Con­sid­ered the first great human­ist essay­ist, Michel de Mon­taigne was also the first to use the word “essay” for the casu­al, often mean­der­ing, fre­quent­ly first-per­son explo­rations that now con­sti­tute the most preva­lent lit­er­ary form of our day. “Any­one who sets out to write an essay,” notes Antho­ny Got­tlieb in The New York Times, “for a school or col­lege class,” a mag­a­zine, news­pa­per, Tum­blr, or oth­er­wise, “owes some­thing” to Mon­taigne, the French “mag­is­trate and landown­er near Bor­deaux who retired tem­porar­i­ly from pub­lic life in 1570 to spend more time with his library and to make a mod­est memen­to of his mind.”

Mon­taigne’s result­ing book, called the Essais—“tri­als” or “attempts”—exemplifies the clas­si­cal and Chris­t­ian pre­oc­cu­pa­tions of the Renais­sance; he dwelt intent­ly on ques­tions of char­ac­ter and virtue, both indi­vid­ual and civic, and he con­stant­ly refers to ancient author­i­ties, the com­pan­ions of his book-lined fortress of soli­tude. “Some­what like a link-infest­ed blog post,” writes Got­tlieb, “Montaigne’s writ­ing is drip­ping with quo­ta­tions.” But he was also a dis­tinct­ly mod­ern writer, who skew­ered the over­con­fi­dence and blind ide­al­ism of ancients and con­tem­po­raries alike, and looked with amuse­ment on faith in rea­son and progress.

For all his con­sid­er­able eru­di­tion, Mon­taigne was “keen to debunk the pre­ten­sions of learn­ing,” says Alain de Bot­ton in his intro­duc­to­ry School of Life video above. An “extreme­ly fun­ny” writer, he shares with coun­try­man François Rabelais a satirist’s delight in the vul­gar and taboo and an hon­est appraisal of humanity’s check­ered rela­tion­ship with the good life. Though we may call Mon­taigne a moral­ist, the descrip­tion should not imply that he was strict­ly ortho­dox in any way—quite the con­trary.

Montaigne’s ethics often defy the dog­ma of both the Romans and the Chris­tians. He stren­u­ous­ly opposed col­o­niza­tion, for exam­ple, and made a sen­si­ble case for can­ni­bal­ism as no more bar­barous a prac­tice than those engaged in by 16th cen­tu­ry Euro­peans.

In a con­trar­i­an essay, “That to Study Phi­los­o­phy is to Learn to Die”—its title a quo­ta­tion from Cicero’s Tus­cu­lan Dis­pu­ta­tions—Mon­taigne threads the nee­dle between memen­to mori high seri­ous­ness and off­hand wit­ti­cism, writ­ing, “Let the philoso­phers say what they will, the main thing at which we all aim, even in virtue itself, is plea­sure. It amus­es me to rat­tle in their ears this word, which they so nau­se­ate to hear.” But in the next sen­tence, he avows that we derive plea­sure “more due to the assis­tance of virtue than to any oth­er assis­tance what­ev­er.”

The great­est ben­e­fit of prac­tic­ing virtue, as Cicero rec­om­mends, is “the con­tempt of death,” which frees us to live ful­ly. Mon­taigne attacks the mod­ern fear and denial of death as a par­a­lyz­ing atti­tude. Instead, “we should always, as near as we can, be boot­ed and spurred, and ready to go,” he breezi­ly sug­gests. “The dead­est deaths are the best.… I want death to find me plant­i­ng cab­bages.” The irrev­er­ence he brought to the gravest of subjects—making, for exam­ple, a list of sud­den and ridicu­lous deaths of famous people—serves not only to enter­tain but to edi­fy, as de Bot­ton argues above in an episode of his series “Phi­los­o­phy: A Guide to Hap­pi­ness.”

