Montaigne on Wealth

One of my current longer-term reading projects is to make my way through the Penguin Classics edition of Montaigne’s Complete Essays, translated by M.A. Screech. I have previously only passed by, rather than conversed with Montaigne. I’ve had the pleasure of reading a couple of his essays, the biographies of both Stefan Zweig and more recently Sarah Bakewell, but never the full experience so to speak. Of course, one lesson I have drawn from Bakwell is that there is no single Montaigne: not only are there many interpretations over the years, driven by the contingent concerns of the era, but there are also competing versions of the Essays.

This will, I suspect, be the first of many short blogs on Montaigne and his Essays as I make my way through them. I expect it to take at least a couple of years, as I dip in and out depending on my time, mood, and competition from other books. One of the great pleasures of the essay format is that it enables this kind of reading - diving in, enjoying an essay, leaving, then coming back with greater knowledge of the text, or perhaps a different perspective on life which enables new and interesting ways of understanding Montaigne’s message.

I want to focus in this post on Montaigne’s account of wealth in essay I:14, The taste of good and evil things depends on our opinion.This essay expresses Montaigne’s stoicism: the notion that things are not good or bad in themselves, but rather depend on our own internal perception of them. Most of the essay is in the form of numerous examples of people preferring ostensibly bad things, such as death or pain. A man at the gallows prefer to die rather than take an amnesty by marrying a woman with a limp, another refuses an intercession to God by a priest as he’ll soon be able to intercede on his own part, and flagellants cut themselves. The point of listing all these examples, presumably, is that for these people neither death or pain were so obviously bad.

Towards the end of the essay, Montaigne turns instead to something taken for granted to be good: wealth. He asserts that he has been through three stages in his life. First, a period where he had only sporadic income, and had to both take the orders of others and depend on them for survival. He asserts:

“I spent my money all the more easily and cheerfully precisely because it depended on the caualness of fortune. I have never lived better …”

He goes on to say how his friends were always happy to lend to him, in part because he preferred to pay off his debts as fast as he could. In his second stage of life, he was a wealthy man. But for Montaigne, this was a mixed blessing. The more he saved his money, the more he feared losing it and feared spending it:

“You go on making your pile bigger, increasing it from one sum to another, until, like a peasant, you deprive yourself of the enjoyment of your own goods: your enjoyment consists in hoarding and never actually using it … To my way of thinking, any man with money is a miser.”

In other words: Montaigne found becoming wealthy a curse, in part because he feared losing his wealth, and in part because he found it came with numerous expenditures and obligations he had to meet (presumably in the form of his estate). As he tells us:

“… it seems to me that a rich man who is worried, busy and under necessary obligations is more wretched than a man who is simply poor”.

Of course, one might comment that all of this is considerably easier for a man born into wealth such as Montaigne to say, and one wonders what the peasants working on his estate would have thought, but one takes the point. In the end, Montaigne manages to move into a third stage of his life which he finds

“… far more enjoyable, certainly, and also more orderly: I make my income and my expenditure run along in tandem: sometimes one pulls ahead, sometimes the other, but only drawing slightly apart. I live from day to day, pleased to be able to satisfy my present, ordinary needs: extraordinary ones could never be met by all the provision in the world.”

He cites the example of Pheraulus, who made both himself and a loyal friend happy by giving the friend all of his wealth. The only condition: that his friend maintain him and feed him. Notably, the friend also became happy through wealth: it depended on each of their dispositions. He concludes his discussion on wealth by asserting:

“Blessed is the man who has ordered his needs to so just a measure that his riches suffice them without worrying him or taking up his time, and without the spending and the gathering breaking into his other pursuits which are quiet, better suited and more to his heart”

The message, and accomanying examples, is the same as with death and pain: just as these are not necessarily evils, nor is wealth necessarily a good. Rather, for Montaigne, whether these are harms or blessings depends on how we feel about them as we experience them.