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Four hundred years ago, the great French essayist recognised that our inbuilt capacity for sympathy depends on our physical proximity to others. Recent neurological research appears to back him up, argues Saul Frampton.
His house stood on a hill a few miles north of the Dordogne, about 30 miles east of Bordeaux. Its walls overlooked his poultry yard and vegetable garden, the surrounding fields neatly embroidered with vines. At one corner stood a tower containing his library, some sooty paintings, a table and a chair. And standing as a solitary sentinel over all this was an ancient porter, "whose function", admitted Montaigne, "is not so much to defend his door as to offer it with more grace and decorum", making an attack on it "a cowardly and treacherous business . . . it is not shut to anyone that knocks".
Summoned from his books, Montaigne found himself confronted by a neighbour – a man he knew almost "as an ally" – standing "completely terrified" on his doorstep. He had, he said, just been set upon by an enemy about a mile away, and begged to be let in. This Montaigne did – "as I do to everyone" – trying his best to calm and reassure his terrified countryman. But then, rather ominously:
Four or five of his soldiers arrived, with the same bearing and fright, in order to be admitted. And then more and more after them, well-equipped and well-armed, until there were twenty-five or thirty of them, pretending to have the enemy at their heels. This mystery was beginning to arouse my suspicion. I was not ignorant of the sort of age in which I lived, how my house might be envied . . . However . . . I abandoned myself to the most natural and simple course, as I do always, and gave orders for them to be let in.
The "sort of age" in which Montaigne lived was that of the French wars of religion, which stretched from 1562 to 1598. Montaigne's house stood in the middle of the region of the most intense fighting. And he himself, having tried to negotiate between the warring factions, had made enemies on both sides. It was this civil unrest, combined with Montaigne's trusting nature, that the neighbour planned to use to his advantage. Having tricked his way in, he now stood in Montaigne's living room, his men greatly outnumbering Montaigne's, and his objective clearly within his grasp.
But then, just as suddenly as he had embarked on his treacherous undertaking, the neighbour left: "He remounted his horse, his men keeping their eyes on him for some signal he might give them, very astonished to see him leave and abandon his advantage."
When Montaigne sits down to recount these events in his Essays, he says that his neighbour – "for he was not afraid to tell this story" – admitted that it was Montaigne's demeanour that had defeated his stratagem: "He has often said to me since . . . that my face and my frankness wrestled his treachery from him."
Montaigne has a reputation as a sceptical and slightly otherworldly observer of human affairs, surveying life from the isolation of his ivy-covered tower. But in the body of his work – his Essays and the Travel Journal of his trip to Italy – his writing displays an obsessive concern with the power of personal presence in moral life, and a fascination with how people act on, influence and affect each other through their physical being. In this, Montaigne can be seen to reflect a characteristically Renaissance concern with gesture and deportment. Shakespeare, in The Winter's Tale, describes Leontes and Camillo as having "speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture". And Francis Bacon observes: "As the tongue speaketh to the ear, so the gesture speaketh to the eye."
But in his writings Montaigne seems to go beyond language – and language as metaphor – and begins to explore a deeper, more instinctive conception of our understanding of others, one that has only recently begun to be understood. For the question remains – why did Montaigne's neighbour leave when he had got so close to his supposed objective?
In the early 1990s, a team of neuroscientists at the University of Parma, headed by Giacomo Rizzolatti, discovered the surprising behaviour of certain neurons in the brains of macaque monkeys – they fired not only when the monkeys grasped food, but when they saw the experimenter grasp it. These neurons have since come to be known as "mirror neurons", or "empathy neurons". And in April last year, researchers at UCLA reported the first direct recordings of mirror neurons in humans, a fact that had long been suspected. The neurologist VS Ramachandran predicts that this discovery "will do for psychology what DNA did for biology". Scientists are excited about the huge advances to be made in the understanding of autism, schizophrenia, language, consciousness – indeed, what it is to be human.
These neurological findings not only help us to understand human and animal behaviour, but also to explain and in some ways legitimate whole swaths of the history of human culture. The philosopher David Hume argued that "No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathise with others". And Shakespeare's theatre can be seen as a great neurological hall of mirrors in which characters both reflect and fail to reflect the emotional states of others.
But it is perhaps Montaigne who has considered this realm of human nature most deeply. As he looks into himself he recognises his "aping and imitative character"; "whatever I contemplate, I adopt – a foolish expression, a disagreeable grimace, a ridiculous way of speaking"; "I often usurp the sensations of another person". He sees that such capacities lie behind the power of theatre: how sorrow, anger, hatred, pass though writer, actor and audience, like a chain of magnetised needles, "suspended one from the other", causing us to weep for those we care little about.
