Montaigne

Pierre Manent, Paul Seaton

Description

In Montaigne: Life without Law, originally published in French in 2014 and now translated for the first time into English by Paul Seaton, Pierre Manent provides a careful reading of Montaigne’s three-volume work Essays. Although Montaigne’s writings resist easy analysis, Manent finds in them a subtle unity, and demonstrates the philosophical depth of Montaigne’s reflections and the distinctive, even radical, character of his central ideas. To show Montaigne’s unique contribution to modern philosophy, Manent compares his work to other modern thinkers, including Machiavelli, Hobbes, Pascal, and Rousseau. What does human life look like without the imposing presence of the state? asks Manent. In raising this question about Montaigne’s Essays, Manent poses a question of great relevance to our contemporary situation. He argues that Montaigne’s philosophical reflections focused on what he famously called la condition humaine, the human condition. Manent tracks Montaigne’s development of this fundamental concept, focusing especially on his reworking of pagan and Christian understandings of virtue and pleasure, disputation and death. Bringing new form and content together, a new form of thinking and living is presented by Montaigne’s Essays, a new model of a thoughtful life from one of the unsung founders of modernity.

Throughout, Manent suggests alternatives and criticisms, some by way of contrasts with other thinkers, some in his own name. This is philosophical engagement at a very high level. In showing the unity of Montaigne’s work, Manent’s study will appeal especially to students and scholars of political theory, the history of modern philosophy, modern literature, and the origins of modernity.

Translator’s Foreword Introduction: The Word and the Promise

Part 1. The War of Men

1. To Save One’s Life

2. To Compare Oneself

Part 2. The Powers of the Word

3. From Rhetoric to Literature

4. The Word and Death

Part 3. The Mysteries of Custom

5. A New World

6. Command Reason

7. Three Conditions of Men

Part 4. Life Without Law

8. Governed Men

9. Nature and Truth

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie politique
• Éthique et morale
• Movements
• Individual Philosophers
• Political
• PHILOSOPHY
• Philosophie et théologie
• Humanism
• Politics
• Niccolò Machiavelli
• Machiavelli
• Thomas Hobbes
• Rousseau
• Pascal
• Renaissance

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 31 août 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 7
• EAN13: 9780268107833
• Langue: English

Extrait

MONTAIGNE
CATHOLIC IDEAS FOR A SECULAR WORLD
O. Carter Snead, series editor

Under the sponsorship of the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture at the University of Notre Dame, the purpose of this interdisciplinary series is to feature authors from around the world who will expand the influence of Catholic thought on the most important conversations in academia and the public square. The series is “ Catholic ” in the sense that the books will emphasize and engage the enduring themes of human dignity and flourishing, the common good, truth, beauty, justice, and freedom in ways that reflect and deepen principles affirmed by the Catholic Church for millennia. It is not limited to Catholic authors or even works that explicitly take Catholic principles as a point of departure. Its books are intended to demonstrate the diversity and enhance the relevance of these enduring themes and principles in numerous subjects, ranging from the arts and humanities to the sciences.
MONTAIGNE
Life without Law

PIERRE MANENT
Translated by Paul Seaton
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana
University of Notre Dame Press
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
undpress.nd.edu
Copyright © 2020 by the University of Notre Dame
Original French edition, Montaigne: La vie san loi.
© Flammarion, Paris, 2014.
Translated from the original French text by Paul Seaton.
All Rights Reserved
Published in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940880
ISBN: 978-0-268-10781-9 (Hardback)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10784-0 (WebPDF)
ISBN: 978-0-268-10783-3 (Epub)
This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]
Contents Translator’s Foreword Introduction: The Word and the Promise PART 1 THE WAR OF HUMAN BEINGS 1 To Save One’s Life 2 To Compare Oneself PART 2 THE POWERS OF THE WORD 3 From Rhetoric to Literature 4 The Word and Death PART 3 THE MYSTERIES OF CUSTOM 5 A New World 6 Commanded Reason 7 Three Conditions of Human Beings PART 4 LIFE WITHOUT LAW 8 Governed Human Beings 9 Nature and Truth Notes Index
Translator’s Foreword
The eager reader can go directly to Manent’s own text. In this foreword I place it in two relevant Manentian contexts; then I indicate something of what awaits the reader. The contexts are Manent’s own oeuvre and his developing understanding of modernity’s origins. What awaits is an explication de texte by a master reader.

In Montaigne: Life without Law, Pierre Manent (1949–) is at the top of his game; truth be told, he’s been there for some time now. Long ago he did the homework, an intensive study of the classics of political philosophy and social theory. A close apprenticeship with Raymond Aron (1905–83) and private reading of Leo Strauss (1899–1973) completed his first formation. Then he struck out on his own.
Toward the end of the Cold War, he noted a worrisome “depoliticization” and attendant “denationalization” of life and thought in Western Europe. In the decades that followed, he tracked and criticized this attitude as it engaged in its defining project, “the construction of Europe.” He became one of the European Union’s best-known critics. In doing so, he went to the fundamentals. Its guiding “Idea of Humanity”—as “virtually integrated,” with “no significant collective differences”—is patently false and politically debilitating, while its byzantine structures and bureaucratic rules resemble a return of enlightened despotism. 1 At the same time, and positively, he became a defender of the nation-state. 2 Manent did all this from a distinctive point of view, that of political philosophy.

