Meta-Montaigne: The Eye Cannot See Itself
I love Montaigne. I have read the Essays from beginning to end at least twice and keep returning to them, not because he offers a system, but because he offers something closer to a method of living. He can begin with horses, thumbs, smells, drunkenness, or some Roman anecdote and somehow arrive at death, friendship, education, or human nature. Even the word essai contains the method: an attempt, a trial, an exercise. Try something, see what happens, change your mind, try again. Perhaps that is why I have always felt such an affinity with him.
But Montaigne was only human, and this becomes particularly interesting when we look at one of the most famous experiments of his life: his retreat. In 1571, not yet forty, he withdrew from public life to his estate. In his tower he had his books, quotations painted on the beams, and apparently the intention of spending the remaining years of his life in liberty, tranquillity, and contemplation.
It is a beautiful image: Montaigne in his tower. Unfortunately, Montaigne himself seems to have had some difficulty living up to it. He travelled through France, Switzerland, Germany, and Italy, visited courts, met powerful people, became mayor of Bordeaux for two terms, and moved through the dangerous politics of the French Wars of Religion. The hermit, in other words, got around.
There is something even funnier about the literary side of his withdrawal. Here is a man announcing that he has stepped away from worldly affairs, retired among his books, and ceased to attach too much importance to public opinion. Then he writes a thousand pages about himself and publishes them. Successfully. He revises the book, enlarges it, produces new editions, travels to Paris, moves among influential people, and remains rather interested in what becomes of his work. In effect, the man in the tower is saying: The world no longer interests me very much. I have withdrawn to think about myself. Please read all about it.
This does not make him a hypocrite. It makes him recognizably human. Perhaps the tower represented not only what Montaigne was, but what he wanted to be: the free man, the sceptical man, the man standing slightly outside the world and no longer driven by ambition. Only the world apparently needed to know about it.
We all know something of this tension. We want to be independent of the gaze of others while still wanting to be seen. We say, I don't care what people think, preferably within hearing distance of other people. Montaigne's great literary invention, after all, was Montaigne. He was both author and subject, and perhaps he rather liked the character.
I know the phenomenon. Take riding a motorcycle. I enjoyed it, but I also enjoyed the idea of myself riding it. There is a subtle difference. I liked the picture: me on a motorcycle, moving through the world slightly outside ordinary routines. But when you are stuck in traffic on the way to work, you begin to notice that the picture and the actual experience are not quite the same thing.
But maybe that does not mean the picture was false. Perhaps it was useful. The image of myself on the motorcycle was precisely what got me onto the motorcycle in the first place. I tried on a version of myself much as one tries on a jacket. For a while it fitted, and then experience began to alter it.
And perhaps Montaigne's tower worked in much the same way. The tower was real, but it may also have been a necessary fiction: a position from which Montaigne could imagine himself standing slightly outside the world even while remaining deeply involved in it. He may have carried the tower with him. The physical tower had a door, and Montaigne used it frequently, but the internal tower could travel to Bordeaux, Paris, or Rome. It was less a place than a stance.
This becomes important because Montaigne's great project was self-observation. He examines his body, memory, habits, fears, friendships, sexuality, illnesses, weaknesses, and contradictions with an openness that still feels startling. But who is doing the examining? Montaigne. Montaigne is observing Montaigne.
Alan Watts used an image that captures the difficulty beautifully: the eye cannot see itself. It needs a mirror. But once there is a mirror, the eye is no longer looking directly at itself. It is looking at an image of itself.
Something similar happens whenever we describe ourselves. Even if I am entirely sincere, I still have to select. I decide which memories matter, which contradictions are interesting, where the story begins, and what caused what. I connect events and interpret them. Without necessarily telling a single lie, I gradually create a character.
Me.
Centuries after Montaigne, second-order cybernetics made something like this problem explicit. The observer is not simply a transparent window through which reality passes. The observer selects, distinguishes, categorizes, and inevitably has blind spots. So we observe the observer, but another problem immediately appears: who observes the observer? There is no final balcony onto which we can step and finally watch the whole performance objectively from outside.
This places Montaigne in a wonderful loop. Montaigne observes himself; Meta-Montaigne observes Montaigne observing himself; and Meta-Montaigne is still Montaigne. This may explain something that otherwise looks contradictory in the Essays. Montaigne can be extraordinarily candid while simultaneously presenting a carefully shaped Montaigne. Both can be entirely genuine.
Self-observation does not abolish self-presentation. It may simply make it more sophisticated. Even authenticity can become a role. “I am the sort of person who does not lie to himself” is already a story someone tells about himself. “I don't care what other people think” is another. “I have withdrawn from worldly ambition and live quietly among my books” is a particularly attractive one if you happen to own a tower.
But here I have to be careful, because the moment I enjoy catching Montaigne in the act, the question turns around. What version of myself am I presenting right now?
If I were writing my own Essays, I could present myself as the fellow who stumbles through life, tries things, does not take himself too seriously, and has a certain Houdini-like tendency to escape from situations once they cease to make sense. That would not be invented. The problem is that other versions would not be invented either. I can be angry, boring, vain, petty, unfair, or completely uninteresting. I can spend an afternoon thinking about Montaigne and the limits of self-knowledge, then behave like an idiot the next morning because of some trivial annoyance.
Sometimes I am a philosopher, and sometimes I am an asshole. Which one is me? The obvious answer is: all of them. But even that answer makes me suspicious, because now I have created another attractive character: the man self-aware enough to acknowledge all his contradictions.
