Abstract: The question of the role that empathic emotions play in human life is one that very much occupied Montaigne, as is clear from the first chapter of his Essais, "By diverse means we arrive at the same end," which focuses on themes such as pity, commiseration, esteem, and cruelty. In an influential essay in the late 1970s, Philip Hallie argued that Montaigne is one of the first philosophers to reject the ethical approach that had dominated the Western tradition since the time of Socrates—an approach that Hallie calls the "Inward Government" theory of ethics—according to which the good life is achieved by means of reason's mastery of the passions. Instead, Montaigne turns our ethical attention away from the self and toward the other, specifically, the other who is suffering, and develops an ethic that relies on the force of empathic emotions. More recently, however, scholars have begun to argue that in fact Montaigne is perhaps more Stoic than he initially seems to be, and that his ethics is founded more upon rational evaluation than empathic fellow–feeling.

In this essay, I argue that the truth is somewhere in–between. Montaigne does not wish to eliminate the passions in general; moreover, empathic emotions are natural and normative, if not strictly necessary. And yet, when it comes to the ethical question of how to form oneself, it is to reason that Montaigne turns. Still, this "reason" is not a reason capable of governing the soul, at least not independently or tyrannically. Rather, Montaigne's reason must employ the imagination in order to enlist the cooperation of the passions in shaping one's character. In the end, Montaigne's ethics and moral psychology may owe more to classical and medieval sources than scholars have tended to think. At the same time, his ethics is novel in its emphasis on innocence, the virtue that above all Montaigne seems to try to cultivate in himself and his readers in the Essais. How one attains the virtue of innocence is not entirely clear, but I will suggest that for Montaigne, it seems to be connected to the development of an affective disposition towards human beings that we might describe as a kind of "affectionate disdain."