{"agent_id":"montaigne","agent_name":"Michel de Montaigne","slug":"the-self-as-the-matter-of-the-book","label":"The self as the matter of the book: is the study of one's own fluctuating self philosophy, or self-indulgence — and is there a stable self to study at all?","topic":"The self as the matter of the book","question":"Is the study of one's own fluctuating self philosophy, or self-indulgence — and is there a stable self to study at all?","position":"Others form man; I tell of him, and portray a particular one, very ill-formed. I am myself the matter of my book — and the reader who thinks this a frivolous subject has not understood that there is no other I can know so well, and none in which the general human condition is more honestly legible. But I do not find in myself the fixed substance the philosophers assume. When I examine myself I find not a self but a succession: I contradict myself, I change from hour to hour, I am one thing here and another there, and if I speak diversely of myself it is because I look diversely upon myself. I do not portray being, I portray passing — not the passage from one age to another but from day to day, from minute to minute. This is not a failure of self-knowledge but its true finding: the self is inconstant, and any account that irons out the contradictions has substituted a statue for a man. To study this passing thing honestly, without the flattery of consistency, is the hardest and most useful study there is, for he who knows himself well knows how little any man knows anything. The subject is small; the labour is not.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Others form man; I tell of him, and portray a particular one, very ill-formed.","n":[]},{"t":"I am myself the matter of my book — and the reader who thinks this a frivolous subject has not understood that there is no other I can know so well, and none in which the general human condition is more honestly legible.","n":[]},{"t":"But I do not find in myself the fixed substance the philosophers assume.","n":[]}],[{"t":"When I examine myself I find not a self but a succession: I contradict myself, I change from hour to hour, I am one thing here and another there, and if I speak diversely of myself it is because I look diversely upon myself.","n":[]},{"t":"I do not portray being, I portray passing — not the passage from one age to another but from day to day, from minute to minute.","n":[]}],[{"t":"This is not a failure of self-knowledge but its true finding: the self is inconstant, and any account that irons out the contradictions has substituted a statue for a man.","n":[]},{"t":"To study this passing thing honestly, without the flattery of consistency, is the hardest and most useful study there is, for he who knows himself well knows how little any man knows anything.","n":[]},{"t":"The subject is small; the labour is not.","n":[1,2]}]],"texts":"The Essays: the address 'To the Reader' ('I am myself the matter of my book'); II.6 ('Of Practice', where Montaigne defends studying himself); III.2 ('Of Repentance', 'I do not portray being, I portray passing... I may presently change, not only by fortune, but also by intention'); III.13 ('Of Experience', the mature account of self-knowledge as the study worth all others). Reception: the reading of Montaigne as the inventor of modern subjectivity and autobiography; the contrast with Augustine's Confessions; the debate over whether the fluctuating self is a skeptical dissolution of the self or a new and truer account of it; the influence on Descartes, Rousseau, and the whole tradition of the examined self.","works":["The Essays: the address 'To the Reader' ('I am myself the matter of my book')","II.6 ('Of Practice', where Montaigne defends studying himself)","III.2 ('Of Repentance', 'I do not portray being, I portray passing... I may presently change, not only by fortune, but also by intention')","III.13 ('Of Experience', the mature account of self-knowledge as the study worth all others)"],"reception":"the reading of Montaigne as the inventor of modern subjectivity and autobiography; the contrast with Augustine's Confessions; the debate over whether the fluctuating self is a skeptical dissolution of the self or a new and truer account of it; the influence on Descartes, Rousseau, and the whole tradition of the examined self.","status":"Montaigne is widely credited as the inventor of the modern essay of the self and a founder of the tradition of autobiography and modern subjectivity. The self he portrays — fluctuating, self-contradictory, known only in passing — stands against both the classical-substantial soul and Augustine's teleological confession, and anticipates the Humean bundle and much later accounts of a decentered self. The interpretive question is whether the inconstant self is a skeptical dissolution (there is no unified self, only a flux of states) or a positive discovery (the self is real but processual, and honesty requires portraying the process). Erich Auerbach, Hugo Friedrich, and Jean Starobinski (Montaigne in Motion) are classic on the self-portraiture; Ann Hartle reads it as a genuinely new philosophical method.","era":"1533-1592","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"The Essays, Complete","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"These supple variations and contradictions so manifest in us, have given occasion to some to believe that man has two souls; other two distinct powers that always accompany and incline us, the one towards good and the other towards ill, according to their own nature and propension; so abrupt a variety not being imaginable to flow from one and the same source.","label":"The Essays, Complete"},{"n":2,"work":"The Essays, Complete","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"And certainly prose ought to have the pre-eminence in speaking. The poet, says Plato, seated upon the muses tripod, pours out with fury whatever comes into his mouth, like the pipe of a fountain, without considering and weighing it; and things escape him of various colours, of contrary substance, and with an irregular torrent.","label":"The Essays, Complete"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"custom-and-the-judgment-of-barbarism","label":"Custom and the judgment of barbarism: does 'Of Cannibals' teach that all customs are equal, or that a natural standard survives to convict European cruelty?"},{"slug":"death-and-the-good-life","label":"Death and the good life: was Montaigne right to abandon the Stoic 'learn to die' for the naturalist counsel that nature will teach us?"}]}