Montaigne and the Art of Changing Your Mind: Where the Essay Began

A while ago I found an old notebook of mine, and on one page I had written, in firm capitals, a confident opinion about how to organise a bookshelf. Two pages later, in a different pen, I had politely disagreed with myself. I remember feeling faintly embarrassed, as if I'd been caught out by a stranger. It took me an embarrassingly long time to see that the second pen was the better thinking. I had simply done it in private, where it felt like a failure and not a method.

So how do you change your mind without feeling foolish? One answer comes from a sixteenth-century Frenchman. Treat an opinion as a trial rather than a verdict: something you try out, look at honestly, and are allowed to revise. Michel de Montaigne built a whole literary form on that habit, and it still works on small, everyday questions.

Who was Montaigne, and what was he trying to do?

Michel de Montaigne lived from 1533 to 1592 in the Périgord region of south-western France. He worked for a time as a magistrate in Bordeaux. Around 1571, when he was in his late thirties, he withdrew to his family estate to read and write in a tower library. The first edition of his Essais appeared in 1580. He kept adding to the book until he died, and a posthumous edition followed in 1595.

The word essai in French meant something like "attempt" or "trial". He was not offering finished doctrines but trying out thoughts to see how they held. The subjects ranged widely: friendship, idleness, thumbs, cannibals, the education of children, and the odd behaviour of his own imagination. He did not say what a reader ought to conclude. He set down what he thought, noticed where it wobbled, and often wandered somewhere else.

The problem he was working on, as far as I can tell from reading him, was a very human one. How do you judge anything, including yourself, when your own mind keeps moving? His answer was to watch it moving and write that down.

What does Montaigne say about being inconsistent?

His essay "Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions" is the best place to see this. As I read it, he begins by noting that people want to explain a person by one steady trait. Writers who describe someone's character pick a single quality and read every action through it. When an action won't fit, they put it down to pretence. Montaigne thinks this is a poor way to understand anyone, and he says it is a poor way to understand himself.

His own view is that we are patchwork: stitched together from odd pieces, each moment playing its own part. He adds that there is as much difference between us and ourselves as between us and other people. Think of how differently you behave when you are rested and well fed, and when you are tired and the bus is late. Montaigne suggests that both of those people are you, and that an honest account has to include both.

In a later essay, "Of Repentance", he describes his subject as something always in motion, so that what he records is passage rather than a fixed state. Quoting the passage word for word would risk getting a particular translation wrong, so I'll only say that this is the spirit of it: he cannot keep himself still long enough to take a final portrait.

Why this is more than a polite shrug

There is a common misconception worth gently correcting here. It runs: if Montaigne admits he changes his mind, he must believe nothing, and "it depends" is the whole of his philosophy.

That is not what he does. In the long essay "Apology for Raymond Sebond", he engages with the ancient sceptics, including Sextus Empiricus, whose writings had become newly available in print in Latin during the sixteenth century. His favourite question is often rendered in English as:

"What do I know?"

It is a question, not a refusal to answer. Doubt of this kind is a working posture. It means you keep looking, you hold conclusions loosely enough to revise them, and you stay curious about the evidence. Montaigne still has opinions, often strong and vividly expressed ones. What he refuses to do is mistake the strength of a feeling for a settled fact.

There is also a habit of his that I find quietly instructive, though I'd want you to check it against a good edition. His surviving annotated copy of the Essais, usually called the Bordeaux copy, shows that he mostly added to his text in the margins rather than striking out what he had said before. I understand that he comments on this himself, saying roughly that he adds but does not correct. Whatever the exact wording, the practice is well documented. The earlier thought stays on the page, and the later one sits beside it. His mind changes in public, in layers, without apology.

How the habit travelled

Montaigne did not invent his way of thinking from nothing. He read the classical authors closely, especially Plutarch and Seneca, whose letters also wander from topic to topic and think aloud. What he did was turn that wandering into a deliberate form, and he pointed it at himself.

The form spread. Francis Bacon published a slim first collection of essays in England in 1597, and the word "essay" came to name a kind of writing in English. Montaigne himself reached English readers through John Florio's translation, published in 1603, which is in the public domain today. Another translation, by Charles Cotton, followed later in the seventeenth century.

Historians trace this line of influence in some detail. How exactly any individual reader absorbed Montaigne's attitude, and whether they absorbed it or only the format, is harder to say, and I wouldn't claim more than that. I do think something shifted along the way. The essay became a genre where a writer could be tentative on the page, and the school essay later turned it into a place where you must "prove a thesis". That is almost the reverse of what Montaigne was doing.

Where else does this idea show up?

Two ordinary analogies helped me understand why the trial-run habit is sensible.

A cook tastes the soup. Nobody calls that indecision. Tasting is how the dish gets good, and adding salt after the first spoonful is part of the recipe. Testing a belief works the same way: you try it, notice what you find, and adjust.

A scientist's notebook is another example. A good hypothesis is stated clearly enough that something could count against it. Montaigne wasn't running experiments in that modern sense, and I don't want to stretch the comparison. But the shared instinct is real: an idea that can never be wrong is not doing any work for you. Writing down a way you might be wrong is what turns a mood into something you can actually check.

A small practice: one belief, one honest reason you might be wrong

This is a simple exercise inspired by Montaigne's habit. It is not his own method, since he didn't leave us a procedure, only an example. It takes about five minutes and needs a pen.

1. Write down one belief, in a single sentence. Choose something small and low-stakes to start with, such as "The back road to the shops is quicker than the main one."
2. Write one honest reason you might be wrong. Only one is needed, and it should be a real one, not a token objection. For example: "I only remember the days it worked, and I've never timed it."
3. Note what would settle it, if anything could. Perhaps time both routes on three separate trips.
4. Leave the original sentence where it is. Add your update underneath, as Montaigne seems to have done in his margins, rather than rubbing it out.

The why behind each step matters. Writing the belief down stops it from quietly changing shape in your head. Asking for a reason you might be wrong is a gentler form of cross-examination than arguing with yourself, because you are only being asked for one. Leaving the first version in place keeps the history honest, so you can see that you changed your mind rather than pretend you always thought this.

When I tried this on my bookshelf opinion, the honest reason turned out to be simple: I had arranged books by colour once and hated finding anything. That was enough to move me. It didn't feel like losing an argument, because nobody else was there.

A note on limits: this works best on matters of habit, preference and everyday judgement. I don't think a five-minute exercise should be asked to settle weighty questions, and it won't make a stubborn belief vanish. For me it mostly makes changing my mind feel less like falling over and more like taking the next step.

A question to carry about

Montaigne was often struck by how much of himself he could not predict. He thought a fair self-portrait had to include that. I'm still learning what to make of this. If we really are patchwork, with each moment playing its own part, then the person who writes down a belief on Monday and the person who reads it on Friday are not quite the same reader.

So perhaps the most useful thing to wonder about is a different one. Which of your own firmly held opinions would you like your future self to be allowed to argue with, and what would you want to leave in the margin to help them?