entreprinse pourpensée et deliberée, et devenue juste par l’usage … certes je ne sçay pas bien encores quelle elle est. (III, 12, 1062)
The true cause of so unusual an about-face and change of mind, without any apparent motivation, and of such a miraculous repentance, at such a time, in a premeditated and deliberate enterprise which had been made lawful by custom … I truly do not even now well know. (813–14)
The inability of the story’s denouement to engender certainty functions as an affirmation and abnegation that cannot simply be considered in an oppositional way. Instead, the story’s success may be found in its failure to produce absolute meaning, which must be viewed in that word’s etymological sense as a phenomenon that absolves itself of all objects and ends. Although sight discerns and concerns a situation and a place, it knows no bounds since contingency renders meaning equivocal. Montaigne’s text makes mobile and tentative what physiognomists might consider determinable: “C’est une foible garantie que la mine; toutesfois elle a quelque consideration” (III, 12, 1059) (“The face is a weak guarantee; yet it deserves some consideration” [811]).
In both stories Being cannot necessarily be equated with truth and perception; it cannot be reduced to pure receptivity since it is subject to interpretation and change. Although Montaigne admires fortitude, as others admire it in him, ultimately he cannot remain entirely resolute in his actions: “Comme aux actions legitimes je me fasche de m’y employer quand c’est envers ceux qui s’en desplaisent, aussi, à dire verité, aux illegitimes je ne fay pas assez de conscience de m’y employer quand c’est envers ceux qui y consentent” (III, 12, 1063) (“As I do not like to take a hand in legitimate actions against people who resent them, so, to tell the truth, I am not scrupulous enough to refrain from taking a hand in illegitimate actions against people who consent to them” [814]). As Montaigne discovers as spectator of the rhetoric of self-portraiture, writing can never be transparent. According to Slavoj Zizek, “self-consciousness is founded upon the non-transparency of the subject to itself.”6 The writer once again discovers that he is a man just like all men, “merveilleusement vain, divers, et ondoyant” (I, 1, 9) (“marvelously vain, diverse, and undulating” [5]), an “escuyer de trefles” (III, 12, 1063) (“jack of clubs” [814]), signifying a character without importance. Nevertheless, the motif of specular identification in Montaigne’s essay eventually succeeds through the ability to assume, as part of his cultural memory, what he considers to be the Socratic failures of the past: the inability to adapt to the trajectory of life’s contingencies. In juxtaposing Socrates’ story with his own, Montaigne discovers a new emphasis on action as either creative or adaptive—and perhaps even contingent.
Montaigne’s text compares the essayist to Socrates, who defends himself before his Athenian judges. By referring to Socrates’ trial and martyrdom as his “loftiest essay,” and considering his trials and tribulations in a similar light, Montaigne describes himself as strikingly un-Socratic in his ability to adapt to the vicissitudes of human existence. In the essay the figure of Socrates—historically regarded as a morally accessible being who followed the course of nature— paradoxically appears as the one who is paralyzed, the victim of a lofty ideal. Engaged in a form of moral narcissism, Socrates’ clarity of mind vanishes before his judges. His self-imposed blindness and rigidity lead him down the path of immoderate desire. For Socrates the inability to see seemingly functions as a way of avoiding the gaze of the other. Yet this illusion of autonomy paradoxically prevents him from recognizing that he has already unwittingly situated himself before an imagined gaze against which he measures his perception of moral purity. The human wisdom that Socrates had once brought down to earth now finds itself compromised as a result of the philosopher’s obstinacy. In his arrogance (lit. “talking from a high standpoint” in Greek) Socrates made the immoderate decision to choose death over life and refuse the defense that Lysias had prepared on his behalf. This act put an end to the future once and for all; it eradicated it in a present without difference. By deciding to become a martyr in the name of justice, Socrates’ act of resistance, his rigidity when confronted with an ideal, was perceived as disdainful conduct. Furthermore, it was Socrates’ speech, as recounted in the Apology, that led to his demise:. “Eust-on ouy de la bouche de Socrates une voix suppli-ante” (III, 12, 1054) (“Should people have heard a supplicating voice from the mouth of Socrates?” [807]). Montaigne was able to succeed where Socrates could only fail: “Les plus belles vies sont, à mon gré, celles qui se rangent au modelle commun et humain, avec ordre, mais sans miracle et sans extravagance” (III, 13, 1116) (“The most beautiful lives, to my mind, are those that conform to the common human pattern, with order, but without miracle and without eccentricity” [857]).
