Montaigne as Prelude to the Enlightenment

Montaigne lived before the Enlightenment proper (he died in 1592, more late Renaissance than Enlightenment), but he is often treated as a precursor: the first great essayist, probing the human condition in everyday, bodily, and personal terms rather than in scholastic or theological abstractions. That human-centered curiosity fed directly into Enlightenment writers, and Jefferson owned and drew on Montaigne’s writings.

Montaigne’s subject was the mundane — literally, “this world.” In medieval thought the mundane was dismissed as inconsequential, a short passage on the way to eternity. Montaigne instead explored and celebrated it, turning daily life into a worthy subject of reflection. In doing so, he helped set the stage for the Enlightenment’s insistence that this world is where mysteries must be investigated, laws discovered, forces harnessed — from Franklin grounding lightning to ships riding the wind across oceans, to the even harder task of understanding and realizing the potential of our own selves.

The mundane, of course, included the bluntly ordinary. “Kings and philosophers shit, and so do ladies,” he wrote — a reminder that all humans share the same impulses and realities regardless of title or rank. And Montaigne shifted his focus away from speculation about the divine to the observable self: “I study myself more than any other subject. That is my metaphysics; that is my physics.” This was the foundation of Enlightenment method — study what can be seen, tested, corrected, and improved, not what can only be speculated.

Finally, Montaigne noted the power of habit: “Custom is the best master of all things. What we are used to we find natural.” Here he glimpsed something radical: the world we inherit feels inevitable, but it is not destiny. Life could be different. In that seemingly small insight lay the seed of revolution.