Philosophers · 哲學家 · The Early Modern Age
Michel de Montaigne 蒙田 · Michel Eyquem de Montaigne
A magistrate who retired to a tower at thirty-eight, took himself as his subject, and in trying to say honestly what he was like invented the essay.
一位法官，三十八歲退隱到一座塔樓裡，拿自己當題目；他試著誠實地說出自己是什麼樣子，就這樣發明了「隨筆」。
- Born 出生
- February 28, 1533, Château de Montaigne, near Bordeaux
- Died 去世
- September 13, 1592, at the same house
- Occupations 職業
- Magistrate in Bordeaux, 1557–1570; mayor of Bordeaux, 1581–1585
- The book 著作
- Essais: Books I–II in 1580, Book III and many additions in 1588
- Motto 座右銘
- Que sais-je? “What do I know?”
- Wrote in 寫作語言
- French, with more than a thousand quotations from Latin
中文翻譯Every paragraph has a Chinese translation. Tap 中譯▾ under a paragraph to open that one, or use Show Chinese · 顯示中譯 at the top to open them all. 每一段都有中譯：點段落下方的「中譯」只開那一段，或按上方的「顯示中譯」一次全部打開。
Life · 生平
A life in three scenes 三幕人生
A boy raised in Latin 用拉丁文養大的男孩
Montaigne was born in 1533 on his family’s estate in the wine country east of Bordeaux. His great-grandfather had made a fortune in salt fish and bought the land and the title with it. His father had ideas about education. The infant was sent to nurse with a peasant family, so that he would feel close to the poor. He was then given a German tutor who spoke no French, and everyone in the household, including the servants, was required to address the child only in Latin. He was six before he heard French. Each morning he was woken by music. He said later that he had been brought up with such gentleness that he was unfit for effort, and it gave him a lifelong belief that learning should be a pleasure.
蒙田 1533 年生於他家在波爾多以東產酒區的莊園。他的曾祖父靠鹹魚生意發了財，用那筆錢買下了土地與頭銜。他的父親對教育有一套想法。這個嬰兒被送到一戶農家去餵養，好讓他覺得自己跟窮人親近。接著，他有了一位不會說法語的德國家庭教師；而家裡的每一個人，連僕人在內，都被要求只能用拉丁文跟這個孩子說話。他六歲才第一次聽到法語。每天早上，他是被音樂喚醒的。他後來說，自己被養得太溫和，以致不適合吃苦；而這也讓他一輩子相信，學習應該是一件樂事。
He studied law and at twenty-four became a magistrate in the high court at Bordeaux. There he met Étienne de La Boétie, a colleague three years older, a poet and the author of a bold essay against tyranny. The friendship lasted until La Boétie’s death in 1563. Montaigne sat by the bed through the last days and wrote a long account of them to his own father. He said that the rest of his life was smoke and a dark, tedious night. He married two years later, without much enthusiasm, and of his six daughters only one lived to grow up.
他讀了法律，二十四歲成為波爾多高等法院的法官。他在那裡遇見了拉波埃西：一位比他大三歲的同事，是詩人，也是一篇大膽的反暴政文章的作者。這段友誼一直持續到 1563 年拉波埃西去世。最後那幾天，蒙田守在床邊，並且把經過寫成一封長信給自己的父親。他說，此後他的餘生不過是煙，是一個黑暗而乏味的夜。兩年後他結了婚，並不怎麼熱中；他的六個女兒當中，只有一個活到成年。
The tower 塔樓
In 1571, on his thirty-eighth birthday, he retired. He had a Latin inscription painted on the wall of his study, saying that Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, had withdrawn to the bosom of the learned Muses. The study was on the third floor of a round tower at the corner of the house, lined with a thousand books, and on its ceiling beams he had some fifty sayings painted, most of them from the ancient skeptics and from the Bible: I suspend judgment. What do I know? Man is clay. He meant to spend his remaining years in calm.
