Montaigne on Torture: Renaissance Thoughts on Guantanamo (plus Osama bin Laden's death)

Montaigne’s thoughts against torture would put a number of North American public figures to shame, including Stephen Harper and Michael Ignatieff (that latter being a little fuzzy around the edges).  Montaigne’s thinking  demonstrate how far current public discourse has shifted uncritically in favour of torture (and violence), since 9/11 and Guantanamo Bay, and “Prime Minister” Stephen Harper would find himself in the same company as perhaps Montaigne’s contemporary, Jean Bodin, who favoured the torture of children accused of witchcraft.  Incidentally, Bodin is also considered the intellectual father of French absolutism, which brings us to recall the value of classical wisdom as expressed by Isocrates: “imperfection has a greater interest in moderation than excess does.”[i]

Let us begin with a short summary of Montaigne's life and significance as an independent thinker, followed by extensive quotations of remarks against torture and cruelty.  This is followed by what could be considered sound criticism of bin Laden's death. 

Montaigne mostly lived on his eponymous estate near Bordeaux, France, from 1533 to 1592 and, like his father, suffered from kidney stones late in life, a topic about which he wrote much.  A wealthy man, his father was determined to educate his son in the best manner possible – and so Michel de Montaigne’s first language was Latin.

A man with a Renaissance spirit, Montaigne’s expertise was himself, or so he said, and he coined the written “Essay” (or “attempt”) thus becoming one of the first in a line of ‘modern-era’ thinkers striving for moderation with a healthy dose of scepticism, epitomized by his most famous expression, “Que sais-je?” (What do I know?), which can be found in his best-known (and longest) essay, “An Apology for Raymond Sebond.”

One of his most interesting chapters, “On the uncertainty of our judgement” begins with a quotation of Homer’s Iliad: “there is every possibility of speaking for and against anything.”[ii]  And it concludes with a line from Plato’s Timaeus: “We argue rashly and unadvisedly, because in our reasoning as in ourselves, a great part is played by chance.”[iii]  Elsewhere (in his “Apology”) he explains: “Reason is a two-handled pot: you can grab it from the right or the left.”[iv] Again, using a different metaphor, he continues: “Human reason is a two-edged sword.”[v]  And in a philosophical chapter (“That the taste of good and evil things depends in large part on the opinion we have of them”) he reflects on the significance of perception and belief: “men are tormented not by things themselves but by what we think about them.”[vi]

Montaigne was an outstanding man of his times and possibly one of the most insightful writers the world has ever known, with an influence even on Shakespeare.[vii]  In his career he studied law, served as counsellor to the Parlement at Bordeaux, and was twice chosen Mayor of Bordeaux – once (at the invitation of Henri III) when he was travelling outside the country.  When he fell out of political favour he even spent a stint in the Bastille (not unlike Voltaire, centuries later), only to be released following the efforts of wily Catherine de Medici.

Being a moderate was not easy in Montaigne’s day and age, as Europe was torn apart by the Religious Wars, the struggle between Catholics and Protestants, which was particularly nasty and inclined to violence, including widespread torture, which he abhorred and proclaimed against.  In this case he borrowed significantly from St. Augustine’s City of God, but throughout the Essays his many classical sources included Plutarch, Cicero, Horace and Seneca whom he plunders and credits with wild abandon.

Here is what Montaigne says about torture:

Torture is a dangerous innovation; it would appear that it is an assay not of the truth but of man’s endurance.  The man who endures it hides the truth: so does he who cannot.  For why should pain make me confess what is true rather than force me to say what is not true?  And on the contrary if a man who has not done what he is accused of is able to support such torment, why should a man who has done it be unable to support it, when so beautiful a reward as life itself is offered him?

I think that this innovation is founded on the importance of the power of conscience.  It would seem that in the case of the guilty man it would weaken him and assist the torture in making him confess his fault, whereas it strengthens the innocent man against the torture.  But to speak the truth, it is a method full of danger and uncertainty.  What would you not say, what would you not do to avoid such grievous pain? ...

Pain compels even the innocent to lie.

This results in a man whom the judge has put to the torture lest he die innocent being condemned to die both innocent and tortured. [viii]...

All the same it is, so they say, the least bad method that human frailty has been able to discover.  Very inhumanely, however, and very ineffectually in my opinion.  Many peoples less barbarous in this respect than the Greeks and the Romans who call them the Barbarians reckon it horrifying and cruel to smash a man of whose crime you are still in doubt.  The ignorant doubt is yours: what has it to do with him?  You are the unjust one, are you not? Who do worse than kill a man so as to not to kill him without due cause! You can prove that by seeing how frequently a man prefers to die for no reason at all rather than to pass through such a questioning which is more painful than the death-penalty itself and which by its harshness often anticipates that penalty by carrying it out.[ix]

Here is Montaigne on cruelty:

I live in a season when unbelievable examples of this vice of cruelty flourish because of the licence of our civil wars; you can find nothing in ancient history more extreme than what we witness every day.  But this has by no means broken me in.  If I had not seen it I could hardly have made myself believe that you could find souls so monstrous that they would commit murder for the sheer fun of it; would hack at another man’s limbs and lop them off and would cudgel their brains to invent unusual tortures and new forms of murder, not from hatred or for gain but for the sole purpose of enjoying the pleasant spectacle of the pitiful gestures and twitching of a man dying in agony, while hearing the screams and groans.  For there you have the farthest point that cruelty can reach ... That man should kill not in anger or in fear but merely for the spectacle.[x] ...

... I fear that Nature herself has attached to Man something which goads him on towards inhumanity.[xi]

Here is Montaigne in his chapter “On cowardice, the mother of cruelty” (and this offers a perspective on Osama bin Laden’s death):

Everyone knows that there is more bravery in beating an enemy than in finishing him off; more contempt in making him bow his head than in making him die; that, moreover, the thirst for vengeance is better slaked and satisfied by doing so, since the only intention is to make it felt. ... To kill a man is to shield him from our attack. ...

‘He’ll be sorry for it,’ we say.  Do you really think he will be sorry for it once we shot him through the head? Quite the contrary: if we look closely we will find him cocking a snook as he falls: he does not even hold it against us.  That is a long way from feeling sorry!  And we do him one of the kindest offices of this life, which is to let him die painlessly.  He is at rest while the rest of us have to scuttle off like rabbits .... It is a deed more of fear than of bravery; it is an act of caution rather than of courage, of defence rather than attack.  It is clear that by acting thus we give up both the true end of vengeance and all care for our reputation: we show we are afraid that if we let the man live he will do it again.  By getting rid of him you act not against him but against yourself.[xii]

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[i] Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays, tr. and ed., M.A. Screech (Toronto: Penguin, 2003), p. 136.

[ii] Ibid., p. 314.

[iii] Ibid., p. 320.

[iv] Ibid., p. 656.

[v] Ibid., p. 743.

[vi] Ibid., p. 52.

[vii] Saul Frampton, When I Am Playing with My Cat, How Do I Know She Is Not Playing with Me?  Montaigne and Being in Touch with Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011), 251-254.

[viii] See the early Christian arguments against torture by St. Augustine, City of God, XIX, vi

[ix] Montaigne, Essays, pp. 414,415

[x] Ibid., p. 484.

[xi] Ibid., p. 485.

[xii] Ibid., pp. 787,788