For Montaigne, as for contemporary neuroscientists, humans thus have an inbuilt imitative, sympathetic capacity. Moreover, he does not see it as species-dependent (this is backed up by Rizzolatti's discovery). In one of his most famous aphorisms he asks: "When I am playing with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me?" And he tells how animals themselves form "a certain acquaintance with one another" and greet each other "with joy and demonstrations of goodwill". Then, in a lengthy comment added to the final edition of his essays, he completes the circle from animal-to-human to human-to-human again, concluding that we cannot help but communicate ourselves in some way – that our own physical movements "converse and discourse" – even if it is something to which we are habitually blind:
What of the hands? We request, we promise, call, dismiss, menace, pray, supplicate, deny, refuse, interrogate, admire, count, confess, repent, fear . . . There is not a movement that does not speak, and in a language intelligible without instruction, a language that is common to all. From which it follows, seeing the variety and differences between other languages, that this one ought to be judged the true language of human nature.
The "true language of human nature" may seem an exaggeration, but in fact many argue that language is built on this more ancient capacity for "mirroring" the actions of others. Montaigne says he understands people "by their silence and their smiles, and I perhaps understand them better at the dinner-table than in the council-chamber". He imagines sitting next to Alexander at table, seeing him talking and drinking and "fingering his chess-men". And he notes how the ancients were more attuned to the physicality of others. Hippomachus claimed to be able to tell a good wrestler simply by the way he walked.
At this point one might ask why, if the existence of mirror neurons is such an important factor in our makeup, human history is not a series of pacts, congresses and get-togethers, rather than a chain of wars and massacres? Here, too, Montaigne, has something to tell us. For in many ways the Essays constitute not only an argument for people's capacity for sympathy, but an extended disquisition on how and why it breaks down.
The reasons he gives are diffuse and wide-ranging, and invariably filtered through his experience of 16th-century political and religious life. Above all, he concentrates on a very simple element, one that we tend to overlook in our attempts to arrive at a universal moral code – that our ability to feel sympathy with others is directly proportionate to our proximity to them. So while the Stoics advised that one can prepare oneself for death and bereavement by imagining our children and wives as fragile objects, Montaigne insists: "No wisdom is so highly formed as to be able to imagine a cause of grief so vivid and so complete that it will not be increased by the actual presence, when the eyes and ears have a share in it."
For Montaigne, as for ourselves, the language of emotion is couched in a language of spatial intimacy: we feel "close to", "attached to" and "touched" by others – as Montaigne shows in his essay "Of Friendship", dedicated to the memory of his close friend Etienne de La Boétie. And just as importantly, Montaigne recognises how vice thrives on distance. He quotes Lucretius on the callous pleasure of seeing someone far from shore, struggling against the storm. And in Rome he notes that the brotherhood of "gentlemen and prominent people" that accompany public executions hide themselves behind white linen masks. For Montaigne, human proximity is at the heart of morality. Piety is easily faked: "Its essence is abstract and hidden; its forms easy and ceremonial." But "to hold pleasant and reasonable conversation with oneself and one's family . . . this is rarer and more difficult to achieve". What is interesting is how this link between moral urgency and proximity – so blindingly true – is also something that seems to be hard-wired within us.
In his infamous series of electric-shock experiments carried out at Yale in the 1960s, the psychologist Stanley Milgram exposed people's willingness to obey figures of authority. But in a series of variations on his experiments he also showed how this was affected by distance – subjects were less likely to inflict pain on those close to them, rather than in another room. This might seem obvious, but one still needs to ask why we feel less sympathy with someone distant – it is not as if we somehow doubt the truthfulness of their pain.
It is therefore interesting to note that very recent scientific research suggests that mirror neurons can fire in ways that are dependent on spatial proximity. In a paper co-authored by Rizzolatti and published in Science in 2009, it was shown how different sets of mirror neurons fire depending on whether rhesus monkeys are witnessing actions inside or outside their peripersonal space – that is, within the range of their grasp. Could it be too far-fetched to suggest that something similar happens in our moral responses to others – that they seem more vivid, and more relevant to ourselves, the nearer the other person is, and that this is more than simply a self-interested, "rational" response?
Did Montaigne intuitively know that by inviting his would-be enemy into his living room, and into the moral equivalent of his peripersonal space (or something like it), he was simultaneously invading the moral intimacy of his assailant, and was therefore in a better position to influence him, and precipitate in him a decency similar to his own?
Montaigne's general point is clear: that we have an inbuilt propensity for sympathy and understanding, but that proximity matters. And whilst some could see this as a depressing limit on the jurisdiction of our moral sympathies, we can also see it as something on which to build. Montaigne is no political theorist, but rather a man who wishes to remind us of a fragile but significant fact: that the preservation of our moral awareness relies on the preservation of the nearness between us – something that no number of emails or tweets can ever properly replace. Even the pope is not immune to the affective influence of the nearness of others, as his secretary records during Montaigne's meeting with him in Rome – he is still a man of flesh, and blood, and feet:
The ambassador presenting them then got down on one knee, and turned back the pope's robe from his right foot, on which there is a red slipper with a white cross upon it. Those who are on their knees drag themselves along in this posture up to his foot, and stoop down to the ground to kiss it. Monsieur de Montaigne said he had slightly raised the end of his toe.
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