Michel de Montaigne 1533 – 1592

Michel de Montaigne was a French Renaissance philosopher and the inventor of the modern essay. Withdrawing in middle age to his tower library, he composed the three books of the Essais, an unprecedented program of self-examination conducted in dialogue with Greek and Roman authors. The motto Que sais-je?, what do I know, captures his temperate skepticism, while his frank attention to the body, to custom, and to the particularity of his own experience set the tone for modern introspective writing. Through Pascal, Shakespeare, and Emerson, his influence on Western thought has been immense.

Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) was a French essayist and philosopher whose Essais founded the modern essay form and shaped Western philosophical-personal writing decisively. Born to a wealthy noble family at the Château de Montaigne in Bordeaux, raised speaking Latin as his first language by his father's deliberate pedagogical experiment, he served as a magistrate in the Bordeaux parlement and later as mayor of the city before retiring in 1570 to the tower library where he wrote.

The Essais — composed and continually revised between 1570 and 1592 across three editions — are the founding work of philosophical self-examination in the modern Western tradition. Montaigne wrote against the systematic philosophical treatise: I think because I write, and what I write is myself. The form combines classical erudition (Plutarch, Seneca, Sextus Empiricus) with personal observation, comparative anthropology (especially in the Apology for Raymond Sebond and Of Cannibals), and a sustained skeptical questioning of human pretension to knowledge.

Montaigne's skepticism — what he called the Pyrrhonist motto que sçay-je? (what do I know?) — is moral and personal rather than systematic. The Essais are themselves the philosophical work: not the application of an antecedent doctrine but the practice of philosophical self-examination as itself a form of philosophical inquiry. Montaigne's influence on Pascal, Descartes, Bacon, Shakespeare, Rousseau, Emerson, and Nietzsche is enormous; the modern essay as Bacon, Hazlitt, Emerson, and Woolf practiced it would be unimaginable without him.