Mon­taigne “seemed to under­stand what makes us feel bad about our­selves, and in his book tries to make us feel bet­ter.” He endeav­ors to show, as he wrote in his first essay, “that men by var­i­ous means arrive at the same end.” Like lat­er first-per­son philo­soph­i­cal essay­ists Kierkegaard and Niet­zsche, Mon­taigne address­es our feel­ings of inad­e­qua­cy by remind­ing his read­ers how thor­ough­ly we are gov­erned by the same irra­tional pas­sions, and sub­ject to the same fears, con­ceits, and ail­ments. There is much wis­dom and com­fort to be found in Montaigne’s essays. Yet he is beloved not only for what he says, but for how he says it—with a style that makes him seem like an elo­quent, bril­liant, prac­ti­cal, and self-dep­re­cat­ing­ly sym­pa­thet­ic friend.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Goethe, Germany’s “Renais­sance Man”

Watch Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to 25 Philoso­phers by The School of Life: From Pla­to to Kant and Fou­cault

6 Polit­i­cal The­o­rists Intro­duced in Ani­mat­ed “School of Life” Videos: Marx, Smith, Rawls & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Image by Nemo­main, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

French the­o­rist Michel Fou­cault rose to inter­na­tion­al promi­nence with his crit­i­cal histories—or “archaeologies”—of sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge and tech­no­crat­ic pow­er. His first book, Mad­ness and Civ­i­liza­tion, described the Enlight­en­ment-era cre­ation of insan­i­ty as a cat­e­go­ry set apart from rea­son, which enabled those labeled mad to be sub­ject­ed to painful, inva­sive treat­ments and lose their free­dom and agency dur­ing a peri­od he called “the Great Con­fine­ment.”

A fol­low-up, The Birth of the Clin­ic, appeared in 1963, intro­duc­ing the notion of the “med­ical gaze,” a cold, prob­ing ide­o­log­i­cal instru­ment that dehu­man­izes patients and allows peo­ple to be made into objects of exper­i­men­ta­tion. Fou­cault tend­ed to view the world through a par­tic­u­lar­ly grim, claus­tro­pho­bic, even para­noid lens, though one arguably war­rant­ed by the well-doc­u­ment­ed his­to­ries he unearthed and the con­tem­po­rary tech­no­crat­ic police states they gave rise to.

But Fou­cault also insist­ed that in all rela­tions of pow­er, “there is nec­es­sar­i­ly the pos­si­bil­i­ty of resis­tance.” His own forms of resis­tance tend­ed toward polit­i­cal activism, adven­tur­ous sex­u­al exploits, Zen med­i­ta­tion, and drugs. He grew pot on his bal­cony in Paris, did cocaine, smoked opi­um, and “deanat­o­mized the local­iza­tion of plea­sure,” as he put it, with LSD. The exper­i­men­ta­tion con­sti­tut­ed what he called a “lim­it expe­ri­ence” that trans­gressed the bound­aries of a social­ly-imposed iden­ti­ty.

But in a strange irony, the first time Fou­cault dropped acid, he him­self became the sub­ject of an exper­i­ment con­duct­ed on him by one of his fol­low­ers, Sime­on Wade, an assis­tant pro­fes­sor of his­to­ry at Clare­mont Grad­u­ate School. In 1975 Fou­cault gave a sem­i­nar at UC Berke­ley, where he would lat­er fin­ish his career in the years before his death in 1984. While in Cal­i­for­nia, he accept­ed an invi­ta­tion from Wade and his part­ner Michael Stone­man to take a road trip to Death Val­ley. “I was per­form­ing an exper­i­ment,” Wade remem­bered in a recent inter­view on Boom Cal­i­for­nia. “I want­ed to see [how] one of the great­est minds in his­to­ry would be affect­ed by an expe­ri­ence he had nev­er had before.”

We went to Zabriskie Point to see Venus appear. Michael placed speak­ers all around us, as no one else was there, and we lis­tened to Elis­a­beth Schwarzkopf sing Richard Strauss’s, Four Last Songs. I saw tears in Foucault’s eyes. We went into one of the hol­lows and laid on our backs, like James Turrell’s vol­cano, and watched Venus come forth and the stars come out lat­er. We stayed at Zabriskie Point for about ten hours.

