Michel de Montaigne: Invitación a la Amistad - Michel de Montaigne: An Invitation to Friendship

Abstract

Michel de Montaigne is a philosopher of friendship. The writing of his Essays conceives, as one of its main purposes, the study of his own essence—an attempt to reach the understanding of himself that his late friend Étienne de La Boétie had once possessed. Hence, his act of essaying acquires a conversational, intimate, and engaging tone, allowing us to define the writing of the Essays as a writing of friendship. In this text, we encounter Montaigne’s “friends”: both those who have established a bond with the author through close reading, and those Ancients who, belonging to the philosophical tradition of reflecting on friendship, influenced his conception of it as the most perfect of relationships. His exercise reveals a philosophical and experiential form of writing that conceives friendship as a free, voluntary, equal, and univocal bond—one that leads us to understand a supreme relationship, an encounter with affection not rooted in kinship, possession, need, or utility.