How to Live
Or A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
Book Edition Details
Summary
How do you live a good life? Explore this timeless question through the wisdom of Michel de Montaigne in Sarah Bakewell's How to Live (2010). This engaging biography and overview of Montaigne's revolutionary Essays offers companionship, entertainment, and profound lessons from the original modern thinker on navigating life's challenges with honesty and charm.
Introduction
In the autumn of 1569, a French nobleman named Michel de Montaigne lay unconscious on a forest path, his horse beside him, both struck down by a violent collision. As he drifted between life and death, floating in what he would later describe as a state of "infinite sweetness," Montaigne experienced something that would transform not only his understanding of mortality but his entire approach to living. This moment of suspended consciousness became the seed of a revolutionary form of writing that would influence literature, philosophy, and human self-understanding for centuries to come. Montaigne lived through one of history's most turbulent periods, when religious wars tore France apart and certainties crumbled on all sides. Yet from this chaos, he created something entirely new: the personal essay, a form of writing that turned the microscope inward to examine the self with unprecedented honesty and curiosity. Neither purely philosophical treatise nor simple memoir, his Essays became a mirror in which readers across the ages have recognized their own humanity reflected back at them. Through Montaigne's journey, we discover how one man's quest to understand himself became a timeless guide for navigating the complexities of human existence, the art of living authentically, and the courage to embrace our own imperfections as the very source of wisdom.
From Crisis to Creation: The Making of an Essayist
Montaigne's transformation from provincial magistrate to literary revolutionary began with a series of devastating losses that shattered his comfortable assumptions about life. The death of his closest friend, Étienne de La Boétie, in 1563 left him emotionally adrift, while his own near-fatal riding accident a few years later gave him an intimate encounter with mortality that few survive to describe. These experiences converged with his growing disillusionment with his legal career in Bordeaux, where he witnessed the corruption and futility of a justice system more concerned with precedent than truth. The crisis deepened when Montaigne inherited his family estate and found himself trapped between the competing demands of public duty and private inclination. His father's death in 1568 brought new responsibilities he felt ill-equipped to handle, while the ongoing religious civil wars made every political position dangerous. Rather than succumb to despair, Montaigne made a radical decision: at the age of thirty-eight, he retired from public life to pursue what he called "freedom, tranquillity, and leisure" in his tower library. This retreat was not mere escapism but a deliberate choice to turn inward and examine the one subject he felt qualified to study: himself. Surrounded by a thousand books and the wisdom of the ancients, Montaigne began the extraordinary experiment of writing about his own thoughts, experiences, and observations with complete honesty. What started as a way to cope with grief and uncertainty evolved into something unprecedented: a new form of literature that captured the fluid, contradictory nature of human consciousness itself. The Essays that emerged from this period of introspection were unlike anything written before. Montaigne invented a genre that was simultaneously deeply personal and universally relevant, creating a work that spoke to the fundamental questions of human existence while remaining grounded in the particular details of one man's life and times.
The Philosophy of Uncertainty: Embracing Human Fallibility
At the heart of Montaigne's revolutionary approach to life and writing lay a profound acceptance of human limitation and uncertainty. Drawing from the ancient Skeptical tradition, particularly Pyrrhonism, he developed what might be called a philosophy of intellectual humility. His personal motto, inscribed on a medal he had struck, was "Que sais-je?" – "What do I know?" – a question that became both his method and his message. This embrace of uncertainty was not mere intellectual posturing but a practical response to the dogmatic certainties that were tearing his world apart. In an age when Catholics and Protestants slaughtered each other over theological differences, when philosophers claimed absolute knowledge, and when political leaders demanded unquestioning obedience, Montaigne proposed a radical alternative: the suspension of judgment. He argued that most human conflicts arose from the arrogant assumption that we could know truth with certainty, when in fact our perceptions are limited, our reasoning flawed, and our perspectives inevitably partial. Montaigne's Skepticism was not the paralyzing doubt that would later trouble Descartes, but a liberating recognition that freed him to observe the world with fresh eyes. By acknowledging his own fallibility, he became more curious about others' viewpoints, more tolerant of difference, and more attentive to the complexity of human nature. He delighted in contradictions, both in himself and others, seeing them not as flaws to be corrected but as evidence of the rich multiplicity of human experience. This philosophy of uncertainty extended to his writing style, which deliberately avoided systematic argument in favor of exploratory meandering. Like his thoughts, his essays followed no predetermined path but wandered wherever curiosity led, doubling back on themselves, contradicting earlier statements, and leaving questions unresolved. This was not carelessness but a conscious artistic choice that reflected his belief that truth was too complex and dynamic to be captured in rigid formulations.