The desert acid trip, Wade says, changed Fou­cault per­ma­nent­ly, for the bet­ter. “Every­thing after this expe­ri­ence in 1975,” he says, “is the new Fou­cault, neo-Fou­cault…. Fou­cault from 1975 to 1984 was a new being.” The evi­dence seems clear enough. Fou­cault wrote Wade and Stone­man a few months lat­er to tell them “it was the great­est expe­ri­ence of his life, and that it pro­found­ly changed his life and his work…. He wrote us that he had thrown vol­umes two and three of his His­to­ry of Sex­u­al­i­ty into the fire and that he had to start over again.”

Fou­cault had suc­cumbed to despair pri­or to his Death Val­ley trip, Wade says, con­tem­plat­ing in his 1966 The Order of Things “the death of human­i­ty…. To the point of say­ing that the face of man has been effaced.” After­ward, he was “imme­di­ate­ly” seized by a new ener­gy and focus. The titles of those last two, rewrit­ten, books “are emblem­at­ic of the impact this expe­ri­ence had on him: The Uses of Plea­sure and The Care of the Self, with no men­tion of fini­tude.” Fou­cault biog­ra­ph­er James Miller tells us in the doc­u­men­tary above (at 27:30) —Michel Fou­cault Beyond Good and Evil— that every­one he spoke to about Fou­cault had heard about Death Val­ley, since Fou­cault told any­one who would lis­ten that it was “the most trans­for­ma­tive expe­ri­ence in his life.”

There were some peo­ple, notes inter­view­er Heather Dun­das, who believed that Wade’s exper­i­ment was uneth­i­cal, that he had been “reck­less with Foucault’s wel­fare.” To this chal­lenge Wade replies, “Fou­cault was well aware of what was involved, and we were with him the entire time.” Asked whether he thought of the reper­cus­sions to his own career, how­ev­er, he replies, “in ret­ro­spect, I should have.” Two years lat­er, he left Clare­mont and could not find anoth­er full-time aca­d­e­m­ic posi­tion. After obtain­ing a nurs­ing license, he made a career as a nurse at the Los Ange­les Coun­ty Psy­chi­atric Hos­pi­tal and Ven­tu­ra Coun­ty Hos­pi­tal, exact­ly the sort of insti­tu­tions Fou­cault had found so threat­en­ing in his ear­li­er work.

Wade also authored a 121-page account of the Death Val­ley trip, and in 1978 pub­lished Chez Fou­cault, a mimeo­graphed fanzine intro­duc­tion to the philoso­pher’s work, includ­ing an unpub­lished inter­view with Fou­cault. For his part, Fou­cault threw him­self vig­or­ous­ly into the final phase of his career, in which he devel­oped his con­cept of biopow­er, an eth­i­cal the­o­ry of self-care and a crit­i­cal take on clas­si­cal philo­soph­i­cal and reli­gious themes about the nature of truth and sub­jec­tiv­i­ty. He spent the last 9 years of his life pur­su­ing the new path­ways of thought that opened to him dur­ing those extra­or­di­nary ten hours under the hot sun and cool stars of the Death Val­ley desert.

You can read the com­plete inter­view with Wade at BoomCalifornia.com.

Relat­ed Con­tent:   

Michel Fou­cault: Free Lec­tures on Truth, Dis­course & The Self (UC Berke­ley, 1980–1983)

Hear Michel Foucault’s Lec­ture “The Cul­ture of the Self,” Pre­sent­ed in Eng­lish at UC Berke­ley (1983)

Watch a “Lost Inter­view” With Michel Fou­cault: Miss­ing for 30 Years But Now Recov­ered

Michel Fou­cault – Beyond Good and Evil: 1993 Doc­u­men­tary Explores the Theorist’s Con­tro­ver­sial Life and Phi­los­o­phy

Read Chez Fou­cault, the 1978 Fanzine That Intro­duced Stu­dents to the Rad­i­cal French Philoso­pher

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Ear­ly Enlight­en­ment French philoso­pher and math­e­mati­cian René Descartes invent­ed a new genre of phi­los­o­phy, we might say, one that would dom­i­nate the cen­tu­ry to come. Before Locke, Leib­niz, or Kant, Descartes stood out as a “the­ist ratio­nal­ist.” Rather than trust­ing in rev­e­la­tion, he leaned sole­ly on log­ic and rea­son, cre­at­ing a set of “rules for the direc­tion of the mind,” the title of one of his books. He believed we might think our way—solely unaid­ed by unre­li­able exter­nal sources—to belief in God and “all the knowl­edge that we may need for the con­duct of life.”

