It is significant that the quadricentennial of Montaigne’s death coincides with the quincentennial of the discovery of America: both are being celebrated this year. Indeed, no one better than Montaigne was able to understand and anticipate the upheavals that the discovery of the New World would bring to the Old World’s philosophical, political, and religious ideas.
Previously the general public and even scholars had seemed largely untroubled by the news, however dramatic, that their kind represented only half the human race. The discovery of “an infinite extent of terra firma,” as Montaigne said, “not an island or single country, but a division of the world, nearly equal in greatness to that we knew before,” did not come as a revelation. It simply confirmed what was known through the Bible and the Greek and Latin authors: there were faraway lands—Eden, Atlantis, the Garden of the Hesperides, the Fortunate Islands—and strange races, which had already been described by Pliny. The customs of the indigenous peoples of the New World offered nothing very new, when compared to those of the exotic nations known to the ancients. Rather, the reports of these customs simply corroborated the ancient accounts. At the dawn of the sixteenth century European consciousness, all the more certain of its knowledge, could withdraw into itself. For Europe, the discovery of America did not inaugurate modern times: it closed a chapter that had begun in the Renaissance with the discovery, judged much more important, of the ancient world through the Greek and Latin works.
Montaigne was born in 1533 and began thinking soon after. His ever-keen curiosity impelled him to learn about the New World. He had two sources: the first Spanish chronicles of the Conquest and the recently published accounts of French travelers who had shared the Indians’ life on the coast of Brazil. He was even acquainted with one of these witnesses and, as we know, encountered a few “savages” brought to Rouen by a sailor.
In comparing these sources, Montaigne became aware of a distinction, which Americanists still make, between the great civilizations of Mexico and Peru and the humble cultures of the tropical lowlands: on the one hand, very dense populations that were in every way our equal in their political organization, the magnificence of their cities, and the refinement of their arts; on the other, little village groups with rudimentary industries, which astonished Montaigne for a different reason. He marveled that life in society needed “so little artifice and human patchwork” to exist and maintain itself.
That contrast orients Montaigne’s thinking in two ways. For him, the savages of Brazil, or, as he calls them, “my cannibals,” raise the issue of the minimal conditions required for life in society to be possible. In other words: What is the nature of the social bond? Preliminary responses are scattered throughout the
Essais, but it is clear above all that Montaigne, in formulating the problem, laid the foundations on which Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau would build the entire political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The continuity between Montaigne and Rousseau stands out all the more clearly in that the last response to the question, given by Rousseau in the
Social Contract, proceeds, like Montaigne’s initial inquiry, from a reflection on the ethnographic facts (Rousseau elaborated that reflection in his
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality)
. It could almost be said that the lessons Montaigne asked of the Indians of Brazil led via Rousseau to the political doctrines of the French Revolution.
The Aztecs and the Incas raised a different problem since their high level of civilization put distance between them and natural laws. They might have been on an equal footing with the Greeks and the Romans: comparable weapons would have made them safe from the “mechanical victories” that breastplates, knives and swords, and firearms allowed the Spanish to enjoy over peoples still backward in that respect. Montaigne thus discovered that a civilization can display internal discordances and that external discordances exist between civilizations.
The New World provides surprising examples of similarities between its practices and our own, past and present. And because we knew nothing of each other, the indigenous peoples of the Americas could not have borrowed them from us, or vice versa. Since other practices differ from one shore of the Atlantic to the other and even contradict each other, no natural foundation for any of them is to be had.
To extricate himself from that difficulty, Montaigne came up with two possible solutions. The first would be to defer to the court of reason, which views all societies—past and present, near or far away—as barbaric, since their disagreements and accidental agreements have no foundation other than custom. The second solution would acknowledge that “every one gives the title of barbarian to everything that is not in use in his own country.” Yet there is no belief or custom, however bizarre, shocking, or even revolting it might appear, for which, when it is placed in its context, a well-reasoned argument could not find an explanation. In the first hypothesis, no practice is justified; all practices are justified in the second.
Montaigne thus opens two perspectives on philosophical thought; and even today, philosophers do not seem to have made a firm choice between them. On the one hand, the philosophy of the Enlightenment subjects all historical societies to its criticism and cherishes the utopian dream of a rational society. On the other, relativism rejects any absolute criterion by which a culture could allow itself to judge different cultures.
Since Montaigne, and following his example, we have never stopped looking for a way out of that contradiction. In 1992, as we commemorate both the death of the author of the Essais and the discovery of the New World, it is important to recall that that discovery did not simply procure us material goods (food, industrial products, medicines) that transformed our civilization from top to bottom. It was also the source—in this case, thanks to Montaigne—of ideas that still provide food for thought, of philosophical problems that he was the first to raise. They have lost none of their urgency for contemporary thought—on the contrary. But over the last four centuries, no one has managed to analyze them more lucidly and in more depth than Montaigne in his Essais.