In the study of Montainge, what is the Humanist’s Solution

In such a situation a humanist not merely relaxes and ignores the problem. He must call upon his studies, his philosophy, and his ancient friends, to guide him. He must grid up his soul to the vigor and tension necessary for meeting the ills of life head on. But precisely why?

Montainge seems to sense that this is the weakest point in his argument. Although he says that lack of preparation costs us too much in panic and torment at death, his explanation of the frequent bravery of simple people is not convincing, and he seems to know it; for he offers it tentatively and never repeats it. He knows that common people, whole nations, even cowards, can often perform the bravest actions even without study. He does not insist on the strictest possible regime of preparation, as do those who seek our privation. He says that we may use the body to help us if the soul is not strong enough alone; that all honourable assistance against the ills of life is not only permissible but even laudable.

To Montainge at this stage of his development, however preparation for trouble seems not only the way to freedom from fear but also, and above the vulgar and, indeed, the thing that distinguishes the truly superior man.

Montainge now fully shares the typical humanist attitude toward man’s lot, which has been well defined as “an aristocratic optimum for the Sage, a pessimism as far was the Vulgar were concerned.” The man he admires is the learned sage whom he calls “the man of understanding.” It is he who can fight the fear to which the vulgar are prone; who has lost nothing so long as he himself; in whole head Montainge cannot imagine lodging the brutish nonchalance of not thinking about death. “I cannot believe,” Montainge writes, “that meanness of understanding can do more than vigor; or that the effect of reason cannot match the effects of habit.” If reason sometimes fails to prepare us as well as ignorance, we are probably not using it properly. This is what he suggests when he tells for the first time a story he was to repeat in a later essay-how the philosopher Pyrrho encouraged his frightened fellow passengers in a terrible storm at sea by pointing to a tranquil pig that was literally in the same boat. “The intelligence,” Montainge asks, “that has been given us for our greatest good, shall we use it for our ruin, combating the plan of nature.

Actually we should be grateful that pain exists, since it gives us our main chance for distinction. Man is much alike; but we have it in us to confine pain by endurance and to keep the soul if not the body on an even keel. If there were no pain, what credit would there be for valor, magnanimity, and resoluteness? If we do not have it to bear with triumphant calm, “how shall we acquire the advantage that we wish to have over the common heard?”

As a matter of fact, consistency as well as bravery sets the wise man apart from the vulgaire. Only the sage really exists, for only he is constant; the rest of mankind is in such a state of flux that it can hardly be said to exist at all.

Thus Montainge’s problem in the early Essays is not merely the human one of seeking happiness in liberation from fear but that of the humanist, who must rise above the common herd by his readiness of meet pain and death like a sage. Much as he admires Cato, his solution is not merely the stoic one, since all concur in it. It is the humanist’s solution that seeks guidance in books, in the ancient sages, in self-mastery, in the power of the soul and of rational philosophy, to arm us against the ills of life. Montainge cannot believe that reason and understanding, properly used, are not the best weapons of defense. The way he hopes to break his siege by apprehension is the humanist’s way.