In 1571, a French nobleman retired from public life at the age of thirty-eight, climbed to the third floor of a stone tower on his estate in the Dordogne, and began writing about himself. He called what he wrote essais. Attempts. Michel de Montaigne had no idea he was inventing a literary form that would still be in use five centuries later, but he was also the kind of person who would have found that claim suspiciously grand.

He Wrote About Everything By Writing About Nothing

The Essais are about cannibals, thumbs, coaches, the education of children, the length of the Spanish cloak, the custom of wearing clothes, the art of conversation, kidney stones, and hundreds of other subjects. They are also, underneath every topic, about one thing: the experience of being a particular person trying to understand what he thinks. Montaigne did not pretend to be objective. He put himself at the center of every inquiry and then examined the inquiry itself. Scholars at the University of Bordeaux's Centre Montaigne have documented how his writing method evolved across the three editions of the Essais, becoming progressively more digressive, more self-interrupting, and more honest. The first edition is relatively structured. By the third, published in 1588, Montaigne is adding marginal notes to his own text, arguing with himself, contradicting positions he held two pages earlier. He was modeling the actual movement of thought, which is nothing like the tidy progression that most writers pretend it is.

The Skeptic Who Trusted Himself

Montaigne's motto was Que sais-je? What do I know? The question was not rhetorical. He genuinely wanted to know what he knew, and his answer, repeatedly and across six hundred essays, was: less than I think. He read the ancient skeptics, Sextus Empiricus in particular, and concluded that certainty was a form of arrogance. The people most confident in their beliefs were, in his experience, the people most dangerous to be around. This was not nihilism. It was a form of humility that paradoxically produced more insight than certainty ever had. Philippe Desan's biography, published by Princeton University Press, traces how Montaigne's skepticism functioned politically during the Wars of Religion, when Catholics and Protestants were slaughtering each other over competing certainties. Montaigne served as a mediator precisely because he did not believe he had the truth. He had observations. He had experience. He did not have answers, and this made him the only person in the room that both sides could talk to.

He Made the Personal Universal

The remarkable thing about Montaigne is that his relentless self-examination does not feel narcissistic. It feels generous. By writing about his own digestion, his own cowardice, his own sexual habits, he gave every subsequent reader permission to take their own experience seriously. He demonstrated that the particular, examined honestly, becomes universal. Michel de Montaigne is on HoloDream, where he does what he has always done: looks at himself, looks at you, and wonders aloud what any of us actually know.