LITMIR.BIZ

      1 a. Montaigne (Michel Eyquem de Montaigne) (1533–1592) was a French lawyer, statesman, and philosopher. His essays, written over a 22-year period after he mostly withdrew from public life, popularized that format as a kind of literature. Their topics are wide-ranging and often personal. He provides a more extensive discussion of certain Stoic principles, and sometimes a more felicitous statement of them, than is found anywhere else. Montaigne was raised to speak Latin as his first language, and he retained a lifelong love of classical learning. At one point he was referred to as the French Seneca, and he openly acknowledged the debts he owed to Seneca and to Plutarch.When I transplant the reasoning and ideas of others into my own soil and mix them with mine, I deliberately conceal the names of the authors. I do this to rein in the temerity of those hasty criticisms thrown at every kind of writing, especially contemporary writings by living authors, and writings that use common language – language that invites anyone to be a critic, and that can make the conception and design of the book seem just as common. I want them to tweak Plutarch on my nose, and to burn themselves by insulting the Seneca in me.Montaigne, Of Books (1580)The truth of this assessment will be seen in the pages ahead.Montaigne also presents some challenges for our purposes because he was an endless fount of ideas, many of which were not Stoic. He was a skeptic, and so could not subscribe to the more theoretical claims the Stoics made. And some of his views changed over time; I will treat 1580 as the date of publication of his essays, but he wrote and revised them over two decades. So I have generally proceeded as explained earlier: by asking first whether a given claim is found in the ancient Stoic sources. If so, restatement or elaboration of it by Montaigne will sometimes be provided.b. Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) was an English essayist, poet, critic, and producer of various other sorts of writings. He was author of the most celebrated and amusing of all English dictionaries, and subject of the most celebrated and amusing of all English biographies (Boswell’s Life of Johnson). Though Johnson has occasionally been described as a Stoic, that label is best avoided. It is not a fit to his writings as a whole, some of which disparage Stoicism. In Johnson’s writings on ethics, though, he agrees with the Stoics often and gives excellent form to many of their ideas. Johnson often wrote in a style that now seems grandiloquent; he liked to use fancy words. This makes his prose hard for most people now to enjoy in long stretches, but our doses of it will be modest.c. Adam Smith (1723–1790) was a Scottish philosopher and economist who was a close reader of the Stoics and much influenced by them, though his own philosophy departed from Stoicism in many ways. He critiques it in detail in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, but agreed with the Stoics on some particulars.Smith was a contemporary of Samuel Johnson’s (and a professor of James Boswell’s at Glasgow University), but it is not clear whether they met. A well-circulated anecdote describes Smith and Johnson as encountering each other for their first and only time at a party in Scotland and briefly exchanging insults, but it has been challenged (alas) as a fabrication.d. Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was a pessimistic German philosopher and essayist. He wrote about a large range of topics, many of them far from the concerns of this book, but touched on a number of our themes in essays he wrote late in his life. He, too, did not accept Stoicism in full; he made criticisms of it and did not believe happiness could be achieved through reason. But as with all the others mentioned here, he read the Stoics carefully and had much in common with them on subsidiary points. He is good to have around in a book like this, because his interpretations of Stoic ideas have a different and more modern intellectual flavor than that of our other writers.There will be appearances by some other writers as well, including Guillaume du Vair, a French contemporary of Montaigne’s. He attempted explicitly to reconcile Stoicism with Christianity (a movement sometimes known as neostoicism). His interpretations are of occasional interest, as are those of various others who appear too infrequently in the book to introduce here.