The Socrates described by Montaigne in the text appears to follow Xenophon’s version of the trial, which reflects the presumption of the unrepentant philosopher, who vainly asserts his wisdom in the name of philosophical dogma.7 By failing to be flexible, Socrates posits a continuity between past and present that must be distinguished from the nonpositing representations of the imagination. His refusal to appeal to the pity of his judges by projecting “laches contenances” transforms him into a stoic hero exiled from nature’s realm.
From a tropological perspective Socrates’ unreasonable reason undermines his quest to be unequivocally natural: “Je n’ay pas corrigé, comme Socrates par force de la raison mes complexions naturelles… . Je me laisse aller, comme je suis venu” (III, 12, 1059) (“I have not, like Socrates, corrected my natural disposition by force of reason… . I let myself go as I have come” [811]). Unlike Montaigne, who has the good fortune to possess a “port favorable” (III, 12, 1059) (“favorable bearing” [811]), a sign of virtue, Socrates had to overcome the grotesque face that nature had given him through the lessons of philosophy. What implicitly emerges here is the suggestion that Montaigne is closer to nature than Socrates.
Montaigne’s makeover of the Socratic model suggests that in order to survive nature sometimes needs to be supplemented by art: “Si mon visage ne respondoit pour moy, si on ne lisoit en mes yeux et en ma voix la simplicité de mon intention, je n’eusse pas duré sans querelle et sans offence si long temps” (III, 12, 1062) (“ If my face did not answer for me, if people did not read in my eyes and my voice the innocence of my intentions, I would not have lasted so long without quarrel and without harm” [814]). Credit and the possibility of illusion produce a misrecognition that might have actually saved Montaigne from impending death. In a sense reading replaces seeing, according to which the essay becomes an allegory about how to read Montaigne. Physiognomy reveals itself as a trope for the role assigned to us as readers. The image inscribed in Montaigne’s essay enables us to assess the value of his face and decipher him as a text.
The defacement of Socrates undoes the factitious unity of the ego and dissolves the possibility of projecting a monolithic self-identity. The repositioning of Socrates into a contemporary context allows Montaigne to discover the impossibility of being unequivocally Socratic. His engagement in the two encounters undermines the possibility of consubstantiality with the Socratic model. Just as Socrates’ parrhesiastic speech makes him the agent of his own demise, Montaigne’s staging of firmness in physiognomy and in speech ultimately proves that artifice might ultimately enable one to escape the threat of a hostile other. Within the recounting of his personal history, Montaigne’s de-formation of nature suddenly acquires a curative effect. In the course of the essay, the evocation of nature suggests an aporia of the proper in representation: “Les paroles redictes ont, comme autre son, autre sens” (III, 12, 1063) (“Words when reported have a different sense, as they have a different sound” [814]). The self-presence of nature is perhaps only something than can be an ideality, for nature and the proper depend on an experience of the impossible.
It is through his experiences, however, that Montaigne is able to question the Socratic model, imitate it, and try to make it his own. The specularity and identification offered through the example of Socrates are internalized by the essayist, with the end result being represented as cognitively different: “Il ne nous faut guiere de doctrine pour vivre à nostre aise. Et Socrates nous aprend qu’elle est en nous, et la manière de l’y trouver et de s’en ayder… . Recueillez vous; vous trouverez en vous les arguments de la nature contre la mort” (III, 12, 1039) (“We need hardly any learning to live at ease. And Socrates teaches us that it is in us, and the way to find it and help ourselves with it… . Collect yourself: you will find in yourself Nature’s arguments against death” [795]).
