A Common Ground: The Essay in the Academy

Abstract

If the essay as a distinct genre begins with Montaigne, it also begins as an assault upon the scholasticism he alludes to in this passage. Through his account of the two self-absorbed pedants, Montaigne makes light of the conception of knowledge that distinguishes so exactly between the grammarian and the logician, and he introduces, as an alternative to such distinctions, the example of La Rochefoucauld, the gentleman, by which he does not mean a member of the ruling class, but instead the questioner whose pursuit of understanding has carried him beyond the limitations of the customary. The new system of education proposed by Montaigne in his essay is designed to repair precisely that fragmentation of experience-into grammar, logic, theology, rhetoric, and so forthwhich characterized scholastic discourse, and which arose from still another fragmentation, between the high language of court and college and the low language of the street and the home. Unlike Montaigne's two erudite travelers, a person of genuine sophistication, a person like La Rochefoucauld, surmounts these divisions because he measures them against an experiential unity no single discipline can encompass. Indeed, Montaigne repeatedly warns that the conventional branches of learning, because they are by nature specialized and mutually exclusive, obscure not only the complexity of real life, but also the coherence. As an antidote to the tautological circularity which is a danger for all discourse, he commends the test of personal experience. Let the student be asked for

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