The longest chapter

The twelfth chapter of Book II of the Essays is called An Apology for Raymond Sebond. It is the longest chapter in the work: a small book inside a much larger one.

The title promises a defence. Sebond was a fifteenth-century scholar who had written a book reasoning from the human world towards matters of faith. Montaigne's father asked him to translate it into French. When critics attacked the book, Montaigne took up its defence.

His method was to take apart the human capacity for arriving at certainty through reason. How far he carried this will be the subject of the next essay. Here, the question is what he kept for himself when the work was done.

The trouble with saying it

Partway through the chapter, Montaigne describes a difficulty faced by the sceptics. They are unwilling to make a firm pronouncement. But they still have to speak. As soon as they do, someone can interrupt.

You say you do not know. Do you know that?

The objection finds a vulnerable point. I know nothing still sounds like a claim to knowledge. If every claim is to be withdrawn, this one seems to belong in the same pile. If it is to be spared, on what grounds?

Montaigne records their answer. The statement carries itself away along with everything else. He gives it an image from the apothecary's shop: rhubarb, the purgative that expels what is unwanted and is itself expelled.

The force of the image lies in what it does not promise. The sentence is not being awarded a permanent place above the argument. Once it has done its work, it has to go too.

He brings it home

Until this point, Montaigne has been keeping an account of other people's predicament: the trap they found themselves in, and the way they tried to escape it.

Then he speaks for himself. The thought would be more securely expressed, he says, as a question.

Que sais-je? What do I know?

And he does something more unusual still. He tells us that he carries this question as his motto, accompanied by the image of a balance.

Where a motto belongs

A motto belongs, figuratively, over the door.

Whether it is a family maxim or a personal watchword, it usually commits its owner to something. It must bear being displayed for years. It tells whoever enters what the household stands for.

Montaigne gives that place to a question.

The balance suits it. Its two pans can remain suspended while the weighing continues. Here it looks less like a seal announcing victory than a way of keeping a judgment open.

Did he return to it?

For that, we turn to the Bordeaux Copy: Montaigne's own copy of the 1588 edition, bearing the marks of the years that followed.

The printed Que sais-je remains unchanged. But in the words immediately following it, Voyla comme je la porte, he crossed out Voyla.

His pen reached the neighbouring words without removing the question. Leaving a sentence in place is not the same as renewing an oath to it. Still, the distance is worth noticing: he came back to this spot, and the question remained.

What the question leaves open

A question makes one thing easier and leaves other things difficult.

It no longer announces I know nothing as a certain piece of knowledge, and so avoids that particular collision with itself. But it is not beyond scrutiny. Why ask? Where does the asking stop? How does one live while the answer remains unsettled?

Montaigne does not tell us he has won. He places his question beside a balance. The pans remain suspended. They do not settle his account for him.