''This Saves Us From Being Oppressed'

“It will be remembered that the brilliant and informal genius of Montaigne had perceived that our most certain knowledge is what we know about ourselves, and had made of this a philosophy of introspection.” 

Typically, Michael Oakeshott consigns this interesting observation to a footnote, in his introduction to the edition of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan he published in 1946. The footnote is linked to this sentence: “[Hobbes] begins with sensation; and he begins there, not because there is no deceit or crookedness in the utterances of the senses, but because the fact of our having sensations seems to him the only thing of which we can be indubitably certain.” Oakeshott never devoted an entire essay to Montaigne but his presence shadows his work like a tutelary spirit. In his essay “The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind” (1956; Rationalism in Politics, 1962) he writes:

 

“This conversation is not only the greatest but also the most hardly sustained of all accomplishments of mankind. Men have never been wanting who have had this understanding of human activity and intercourse, but few have embraced it without reserve and without misgiving, and on this account it is proper to mention the most notable of those who have done so: Montaigne.”

 

Like many of the finest essayists, Montaigne gives the impression of writing about himself but always addressing the individual reader, not the crowd. Montaigne confides. He leads us over to the corner, puts his arm around our shoulders and talks to us, softly. He seldom grows shrill or domineering. It’s a foreign-sounding voice to moderns because we’ve grown accustomed to being harangued, whether in politics, religion or literary criticism. Some of us stop listening when it becomes clear the speaker wants to impress us with his brilliance and persuade us with the force of his arguments. And that’s what he wants – argument, often ad hominem, almost always tedious. Montaigne wants to clarify his thought and share it with us. In some ways, he is the most “interactive” of writers, expecting us to at least ponder his thinking the way we would an intelligent friend’s.

 

In an entry dated 1955 in his Notebooks, 1922-86 (ed. Luke O’Sullivan, Imprint Academic, 2014), Oakeshott writes: “Concupiscence of experience, boundless curiosity to set our foot everywhere, to enter every possible situation. Montaigne.” Oakeshott turned a youthful fifty-four that year. In 1964 he wrote:

 

“All great works of art have a touch of lightness, happiness, almost inconsequence, & this saves us from being oppressed & having to turn away from them.”