Moral philosophy today is not what it was in the Athens of Socrates and Plato, nor what it was in Montaigne's France. Philosophers today tend to think their task is, as Alexander Nehamas puts it, “to offer systematically connected answers to a set of independently given problems.” Philosophy is understood, moreover, as a largely if not wholly theoretical enterprise. Montaigne did not see it that way; and if we want to understand his relation to moral philosophy we need to begin by asking what he could have taken it to be. We must moreover include some consideration of how he saw the good life. With everyone else, he took it that in ancient philosophy - the philosophy he mainly studied - the pursuit of philosophy and the pursuit of the good life were inseparable. In this chapter I examine his reactions to some views of moral philosophy that he scrutinized with great care. I then consider what bearing his responses had on the moral philosophy that came after him, which for convenience I will refer to as modern moral philosophy.

The year following the 1952 publication of Invisible Man, at the presentation ceremony for the National Book Award he had just won, Ralph Ellison told his audience that if he were asked in all seriousness what he considered to be the chief significance of Invisible Man as a fiction, he would reply, first, ''its experimental attitude'' and, second, ''its attempt to return to the mood of personal moral responsibility for democracy which typified the best of our nineteenth century fiction.'' That his first novel had won such an award he acknowledged as a clear sign of crisis in the American novel, a sense of crisis that he and the other ''younger novelists'' of the time shared.

On the aesthetic level, Ellison’s experimental novel had proceeded from his own reaction to a growing uncertainty about the formal possibilities of the novel – an uncertainty that led him to reject both the forms of the ‘‘tight, well-made Jamesian novel’’ and the ‘‘hard-boiled novel’’ of Hemingway, which had been a center of literary revolt among apprentice writers of the 1930s (Shadow 178–9). The narrative experiment that Ralph Ellison created to fill the void moved consciously ‘‘from naturalism to expressionism to surrealism,’’ from the world of ‘‘facts’’ to the world of dream and nightmare, from the determined to the disordered.

Loath to identify himself with any school of thought (he never even directly called himself a skeptic), Montaigne nonetheless does name himself a “naturalist”: “We naturalists judge that the honor of invention is greatly and incomparably preferable to the honor of quotation”(iii.12, F809, V1056C). Used in a literary instead of a philosophic context, as well as somewhat off-handedly, the label would nevertheless have sent a specific signal to readers. Today, the term applies capaciously to a diverse array of scholars working within what can be described as a pre-scientific mentality, most notably empirical medical practitioners such as Ambroise Paré (1510-1590) and observers of flora and fauna such as Pierre Belon (1517-1564) and Guillaume Rondelet (1507-1566). But Montaigne's peers used it more pointedly to designate the attempt to explain phenomena without recourse to divine causation, or “first causes.” Naturalism, in brief, entailed a search for secondary causes.

Among readers of Ellison, it is a truth universally acknowledged that the benchmark for his aesthetics and novelistic style is jazz. His own body of critical writing, as well as received readings of black modernism, insist on a definitive continuity between literature and music, from which visual culture remains at a considerable, historically determined distance. In often-cited essays on such blues and jazz legends as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, and Charlie Christian; in remembrances of earlier jazz cultures; in the narrative rhythms of Invisible Man (which has been aptly described as ''a progression of jazz breaks taking off from and returning to the bass line of invisibility''): everywhere throughout his work, Ellison asks to be read as an ''ambidextrous'' figure, riffing on jazz and literary histories, thus responding to this American life and forging an authorial identity. Indeed, critic Robert O'Meally has identified jazz in America as ''Ellison's metaphor for democracy and love'' and ''the answer to the complicated question of identity'' in one. Ellison’s work is thus taken to exemplify the apercu that, throughout their history and in response to the social conditions of their emergence, all black arts aspire to the condition of music – most particularly, the high-flying, mind-bending, magisterial flights, the hot dizzy highs and soulful lows, of improvisatory jazz.