1571 年，在三十八歲生日那天，他退隱了。他請人在書房的牆上漆了一段拉丁文銘文，說：米歇爾・德・蒙田，久已厭倦宮廷的奴役與公職，已經退到博學的繆思的懷抱裡。書房在宅邸一角一座圓塔的三樓，四壁排著一千本書；他請人在天花板的橫梁上漆了大約五十句格言，大多出自古代的懷疑論者與聖經：我擱置判斷。我知道什麼？人是泥土。他打算在平靜中度過餘年。
The calm did not come. His mind, he found, behaved like a runaway horse and gave birth to so many chimeras and fantastic monsters that he began to write them down, hoping to make his mind ashamed of itself. That is how the Essays began. Outside the tower France was tearing itself apart. The wars between Catholics and Protestants broke out when he was twenty-nine and were still going on when he died, and the massacre of Saint Bartholomew’s Day took place the year after his retirement. His estate lay between the two parties. He left his gates unlocked through the whole of the wars and was robbed once.
平靜並沒有來。他發現自己的心，表現得像一匹脫韁的馬，生出了那麼多的怪物與幻想，以致他開始把它們寫下來，指望讓自己的心感到羞愧。《隨筆集》就是這樣開始的。塔樓之外，法國正在把自己撕成碎片。天主教徒與新教徒之間的戰爭，在他二十九歲那年爆發，到他去世時還在打；而聖巴托羅繆日的大屠殺，就發生在他退隱的隔年。他的莊園位在兩派之間。整場戰爭期間，他的大門始終沒有上鎖；他被搶過一次。
Mayor, traveler, patient 市長、旅人、病人
The first two books of the Essays were published in 1580. He then set off on horseback through Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, partly to see the world and partly to try the mineral springs, since he had begun to pass kidney stones, the disease that had killed his father. In Rome he learned that he had been elected mayor of Bordeaux. He served four years, carrying messages between the Catholic king and the Protestant Henry of Navarre, who twice stayed at his house. When plague broke out in the city at the end of his term, he declined to enter it to hand over his office, for which he has been blamed ever since.
《隨筆集》的前兩卷在 1580 年出版。接著他騎馬出發，穿過德意志、瑞士與義大利；一部分是為了看看世界，一部分是為了試試礦泉，因為他開始排腎結石了，那是奪走他父親性命的病。在羅馬，他得知自己被選為波爾多市長。他做了四年，在天主教的國王與新教的納瓦拉的亨利之間傳遞訊息；亨利兩度住在他家。任期將滿時，城裡爆發了瘟疫；他婉拒進城去辦交接，為此被人責備至今。
He spent his last years adding to the book. He never deleted. He wrote new passages in the margins of his own copy, so that an essay begun in his thirties may contain a remark from his fifties contradicting it. A third book appeared in 1588, franker and more personal than the first two. He died in 1592, during a mass said in his room, of an inflammation of the throat that had taken away his speech. He was fifty-nine.
他把最後的歲月用來增補這本書。他從不刪。他在自己那一本的頁邊寫下新的段落；所以，一篇他三十幾歲開始寫的隨筆，裡面可能有一句他五十幾歲時的話，跟前文互相矛盾。第三卷在 1588 年問世，比前兩卷更坦率、也更個人。1592 年，他在自己房間裡舉行的一台彌撒當中去世；死因是喉嚨發炎，那已經使他說不出話。他五十九歲。
- 1533Born at Montaigne生於蒙田莊園
- 1557Magistrate at Bordeaux任波爾多法官
- 1563Death of La Boétie拉波埃西去世
- 1571Retires to the tower退隱塔樓
- 1580Essays, Books I and II《隨筆集》卷一、卷二
- 1581–85Mayor of Bordeaux任波爾多市長
- 1588Book III卷三
- 1592Dies去世
The central idea · 核心觀念
Trying oneself out 拿自己來試
The French word essai means a trial or an attempt, and Montaigne chose it to describe what he was doing. He takes a subject, thumbs, cannibals, fear, the education of children, and tries his judgment on it, to see what he thinks. The subject of every essay is finally the one named in his note to the reader: “myself am the matter of my book.” Philosophers before him had asked what Man is. He asks what this man is, and reports what he finds with a candor nobody had attempted: his laziness and bad memory, his fondness for scratching his ears, his fear of pain, the way his opinions shift with his digestion. He justifies the project in a sentence. “Every man carries the entire form of human condition.” To describe one person truthfully is to describe something about all.