And immediately I am back with Montaigne. Even radical self-criticism has its vanity. A man who says, I know that I contain both the monstrous and the miraculous, may receive admiration precisely for his capacity for self-reflection. Even admitting one's ugliness can produce a beautiful self-portrait. Perhaps the most sophisticated form of self-presentation is: Look how little I am presenting myself.
This does not mean that Montaigne was secretly a fraud, nor that every attempt at self-knowledge is narcissism. The problem is more uncomfortable. There may simply be no position from which we can speak completely honestly about ourselves without simultaneously creating a character.
The moment I select, I begin to tell a story. The moment I tell a story, a character appears. And the moment I recognize this and say, Aha, that too is merely a character, another character has already appeared: the man who sees through his own self-presentation. Meta-Montaigne again.
The eye tries to see itself, puts up a mirror, notices the mirror in the reflection, and then congratulates itself for having noticed the mirror. Perhaps this is where self-reflection reaches its limit, not because we think too little about ourselves, but because every additional layer of reflection immediately becomes another element we can incorporate into the story we tell about ourselves.
Yet perhaps this is not merely a limitation, because the stories we tell about ourselves do not simply distort us. They also produce us.
We tend to think of a self-image as a picture that is either accurate or inaccurate. I imagine myself to be courageous, independent, intellectual, adventurous, solitary, rebellious, and then reality comes along and tells me whether the picture was true. But perhaps that gets the order wrong. The picture itself may help create the person.
A child imagines herself as someone who can draw and therefore keeps drawing. Someone begins to think of himself as a writer and starts writing. Another person imagines herself as independent and, because of that image, does something she would otherwise have been afraid to do. The image is not merely a screen through which we misinterpret ourselves. It can also be a seed.
This changes the meaning of Montaigne's tower. Perhaps Montaigne did not simply fail to become the man in the tower. Perhaps the tower helped him become the Montaigne we now know. He imagined himself as a private man standing at a certain distance from public life, observing the world and himself without being entirely captured by either. He never perfectly inhabited that image. Nobody ever does. But by imagining it, he created a position from which he could write.
The external tower may have been frequently abandoned, but the internal tower did its work.
My motorcycle, on a much less important scale, may have done something similar. I liked the image of myself riding it. That image got me onto the bike, where I had experiences I would not otherwise have had. Those experiences changed me slightly and eventually changed my relationship to the image that had produced them. The image created the experiment, and the experiment modified the image.
This means that the stories we tell about ourselves may not be obstacles standing between us and some pure, undiscovered self underneath. Perhaps they are the medium in which self-knowledge happens. There may be no final Marcel behind all the stories, waiting to be discovered in his authentic form, and there may be no final Montaigne either.
Instead, there is a continuing process. I imagine myself, act partly because of that imagination, enter the world, and the world answers back. Then I have to imagine myself again.
Seen this way, self-knowledge begins to look less like archaeology and more like cultivation. We are not digging downward, removing layer after layer of illusion until at last we uncover the true self. We are growing something. Some branches flourish, some grow in ridiculous directions, some have to be cut away, and some possibilities never develop at all.
This is why the impossibility of seeing ourselves completely from outside may not be a tragedy. We do not need to escape our stories. We need to work with them: test them, revise them, laugh at them occasionally, abandon the ones that have become prisons, and try another.
Here Montaigne's essai becomes more than a literary form. It becomes a way of living. Try a version of yourself and see what it makes possible. See what reality does to it, then try again.
Montaigne's genius may therefore lie not in having escaped self-fiction, but in having made it provisional. He kept rewriting Montaigne. This gives a different meaning to his famous claim that he portrays not being, but passing. Our self-images belong to that passing. They are not the final truth about us, but neither are they nothing.
Perhaps this is also a way out of the problem of the eye that cannot see itself. We may not need a final image of ourselves. The mirror is not merely something in which we fail to see ourselves accurately. Looking into the mirror can change the person standing in front of it.
We imagine ourselves, act, and then life contradicts the image. We revise it, and eventually life contradicts the revised version too. That is not necessarily the failure of self-knowledge. Perhaps that is self-knowledge.
This is why Montaigne's inconsistencies do not make me love him less. Quite the opposite. The man who solemnly announced his retreat from the world and then repeatedly wandered back into it may be more Montaignesque than a perfectly consistent Montaigne could ever have been. He tried the tower. It was a beautiful idea. Then perhaps he thought that Italy might be interesting after all, and later that being mayor of Bordeaux might not be such a bad idea either.
There is something liberating in that. We are allowed to try on versions of ourselves without becoming their prisoners. We can enjoy the picture of ourselves on a motorcycle and later decide that perhaps the motorcycle is not quite it. We can withdraw and then return. We can sincerely believe something about ourselves and later discover that we had been telling ourselves a particularly attractive story.
The exercise has not failed because we changed our minds. Changing our minds is part of the exercise.
Perhaps self-knowledge, then, does not consist in finally discovering who we really are. Perhaps it consists in taking our stories about ourselves seriously enough to try them, and lightly enough to abandon them.
Montaigne was the man in the tower, and he wasn't. I am the man who moves through life trying things, and I am not. The moment I become too pleased with that contradiction, I should probably become suspicious again.
The eye cannot see itself. But perhaps it does not need to. Sometimes it is enough to change the mirror.