Montaigne has been called the founder of modern skepticism. According to this view, he was the first to put forward in a compelling way the arguments of ancient skepticism that had been rediscovered in the sixteenth century. The “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” Montaigne's longest and most explicitly philosophical essay, presents the skeptical case in a sympathetic way and that presentation has been taken to express Montaigne's own philosophical position. But is Montaigne a skeptic? Is his philosophical stance a reappropriation of ancient skepticism or is he rather a profoundly original philosopher who in some way incorporates a skeptical tone or “moment” within his own original thought?

ANCIENT SKEPTICISM

The history of ancient skepticism spans five centuries, from the third century b.c. to approximately 200 a.d. Skepticism was not, however, one continuous philosophical movement or school. Rather, there were two forms of skepticism, the Pyrrhonian and the Academic. Pyrrho of Elis, the first skeptic, left no writings, so that what we know of him comes through his disciple Timon and Diogenes Laertius’ Life of Pyrrho. Academic skepticism emerged out of Plato’s Academy when Arcesilaus became head of the Academy in the third century b.c. The Academic skeptics were inspired by the Socratic dialectic of some of the earlier dialogues. Carneades became head of the Academy in the mid-second century b.c. and continued the skeptical tradition there. Aenesidemus broke away from the New Academy and founded a movement based on a revival of Pyrrhonism.

Montaigne was born in 1533, during the reign of François I (1515-47), but he did not begin writing his Essays until after his “retirement” to his estate in 1571, as a mature man. France seemed then a country very different from the heady days of François I. For much of the second half of the sixteenth century, and especially so in the southwest, it was a “disturbed and sick state,” as Montaigne himself remarked (iii.8, F719, V941). Many factors contributed to this experience and to this perception, most obviously the wars of religion (1562-98), which were fought intermittently, with varying intensity and with varying geographical extension. However, the religious conflict between Huguenots and Catholics was only one of the factors inducing a sense of fragility and contingency in French society. The sixteenth century witnessed a remarkable set of political and religious changes, fuelled by an early economic expansion which produced exceptional social mobility at the upper levels (from which Montaigne's own family benefited). On the political level, the religious conflict enabled a critique and a corresponding defence of the monarchy which in theory at least became a guarantor of order in a troubled society. Montaigne's political functions as magistrate, mayor of Bordeaux for two successive terms (1581-5), and administrator of his domain, and his involvement in mediation attempts between the warring factions and in diplomatic missions at the highest level, exposed him both to the local consequences of conflict and to the issues relevant to the direction of the ship of state.

In 1953, one year after the publication of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Hugh Hefner launched his men's magazine, Playboy. The magazine's centerfold featured a nude Marilyn Monroe posed against a striking red velvet curtain. The photograph was taken in 1949 as Ellison was working diligently on the novel, and it became a quintessential example of American femininity, an icon of American cultural history. As a photographer, art student, and collector of painting and portraiture, Ellison understood the power of visual images. He liked to look at pictures. In his novel, Ellison describes a nude woman that seems to invoke the Playboy image: ''the red robe swept aside like a veil, and I went breathless at the petite and generously curved nude, framed delicate and firm in the glass.'' This nameless woman, ''acting a symbolic role of life and feminine fertility'' (Invisible 409), has a sexual affair with the protagonist and she appears in the novel just as invisible man confronts ''The Woman Question.'' Ellison's artful description of the woman's symbolic role, like Monroe's pose, suggests complicity in a well-known and longstanding iconography of female difference and sexual objectification that critics have argued amounts to nothing more than a literary pinup.