法文的 essai 意思是「試驗」或「嘗試」；蒙田選這個字，來描述自己在做的事。他拿一個題目（大拇指、食人族、恐懼、兒童的教育），在它上面試一試自己的判斷，看看自己是怎麼想的。每一篇隨筆的題目，最終都是他在〈致讀者〉裡點名的那一個：「我自己就是我這本書的材料。」他之前的哲學家問的是「人」是什麼。他問的是「這個人」是什麼，並且以沒有人嘗試過的坦率，回報他的發現：他的懶惰與壞記性、他愛抓耳朵、他怕痛、他的意見怎樣隨著消化的好壞而變。他用一句話為這個計畫辯護：「每一個人身上，都帶著人類處境的完整形式。」把一個人如實地描述出來，就是描述了關於所有人的某件事。
What he finds is movement. “I cannot fix my object; ’tis always tottering and reeling by a natural giddiness… I do not paint its being, I paint its passage,” from day to day and from minute to minute. He contradicts himself, he says, and does not contradict the truth. From this comes his skepticism. A creature so changeable, whose reason can be bent by a toothache, a custom, or a glass of wine, has small claim to certainty about God and nature, and none to burn other people for disagreeing. His longest essay turns the arguments of the ancient skeptics against human pride. The lesson he draws is tolerance and a certain cheerfulness. Since we cannot be angels, we had better learn to be human well. “There is nothing so fine and legitimate,” he writes at the end of the book, “as well and duly to play the man.”
他發現的是「動」。「我沒辦法把我的對象固定住；它天生暈眩，總是搖搖晃晃……我不描繪它的存在，我描繪它的經過」，一天又一天，一分鐘又一分鐘。他說，他會自相矛盾，卻不會違背真實。他的懷疑論由此而來。一個這麼善變的生物，理性可以被一次牙痛、一種習俗或一杯酒扳彎；他對於上帝與自然，沒有多少資格宣稱確定；至於因為別人意見不同就把人燒死，更是毫無資格。他最長的那篇隨筆，把古代懷疑論者的論證轉過來對付人類的傲慢。他從中引出的教訓是寬容，以及某種開朗。既然我們當不了天使，就最好學著把人當好。他在全書的結尾寫道：「沒有什麼比把人這個角色演得好、演得恰如其分，更美、更正當的了。」
I do not paint its being, I paint its passage.我不描繪它的存在，我描繪它的經過。
He is speaking of himself as the object of his own portrait. 他說的是作為自己畫像對象的那個自己。
The strongest objection · 最強的反駁
The foolish project 那個愚蠢的計畫
The deepest criticism came from his greatest reader. Blaise Pascal, two generations later, knew the Essays almost by heart, borrowed from them on every page, and condemned them. “The foolish project he has of painting himself!” Montaigne, he said, inspires indifference about salvation. He shows us how wretched and inconstant we are and then tells us to be at ease with it, and he thinks only of dying softly and without fuss. For Pascal the discovery that reason is weak and the self a muddle should drive a person to his knees. Montaigne makes a pillow of it.
