Michel de Montaigne and the nature of personal growth

“The best human attribute is rising after every downfall,” wrote Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592). Like no other author before the Renaissance, Montaigne devoted two decades of his life to identifying the keys to personal growth, and recording them in his essays. The above citation is taken from Montaigne’s essay “That no man should be called happy until his death,” which is one of my favourites. However, recommendations on personal growth can be found in every essay he wrote. Montaigne regarded writing as an exercise in thinking. His goal was to figure out the answers to important questions, and write down his thought processes. He began his essays with the formulation of a question, and then presented the arguments in great detail, either in favour of or against a particular answer. For Montaigne, writing means exploration. Personal growth was his principal subject because it was his primary concern. I view Montaigne as the most results-oriented author of his time because of his relentless search. He wanted to identify the truth and would not be happy with anything else. Reading Montaigne’s essays requires a couple of weeks, but his recommendations about personal growth are repetitive. I’m going to summarise them here for those who lack the patience or the energy to read all of Montaigne’s essays. First and foremost, Montaigne was keen on finding practical answers. He regarded general recommendations as worthless. I can tell myself “be happy” or “be healthy” a hundred times per day, but those statements are too vague to prompt any specific action. The essay “That it’s folly to measure truth and error by our own capacity” gives a salient example of Montaigne’s penchant for practical action based on observation. Montaigne recounts in this essay that Alexander the Great, when he was still a boy, wanted to tame a wild horse named Bucephalus. So far, everybody had failed because Bucephalus was too nervous, too aggressive. Alexander wanted to tame Bucephalus, but all experienced riders had failed. The standard approach to horse taming does not work in this case, thought Alexander, but a solution can be found through observation. For the next few days, Alexander did just one thing: he watched Bucephalus. He was looking for the exact cause of the issue, so that he could then identify a practical solution. Through observation, Alexander discovered the reason for Bucephalus’ nervousness and aggressiveness: Bucephalus was afraid of his shadow. The discovery of the problem’s cause enabled Alexander to figure out a practical solution. He simply turned Bucephalus towards the sun, so that it was blinded. In this way, Bucephalus couldn’t see his shadow and its nervousness disappeared. That’s how Alexander became able to ride it. Montaigne employs the story of Alexander and a wild horse to drive home a key lesson about personal growth, namely, that practical solutions become easy to find after a problem’s cause has been identified. Here is the link to the original article: https://johnvespasian.com/michel-de-montaigne-and-the-nature-of-personal-growth/