#mimesis

Michel de Montaigne begins with himself in his search for knowledge. By examining the human being who is immediately available to him, he hopes to say something about the human being as such.

The self interests him not because it is exceptional, but because it is present before him and can be observed from within.

He might say: I study myself because this is the material I actually have before me.

In Montaigne, the individual therefore becomes a kind of laboratory. He examines his body, his fear, his vanity, his habits, his memory, his illness, and his mutability. Since he himself is an instance of humanity, this examination can say something about la condition humaine.

This is what Erich Auerbach, in Mimesis, identifies as something new. Montaigne turns the everyday, the bodily, and the contingent into bearers of knowledge. He no longer needs the ancient hierarchy of styles or the Christian history of salvation in order to give depth to the life of an individual human being.

The depth lies in the unfinished observation of the self.

Auerbach emphasizes that much in Montaigne remains implicit. A sentence may appear incomplete or contradictory when read in isolation, but it can be expanded by connecting it with things Montaigne has written elsewhere. Some formulations function almost like prompts separated by open spaces, whose meaning emerges only when those spaces are filled by the movement running through his thought as a whole.

Montaigne may therefore appear ambivalent. Individual statements can point in different directions without entirely cancelling one another out. But this openness does not make every interpretation equally valid. It is still possible to discern a position in the way he approaches the human being, the body, and the world.

Christian Creatureliness

Auerbach refers to Montaigne’s Christian creatureliness.

By creatureliness, I mean here the human being’s condition as a created being: bodily, perishable, dependent, vulnerable, and mortal.

The human being is not a self-grounding consciousness that merely happens to inhabit a body. They are a living whole that cannot be separated from hunger, desire, pain, illness, ageing, contingency, and death.

Creatureliness is therefore more than bodily existence.

It means that the human being is given to themselves under conditions they have neither chosen nor created. They can relate to these conditions, but they cannot abolish them. Their thinking is not situated outside their bodily and temporal condition.

The Christian background also means that the lowly and the everyday can be treated with the utmost seriousness. The body, suffering, and death are not unworthy subjects beneath the spiritual life of the human being.

Through the Incarnation and the Passion narrative, Christianity had already broken with the ancient separation between elevated style and lowly subject matter. What was bodily and humiliating could bear the deepest significance.

Montaigne carries this creatureliness forward, but largely detaches it from the Christian history of salvation.

The body and perishability remain, while earthly life is no longer understood primarily as a figure of what is to come. The created human being instead becomes the object of an unfinished investigation in the here and now.

Montaigne allows the body to act. He observes how it alters thought, mood, and self-understanding. He allows illness, pain, ageing, and the drives to correct ideas about human autonomy and reason.

Yet there is a limit.

Concrete Material and an Abstract Position

Although Montaigne is wise, there is in him a trace of pride.

It lies not primarily in what he says about himself, but in the position from which he says it.

His wealth gives him a certain distance from the world.

He is not protected from illness, bodily suffering, or death, but he possesses a material and social space around his experience. He can withdraw, read, travel, think, and transform what happens to him into reflection.

He experiences the body and allows it to correct his ideas, but he also turns the body’s effects into material for his observing self. The body may show him his mutability and limitations, but it is not fully permitted to put into question the self’s position as the place from which the world is interpreted.

Montaigne is therefore not abstract in his subject matter. On the contrary, his material is strikingly concrete: illness, sexuality, digestion, fear, kidney stones, habit, ageing, and death. Yet his position can still feel abstract.

He brings the body and experience into thought, but retains a vantage point above what is happening. He allows the world to affect him without fully surrendering the observing self to the world’s testing.

In this way, he never quite enters the world as part of it. He raises himself above his own participation and observes it from above. The body, nature, and contingency may reveal his limitations to him, but they are not permitted to unsettle completely the position from which those limitations are seen and judged.

This is where his understated pride lies: not in the belief that he controls the world, but in the belief that he can observe his participation in it without being entirely exposed to it.

He acknowledges that he is a body, yet he also wishes to be the one who observes the body. He acknowledges change, yet seeks a position from which he can follow it. He acknowledges creatureliness, but does not fully carry it through as a relationship.

Nature as Teacher

Montaigne also speaks of nature as a gentle teacher or guide. This can be understood in relation to his criticism of artificial doctrines, customs, and human pride. Nature returns the human being to their given constitution and shows that human habits and systems of thought are not necessarily the laws of the world.

Montaigne therefore does not reject nature as a condition of life. Rather, he rejects nature as a book whose deepest meaning human beings can read with certainty. The human being does not know the order of creation, animals cannot simply be placed beneath humanity, reason is uncertain, and our customs are not the laws of nature.

