The article provides a short overview of the 400-year-long reception of the seminal work by the French renaissance writer. It discusses the question of Montaigne's fathering the genre of essay and the possibility of acknowledging his oeuvre as the most typical, prototype-like example of the kind emerging in the Early Modern literature. The main interest is focused on the possible reading tactics used to interpret Essais, suggested or enacted by its followers, editors, critics, researchers and by Michel de Montaigne himself. Two mainstream practices are emphasized: the more traditional, unifying and classifying, leading to an image of the Essais as a coherent, humanist manifesto; and the new one, undertaken by postmodern critics who stress the inexhaustivity, illimitability, undecidability of the essayistic text turning into a perilous territory of the combat between the deceptive self controlling the essay and the one who attempts to read it.
The idea of philosophy as meditatio mortis is illustrated with the examples of Plato’s and Montaigne’s views. According to Plato, life within body is a kind of evil, and death is the way of release and return to divine life. Philosophy regarded as seeking the truth is at the same time an exercise in dying because it consists in taking off reason from body and senses. Philosophy as meditatio mortis is then preparing to true and eternal life. According to Montaigne, death is the necessary end of human existence, which we should accept without reservation and fear. Philosophy lies in preparing to death as a natural biological event, common to all living creatures. Human dying should be liberated from all ceremonies and cultural rituals because they are the main reasons of our fear and prevent us from accepting death as a natural event.
This article aims to analyse the philosophical relationship between Descartes and Montaigne on divine power and human reason. Within Cartesian historiography, a relationship was usually established between Descartes and Montaigne to cast more light on the originality of the approach that Descartes introduced to the philosophical scene. On the contrary, the main goal of this article is to show how Descartes’ theory of eternal truths positively incorporated and preserved some aspects of Montaigne’s reflection on divine power. Were this the case, the historiographical interpretation that tends to establish a link between the two authors in order to separate Descartes from Montaigne would at least need to be integrated. This does not mean denying the originality of Cartesian approach, but more broadly defining the context in which Descartes voices his opinion.
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