Within the first pages of the 1952 novel Invisible Man Ralph Ellison's narrator relates Louis Armstrong's music to his own desires and self-conceptions. ''I'd like,'' the narrator writes, ''to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing 'What Did I Do To Be So Black and Blue' – all at the same time''. When Armstrong recorded the show tune by Andy Razaf and Fats Waller from the Broadway revue Hot Chocolates in 1929 he edited the lyrics to shift a dark-skinned female lover's lament over intra-racial color discrimination (the song's place within the plot of the musical Chocolate Dandies) toward a more general lament about racism. Ellison's narrator considers the lyrics but focuses more intently on the specifics of Armstrong's tone and phrasing. Ellison's seemingly central metaphor of invisibility takes on an aural dimension when he attends to Armstrong's ''lyrical beam'' and rhythmic mastery at creating a ''slightly different sense of time.'' The literary translation and transposition of Armstrong's mastery of swing rhythm opens a window onto the intellectual landscape where the author intertwined his musical and social thought.

Over the years, critics have disagreed about the relation between aesthetics and politics in Ralph Ellison's work. Early evaluations of Invisible Man often praise the richness of Ellison's literary invention without comment on its political significance. Others have disapproved of what they see as Ralph Ellison's preference for the aesthetic over the political. In ''Black Boys and Native Sons,'' Irving Howe famously criticized Ellison and James Baldwin for lacking the confrontational zeal appropriate to a minority writer in a racist society. More recently, Jerry Watts faults Ellison for his ''elitism'' and ''extreme . . . political disengagement.'' Much of this criticism, whether sympathetic or unsympathetic, appears to wish Ellison would choose between art and politics, high culture and folklore, universal themes and the particularities of black experience; otherwise, either his aesthetics or his politics become tangled and suspect. Ellison, however, steadfastly refuses this choice. Instead, his fiction and essays suggest an artistic and democratic vision of justice combining aesthetics and politics, ethics and law, high and vernacular culture, a vision that ''plays havoc with conventional ideas of order,'' such as the categorical division of art and law.

In this chapter I shall address two questions: what did Montaigne have to say about the truth claims and pretensions to knowledge of the philosophy of his day? And how does this relate to his own project in writing the Essays? Truth is, of course, a notoriously difficult term. For some it resides in the relationship of propositions to reality. If there is a correspondence between the two, then the conditions for the proposition being truthful are satisfied; as Montaigne says, “If you say 'it is fine weather' and you are speaking the truth, then it is fine weather.” But you may wish to specify how this correspondence is achieved: in other words, you may wish to associate truth with verifiability, and account for how it comes to be known to be true. Lorraine Daston has pointed out that this version of truth can vary over time, depending on which of several different “epistemological virtues” it is linked to, such as certainty, objectivity, universality, applicability (the “pragmatic”version of truth), or correlation with a whole body of beliefs (what came to be known as the “coherence” theory of truth). Montaigne himself, from his wide reading in ancient writings, touches on all these criteria, and associates them with what he sees as the aim of philosophy, which is to seek truth, knowledge, and certainty;3 he shows himself moreover to be very sensitive to the relationship of authoritative statements and truth, by warning us to dissociate hermeneutic questions (“is this a correct account of what a certain philosopher said?”) from philosophical ones (“how valid is this proposition?”);4 and as a writer about the self, he evinces an understandable preoccupation with truth-telling and sincerity. We can therefore expect his reaction to the philosophy of his day in all these regards to be thoughtful; it is also, as we shall see, relatively well-informed.

Writing of late 1990s Hollywood films (Independence Day, Men In Black) in which black men and white bond in the midst of the greater dangers represented by alien invasions and incipient cosmic disasters, Paul Gilroy in Against Race (2000) finds them expressing a ''real and widespread hunger for a world that is undivided by the petty differences we retain and inflate by calling them racial.'' A few lines later his book concludes by posing a utopian challenge to bring visions of ''planetary humanity from the future'' into the present and reconnect them with ''democratic and cosmopolitan traditions.'' If in our global, transnational age the renewed promise of cosmopolitan democracy has emerged as an animating ideal of popular, political, and academic culture, this is a way of saying that we are only now beginning to catch up with Ralph Waldo Ellison (1913-94).