Nature therefore functions negatively and correctively in his thought.

He might say: You do not know what the whole is. Do not therefore make your human measure the measure of the world.

This is a significant insight. Yet when Montaigne nevertheless calls nature a teacher, he makes, in my view, a mistake.

Nature is a condition, not a model. The fact that human beings are subject to natural conditions does not mean that nature carries a norm they ought to obey. A limitation is not an authority merely because it imposes a boundary. It may be blind, brutal, arbitrary, or devastating. Illness, starvation, parasitism, and destruction are as natural as care, cooperation, growth, and recovery.

Nature does not speak with a single voice. It contains competition and cooperation, birth and death, tenderness and devouring, symbiosis and domination. It can therefore be used to legitimize almost any human order.

Anyone who regards nature as a teacher risks reading their own will into it. Human beings select which part of nature they wish to notice and then turn that part into nature’s lesson. Those who wish to justify power can point to competition. Those who wish to justify cooperation can point to symbiosis. Those who seek a fixed order can see hierarchies, while those who seek variation can see mutability and diversity.

It is then not nature that teaches. It is the self speaking through the nature it has chosen to see.

The metaphor of nature as teacher therefore easily conceals the power of one’s own interpretation. It transforms a human selection into an alleged natural authority.

Nature as Condition and Relationship

For me, nature is not merely the limit of human knowledge. It is also an encounter.

The unfamiliar world—the forest, the animal, pain, matter, the weather, and the body—acts back upon the human being and may reveal something that has not yet been discovered within them.

This does not mean that nature delivers a ready-made message. It is not a textbook in which human beings can look up how they ought to live. 

Knowledge does not arise because nature speaks and the human being obeys, but through what happens in the relationship between the human being and what is not them.

Knowledge therefore arises not only through the human being going more deeply into themselves, but through the tension between the self and what is not the self. Meaning and direction arise in encounters and relationships, not least where the will meets a limitation and is forced to find a form.

But the form is not dictated by the limitation.

The will is not the sole authority, but neither is the boundary. Form arises in the relationship between that which wills and that which resists. Without will, there is no movement. Without limitation, movement acquires no definite form. But the limitation is not thereby good, wise, or worthy of imitation.

The fact that something defeats the human being does not mean that it was right.

Nature can reveal consequences. It can show that an idea cannot be sustained, that a body has a limit, or that the will cannot determine the form of reality by itself. But nature cannot, on its own, decide what is good, right, or worth pursuing.

Nature is therefore a condition of testing, not the final judge of the test.

Where I Go Further

Montaigne might say: I discover the human being by observing myself.

I say: I discover both myself and the world by exposing myself to that which does not obey me.

This is an essential difference. In Montaigne, the self is fluid, contradictory, and open, but it remains the principal space of knowledge.

For me, the self is not sufficient as a source. Left to itself, it can become self-confirming, fanciful, or closed. It can also create an image of nature that merely reflects the self’s own desires.

The self must therefore be tested against resistance: the body, nature, other human beings, history, and the consequences of reality. But this testing, too, must be interpreted. Resistance must not automatically be transformed into truth or authority.

Nature therefore assumes, in my thought, a role resembling that which Judgment has acquired in my theology. It does not affirm the human being or point towards a finished morality, but it prevents the human being from making their inner world absolute.

Judgment does not consist in nature pronouncing a verdict upon the human being. It consists in human ideas being exposed to something that does not bend to them. Something may then be revealed: a boundary, a consequence, a dependency, or a previously unknown possibility.

But Judgment, too, is a relationship. It can never be reduced to the claim that the stronger force is always right.

Nature is not a harmonious mother or a secret textbook. It can be beautiful, indifferent, creative, and devouring at the same time. Yet the encounter with it can produce knowledge, because within that encounter the human being discovers their actual relationship to something that exceeds them.

Montaigne dissolves the human claim to know nature and thereafter seeks knowledge within the human being. I accept the dissolution of that claim, but I do not stop there. Even the impenetrable can communicate knowledge through relationship, resistance, and experience.

I am therefore not reintroducing an old metaphysics in which nature possesses a ready-made message. I am doing something more cautious: nature may have no statement to make, but the encounter with it changes what can be said.

Montaigne acknowledges human creatureliness, yet still allows the observing self to retain a certain freedom above its participation in the world. I go further by allowing the one who understands to be drawn into the testing as well.

The human being cannot first stand above the world and then understand their relationship to it. They understand by already being entangled in the world and by allowing the encounter to transform the one who understands.

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Мимезис /mimesis

стгрч. μίμησις