最深的批評，來自他最偉大的讀者。兩代之後的巴斯卡，幾乎把《隨筆集》背了下來，每一頁都從中借用，卻譴責了它。「他那個要描繪自己的愚蠢計畫！」他說，蒙田使人對得救漠不關心。他讓我們看到自己多麼可憐、多麼反覆無常，然後叫我們對此安之若素；而他只想著死得輕鬆、不費事。對巴斯卡來說，發現理性是軟弱的、自我是一團亂，應該把人逼得跪下來。蒙田卻拿它當了枕頭。
A second objection is political. His skepticism leads him to conservatism. Since we cannot know that any new arrangement would be better, he argues, we should keep the laws and the religion we were born under, and he remained a Catholic and a royalist on those grounds. Critics reply that this is a comfortable conclusion for a landowner, and that the same argument would have told the Protestants of his day, and the slaves of the New World, to stay as they were. He saw part of the difficulty. His essay on the peoples of Brazil asks which is the more barbarous, to eat a man who is dead or to torture one who is alive, as his own countrymen were doing.
第二個反駁是政治上的。他的懷疑論把他帶向保守。他論證：既然我們無法知道任何新的安排會更好，我們就應該保持自己生來所處的法律與宗教；而他就是基於這個理由，始終是一位天主教徒與保王派。批評者回答：對一位地主來說，這是一個舒服的結論；而同一個論證，也會叫他那個時代的新教徒與新大陸的奴隸維持原狀。這個困難，他看到了一部分。他那篇談巴西原住民的隨筆問道：吃一個死人，跟拷打一個活人（他自己的同胞正在這樣做），哪一個比較野蠻？
How we know · 史料
A book that kept growing 一本不停長大的書
With Montaigne the problem is the reverse of the usual one. We have too much of him. He published the Essays three times in his life and was preparing a fourth edition when he died, working in a printed copy whose margins he had filled with about a thousand additions in his own hand. That volume, the Bordeaux Copy, survives. Modern editions mark the three layers with the letters A, B, and C, so that a reader can see a sentence of 1580 interrupted by a second thought of 1588 and a third of 1592. Which Montaigne is the real one is a question he would have enjoyed. His literary executor, Marie de Gournay, a young admirer whom he called his adopted daughter, brought out an edition in 1595 from another annotated copy, now lost, and scholars still dispute which text is closer to his final wishes.
蒙田的問題跟通常的正好相反。我們擁有的他太多了。他生前把《隨筆集》出版了三次，去世時正在準備第四版；他用的是一本印好的書，頁邊被他親手寫下的大約一千處增補填滿了。那一冊，「波爾多本」，留存至今。現代的版本用 A、B、C 三個字母標出這三個層次；所以讀者可以看到 1580 年的一個句子，被 1588 年的一個轉念打斷，接著又被 1592 年的第三個想法打斷。哪一個蒙田才是真的？這是一個他自己會樂在其中的問題。他的文學遺囑執行人瑪麗・德・古爾奈（一位他稱為義女的年輕仰慕者），在 1595 年根據另一本已經失傳的批註本出了一個版本；學者至今還在爭論，哪一個文本更接近他最後的意願。
There is also the question of how far to trust the portrait. He promises to paint himself whole and naked, and he was a public man during a civil war, writing under the eye of the Church, which placed the book on its Index in 1676. He says a great deal about his kidney stones and very little about his wife or his mother.
還有一個問題：這幅畫像能信到什麼程度？他承諾要把自己完整而赤裸地畫出來；而他是內戰期間的一位公眾人物，在教會的注視下寫作（教會在 1676 年把這本書列入了禁書目錄）。關於自己的腎結石，他說了很多；關於自己的妻子與母親，他說得很少。
Dharma and the West · 佛法與西方哲學
Montaigne and the Buddha 蒙田與佛陀
Montaigne did by temperament what the Buddha taught as a discipline. He watched his own mind, day after day, for twenty years, and wrote down what he saw without trying to make it consistent. What he saw was what the Buddha said one would see: no fixed thing, a passage. “I do not paint its being, I paint its passage” is as good a statement of impermanence applied to the self as European literature contains, and it was reached by observation with no doctrine to guide it. His essay arguing that to philosophize is to learn to die recommends keeping death always before the mind so that it loses its strangeness, which is the practice the Buddhist texts call mindfulness of death. And his refusal to assert, with “What do I know?” struck as a medal, recalls the Buddha’s warning against clinging to views.
蒙田憑著性情，做了佛陀當作一門紀律來教的事。他日復一日地看著自己的心，看了二十年，並且把所見寫下來，不去設法讓它前後一致。他看到的，就是佛陀說人會看到的東西：沒有固定的東西，只有「經過」。「我不描繪它的存在，我描繪它的經過」，是歐洲文學裡把無常用在自我身上最好的陳述之一；而它是靠觀察得到的，沒有任何教義引導。他那篇論證「研究哲學就是學習死亡」的隨筆，建議把死亡時時放在心前，使它不再陌生；這就是佛典稱為「死隨念」的修習。而他的不肯斷言（連同鑄成紀念章的那句「我知道什麼？」），讓人想起佛陀對執取見解的警告。
What he does with the discovery is his own. Having found the self to be a flux, he settles into it and enjoys the view. He has no wish to be liberated from himself. The Buddha treats the same finding as the start of a path, because he holds that clinging to this flux as “me” is the cause of suffering and can be ended. Montaigne also lacks a method. He observes whatever comes up, where the Buddhist practitioner observes in a set order and with a trained stillness of attention. Pascal accused him of resting where he should have gone on. A Buddhist would make the same criticism more kindly, and would add that he had seen more than most philosophers by simply looking (Dharma and the West, D5).
他拿這個發現怎麼辦，則是他自己的事。發現自我是一道流之後，他在其中安頓下來，欣賞風景。他並不想從自己當中解脫出來。佛陀把同樣的發現當作一條道路的起點；因為他主張，把這道流執取為「我」，正是苦的原因，而它是可以止息的。蒙田也沒有方法。冒出什麼，他就觀察什麼；佛教的修行者則是依一定的次第、帶著訓練出來的專注的寂靜去觀察。巴斯卡指控他在應該繼續往前走的地方歇了下來。佛教徒會比較溫和地提出同樣的批評，並且會補上一句：單靠著「看」，他已經比大多數的哲學家看到得更多了（佛法與西方哲學 D5）。
Terms of art · 哲學術語
Words that come with him 跟著他一起來的詞
Fr. essai ‘trial, attempt’
A short prose piece in which a writer tries out his thoughts on a subject. Montaigne’s invention.
作者在一個題目上試驗自己想法的短篇散文。蒙田的發明。
Gk. skepsis ‘inquiry’
The withholding of assent where certainty is lacking.
在缺乏確定性的地方，不輕易同意。
after Pyrrho of Elis
The ancient school that suspended judgment on all questions and found peace in doing so.
古代的一個學派：對一切問題擱置判斷，並且在其中得到平靜。
Fr. coutume
For Montaigne, the main source of what each people takes to be natural and right.
對蒙田來說，每一個民族視為「自然而正當」的東西的主要來源。
Fr. l’humaine condition
What all human beings share by being human. The phrase is his.
所有人因為是人而共有的東西。這個說法是他的。
His image for the Essays: a likeness of one person, drawn over twenty years.
他對《隨筆集》的比喻：一個人的肖像，畫了二十年。
Reading check · 理解測驗
Did it land? 讀懂了嗎
1. What does the word essai mean?
2. What does Montaigne mean by “I do not paint its being, I paint its passage”?
3. What was Pascal’s objection?
Go further · 延伸
Where he appears 他出現在哪幾課
- Michel de Montaigne, Essays, translated by Charles Cotton ↗Begin with “Of Friendship,” “Of Cannibals,” and “Of Experience.” 從〈論友誼〉〈論食人族〉〈論經驗〉讀起。
- The Complete Essays of Montaigne, translated by Donald Frame (1958)The standard modern English version, with the three layers marked. 標準的現代英譯本，標出了三個層次。
- Sarah Bakewell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (2010)The best introduction. 最好的入門書。
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Michel de Montaigne” ↗