Believe it or not, we actually do know who wrote the first essay. It was Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) who invented the form and also coined the term "essay". How he came up with the term is worthy of exploring as well. The word "essay" is related to another word that may already be familiar to you and that is the word "assay". Assay is a term used in mining and metallurgy meaning "the testing of a metal or ore to determine its ingredients and quality" (yes, another Googled definition). You may have heard the term in a movie about the Old West when somebody panning for gold took the gold into town to have it assayed, or tested for purity. To assay the gold is to test it in an attempt to determine its quality. Now we can see why lessor used meanings of the word "essay" include test and attempt.
But, what kind of test or attempt is an essay? It is an attempt to get your thoughts, feeling or musings down on paper in a coherent fashion. Montaigne wrote essays on a very wide variety of his thoughts or musings and these essays are available today on Amazon as Michel de Montaigne - The Complete Essays . Before you rush to Amazon to buy it, I should warn you -it is over 1200 pages. The modern essay form was yet to evolve. In fact, it would be another four centuries before we developed our modern appreciation for brevity. And, Montaigne wrestled verbosely with a lot of issues that were arising in the transition from the Middle Ages to a more Modern Worldview.
Nonetheless, Montaigne is good to know about as he did write the first essay (and, in fact, invented the word and the form). In addition, he influenced many great names including:
Rene Descartes (Father of modern Philosophy)
Francis Bacon (Father of Modern Empirical Science)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (Essayist, Transcendentalist and Advocate for Free Public Education)
Friedrich Nietzsche (Impossible to Describe Briefly)
I am going to get philosophical in order to put Montaigne and the Essay into perspective. So, if you do not have any interest in philosophy, you might want to skip the rest of this post.
You have almost certainly heard of Rene Descartes in connection with his famous pithy line Cogito Ergo Sum or its English version I Think Therefore I Am. This represents, in the minds of many, the beginning of modern philosophy. There are heated debates on the value contributed or the harm done by Descartes which I am simply going to ignore in order to make a lessor but still important point. Prior to Descartes, philosophy focused on the material world or the world external to the individual. The early Existentialist began considering their internal subjective experiences as a legitimate focus for philosophy and this view grew until the height of Existentialism in the mid 20th century. I would argue, with great hubris, that Descartes' observation was more properly - I can feel the internal subjective experience of thinking, therefore I must exist. However, that would be a little more difficult to get on a coffee cup, poster or T-shirt. More simply, I would reword it as I Feel Therefore I Am. This obsession would eventually lead to Post Modernism which asserts that there is no objective reality only internal subjective realities which vary from one person to the next. And this, I believe, has its roots in the ruminations of Montaigne. Yes, we can blame the Might Essay for the mess we are in. But, we might also be able to use it to find our way out of the mess.
Whew! Enough philosophy! But, take heart, deeper dives such as this will not be commonplace in this blog.