Descartes’ proofs of God may not sound so con­vinc­ing to mod­ern ears, slip­ping as they do into the lan­guage of faith when con­ve­nient. But in oth­er respects, he seems dis­tinct­ly con­tem­po­rary, or at least like a con­tem­po­rary of Lud­wig Wittgen­stein. He believed that phi­los­o­phy suf­fered from improp­er def­i­n­i­tions and lacked clar­i­ty of thought. And like the ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry log­i­cal pos­i­tivists, he put tremen­dous store in log­ic and math­e­mat­ics as ana­lyt­ic tools for acquir­ing knowl­edge about the world. These, along with the sci­en­tif­ic method Descartes cham­pi­oned, were indeed the sole means of acquir­ing such knowl­edge.

Descartes, then, has become known for intro­duc­ing the rad­i­cal “method of doubt,” which sup­pos­ed­ly strips away all prej­u­dice and pre­con­cep­tion, every arti­cle of belief, to get at the most fun­da­men­tal­ly ascer­tain­able core of knowl­edge. Upon doing this in his 1637 Dis­course on Method, the French philoso­pher famous­ly found that the only thing he could say for cer­tain was that he must exist because he could see him­self doubt­ing his exis­tence—cog­i­to ergo sum, “I think there­fore I am.” The process involved cast­ing aside all author­i­ty and tra­di­tion, which made Descartes a hero to French Rev­o­lu­tion­ists. His free­think­ing also made him very much the ene­my of many in the Catholic church.

Describ­ing in Dis­course on Method how he had aban­doned all reliance on oth­er texts and resolved to derive the answers to his ques­tions from expe­ri­ence and rea­son, he seemed to dis­miss the author­i­ty not only of church hier­ar­chy and dog­ma but of scrip­ture itself. Rather than fix­ing God at the cen­ter of the uni­verse, Descartes used the “Archimedean point” of his own cer­tain exis­tence to anchor “an epis­te­mo­log­i­cal­ly unsteady world.” Nonethe­less, he was com­mit­ted to keep­ing faith intact, even as he seem­ing­ly demol­ished the foun­da­tions of its exis­tence, including—for Catholics—the cher­ished idea that priests could turn bread into flesh.

It might have been an attempt at self-preser­va­tion or appease­ment, but it seems more to reflect sin­cere belief: in the Med­i­ta­tions on First Phi­los­o­phy, Descartes sought to prove the exis­tence of God in much the same way as he had proved his own exis­tence, through cir­cu­lar rea­son­ing and argu­ments that split mind and mat­ter into two dis­tinct camps. Descartes cre­at­ed a dual­ist view of the world that became a major prob­lem in his phi­los­o­phy. At the time, many of his crit­ics were less con­cerned with this onto­log­i­cal puz­zle than they were with the pos­si­bil­i­ty of his hereti­cal thought inter­fer­ing in world affairs.

Descartes’ rad­i­cal doubt threat­ened not only church doc­trine but also church pol­i­tics. One schol­ar claims to have found evi­dence that a Catholic priest—fearing the French free­thinker would jeop­ar­dize the con­ver­sion of Sweden’s Queen Christi­na to Catholicism—murdered Descartes with an arsenic-laced com­mu­nion wafer. If so, it would have been a cru­el­ly iron­ic death, per­haps by design, for the man who dared to write in the Med­i­ta­tions that transubstantiation—one of the Church’s cen­tral super­nat­ur­al teachings—should be “reject­ed by the­olo­gians as irra­tional, incom­pre­hen­si­ble and haz­ardous for the faith,” and to hope for a time when “my the­o­ry will be accept­ed in its place as cer­tain and indu­bitable.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

The Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix: From Pla­to and Descartes, to East­ern Phi­los­o­phy

Watch Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to 25 Philoso­phers by The School of Life: From Pla­to to Kant and Fou­cault

His­to­ry of Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy: A Free Online Course 

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness