Montaigne and the Philosophy of Enough: Stoic and Skeptic
Somewhere around 1580, a man sits in a tower library in the Dordogne region of France. Surrounding him are the works of Seneca, Plutarch, and Lucretius, opened to passages about desire and deprivation. Michel de Montaigne reads, takes notes, and slowly begins an essay that poses a question still echoing through Masonic ritual centuries later: do we truly lack anything, or is it our own restlessness that creates the sense of shortage? The Intellectual World of Sixteenth-Century France When Michel de Montaigne composed his essays during the 1570s and 1580s, France was plunged into a period of profound religious and political division. The Wars of Religion between Catholics and Huguenots had shattered trust in absolute truths. It was precisely this crisis that drove Montaigne not to seek refuge in dogma, but in the wisdom of classical antiquity. His tower library held more than a thousand books, and the ceiling beams above his head were engraved with quotations from Sextus Empiricus, Lucretius, and the Bible. In that intellectual hothouse, the essay “That We Lack Nothing” was born — a text saturated with Stoic, Skeptic, and Epicurean influences. Renaissance humanism had placed man at the center of philosophical inquiry, but Montaigne took […]