In Search of the Sublime-Fourth Installment

Now, the view from Montaigne's tower:

I began to read the Essais of Montaigne in the late 1980's. I was in law school at the time, and hungry for anything that could re-humanize me. For although the law contains within itself great humanizing potential, it rarely lives up to it.

In his late thirties, Montaigne left his own legal practice to take refuge in his tower and, there, rediscover his own humanity. He, too, went in search of the sublime, but wanted what we might call a homely sublime--for he knew that the sublimity which unhouses us is unsustainable over the long term.

Alan Levine, one of the most perceptive readers of Montaigne in a generation, put it this way: by means of his solitary inventories of himself, Montaigne discovered that the self is "bottomless." Instead of occasioning despair, this realization prompted him to advocate self-exploration as a pleasurable end in itself. Of course, he understood the dangers that such activity entails--but they are not what one may think. Navel-gazing is not the problem. The problem is that human beings, finding no unitary "there" there, become desperate to latch on to one particular dimension of themselves to the exclusion of all others. This one particular dimension then becomes the self, but that is an illusion. Levine observes that "Montaigne is not against this on a temporary basis, for one must act on one's desires and wills in order to explore them, but one must never lose sight of the rest of oneself, to rob oneself of one's possibilities" (Levine, Sensual Philosophy, p. 7). A false "finding" of the self is, paradoxically, a flight from one's "authentic" self (the empty room of the self): something like what Sartre would later term "bad faith."

So we have here two kinds of sublimity: that which transports us out of our grooved ruts, our accustomed selves, and breaks the spell of the myth of the unitary self and that which we discover in the process--the "homely sublime" that subsists within every human psyche. It is the limitations of the false or illusory self that we must flee--limitations that we impose upon ourselves but that others also impose upon us as well (indeed, we may learn to engage in self-limitation at the prompting of others--one of the casualties of living in society and becoming attached to communities, institutions, and social networks).