As the reference to the old-fashioned term “political philosophy” may suggest, going back as it does to Plato and Aristotle, contemporary concerns were always situated in broader contexts and pursued with an eye to the deepest issues. Tocqueville, an early guide, famously considered European man under two vastly different orders, aristocracy and democracy. Manent followed that expansive lead in an early book, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy (1982). Eventually, the context encompassed the entirety of the Western political and spiritual adventure, and among the regularly treated issues was that of the human soul. One was reminded of Plato’s Republic, with its dual focus on soul types and regime types.
At first, Manent tended to proceed by discrete comparisons and contrasts of ancient and modern arrangements and thoughts, but eventually he put it all together in the magisterial Metamorphoses of the City: On the Dynamism of Western Civilization (2010). This book was the fruit of a course he regularly gave at L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris on “political forms.” The ancient Greek city had known a variety of regimes, as had the modern nation. But neither the city nor the nation was a regime, and each was different from the other. Regime analysis, therefore, the focus and forte of classical thought, had to be supplemented by a new science of political forms. Manent went about the task of producing one, and he found that the Sonderweg, the special path, of the West could be rendered intelligible as a series of distinct forms of human association.
These were the city, the empire, and the nation, with the Christian church, yet another form of authoritative human association, enriching and complicating matters. The political forms were so many efforts on the part of the Western political animal to fulfill his nature after the limits of previous forms had shown themselves, while the Christian church was found to provide the most satisfying response to the human desire for access to the transcendent divine. Its founder, the God-man, squared the circle of infinite distance respected and bridged.
However, even this enormously wide-ranging investigation was not the only thing that occupied Manent and his teaching at the time. He also taught courses on “the modern soul,” in which Montaigne, Pascal, and Rousseau and their archetypical explorations of the human condition and the modern situation were compared and contrasted. In a nice counterpoint to the moderns, he also conducted an ongoing seminar on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics during the period.

It was very much in an Aristotelian spirit that he wrote Beyond Radical Secularism, published in France in 2015. 3 In it, the French Catholic philosopher explicitly adopted the perspective of the public-spirited citizen, asking, What needs to be done, what can be done, in order to bring unincorporated Muslim communities into the national community? What followed was a sustained and candid “deliberation,” richly informed by French history, political philosophy, and discreet Christian faith. In it, all parties were included, all were addressed, all were challenged. Here, as was classically the case, deliberation was an attempt to articulate a possible action in view of a common, or shared, good; it was a logos that addressed and sought to knit together the parts of a community in just such a common endeavor. 4
Bookending it, as it were, were two books, including the one before you. There are many important points of contact between the two. 5 Montaigne: La vie sans loi appeared in 2014, and La loi naturelle et les droits de l’homme, originally given as the prestigious Étienne Gilson lectures at L’Institut Catholique de Paris in 2017, appeared in published form in 2018. 6 One notes that “law” ( loi ) is found in both titles, although it is paired and contrasted with two other items: with “life” ( la vie ) by Montaigne, with “human rights” ( les droits de l’homme ), according to the Zeitgeist. Montaigne attempted to articulate a satisfying human life totally apart from “law,” whether natural or divine, whereas in later modern thought, a new teaching of natural rights broke with traditional natural law, and the older concept was reworked accordingly. Eventually, rights were emancipated even from this altered shell.
Traditional natural law is thus something of a ghostly middle term spanning the works, conspicuous by its absence in Montaigne and among “us” ( nous )—us who are partisans of rights and who want law—all law, any law— to serve rights and us. Modern thought, thus construed, was the critical endeavor to replace old authorities and establish new ones. We are this effort’s heirs, often unwittingly. Both investigations by Manent therefore promised increased self-knowledge, by way of a reconsideration of founding fathers and founding thoughts.
Not visible in the titles is that Manent is willing to let the scorned authorities have their say as well. In his rendering, however, these authorities are anything but hoary or hidebound. His Aristotle is as fresh and contemporary as human nature itself, his Pascal and Augustine remarkably relevant interlocutors. These are not Homer’s bloodless shades, or relics of a superseded past. Aristotle in particular provides a robust conception of reason, what Manent intriguingly calls “commanding reason,” while the Christian thinkers are invoked to indicate how Christianity broadened human horizons and deepened the human soul, especially with the notion of “conscience.” In sum, august representatives of premodern reason and faith, nature and grace, are powerfully (and sometimes pointedly) present.
Socrates too is present, not just as a subject of study or an illuminating point of contrast (although he is that) but in his philosophical spirit, the spirit of probing dialectics, which presides over both investigations. The gigantomachia of the West—its great debates—live and breathe in these works of the French Catholic philosopher.

Modernity and its creations, modern times and the modern world, have often been scrutinized and assessed, perhaps starting as early as the day after modernity was first declared. Be that as it may,