Living by Questions: Twenty Approaches to the Good Life
Rather than prescribing a single path to happiness, Montaigne approached the ancient question "How to live?" through multiple experiments in living, each offering a different angle on human flourishing. His Essays can be read as a collection of practical philosophies, drawn from his reading of classical authors like Seneca, Plutarch, and Sextus Empiricus, but tested against his own experience and observation. From the Stoics, he learned techniques for managing adversity and accepting what cannot be changed, though he adapted their sometimes harsh prescriptions to his own more gentle temperament. He practiced the art of negative visualization, imagining loss to better appreciate what he had, and cultivated the discipline of focusing on the present moment rather than anxiously anticipating the future. Yet he rejected the Stoic ideal of emotional invulnerability, preferring to feel deeply while maintaining perspective. From the Epicureans, he absorbed the wisdom of seeking pleasure intelligently and avoiding unnecessary pain, both physical and mental. He learned the art of distraction as a therapeutic tool, deliberately shifting his attention away from grief or worry toward more pleasant subjects. This was not denial but a practical recognition that the mind, like the body, sometimes needs rest from suffering in order to heal. From the Skeptics, he gained the invaluable skill of stepping outside his own perspective to see himself and his circumstances from multiple angles. This mental flexibility allowed him to maintain equanimity in the face of change and to find humor in his own pretensions and failures. He cultivated what he called "the art of being appropriately" – responding to each situation with exactly the right degree of engagement, neither too much nor too little. Perhaps most importantly, Montaigne discovered that the good life was not a destination to be reached but a way of traveling, characterized by curiosity, acceptance, and attention to the ordinary miracles of daily existence.
Legacy of Self-Examination: Montaigne's Enduring Influence
The ripple effects of Montaigne's literary experiment have continued to spread across centuries, influencing writers, philosophers, and ordinary readers in ways he could never have anticipated. His invention of the personal essay created a new form of self-expression that liberated writers from the constraints of formal genres, allowing them to explore the full range of human experience with unprecedented freedom and honesty. Philosophers from Pascal to Nietzsche grappled with the implications of Montaigne's Skepticism, some recoiling from its apparent relativism, others embracing its liberating potential. Writers like Shakespeare, who likely read Montaigne in John Florio's translation, found in his work a new understanding of human psychology that enriched their portrayal of character. The Romantic movement discovered in Montaigne a kindred spirit who valued individual experience over abstract systems, while modern psychologists have recognized him as an early practitioner of introspective analysis. Perhaps most significantly, Montaigne's approach to self-examination has provided countless readers with a model for understanding their own lives. His willingness to reveal his flaws, contradictions, and uncertainties gave permission for others to accept their own imperfections as part of the human condition rather than obstacles to be overcome. His demonstration that a life examined with honesty and curiosity could be both meaningful and joyful offered an alternative to the perfectionist ideals that often lead to despair. The Essays continue to attract new readers because they address perennial human concerns with a voice that feels remarkably contemporary. Montaigne's questions about identity, mortality, friendship, and the search for meaning resonate across cultural and temporal boundaries, while his method of approaching these questions through personal reflection and storytelling remains as relevant today as it was four centuries ago.
Summary
Michel de Montaigne's greatest achievement was transforming the ancient philosophical injunction to "know thyself" from an abstract ideal into a practical art of living. Through his Essays, he demonstrated that honest self-examination, conducted with curiosity rather than judgment, could become a source of wisdom, compassion, and joy. His legacy reminds us that we need not wait for perfect knowledge or ideal circumstances to begin living fully; instead, we can embrace our uncertainty and imperfection as the very conditions that make authentic human experience possible. From Montaigne's example, we can learn two essential practices for navigating our own complex lives: the discipline of paying attention to our inner experience without trying to fix or perfect it, and the courage to remain open to multiple perspectives, especially those that challenge our assumptions. His work suggests that the examined life is not about achieving final answers but about maintaining the quality of questioning that keeps us engaged with the mystery of existence. For anyone seeking to live more authentically, to write more honestly, or simply to find meaning in the midst of uncertainty, Montaigne's Essays offer not a system to follow but a companion for the journey, reminding us that the art of living well lies not in transcending our humanity but in embracing it fully.
By Sarah Bakewell