The Socratic model paradoxically leaves itself open to change by challenging the very idea of authority. The action of the mind’s eye testifies to the subjectivity of the “I” by recognizing the discrepancy between an immoderate ideal and the exigencies of reality. By revising the Socratic model, Montaigne’s self-portrait becomes a work in progress that simultaneously questions our understanding of Socrates: “Il n’importe pas seulement qu’on voye la chose, mais comment on la voye” (I, 14, 67) (“What matters is not merely that we see the thing, but how we see it” [47]).
The essayist’s reading of Socrates foregrounds the inability of the so-called pure Being of nature to simply let itself be. In a way, the surface of Montaigne’s text disfigures as it rewrites and scars the face of Socrates. Montaigne positions himself as the narrator. His relationship to Socrates thus transcends the spatial and temporal boundaries of the Socratic intertexts and incarnates a sphere of desire. In the process Montaigne’s text transforms the homogeneity of the Socratic antimodel into one that is not. Socrates therefore serves as a kind of mirror that blurs the essayist’s self-image and deflects it in a series of splintered perspectives.
Montaigne’s essay calls into question the norms that establish regimes of truth underlying ontology. From this emerges an interiority that cannot be subsumed by an other; it produces a radical form of individuation that resists philosophy’s desire to normalize and transform the kinetic energy of becoming into the monumental qualities of a static form of Being. As a narrative event, the essay on physiognomy becomes one of defacement: “Je ne veux donc pas oublier encor cette cicatrice, bien mal propre à produire, en public: c’est l’irresolution” (II, 17, 654–55) (“So I do not want to forget this further scar, very unfit to produce in public: irresolution” [496]). For Montaigne, to turn around the wound is to turn around one’s self, which paradoxically projects an image that resists representation.
Montaigne’s story begins belatedly or in medias res since the capacity for self-reflection can only take shape once he has retold his stories in a new narrative frame. Just as the image of Socrates is mediated by other narratives in order that it might be understood, so Montaigne’s self-portrait contributes to his life story through its oblique references to Socrates. However, as Montaigne assumes the position of the narrator, he comes to infiltrate the textual space left vacant by Socrates.8 The Socratic makeover provides a perspectival structure, a haunting, that at best provides a partial account of a self divided from within and for whom there is no final story. In rereading his two stories Montaigne as narrator witnesses a double whose story could only begin to take place in the future. The essayist’s revisiting of the past enables him to see his double in a transformative light rather than in a state of self-constitution, for it is the narrator’s thinking that literally becomes act by making itself into acting: “Les livres m’ont servi non tant d’instruction que d’exercitation” (III, 12, 1039) (“Books have served me not so much for instruction as for exercise” [795]). The essayist’s story of survival becomes a trope for his ability to live on in his writerly quest to escape the transcendent appeal of the Socratic model.
By measuring himself, albeit obliquely, against Socrates, Montaigne succeeds in projecting an ethos (in its fifth-century B.C.E meaning as character) derived from the rhetoric of self-portraiture. However, as Tobin Siebers has suggested, one must also consider the Homeric meaning of “ethos,” which signifies a place or a haunt where language becomes habitual.9 Accordingly, one might consider the mosaic of texts constituting the image of Socrates as forming a literary commonplace or accepted topos against which the essayist reveals his own “hauntology.” This process requires that ethics transcend a limited monological notion of morality based on contractually regulated commonplaces, whether literary or otherwise, appearing to have universal validity. In this context ethics, conceived as a process of critique, acquires a performative function and emerges as a strategy that blocks all attempts to govern ontology in a totalized way.10 What releases us from the enslavement to an idea (as in the tragic fate of Socrates) is an ethical act that suspends our adherence to the exigencies of the Law and the forced choice imposed by an imaginary superego. Montaigne’s essay challenges the imposition of categorical principles in the representation both of self and of other; his text performs a veritable spectacle that one can only begin to envision: the revelation of a face through the process of rereading. In the end, the rhetoric of Montaigne’s essay projects exemplarity in the anti-exemplum of a self-portrait; it multiplies physiognomies and therefore refuses to eradicate difference.