Ideal or singularity? Montaigne’s lesson for acting in an uncertain world

As the world swirls with change and uncertainty, knowing and embracing our true selves becomes crucial—not just to anchor us, but to liberate us. Montaigne believed that understanding and accepting our limits allows us to face uncertainty without bias. Instead of judging what exists, we imagine what could be. Could this perspective be the key to navigating today’s ever-shifting landscape?

Knowing our innermost nature is a quest as old as mankind itself, and the subject is inexhaustible. Thousands of books have been written on the subject. In this field, we quickly fall into the trap of narcissism – “reveal the extraordinary in you,” “discover your hidden powers,” or, more recently, “reveal the leader in you,” or seductive but nonsensical slogans like the one we’re given before a job interview or exam: “Be yourself.

When it comes to self-knowledge, it’s best to turn to the essential master: Montaigne, a French philosopher and political figure. He is the author of the Essais, first published in 1580, a sum total devoted entirely to… himself. It’s difficult to describe this unclassifiable work. It’s a kind of diary in which he recalls his life. But it’s neither a glorified autobiography nor an exercise in contrition. As Régis Debray said of de Gaulle: “Some write to propose themselves, others to justify themselves; de Gaulle, on the other hand, writes to be”. This is also true of Montaigne. Montaigne speaks of himself, but in such a way that he speaks of all human beings. He speaks frankly about his faults, weaknesses, and failings, and these touch us because we sometimes recognize ourselves in them. He admits laziness, greed and cowardice. Mayor of Bordeaux in spite of himself, he escaped the plague by abandoning the inhabitants for whom he was responsible, in an episode of little glory; just as well, he disliked glory… like the plague.

As the philosopher Jean-François Revel notes in his Histoire de la Philosophie, “Until Montaigne, the enterprise of self-knowledge, whether Platonic, Stoic, or Christian (the latter, for example, in Saint Augustine’s Confessions), had always had a moralizing, corrective purpose. It was only a matter of knowing oneself in order to correct oneself.” For Montaigne, correction is out of the question. For him, self-knowledge is not a search for an ideal nature hidden behind our real nature, an ideal nature that would be the only truly authentic one. Nor is it narcissism. Self-knowledge consists in letting our nature “speak” as it is, not as we would like it to be. It’s a principle of reality.

From the particular to the universal

The Essays is a magnificent literary work, and a substantial volume – over a thousand pages long – devoted entirely to the minutiae of Montaigne’s life. In doing so, he goes completely against the grain of his time. “While the seventeenth century, the century of similarity par excellence, always strives to bring together commonalities and ignore individual accidents, Montaigne delights in accumulating these accidents, in showing that man is nothing but a series of differences and exceptions, in invoking the small fact that forbids conclusion,” Revel adds. For Montaigne, the only thing that counts is the singularity, the particular case, the greek idiotes. The particular case teaches us more about ourselves and humanity than the generalities of humiliating classifications like Descartes’ Traité Des Passions de l’Âme (treaty of the passions of the soul), with its six major passions and thirty-three varieties. Montaigne doesn’t use classifications or categories, only the infinite complexity and singularity of human beings. His starting point is what is and what makes it unique. It’s the unique, the singular that interests him.

In doing so, Montaigne fully accepts what seems to us to be a paradox, that of overcoming the opposition between the particular and the general. Indeed, from the very first pages of the Essays, he warns the reader that in this work he intends to describe himself and “the whole shape of the human condition”-at the same time! For him, to know himself in his reality, in his singularity, without duplication, is also to know humanity.

Revel adds: “It is by not being afraid to descend into the minutest details of the knowledge of a particular individuality, with all that these details may have of seemingly idle and, at the outset, theoretically non-generalizable nature, that we have a chance of achieving true generality”. The particular contributes to the universal. This fusion of the particular and the general, so counterintuitive that it is still fiercely resisted today, was a common thread later taken up by Spinoza, Voltaire, and Adam Smith, among others.

Open to infinity

But that’s not all. Humanists like Montaigne wrote at a time when Europe was discovering the vast world. Along with the naturalists of his day, he rejoiced in the richness, complexity, and diversity of the world that was being discovered, especially through travel – the era of great voyages of discovery – and the study of nature. These discoveries overturned the beliefs of the time. It was a time of uncertainty in which old beliefs were weakened or even shattered. The unity of the Christian world broke down into irreconcilable beliefs. For example, it was becoming less and less possible to believe that the sun revolves around the earth; but if the opposite was true, our whole mental universe collapsed! This uncertainty frightened even the scientists of the day, but not Montaigne. On the contrary, he welcomed the uncertainty with joy, with the eagerness of a child who doesn’t know where he’s going, but knows he’s going to have a good time. For Montaigne, it’s no longer about striving for certainty-that’s neither possible nor desirable-but about embracing ambiguity and uncertainty, our own and the world’s.

As Revel points out: “Even today, philosophies, with their obsession with what is ‘authentic’ and what is not in man, hasten to install this eternal trial in the heart of man. But there is no such thing in man as the important and the unimportant, the noble and the trivial, the authentic and the inauthentic.” The great authors of metaphysics had in fact made man a being apart, an interlocutor with God. Pascal wanted to lead man to consider himself implicitly divine, to reject any destiny other than the eternal and the heavenly, to create a magnificent double ideal in order to escape despicable reality.

But to create this double ideal is to judge ourselves in relation to it. We can only be disappointed because this ideal is, by definition, unattainable. It crushes us, and our actions seem insignificant. We are tempted to resign ourselves and take refuge in speculation. Montaigne has nothing to do with this impossible ideal; he dissolves the double to put man back in his place, in the reality of nature, accepting himself as he is.

He turns this inversion of the ideal towards man into a driving force. Indeed, when we start from what we are and accept it, we are available without prejudice to the unpredictability of reality. We look at events not to judge them in relation to an ideal, but to give them meaning in relation to who we are. We look at the vast world and ask ourselves: “What can I do with what I have and who I am?” By accepting our uniqueness and all the limitations that are ours, we rediscover the possibility of action.

Montaigne’s goal, then, is to make us seek only what is within our reach – no more ideals – but everything that is within our reach. Pascal humiliated man by showing him that, starting from his insignificance, he could only aspire to the infinite; Montaigne celebrates man and his limits so that he can trace his path through this infinite. The former limits man to what must be; the latter invites him to seek what can be. The necessary gives way to the possible.

An essential key for today’s world

With Montaigne, we can accept what seemed paradoxical: that in the face of uncertainty, it is the acceptance of our limitations that opens us up to the infinite possibilities of action, and it is by embracing our singularity that we contribute to the universal. And what if Montaigne was not only an essential key to today’s world, but also the spiritual father of all modern entrepreneurs?

🇫🇷 French version of this article here.

➕ On the same topic read my previous article: Effectuation: How Entrepreneurs (Really) create new products, new organizations and new markets and Frank Knight’s century-old wisdom on risk, uncertainty, and profit. On the importance of defending one’s singularity, see: Being Yourself in an Era of Corporate Legitimacy Challenge: Lessons from the Coinbase Story. Studies about Montaigne in English can be found here.

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