Knowing Through Imagination and Experience: Connecting Montaigne's Essays Michelle Qiu College

The question of how one gains knowledge of a topic comes up in multiple essays by Montaigne. “On Practice” suggests imagination is not good enough to practice being close to death because the closest one can get to understanding the experience of death is through a near-death experience, such as the one Montaigne encountered. His position on understanding death through experience seems to contrast his previous position in “On Imagination”, in which he argues that the power of imagination is strong enough to create an event, such as causing illness in one's own body. In his very last essay “On Experience”, written nearly 15 years later, Montaigne seems to change his position on imagination and argues about how he only truly knows what he has experienced firsthand. A way to reconcile these differences between Montaigne’s opinions of when imagination or experience is more useful is to understand the circumstances surrounding each situation and to see if he is consistent in his method.

Montaigne’s argumentative style is draws on anecdotes from his own lived experience, what he has heard about other experiences, and extrapolating from those to invent his own useful anecdotes. His argumentative style implicitly suggests that...