Montaigne’s Elusive Self: An Essay

Abstract

In this essay, John Martin uses the autobiographical musings of Montaigne’s Essays as a starting point for reconsidering the nature of the sense of self and the individual in the context of Life-Writing and Egodocuments in the early modern period for Montaigne and for the volume as a whole. He argues that, for Montaigne, freedom lay in one’s inability to ascribe a fixed nature to oneself, a radical posture in a day in which intense political and confessional pressures demanded clear definitions of identity. But Montaigne not only recoiled against these, he claimed in his Essays that the self was patchwork, multi-layered, always in movement, and thus elusive. This not only broke with courtly and confessional models of identity but also posited the self as a persona capable of claiming both intellectual and political liberties in a world whose reigning passions always risk subsuming and denying us our most fundamental freedoms. Thus, for Martin, Montaigne’s provisional nature of self and evaluation of all things offers a model for a more humane and gentle relationship with society, others, and one’s sense of self even in our own troubled times and a theoretical model for the following essays.