Of all American writers, Ellison most forcefully took up the challenge of thinking beyond the imprisoning reductiveness of race and of liberating the cosmopolitan energies of democracy. It is apt that Ellison has long been ahead of us, for he found art and utopian thinking intimately aligned, describing the ‘‘true function’’ of both politics and fiction at their most serious as a ‘‘thrust toward a human ideal’’ which demands ‘‘negating the world of things as given.’’ Only then is the ‘‘potential’’ for effecting change possible.

In his moving story, ''Boy on a Train,'' written approximately fifteen years before the publication of Invisible Man (1952), Ellison portrays through the eyes of an eleven-year-old child the conflict that was to consume him both as an artist and as a cultural critic until his death in 1994: How to represent the distinctiveness of Negro American culture without being consumed by the soul-killing racism endemic to American life. James, the protagonist of the story, is riding with his mother and brother in a Jim Crow train car away from their home in Oklahoma City to begin a new life after the death of James's father. The reader sees the boy first as his mother directs his attention to the fall colors of the passing trees and tells him that Jack Frost ''made the leaves pretty'' and that he ''paints the leaves all the pretty colors.'' This moment of innocence between mother and child contrasts sharply with the anger James witnesses from his mother when ''a butcher had tried to touch her breasts'' (Flying, 13). Her response is defiant: ''she had spat in his face and told him to keep his dirty hands where they belonged'' (13-14). Traveling in the JimCrow car, seeing that the hostile treatment his family receives is in part a consequence of others’ perception of their skin color, the boy begins to understand his place in a racially divisive society.

Bringing Ellison and Arendt together could well comprise a chapter on yet another failed interaction between black and Jewish intellectuals. After all, on the two occasions when Ellison publically mentions Arendt it is in a less than favorable light. At the start of ''The World and the Jug,'' his compelling skewering of Irving Howe, Ellison remarks that Howe's earlier critique of Ellison is ''written with something of the Olympian authority that characterized Hannah Arendt's 'Reflections on Little Rock''' in the Winter 1959 issue of Howe's Dissent. Ellison is referring to her notorious misreading of black parents' attempts at integrating segregated grade schools as a parvenu effort at social climbing. Ellison's phrase ''Olympian authority'' should not be construed as a compliment; it is his sarcastic euphemism for the arrogance of those such as Howe and Arendt ''who would tell us the meaning of Negro life'' without ever bothering ''to learn how varied it really is.'' ''Evidently Howe feels that unrelieved suffering is the only 'real' Negro experience, and that the true Negro writer must be ferocious'' (Collected Essays 159).

A legacy is something that is given by an ancestor or predecessor and handed down to future generations. A philosophical legacy is normally held by philosophers to consist of a set of questions and concepts that claim attention on their own merit. The origins and tradition of the gift have no effect on its intrinsic significance and authority. Montaigne bequeaths questions about what man can know, together with concepts of selfhood and experience. Philosophers from Descartes and Pascal to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty designate themselves heirs by freely assessing the philosophical merit of the bequest and moving the discussion on unhampered by any obligations to the legator. Their own authority, in turn, does not depend on the origins of their philosophical questions and concepts.

Someone who thought that the authority of a legacy with its heirs is or should be conditioned by the origins of the philosophical gift, by the moral character of its donor or author, by the social tradition identifying it as a source of guidance, would be accused of committing a fallacy. Yet the majority of Montaigne’s contemporaries thought in something like this way. When Montaigne received the philosophical legacy of Raymond Sebond, his freedom of response was significantly conditioned by the circumstances in which he received it from his father, by the fact that court ladies were seeking guidance from the work. But, as we shall see at the end of this chapter, it was precisely the freedom to judge others’ philosophical legacies on their own merits that became Montaigne’s own legacy. To put this another way, he retrospectively changed the character of the ancient philosophical auctoritates (authorities), and the spirit in which they gave their thoughts to posterity. After Montaigne, they became more doubtful, more free-spirited, more open.