ABSTRACT
Although it is unlikely that Montaigne’s thoughts exercised any profound influence on Kierkegaard’s works, there is something to be said about Montaigne’s Essais in relation to Kierkegaard.
Perceptive readers might detect that my opening sentence is modelled on Ronald Grimsley’s slightly similar beginning from his chapter “Kierkegaard and Montaigne” in Søren Kierkegaard and French Literature.1 Grimsley’s chapter, is to my mind, the best place to start and the definitive treatment of the various sources of Montaigne in Kierkegaard’s writings. Were it not for the fact that on numerous occasions, to the reader’s bemusement, Grimsley claims to be able to discern from the few notes Kierkegaard makes in his journal a whole range of intentions on the part of Kierkegaard, we might have found Grimsley’s work adequate in this area. Grimsley’s Kierkegaard “saw in Montaigne a thinker whose honest appraisal of human motives acted as a salutary corrective to the absurd pretensions of human pride,”2 and “probably studied with some care the long and famous Apologie de Raymond Sebond.”3 Moreover, Grimsley claims that the number of quotations spanning the years 1847-50 suggests “a fairly long and close study of the Essais.”4
